Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/11/support-the-human-rights-data.html
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You mean America’s America, because Trump has done nothing yet, and “data… misused to reinforce racial discrimination in policing, in criminal justice determinations…” has been going on for decades, including 8 years under Obama.
This is a deep problem one needs to own up to. Trying to pin this problem on any one group will GUARANTEE that group will ignore, deny it, and fight for it. The divisive finger pointing only leads to more finger pointing, no one paying attention or working on the actual problem.
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By saying Trump’s America, it’s a rhetorical device to acknowledge a long set of circumstances that led to his election; he didn’t create what’s happening out there, but he has given it a political direction.
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Ok, but framing it as such will do nothing but get half the people to not read past the headline.
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Perhaps it will make the other half pay more attention?
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Like they ever listen anyway. No matter how stuff like this is framed, they still take it as a personal attack and they don’t want to listen.
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I disagree. Certainly you’re right about some people - because the tribalism is so deep that they block anything from anything that isn’t one of their whitelisted sources.
But a lot of people might give it a listen to if you frame it as a citizen vs government issue. I have never heard of the HRDAG before, as I am sure a lot of people have. Politicizing an issue this big is not the best route to go, IMHO.
Too much shit is framed as “us vs them”, and when you do that, you just alienated ~half of your potential audience. YMMV.
EVERYONE should be paying attention. And getting only half to care isn’t enough for change, and worse, you get half the people against you, not because it is right or wrong, but because it is “them”.
I don’t see how mentioning Trump matters. Wouldn’t his supporters naturally take umbrage at the notion that there could be human rights abuses in the US under Trump? Even without using his name, it’s a pretty obvious criticism.
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Ugh. Please step back and look at the broader picture. This isn’t just about Trump. Trump might make things worse, but even if he doesn’t do one damn thing, there are already problems this org could research.
“racial discrimination in policing, [and] in criminal justice determinations” is a thing NOW and something that should be looked at.
Framing as such, citizens vs government, will get you more support than citizens vs Trump’s government.
Trump is a symbol of the problems in our society, just like Obama was held up as a symbol of our abiility to transcend our racist past (which we clearly had not and still have not done).
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And what would motivate a Trump supporter to be concerned about racial discrimination???
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And see, there we go. We just assume anyone who voted for Trump automatically did so just because they were racists who wanted to get rid of Mexicans or Muslims or what have you. When in reality, there is a myriad of reasons people voted for him. As crazy as it sounds, there are people who voted for him because they bought the outsider, not part of the Washington establishment angle. They would be willing to look at reforming government. Because, even if most Hillary supports aren’t racists, the Democrats have done fuck all lately in this arena. If anything, because of the rise of cell phones and social media, all this systemic discrimination is at the for front more than ever, but it has been there for forever.
IF we want anything to get better, all of us are going to have wipe our mind slates clean in the attempt to find people who have common ground. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I will repost the CGP Grey video I have been spamming.
No. But clearly, they give two shits about the racism he stirred up. Lack of caring might not be overt racism, but it certainly doesn’t help. They either don’t care about or actively hate the rest of us.
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His voters may not be “active” racists but at the least they must be indifferent to racism.
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OK - that is a fair point. A lot of people don’t care, or don’t care enough. Are you going to permanently write off half of America as bigots and lost causes? Or attempt to find common ground to care about?
The “us vs them” on everything is what is leading to a lack of empathy and understanding and widening rifts between everyone.
You know how you feel about “them”, and how horrible “they” are. “They” feel the same way about you. And as each of you express those feelings, you are just adding more and more fuel to your personal hate fire. Then what?
The original post was about rooting out human rights abuses. That is the topic in this thread. Please tell us how to make Trump voters care about this issue. What is the possible common ground, that is connected to this issue?
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I don’t know. Are they going to continue to make me feel like an auslander in my own country? Are they going to continue to make it a demonstrably worse place for our daughters?
I’m really not sure why the onus is ON ME to be the only one offering empathy and understanding here? And actually, considering all the actual, physical, emotional, and even eocnomic support I’ve done over the years for people who are white working class and in their political views are ACTIVELY HOSTILE TO ME, I’d say I’ve done more than enough.
And for the record, I say that certain views and ideas are bigoted, including certain policy positions that many people on the right advocate for. That doesn’t say shit about the people who believe in them,. however. They are the ones who are actively trying to make this country more hostile to me, to POC, and to religious minorities. I do not support policies that attempts to wrest control over a person’s body away from them. I want ALL of us to have easy access to all aspects of health care. They actively want to take that away. They want policies which target a particular group of people as being more criminally prone (things like stop and frisk or the Muslim ban). I want to bring down the systemic racism in our justice system so that we can all have access to a fair trial when accused of crimes. They want to build a wall and break up families through deportation orders (and in some cases, amend the constitution to end birthright citizenship). I want to figure out a way to keep families together and to ease border restrictions so that we can ALL benefit for free travel and to access to jobs. They want to enshrine Christianity as the ONLY legitmate religion. I want religion out of the public square so that we can all practice our faith or not, as we see fit.
I’m sorry. I am under no illusion that I’m some paragon of perfect. But I AM NOT the bigot here.
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For me, that was the most disheartening part of this whole thing; the realization that so many people just don’t give a damn beyond their own personal self interest.
And that’s what makes finding resolution to all our problems so daunting; how you do incite others to care?
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Hi, Patrick from HRDAG here. We’ve been analyzing human rights violations around the world – including the US – for twenty-five years, since the first President Bush, so this isn’t a new direction motivated simply by Trump’s election.
We’ve criticized US government over decades, in part because we think democracy benefits from candid critique. For example, human rights groups need strong encryption, so we’ve raised concerns about US policy with respect to encryption. It’s worth noting that these concerns largely arose during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Our most recent critique is here. (Free registration required, apologies)
We have been looking at US domestic issues for about the last year and a half. For example, see our estimate of total homicides by police (2003–2011). And we study how machine learning models in policing tend to reproduce the bias in the input data. Links to both analyses are available on our policing project page, and both include analysis covering both the Bush and Obama administrations.
As a candidate, President-elect Trump threatened to use torture against terrorism suspects, to target the families of alleged terrorists with violence, and to target policing in the US against Muslim people. Under international law, the first two policies would be war crimes and crimes against humanity, the third is a clear violation of US constitutional protections.
International human rights law applies to every government. At HRDAG, we monitor and analyze patterns of war crimes and violations of human rights, so the election of a candidate who promised to commit these crimes of course gets additional attention.
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Hi, Patrick. Thanks for stopping by and thanks to the HRDAG for your work. Needed now as much as ever.
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