Here is my problem with that guy. He sits there and parrots numbers and statistics but doesn't do anything with them. He doesn't elaborate the whos whats wheres and whys. The numbers are meaningless without context.
Why is black on black crime up? He offers no insight and instead goes off on a paranoid tangent about black on white hate crimes that are being covered up. What the hell does that have to do with what he was just talking about in the previous paragraph? Absolutely nothing.
As I said, I live in Chicago. Homicides are up a whopping 50% compared to the same time last year. Many of them are young black and hispanic men. Also, the majority of the homicides are gang related.
Gangs are a huge problem in the city. They have literally taken over some poor neighborhoods in the city. The gangs are like weeds, if you don't pull them up by the roots they will just keep coming back. You need to keep kids from joining gangs but some of them are born into crushing poverty and hopeless situations. They have some of the worst public schools in the nation and don't have the same chance at a quality education that a kid growing up in Oak Park or Evanston will get and they see a gang as the only way out. How do you change this? Where do gangs make most of their money? Selling drugs is a big one. Maybe legalizing weed, taxing and selling it would put a huge dent in gangs and their ability to operate.
See how situations are much more complex than just saying, "black guys kill each other a lot and here are some numbers to prove it."
Also, some of the things he writes is just flat out completely false and no different than the race baiting he accuses others of. In the first article he writes about "the pushing of a 57-year-old woman off a train platform" as a racist attack. That happened here in Chicago. The guy grabbed a iphone off of someone and as he was trying to make his get away he ran into the woman on the stairs, knocking her down which led to her unfortunate death. A racist attack? Hardly. But hey, it sounds good when trying to make his point right? Whether or not it is true or false is secondary.
Here is another one from his second article: "Last summer, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing white families." Absolutely completely fabricated. There was a group of kids doing flash mob type of muggings on people to steal their gadgets (iphones, ipads, laptops) yes they were black. Their victims were anyone who had gadgets. This guy though turns it into a harrowing tale of race attacks that shut down the beaches. Never happened.
Lastly, his assertion that the main stream media ignores these types of things (a theme common with right wingers) is so far off base I can't even think of anything witty enough to call it other then outright bs.
Here is a link to an article on the Huffington Post in the Chicago section (which I'm sure you would agree is left leaning) about an off duty cop that was shot. The article mentions some of the gang problems that I was talking about above.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/1 ... ef=chicago
Check the Chicago section again after this weekend and I can almost guarantee you they will have an article detailing the latest body count of yet another violent weekend. To say this stuff is hidden is just flat out silly.
Where libertarian's lose me is when they start talking about abolishing government or getting rid of all regulations. Do you honestly believe you can trust mega corporations to behave themselves and not, say, dump toxic sludge into the Chicago river like they used to? There needs to be some system in place to keep them honest. Checks and balances and all that...
Well, one thing we can agree on is that college (for the most part) is for suckers.
