As a Pennsylvania voter I'm VERY interested to see how 2020 goes, especially if Bernie is nominated.
It's early days, but Bernie does OK in Pennsylvania in the polls.
Statewide opinion polling for the 2020 United States presidential election - Wikipedia
Biden does better though. They probably both lock down the Philadelphia area equally, but Biden does better in the western half of the state. I read this week his campaign is looking to other parts of the country to see what states can be flipped because Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are already looking out of reach. They are looking at trying to flip Colorado and New Mexico. Considering the large Hispanic populations in those states, it's going to be an uphill battle.
I keep hearing most people are in the middle yet most who participate in on-line discussion seem hell bent in pushing the pendulum further to the extremes. I'm pretty sure what happens if we keep going.
The New York Times looked at that and found truth in it
The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate
I've never considered news accounts objective reality. The issue for me is incident rate per capita and that is pretty clear. You are right about the reporting. White people are not ordinarily harassed by police, although my sons used to complain about them (and so far as I know they are Anglo.)
The police tend to be harder on all young males than other age groups and genders. I've never been arrested, but I've been stopped by the police for speeding here and there throughout my life. Before age 30, I always got a ticket, after I just got a warning. The last time was in my Model S and the cop actually apologized when he let me go. The cop was Hispanic, but I wondered how it would have gone down if I hadn't been white.
I think it was Camus who compared St. Just and De Sad: "St. Just said prove your virtue or go to prison while De Sad replied, open your prisons or prove your virtue." I think above you will find details of an exchange student from Norway who was on their swat team and thus uniquely qualified to carry a weapon in his country. He had to go through two years of college courses in sociology of violence, etc., abnormal psychology, before qualified to carry a weapon. He spoke before our Sacramento Police training facility and was shocked to learn cadets had a few months of all training before issue of a weapon.
There was a recent back to back comparison between a US fatal police shooting of a man carrying a cell phone and a Canadian policeman talking someone down with no violent interaction. As Buddha or Jesus might have said, "It's all in your attitude." Years ago I was with a black girlfriend shopping at an upscale grocery store when an obviously deranged, older black woman, refused to pay for a cart full of groceries and was confronted by three cops at the door. My friend successfully intervened when the cops, frustrated because they could not get the woman out of the store, discussed provoking her into violent action when they could use force to restrain her. The law may be an ass, as Blackstone said, but common sense and emotional IQ can be trained. Not easy these days when we have a poorly toilet trained toddler speaking on a megaphone at the top. That, along with the unaddressed real grievances in this country and elsewhere, is contagious. No wonder we have an opioid epidemic.
I read a few years ago that before video games became ubiquitous, basic training in the military involved desensitizing people to firing guns. A few would show up in basic training well trained in gun use, but most would initially flinch. Now they need to do the opposite and teach fire discipline first because the kids coming into basic have so trained their reflexes to pull the trigger with video games they need to be trained to think more before firing.
Any task you do frequently gets wired into the subconscious and you don't need to think about it. Most of us have had the experience of driving between two places we know well and not remembering anything of the trip. When we learn to drive we need to think about everything, but after a while the body does all the basics for us and the conscious mind is free to do other things. When around other drivers who appear to be unreliable (like weaving in the lane), I focus my conscious mind on what they're doing while the subconscious does the driving bit. Though I also ruminate when driving along and nothing unusual demands my attention (while keeping an eye out for things that might need my attention).
For kids who grew up playing first person shooter games, they have rewired their brains to fire weapons without conscious thought. Couple that with any bias they either bring with them to the job, or pick up on the job and that can turn deadly literally before the person has thought about it.
I mentioned the shooting of Tamir Rice. I've seen the police footage, the poor kid was dead before the cop's conscious mind registered anything about the situation beyond there was a person holding something gun shaped.
20 years ago I was reading about the PTSD many ex-cops have to deal with. I also knew an ex-cop who had severe PTSD from an off duty shooting. Both he and the perp got shot and both haunted him. Community policing has been proven to reduce incidents because the cops get to know everyone on their beat. By knowing them, they get less of the them vs us attitude which frequently creeps into most cops minds over time.
The job requires them to interact with many of the worst in society day in and day out. And humans generalize. If all you see are the mentally ill and criminally inclined, most people are going to see that in the world everywhere.
As for drug use, most is linked to trying to suppress some emotion. During the latter days of the Vietnam War a study was done on troops over there and found 90% were using some kind of substance to cope ranging from marijuana and alcohol to hard drugs like heroin. From the study, the VA braced for a flood of vets needing help getting unhooked after the war and it didn't happen.
That prompted another study of vets and what they found was surprising. About 10% of the vets were still hooked, but the other 80% who were using in Vietnam quit when they got home and had no more interest. Even heroin users found they could quit fairly easily. A high percentage had tried drugs after getting back and found they didn't really want them any more, and an even higher percentage knew where to get them if they wanted them, but didn't bother.
They concluded that when people are trying to suppress some extreme emotion, 90% of people will turn to drugs to cope if they are available. 10% are never interested. Of that 90%, 10% are wired to be addicts and will remain hooked even when the situation changes, but the 80% in the middle will find it easy to drop the drugs when the situation changes.
The areas where the opiod epidemic is worst are the parts of the country that have been impacted the worst by globalization. A lot of people are medicating to kill the despair they feel about their economic future and the economic future of their children.
And destroy jobs, my mom lost her job because of the "Job Creator". Many companies are firing independent reps to cut costs, something I sure he anticipated. My business has lost deals over price hikes but I'm sure he has a strategic plan in store that will make it all better. /SS
I've been impacts by the trade war too. The company I contract with has done about 50% of their business with China and even though nothing they make is on any tariff list, the Chinese aren't buying anything American and most of the rest of the world is holding back on buying capital equipment.
I'm still working there, but I've been cut back to 3 1/2 days a week.
The "middle" elected an extreme last time. Now the "middle" seems to be moving in a different direction, not surprising.
The middle was a different demographic last time. Since the 1980s the percentage of whites voting for president drops about 2% every 4 years. This matches the trends in this country's ethnicity changes. The percentage of whites voting in 2016 was almost the same as 2012. This wasn't because the underlying demographics hadn't changed, it was because fewer non-whites turned out and Trump brought out many white voters who had given up voting.
Some of the drop in non-white vote was due to the efforts of Republican state governments who made it tougher for non-whites to vote, but some was also due to the fact that Hillary Clinton didn't really excite many people, of any ethnicity.
I suspect we will see the trend revert in 2020. Some of those states that were run by Republicans are now run by Democrats (like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), but the non-voting whites who turned out for Trump turned out because he promised things would be different and their lives would get better. In many cases their lives have gotten worse under Trump and they will probably go back to not voting.