Ted Diadiun and Plain Dealer Racism

Submitted by lmcshane on Tue, 01/08/2008 - 20:31.

Ted--I just want to let you know that I called and I suspect many others called after Dick Feagler's Sunday column to cancel their subscription to the PD.  Here is Dick Feagler's logic in a nutshell:  if you see a black person, run away.  He calls it realism.  I call it racism.

Phillip Morris--why are you apologizing for your racist colleague?  Let him speak for himself.   Is your employer, the Plain Dealer (Cleveland came off the masthead), forcing you to apologize for his comments?  If so, that would be the ultimate outrage.

Phillip Morris states: Crime happens. Especially in big cities and the suburbs that ring them. Part of saving the region involves the realization that crime isn't about race and that the solution isn't about running.

 Brutal behavior surfaces in all cultures and nationalities.   It's time we acknowledge our capacity for evil.

This city, this region, this country needs to recognize our failure in raising children.

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Lord of the Flies

Here's a book recommendation for those who fail to understand: Lord of the Flies.  

so why exactly did you call to cancel?

Laura, I just don't understand why exactly you first read the Feagler column and then called the PD to cancel your subscription, along with a suspected horde of others. I just don't get it. Please, I await enlightenment.

SHAKER HEIGHTS EXPERIENCES IT'S OWN "WILDING"

 

Hello Tim, 

You are  about my age and of similar sound mind - so you remember wilding....

Though maybe Lmc, like the dozens of angry and irritated others whose letters to the editor were printed today in the Dirty Dealer, was responding to what lmc felt was hypocrisy in Dick's DD piece.

After all, Feagler has had the ear of Ohioans for years through the DD mouth.   And Feager moved out of Cleveland to Bay Village.   

So we have a newspaperman, who has the huge persuasive advantage of the printed page daily in NEO's largest daily paper for the last 30 or 40 years, and that newspaperman is talking about "reality"?  here in NEO? 

 

Feagler is personally responsible for the present reality here in Dirty Dealer County.

 

Myself, I like Dick more lately  cuz I think he is getting more liberal and anti-republican in his recent opinion articles  – I think he is getting ready to retire and is pulling out some stops.    I predict he will be retired within the year.

 

Mr. Feagler,  I invite you to join Reza and me on our Quincy, Woodland, Lakeview, E55 newsgathering trips.  

 Hey, you been in the Hood lately?  Kaizen would demand we   go there to understand wilding.  

I just thought he was being sort of descriptive

As I said above, I just thought he was being sort of descriptive of the situation, from a particular point of view, which you happen to know I don't share. Regardless, it's a point of view that exists, and we need to be aware of it, and take it for what it's worth, and try not to be judgmental about it.

It exists, it's not mine, but I still have to tolerate it. Actually, we can probably capitalize on it yet, for a while. Talk to me privately, some time soon.

Capitalize??

I anxiously await the latest salvo to come from the bunker on Denison!   Some one is definitely capitalizing on us, Tim.  Capitalizing on Slavic Village, too.  It's about time the media really did some uncovering to report the news, and not publish the racist rants of a tired, old coward living in the burbs. 

REporters

Tim, let's talk about REALity.

The PD could start by having reporters, who actually live within city limits.  I spoke to a PD editor after the Mount Pleasant series and he admitted that not one of the reporters covering the story lived any where near the story.  One of the reporters did live in Mount Pleasant at one time, but she ran away.  And the editor on the Mount Pleasant story lives in Akron.  So, how is that news coverage?  

So, to use the war analogy, these reporters are so afraid of the city that they write their news coverage from a bunker?   What ever happened to the concept of the embedded journalist?

good days and bad days

  This comes on the heels of a bad day of visiting our local school.  Tim, it's good that you try to see things from the perspective of some one who runs away.  It's easy to run away.  Most of the teachers at the nearby school live in the burbs.  But, these teachers don't see the kids as an abstraction in terms of color (partially because they are better paid than the suburban teachers).   They are just kids.  Some of these kids have behavioral problems that are worse than others.  Yesterday, visiting the school I saw some of that behavior.  I also saw a child clean out her desk as her parents picked her up for her last day at the school, because they are now moving to Parma, which, to me, is sad, because she could be that one person who made a difference in a diverse world, but now she will grow up in the distorted reality of the suburbs.

And, tomorrow might be a better day at the local school--where classrooms have kids who speak English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Ukranian, Serbian, Catonese and languages I don't recognize (from West Africa).  Towards the end of day, I listened to those multi-hued, beautiful kids laugh over a silly joke that I could not understand.   It was good to hear that carefree, unbridled, silly laughter.

 Here is a microcosm of the world.  If we can't get behavior to change in one school--how can we have any hope for the world?

as Ernie Anderson used to say...

As Ernie Anderson, better known as Ghoulardi, used to say, "PARMA!!!???!!!"

Vote

  Vote for some one who lives in the city and understands children.

School of hate

The problem we live with....Here is some perspective.  An African-American woman came to this community to accept a job with a local development corporation.   She was told to avoid Cleveland schools, so she and her family settled in Brecksville.  Her children stood out as minorities and were tormented for being different.  She chose to move her children back into a system that provided some diversity, so that her children would not be persecuted for being different.   Imagine how it feels to be the mother, father of any child that is not accepted?  How do you think generations of families feel, time after time, to essentially be told: "My child is too precious to be exposed to your child?"  Do you really think that you provide your child with reality by sending them to a school district that offers zero-to minimal diversity??  Would it kill you to spend more time with your child and invest your time with your child's school?  In fairness, I will say I do not have kids by choice.  I know that I have limited time, patience and energy.  Kids are an investment.  You have to think about investments.  Please think about your kids.

Outrage and Fear

Do we save our outrage for victims that look like us?  I am as guilty as Dick Feagler of not caring enough to understand the perpetrators of a crime.  I am old and tired, too.

Just like someone in the suburbs, I want to bury the body, so "outsiders" will only see the good side of my community.  I don't want to know the names or see the faces.

Body--this the impersonal word you use to do a reference search on a murder.   We cease to become anything but a lump of colorless flesh.  It helps to remember that we all end up the same way, despite our fear and running.

I live with the guilt for not caring enough to express outrage over this story:

Teen denies charges in death

Ismael Irizarry Jr., 16, denied charges in Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court that he tampered with evidence and obstructed police from investigating the death of Gabriel Feliciano. The 17-year-old's body was discovered near Brookside Reservation Wednesday. He had been missing since Sept. 23. Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller said Gabriel was shot at least once. Miller has not yet completed the autopsy. According to court records, Irizarry is accused of destroying evidence near where the body was found sometime around Sept. 25. He also remains a suspect in Feliciano's death and could face more charges once the investigation is complete.

Gabriel was found under the Brighton-Brooklyn Bridge.  Poor Gabriel.  I cry for you today and I cry for Ismael, too.  I have written about the teen underworld that lives in the shadows.  I was one of those kids, once.  I sometimes feel my field biologist skills, when I see the tracks and signs on the landscape, invisible to so many people.

What helped me to become not-so-angry, not-so-vicious?  I was forced to take care of an older bed-ridden man during my senior year in high school.  I hated every minute of it.  It was my senior genesis project foisted upon me by my parents.  I still don't have a lot of compassion, but now that I am older, I see that I am just a body, too.

What Do Declining Abortion Rates Mean for Crime in the Future?

January 22, 2008,  9:45 am

 


What Do Declining Abortion Rates Mean for Crime in the Future?

 

By Steven D. Levitt

 

The abortion rate in the
United States is at a thirty year low — though even with the decline, we are still talking about a large number of abortions in absolute terms, or 1.2 million per year. To put this number into perspective, there are about 4 million births per year in the
U.S.

 

John Donohue and I have argued that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s reduced crime in the 1990s. The logic is simple: unwanted children have an increased risk of growing up to be criminals, and legalized abortion reduces the number of unwanted children. Consequently, legalized abortion lowers crime in the future.

 

So what does the steady decline in abortions performed in recent years predict for future crime patterns? The answer is not obvious, because it depends on why abortion rates are falling, and I’m not sure we know the answer to that question.

 

If abortion rates are falling because it has become harder or more costly to get an abortion, then a falling abortion rate is bad news for crime. As the “price” (whether in monetary terms, social stigma, having to travel a long distance, etc.) rises, women who otherwise would have sought an abortion will not get one. This suggests that more unwanted children are being born, and thus crime rates may rise in the future.

 

On the other hand, there are other reasons why the number of abortions might fall, and none of these have dire crime implications. For instance, because abortion has been legalized since the 1970s, there may be fewer women today who are seeking abortions — the women who might have been at highest risk for unwanted pregnancies today may never have been born.

 

A second scenario in which low abortion rates don’t lead to high crime is an increase in reliable birth control. For instance, following the increased spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases in the 1990s, condom use may have risen. More condoms would lead to fewer conceptions, including fewer unwanted conceptions. The result would be both a lower abortion rate and a lower number of unwanted births.

 

A third possibility is that the demographic most likely to obtain abortions is conceiving less for other reasons — including, possibly, less sex. My student Amee Kamdar has a fascinating paper in which she shows that incarceration of twenty-something males greatly reduces the number of teenage births. Indirectly, the continuing rise in incarceration may be contributing to reduced rates of both teen births and teen abortions.

 

As this discussion points out, the relationship between abortion rates and future crime is subtle. Subtle enough, in fact, that I believe that many researchers studying this issue do not understand it themselves.

 

Donohue and I present evidence that the rise in abortions in the years immediately following legalization was due to the fact that abortions got “cheaper.” As such, during that period, more abortions implied less crime. Whether that is still true today is quite questionable. My hunch is that the recent declines in abortion are not really a result of abortions becoming more expensive. There are fewer abortion providers today, so maybe that makes it harder to obtain an abortion. On the other hand, when demand for a good (in this case, abortions) falls, you expect the number of providers to shrink. It is unclear which is causing which.

 

Perhaps more importantly, one might think that the introduction of RU-486 represents an important technological shock that lowers the cost of getting an abortion. Yet there are fewer abortions.

 

So, ultimately, although this is a bit of a guess, I would surmise that the low abortion rate today is being driven by a decrease in unwanted conceptions. If that is true, then these low abortion rate statistics are good news for future crime rates.

 

 

 

From: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/what-do-declining-abortion-rates-mean-for-crime-in-the-future/#more-2250

 

 

Jimmy Malone

  Jimmy Malone weighs in on irrational fear and anger in the Plain Dealer.

Jimmy's take refreshing

I've always enjoyed Jimmy Malone's perspectives, and now here comes another one. Thanks for bringing it up into my consciousness, Laura.