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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23304198
I guess this is old news already, but no one has made a thread about it yet.
Zimmerman, who shot an unarmed kid, has been found not guilty due to draconian US laws. I can't build up any anger at stuff like this anymore, all I can do is shake my head in disbelief and mumble "when will these barbarians ever learn..."
Insanity. Period. Not the ruling, but the laws which allowed the ruling.
Lemurs disease most often strikes patients when the thread is camouflaged:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...tatives/page14
You done goof'd horeTore.
My fault. Maybe it is best for the thread title to be changed.
Your media must be the same as ours Horetore, if you don't watch quality media you can see Zimmermans head bruised in the face and all bloody on the back of his head. Self-defence, yeah
I don't believe capital punishment is the appropriate response to a bruised head. I don't think you do either, considering you've done the same.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
As for Lemur's disease.... If we include thread derails in it, every single thread on this forum suffers from Lemurs disease. I have always assumed that every thread above 10 pages contains every topic known to man.
He was not guilty under Florida law.
The FBI investigated charges of a racial motive in the incident and found none.
The early charges of racism were media manufactured and governmentally fostered. It sparked protests in the black community with the intervention of the usual suspects.
It is tragic that a young man lost his life and both could have avoided the outcome.
But the black community and the white liberal media are silent about the shocking number of deaths of young blacks by other blacks.
It was only noticed because it was a “Man bites Dog” kind of story.
The media is still covering the issue and still putting out misleading and false statements. They are suturing the pot hopping it will boil over.
Inventing racial issues or promoting division is what they are guilty of. That is always good for ratings.
Yeah, it's a tragedy for all involved, no winners here.
Oh but there are winners!Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
The Media and Race Baiters are getting a lot of coverage and add revenues. People are excited and outraged that Zimmerman was not drawn and quartered and dragged behind a buss.
Politicians have another chance to write reactionary laws and put people in jail or maybe even execute them.
Nothing good is coming from it but that doesn’t mean there are no winners.
Heh the quality-media was kinda dissapointed here, they keep pointing out he is half white to the point of it looking desperate.
A cause a cause! My dignity for a cause!
Sure, and Obama is half white too. Is that grounds to assume that he is racist?
don´t think this is necessarily about racism.
it's more about a man on a power trip and a dumb "stand your ground" law that amplified it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_ruleQuote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
he is not white, sir.
(In all seriousness, two halves is almost always one thing, and not two things. Half black half white is black in europe and white in africa, not 2x half anywhere. It is sad, I can know.)
Not really true in the Netherlands, if you are of mixed race you are a 'halfbloed' (halfblood). To non-Dutchies, I know that sounds horrible but it isn't meant badly.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Stranger
just as true in the netherlands, regardless of the word they use. But I dont want to derail this thread.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
The same goes for Hispanic too. The half white is just a media hype.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Stranger
I am classed as Native American though most of my ancestry is European and I have a German last name. That makes me a halfbreed or injun to whites and a white man to Indians. Want to talk about it?
Not neccesarily, and not here. I just thought I should add a serious note to the joke about the one drop rule. because imo, its nothing but a joke.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
I think what happened is that the jury realized they couldn´t give him the death penalty.
so they gave it to him anyway by putting him back on the streets....it's kinda brilliant.
Move to France, where it's illegal to classify citizens according to ethnicity ~;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
(and religion too I think, but I'm not sure about that)
I think Zimmerman was a want-a-be hero doing his neighborhood watch captain thing. He didn’t disregard the dispatchers instructions. He went back to his truck, which is where it should have ended. However Martin chose to double back and confront him.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronin
Did Martin look suspicious? If he was walking through people’s lawns at night with a hood over his head, he did. He was a stranger on other peoples property. Sufficient to be arrested for trespassing.
Some where in that confrontation Zimmerman ended up on the ground with a broken nose and his head being pounded into the sidewalk. Was he seriously hurt? No. Did he have reason to believe he might be? Yes. Is that justification for the use of deadly force? Under Florida law, it is.
Was there a racial motive to the shooting? Not according to an FBI investigation into the matter.
Most of this is inflammatory and concocted from the media. There was a similar case recently also in Florida where the shooter was black and the dead one was white. The shooter went home.
Was it tragic that a young man lost his life that day? It was indeed. And it was also tragic that approximately 20 other young black men lost their lives that day and every other day since. But unlike Martin they didn’t make it into the news because their killers were also black.
It is not a gun problem. It is a violence problem and a culture problem and it was brought about, at least to a large degree by Government Policy.
But that brings no media outcry or rush to change. No calls of injustice or racism. And that is the larger tragedy.
If I may, what are you referring to when you say it is due to the government policy?
The war on poverty. Welfare as practiced in the US.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
Google destruction of the black family or the travesty of black education. I am sure you will find enough to understand what I mean.
In part, at least, it was well meant but ill considered. Other parts were far more cynically implemented for political gain. Even when you take away any political bias it is pretty damning. But neither side has rushed to fix it.
Pretty strong correlation between War on Drugs, mass incarceration of black men, and the national breakdown of the black family.
That's one angle. There's also a correlation between welfare and the breakdown of the black family (as Fisherking mentions—less direct evidence for this hypothesis, but it's not without merit, and it's a favorite trope of Libertarians and the Far Right).
So from the Law & Order crowd you have drug laws that imprison a disproportionate number of black men, with every negative side-effect that entails, and from the Care Bears you have a welfare system that creates disincentives for marriage and family bonding. Quite the fecal taco.
Best/easiest/cheapest thing we could do, as a nation, would be to wind down the expensive and counter-productive War on Drugs. Welfare has already been heavily modified (without corresponding upticks in black employment and family outcomes, which implies welfare was not the central disruption that Libertarians hypothesize).
One thing I find troubling in this discussion:
Do the media sensationalize and attempt to portray the simplest possible conflict to sell airtime/ads? Yes.
Do black and liberal politicians attempt to sell racial conflict, regardless of merit? Yes.
But ... but. We do have a history of racial injustice in this country, and I get wary when I hear people implying that the only form of racism is black-on-white, and that the only injustice is the White Man's Burden as he deals with the Troublesome Negro. Some posts in this thread have tiptoed dangerously close to that border.
I would not want to be a young black man in the American South for a large number of reasons. It's a crappy starting position. Yes, the only way to fix things is to fix them yourself, but to ignore the institutional disadvantages placed on black Americans is a bit much. You don't have to be a gutmensch pinko drum-circler to recognize that there are structures in place that disproportionately impact black men and women.
Well I don't mind being dangerously close to that. I won't cross that line but this doesn't seem to be what some some people want it to be (not here on the org)
Thanks for bringing up the other topics Lemur.
The law and order crowd has much to answer for too.
No one should escape all blame. Left, Right, or Center, politicians black and white and to an extent activist groups likewise.
The Unions of the 1960s were also a part of the problem but now 50 years gone by the level of unrest can still be brought to a fever pitch without people bothering to find out the facts.
A thousand men can be swayed by their prejudices faster and easier than one man can be persuaded by reason.
Friedrich Hayek
I like most others I assumed Zimmerman guilty from media reports, until I started looking into the matter and that was most of the way through the trial.
Crime is not a matter of black or white, it is most often a matter of poverty and lack of opportunity.
Most people today do not see everything in racial tones. Most have long ago given up such stereotypes.
There were no clear racial overtones to this case until they were manufactured by the press. Rather than back down from them, they seem to be perpetuating them.
The case should be over and needs to be over. People upset at the death of one person and its injustice need to be aware of a much larger problem. If that got real national attention perhaps something more could be done.
It had nothing to do with punishment. It sounds like Zimmerman shot Trayvon to stop Trayvon from killing him. Zimmerman was pleading with him to stop, Trayvon had 'won' the fight and could have walked away. Zimmerman was probably so dazed after getting his head beated into the pavement that he could not have pursued. What he was doing was not self-defense, it was beating a man to death out of anger. If Zimmerman had not shot him, Zimmerman probably would have ended up dead.Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
If there was a racial motive to the violence, it appears to be Trayvon who was the racist "creepy ass cracka", etc. He thought Zimmerman was white, and according to the witness, Racheal, it sounds like he assumed he was gay too.
Zimmerman was an armed volounteer neighborhood guard.
That's a recipe for murder. As we have seen.
Except what happened wasn't murder. What led to the death was Zimmerman disobeying his instructions (which is nowhere near murder) and a drugged up Trayvon trying to kill him. Zimmerman acted in self-defense, and is guilty of only stupidity, not murder. Trayvon was most likely an attempted murderer however.Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
There is nothing wrong with a volunteer neighborhood watch, and 99% of the time it is a big help and does not cause problems. Hell, trained police forces probably cause more problems than local neighborhood watches.
And BTW, following someone is not a crime punishable by being beat to death. And from recent revelations, it sounds like Trayvon thought he was gay and was disgusted by that fact, and possibly tried to kill him for racial and homophobic reasons.
For what it's worth, statistically you're in a much better position to invoke self-defense if you are not black. Breakdown below, broken out by "stand your ground" and non-syg states, black-on-black versus black-on-white and white-on-black.
https://i.imgur.com/FgAAcbM.png
Source.
So what? We gotta judge Zimmerman by the facts of the case, not some statistic. That would be like posting a statistic showing that black people are much more likely to rape white women than white men black women on a thread dealing with a black guy being found innocent of raping a white woman.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
I feel to see how it is relevant.
Statistics about the likely outcome of a self-defense plea in a case that hinges on ... a self-defense plea. Seems pretty straightforward.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vuk
In part, I am reacting against the suggestion that the racial angle was completely invented out of whole cloth by the Evil Media. The media messed up many times, and got a great deal wrong, but I don't think the (false) racial narrative would have taken hold if there were not some reality people were reacting to.
There's a solid history of all-white juries refusing to convict people who killed black men. Is this case a result of that? Hell no.
There's irrefutable statistical evidence that a self-defense plea is much more likely to succeed if you are a white person killing a black person. Is that causal to the Zimmerman case? Hell no.
People grabbed this case and ran with it in some fundamentally wrong directions. Grant you that. But the notion that they were behaving in a vacuum, out of some imagined problem, is counter-factual.
@ Lemur
Ok, so I didn’t follow this case until the last minute. I saw all the bull on fb on one side or the other and got what the German media was reporting, which was recycled CNN more or less.
Where did the racial angle come from? At least prior to NBC’s creative editing job.
Was it Florida, gated community, neighborhood watch, the name Zimmerman or what?
Meh, I think it was just a perfect storm race-wise, with elements that managed to twang just about every tension in American race relations.
The thing is, as everyone's at pains to point out, the more you learned the more the case clearly was NOT a perfect storm.
But right, the gated community, the volunteer who was initially reported as white, the unarmed black teen, the shooting, the initial refusal by the police and prosecutor to make a case (which set a lot of alarm bells ringing, given the history), etc.
In the end, it was just a mess. But at the outset, from the outside, it looked like a very bad replay of some very bad episodes of American history.
Yes, but if someone asks me to rob a bank with him and I say no and give him a cookie that says "good luck" instead and he murders someone in the bank I'm guilty of murder by association in the US. Or if that's too removed from you, maybe I was just sitting in the car outside and didn't even have a gun or know that the murderer had one. I'm assumed guilty of murder because I was part of the action and helped him get there and in this light, saying that Zimmerman was just stupid seems a bit easy since his actions that were in violation of strict neighborhood watch rules directly lead to the death of a person. More so IMO, than driving an escape car.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vuk
My point of course is that the whole guilty by association thing is stupid and you should do away with it. The murderer is the one who pulled the trigger and not the one who stood by and shouted "No, don't do it!" but happened to wear a matching balaclava.
Oh and saying Trayvon was most likely an attempted murderer is pure speculation, many people get beaten up and not killed, you cannot know when he would've stopped because our hero stopped him prematurely and now private prisons will earn less. It certainly wasn't good for the economy man.
Have you looked at any of the facts in this case? Convicting Zimmerman would have been anything but fair. You can believe Zimmerman acted with malice if you choose, but there is inadequate evidence to prove it anywhere other than in your mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube
You know, I was sincerely curious about this, so I started reading the link:Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
And then I stopped. If they can't be troubled to get the basic facts of the case right, I'm not going to trust them to present any objective evidence.Quote:
Since Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, invoked the stand-your-ground defense, these laws have been defended by gun rights groups for empowering civilians. They’ve also been criticized by civil rights groups for encouraging violence and being racially biased.
Stand Your Ground was not invoked by the defense.
See, this is where things get wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vuk
A civilian should never be allowed police authority. A civilian should never be allowed to "issue instructions". And when such instructions are backed up with a gun, you get the obvious result.
If Zimmerman hadn't been armed that night, Trayvon wouldn't have attacked him, nor would he have been able to shoot. This murder happened because your society allows random people to walk around with guns "looking tough".
If Zimmerman observed strange behaviour, the obvious solution is to go home and call the cops. That's what he should have done, and in that case there wouldn't have been any beatings or deaths that night.
Sorry, I just saw this when HoreTore quoted you. But, there is no evidence to support this claim. Just one of the many misconceptions still out there... Read the call transcript yourself.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vuk
Which is totally true as a limited and misleading statement.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xiahou
One of the reasons given for a lack of a case in the initial weeks after the shooting was the Stand Your Ground law, the judge instructed the jury to consider self-defense in the explicit terms laid out in the Stand Your Ground law, and the jury considered Stand Your Ground in deliberations.
So it's a trial that hinges on self-defense, which was substantially altered by the Stand Your Ground law ... but because the defense attorney never said the words "Stand Your Ground," you're asserting that the law had nothing to do with this case. (Or rather, you're making the technically true but highly misleading statement that "Stand Your Ground was never invoked by the defense," which is a slippery bit of semantics if I ever saw one. Oh, the judge included it in the jury instructions? I was talking about the defense. Oh, the police mentioned it? I was talking about the defense. Oh, the jury considered it as part of the verdict? I was talking about the defense. Oh, the defense's entire case rested on the Stand Your Ground definition of self-defense? Well they never invoked it, whatever "invoked" means in this context.)
Gotcha.
From a juror's interview:
COOPER: Did you feel like you understood the instructions from the judge? Because they were very complex. I mean, reading them, they were tough to follow.
JUROR: Right. That was our problem. It was just so confusing what went with what and what we could apply to what. Because I mean, there was a couple of them in there that wanted to find him guilty of something. And after hours and hours and hours of deliberating over the law and reading did over and over and over again, we decided there’s just no way — no other place to go.
COOPER: Because of the two options you had, second degree murder or manslaughter, you felt neither applied?
JUROR: Right. Because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground. He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.
I had a longer post under way... but it's late and I'm going to bed. I'll let someone else make my argument for me. They probably explain it better than I could anyhow..
In short, the prosecution said it wasn't about Stand Your Ground. The defense didn't claim SYG as defense. The chief of police said it was clear self-defense and not SYG. And if the law hadn't been on the books it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the trial.
Wow, what a nanny state you dream of.Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
In America normal people are treated as responsible adults who are able to make the right decisions without the state telling them what to do. Responsible adults are certainly more than capable of handling a gun and acting responsible in keeping their neighborhood clean. The police won't be there when something happens, they always come later to pick up the bodies, takes a responsible adult to shoot the punks and defend the grandmothers.
If you want to suck at the government's teet, treat murderers as victims and hurt the prison economy then America is not the country for you because it is populated with responsible, self-respecting and capable adult citizens who value their freedoms, liberties and personal responsibility more than anything else and wouldn't give any of that up to gain a nanny state in return!
Well....Quote:
Originally Posted by Husar
I don't want to arm the police either, so I'm guessing I want more of a "nanny society" than a "nanny state"...
Again, if you take a very narrow read on events, this is literally true. But your talking point gets all flummoxed and angry when it runs up against things like Zimmerman's initial talk of Stand your Ground, and the fact that the jury explicitly considered the law when exonerating Zimmerman. Also, as per your linked article, you have to dismiss the judge's jury instructions to make your talking point work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xiahou
At the very least, you might not want to dismiss any and all people who reference Stand Your Ground in relation to this case; I think it's blindingly obvious that there's more than one legitimate read on the subject. Just because the bloggers at Reason happen to agree with you and Sean Hannity is no cause to be so dismissive of, say, the statistical article I linked earlier.
To be honest, I went back and read the whole article later. It was crap for reasons beyond SYG. For whatever reasons, blacks commit homicide at a much greater rate than whites. In cases where the race of the perpetrator is identified, slightly over 50% of the perpetrators are black. Yet only around 13% of our population is black. Don't you think it reasonable that as the homicide rate increases across a population, that the rate of justifiable (self-defense) homicides would not scale at the same level? Nowhere did I see that "study's" author address this or any other confounding factors. Indeed, I'd call it as much a "study" as when you or I go on Google and pull data from the FBI's website. I guess the difference is that he made a bar graph. :shrug:Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
Yes I do, where are we going to buy a farmQuote:
Originally Posted by Husar
X
And if you had back-tracked from the article, you would have found the earlier source here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xiahou
I'm glad you've moved from dismissing the article because it does not adhere to your particular interpretation of SYG law and its relevance to the Zimmerman case on to dismissing the article because it doesn't address the things you find interesting.
One of the discussion-worthy things about the case is the use of self-defense in a low-evidence situation. (Despite many proclamations people have made about what did and did not happen, the truth of the matter is that most of what happened with Martin and Zimmerman is unproveable.) Stand Your Ground was clearly a factor on everyone's—most importantly the jury's—mind. Whether or not a duty to retreat was a factor depends entirely on how the fight between Martin and Zimmerman was initiated, and nobody can state with any certainty how that played out.
So your assertion that SYG is irrelevant depends entirely on accepting Zimemrman's version of events. Which may or may not be 100% accurate.
It is not easy to tell if this forums "Zimmerman guilty" people are so because they disagree with the USA protection of gun rights and self defense law, or because they think Zimmerman a racist, and therefore representative of our reprehensibly racist society. Outside of these forums however, there is no doubt that the Zimmerman guilty crowd are such because of the latter. That group REFUSES to look at the facts when completely shared, they want ONLY to see what the media fed them in the few days after the event. The media sold a story that would sell. Racism is fantastic print, gun control not so much.
If the media wanted a story about gun control and self defense rights, they'd have made a big deal about the Christopher Cervini - Roderick Scott case several years ago. Very similar circumstances, races reversed. That does not do well for the purposes of race baiters.
Long story short - if you're hanging Zimmerman for being a racist, you can kiss 6 white female jurists ass! hahahahaha bish.
We sure can do without further speculation. That is how it all started.
I think it played out the only way it could have with a trial.
If the state has sent it to a grand jury and had they found no grounds to prosecute there would have still been a lot of upset people. I am not sure if they could have gone a head with a trial if the grand jury has said found insufficient evidence.
Many are upset with the prosecution but the Governor has said he would find someone to do it, and he did.
From the facts of the case it would never have gone so far had the media not over reacted and checked their facts. And NBCs attempt to color the man as a racist proved very damaging. That and the use of the photos of Zimmerman and Martin.
@Fisherking, yeah, that's about the size of it. I would only add that police and prosecutors refusing to bring a case against someone who shot an unarmed black teen had some very unfortunate historical resonance.
So ... people were reacting to something real, even if it was misapplied.
But beyond that, yeah.
A reasonable reason to have a second look, in deed.
Fisherking's post brings me back to something Lemur said earlier...
The racial angle wasn't invented by the media, it was exploited by the media. In their rush for ratings, they ignored, discounted, or flat out altered the facts of the story.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
They knew this was an extremely sensitive subject matter. And instead of treating it with sensitivity, they treated it with sensationalism.
That's a fair take. Like I said, I was pushing back against the notion that the racial sensitivities were fabricated. Which was the implication of a few posts.
The distinction between "invented" and "exploited" is an important one.
As I said at the end of the post you quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
What the media did was take raw facts and made gross assumptions based on the report. They then spun it in the most unfavorable light without bothering to do even cursory investigation.
Some even misrepresented the facts in such a was as prove their view was the correct one and the only conclusion a sensible person could reach.
They did real damage, not only to the individual, but also the state of race relations in the nation and around the world.
Even during and after the trial they continued to misrepresent the true nature of the facts and to obscure what was said or done. More so by pundits than the actual news but no less damaging.
If they want to pursue a case more likely to demonstrate racial bias then they should look into the verdict of Trevor Dooley and his manslaughter conviction.
The case has been touted by the right as to the injustice of the Zimmerman case but Dooley was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 years.
The media in his case cited the triviality of the argument and the fact that minors, including the 8 year old daughter of the dead man, were present. Dooley initially used the stand your ground law as defense, to have the case dismissed. That was denied. He then used self defense in his case, how ever the media made issue with his seeming lack of remorse.
During the altercation Dooley showed his gun in his waist band but turned to leave. At which point James spun him around, wrestled him to the ground and was choking him. Dooley said he could not breath, he prodded James in the leg several times with the gun before he fired, killing him.
If these facts are true, then how did a Tampa Jury find to convict? Surely the law is clear enough that Dooley should also be a free man.
I think we're seeing a bizarre phenomenon in "new reporting" now. News personalities get to say their usual stupid stuff, but then it's reported on by the supposed straight news segments thereby we have networks generating their own "news".Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
There's some big differences with the Dooley case....Quote:
If they want to pursue a case more likely to demonstrate racial bias then they should look into the verdict of Trevor Dooley and his manslaughter conviction.
The case has been touted by the right as to the injustice of the Zimmerman case but Dooley was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 years.
The media in his case cited the triviality of the argument and the fact that minors, including the 8 year old daughter of the dead man, were present. Dooley initially used the stand your ground law as defense, to have the case dismissed. That was denied. He then used self defense in his case, how ever the media made issue with his seeming lack of remorse.
During the altercation Dooley showed his gun in his waist band but turned to leave. At which point James spun him around, wrestled him to the ground and was choking him. Dooley said he could not breath, he prodded James in the leg several times with the gun before he fired, killing him.
If these facts are true, then how did a Tampa Jury find to convict? Surely the law is clear enough that Dooley should also be a free man.
The most important being that there were multiple witnesses to the confrontation- according to whom, it was determined that Dooley initiated the confrontation.
He came into the park screaming at a skateboarding kid, telling him to get off the basketball court. James, who was there with his daughter shooting hoops, told Dooley there was no signage prohibiting skateboards. Dooley responded by yelling "Fuck you!" and brandished his gun. James asked him why he was carrying a weapon and why he would swear in front of children. Then the altercation became physical. A witness stated at one point James was trying to pin Dooley on the ground, holding his arms down. During the struggle, Dooley shot and killed James.
I'm not aware of "Stand Your Ground" laws allowing you to assault someone and then kill them in "self-defense". A manslaughter conviction sounds completely appropriate here. There would have been far better grounds for a second-degree murder charge than there was in the Zimmerman case....
I saw the part where when asked who hit who, James’ daughter said my daddy…
I am sure there were more things considered to get that verdict, but were they pertinent to the case?
edit: I am not saying that Dooley was a good guy. He may have started the argument, but he was attacked when walking away, knocked to the ground and choked.
That is where the self defense comes in!
From my link:Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
Quote:
The teen told jurors that he did not see James get violent, only that the veteran was on top of Dooley at one point, holding his hands down. "He did not choke him," said Arthur.
lol. Massive protests all over America internet says. It must be hard to be a black in America. You want to be discriminated but aren't, what now?
Groovy. Had that been the case he sure as hell wouldn't have made it in politics. The first rule of politics must be use hyperbole.Quote:
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said the president on Friday in his first on-camera response to the verdict.
Barkley is a straight shooter (even though they were easy shots because he spent most of his time trolling the paint). Bottom line is, instead of Obama guiding the media, he allowed them to guide him on this issue. As inept as our politicians may be, their a damn sight better leadership than our media is.Quote:
The NBA Hall of Famer continued: "The main thing I feel bad for, [is that the trial] gives every white person and black person who are racist a platform to vent."
"I don't like when race gets out in the media because...I don't think the media has clean hands," Barkley said.
I have some difficulty treating his speech with anything short of skepticism. Obama grew up in a privileged enviornment, mostly in Hawaii. As most profiling relies on dress as much as color, I just don’t buy it.
Obama accepted an offer to work as a community organizer in Chicago's largely poor and black South Side. As biographer David Mendell notes in his 2007 book Obama: From Promise to Power, the job gave Obama "his first deep immersion into the African American community he had longed to both understand and belong to."
Which way was it? It is rather hard to be both.
Ok, can we give the hoodie a rest? It was raining outside, a hoodie is perfectly acceptable outerwear.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
When I wear my uni's hoodie, people actually think I am less threatening.
Who said anything about hoodies? I was talking about Obama.Quote:
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
If Obama ever did ware a hoodie, would you think the guy with Armani slacks and a hoodie with a designer label was as threatening as the guy with a hoodie and pants hanging to his knees?
Not here, if you wear one if you want to take the bus you will have to wait for the next one, shopkeepers won't help youQuote:
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
He's admitted to drug use (alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) about 35 years ago and his group of friends used to describe themselves as a gang. So previledged backround and hyperbole sure, but he wasn't exactly the saint of his class at that age.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
Who is, I wouldn't pay too much attention to that anyway as he is a bigger idiot right now for going along with race-baiters. No facts matter anymore, blacks got their pittitude and get to howl and he served the gutmensch a cause on a silver plate
That all sounds like hyperbole. In the 1970s cocaine was the drug of choice of the privileged. His gang likely did the drugs and alcohol they pilfered from their parents.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironside
I am less impressed than ever.
:laugh4:
I would be interested to see if there were any way Obama could address race without getting dinged for race-baiting by the Fox/Drudge/NewsMax crowd.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
From what I've seen of the transcripts, I'm missing the whole LET'S HATE ON WHITEY thing that you all seem to be hearing. Sample:
And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.
What does it matter, Obama shouldn't have get himself involved in a non-issue, and now it's an issue.
So by saying anything, Obama is (as my wingnut friends on Facebook are calling him) the race-baiter-in-chief.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
Gotcha. Thanks for playing.
https://i.imgur.com/qbOQTx4.gif
Pretty much. Moreso since his comments were downright retarded.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
Okay, gotcha, for the first black president to have an I-feel-your-pain moment with the black community is evil and retarded. And by saying anything at all he's a race-baiter.Quote:
Originally Posted by rvg
It's a good thing that only other people have identity politics. Since we're white, we are immune! And the only racism left in America is Al Sharpton!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:
https://i.imgur.com/vQLSF2Q.gif
He sure comes across like one. Now, I understand that he's aiming at guns rather than race, however it's not about what he means, it's about how it looks. Had he said "It could have been anybody", he would have shifted this into an anti-gun direction, which I think is what his aim was. The way he did it looked like pure race baiting. As a president he should be above that kind of stuff.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
Lemur, please you are unfairly lumping us all together with these people, there are plenty of good, honest, non-assholish white people and to insinuate we are all like that is quite frankly offensive.
:P
Why encourage pittitude. Leave it to the court that is why you have them. Damage control done wrong, it now looks like he sided with the black community, over a crackhead piece of shit who is actually very likely to have been the burglar scouting the area they were looking for as they found loot in his locker at school and they found pictures of jewelry on his bed and automatic firearms as well. You must be reading quality-media as even I know that and I live on the other side of the ocean.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
But the President is the one who's race-baiting. Gotcha.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
Hard to argue with such a wealth of linked and documented evidence, not to mention your thoughtful analysis of the case.
Of course it's the president. The president should learn when to interject himself into controversy and when to stay out of it. He should have stayed out of this one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
He encouraged it. Courts should be independent and he gave race-baiters a free pass by speaking out on it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
^- rvg says it better
Anyhow, the juwels they found in deadboy's locker can probably be traced back exactly to where they came from but we will never know for reasons that are obvious for anyone who doesn't read quality-newspapers
Nah, I'd say you are both expressing yourselves just fine.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
It isn't what some people want it to be, sorry for that reality sucks sometimes. Maybe you should be apoligising for giving blacks equal rights for the law instead, who to blame now if you just have to blame someone for being a mess.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemur
Zimmerman helps rescue a family from a SUV wreck.
Unable to square this with their mental image of Zimmerman as the embodiment of evil, Zimmerman haters are claiming it was staged.... :no: