Originally Posted by
Whacker
I called him a little thug because that's what he appeared to be.
Whacker, if you want to posit that the person murdered was a "thug," and that's really salient, then you might want to link to some information. Opening the conversation with "the little thug" does not inspire a calm, reasoned debate, as you would realize if you gave it any thought at all.
Last I heard he got suspended, and that was the full publicly known extent of his thuggishness. Moreover, you are aware, I hope, that the "thug" line has been put forward by people just as unhelpful and thoughtless as Bobby Rush. If you're here to say, "race baiting bad," we can all agree on that. Racism bad too, okay? And drugs are bad, unless they're really good, in which case they're a bit of both.
Frankly, by singling out a buffoonish congresscritter and going straight into the "race baiters bad" line of rhetoric, this thread got off to a not-great start. There's a serious issue of the appropriate use of force, and a very disturbing case of a guy shooting another guy in public. There's a reason 75% of the public thinks there should be an investigation, even if the local prosecutor, for reasons unknown, tried to head it off.
-edit-
A little bit of detail about this odd and counter-productive attempt to smear the guy who got shot:
So why this desire to paint Martin, rather than the man who shot him, as the guilty party? Partly, of course, it’s just a reaction to his death becoming a cause célèbre on the left [..] Beyond that, though, some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism. You might call these people anti-anti-racists. They are determined to push back against any narrative that would suggest that a black man has been targeted for the color of his skin.
Riehl does us the great favor of making such views explicit. “In the past when race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton started their usual schtick over some alleged racial issue, they and the media were mostly allowed to run wild with it … But I don't have to tolerate it, now,” he writes, continuing, “[L]ast time I looked, there's a black guy in the White House. You want me to cry and feel sorry for you because America is such a racist country, or I need to explore some hidden racism deep within myself?”
Other anti-anti-racists are equally determined to deny that Martin’s blackness had anything to do with his death. When President Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Newt Gingrich reacted with the apoplexy he often shows in the face of anti-racism, saying, “Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period…. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who'd been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn't look like him?” Rick Santorum echoed, “What the president of the United States should do is try to bring people together, not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.”
But if race has nothing to do with this case, then it makes no sense that Zimmerman was able to kill Martin without consequences—unless, of course, Martin did something to provoke him. If you don’t want to believe that racism is a problem in the United States, it helps to believe that Martin had it coming. Even if the only evidence is a school suspension, a tiny trace of pot, and the juvenile tweets of a kid trying to be cool.
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