The Commish
Footballguy
Zimmerman's statement acknowledges there were words between them before the altercation started. I don't understand this.
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Florida boy killed by Neighborhood Watch (3 Viewers)
- Thread starter Yenrub
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Zimmerman's statement acknowledges there were words between them before the altercation started. I don't understand this.
timschochet
Footballguy
I wasn't aware that DUI stops were the equivalent of espionage. But whatever. Apparently your paranoia about the NSA couldn't be contained within a single thread. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
timschochet
Footballguy
I came back to discuss Obama's speech which I thought was excellent. He didn't fan any flames.
5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
Are you saying you can adequately defend yourself as you reach into your pocket for your phone and then look down when you realize there is no phone in your pocket? Don't be a fool, the fact that there are words exchanged does not negate the possibility of a sucker punch.
A punch that takes your enemy by suprise, possibly knocking them out.
Comes from them being a sucker for not having their guard up. Also known as a ##### move (rhymes with ditch).
avoiding injuries
Footballguy
I wonder if you would have a different opinion if you didn't think it was excellent. This thread had slipped to the 2nd page on this board before he spoke. The interest was fading, kind of like when a fire is going out.
timschochet
Footballguy
The accusation of "fanning the flames", originally made by jon mx in this thread, referred specifically to Obama's statements increasing the possibility of rioting and violence. That's what I was referring to. If you're arguing that Obama fanned the flames of long needed discussion about the racism that still exists in this country, then I would agree with you. I hope it works.
timschochet
Footballguy
Brilliant article from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/19/killing-trayvon-martin-business-as-usual
There's an old tale about a village that existed on the edge of a precipice. Villagers were perpetually tumbling into the abyss, until one day the elders addressed the problem by building a fence. People stopped falling to their doom, and all was well. Indeed, things went so well that the villagers decided the problem no longer existed. So they tore down the fence.
George Zimmerman's exoneration in the killing of Trayvon Martin strikes me as being the result of this kind of foolish, shortsighted and circular thinking this parable exemplifies. For a while in America we were engaged in something like a serious conversation about the costs of racial profiling: there were studies, proposals, acknowledgments and suggested legal recourse. Then, within the last 10 years or so, we seem to have completely lost any sense of direction. Not just anti-profiling policies but the entire edifice of civil rights laws has been attacked, eroded, torn down.
In Zimmerman's trial, the judge explicitly barred any discussion of racial profiling. At the same time, his entire defence was precisely and explicitly premised on how much Trayvon Martin "looked like" a big, black "thug", and how reasonable it was to be suspicious and alarmed when Trayvon – doing nothing more than walking toward his father's house – resembled someone who "might be" a "predator" engaged in a "rash" or a "spree" of crime.
What else can we call it but pervasive racism when confronted with the overwhelming social consensus that so easily and completely displaced the real, unarmed kid carrying candy and a soda with ugly projected fears of much more?
And so, in a country divided down the middle about race – in a country where a young black man dies at the hands of police or security guards nearly every day of the year – we have decided that if we were to just stop talking about it so much, racial division would melt away. According to this logic, we don't have any problem that the dismantling of civil rights laws won't cure.
The civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s brought about some of the most effective structural transformations in race relations in US history. Since then the backlash has slowly swelled and regrouped. With the election of Barack Obama, there were those who insisted that the country had been "cured" of racism, and that we had achieved our long-hoped-for, colour-blind, "post-racial" apotheosis. If only.
Over the past few years the supreme court has aggressively restricted laws meant to redress the legacy of segregation: it has held that it is in and of itself racist to consider race, even for purposes of remedying inequality. It has made proving discrimination nearly impossible by all but barring data about disparate impact. Just last month it gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, placing a nearly impossible burden on individual citizens to show that state officials had invidious intent in restricting the opportunity to vote. It has made class actions, the very staple of civil rights cases, almost completely unavailable.
What makes the exoneration of Zimmerman particularly frustrating – to at least some of us in the United States – is that the killing of Trayvon Martin was in many ways business as usual, the continuation of a long and bloody history – except that in a "post-racial world", we are not supposed to talk about it.
Zimmerman was found not guilty because of a sequence of unquestioned habits of thought: from the prejudgments that clouded his vision on that dark and rainy night; to the Sanford police department's casual reaction to the crime scene, failing to preserve evidence or conduct a thorough investigation in a timely fashion; to the anonymous juror who has declared that Zimmerman's "heart was in the right place". We are afflicted with the kind of "common sense" that turns one black kid into all black men and all black men into criminals – and, most worryingly, all criminality into a black male "thing".
This is an insidious progression of reasoning, but how else to explain comments like the statement of the TV pundit Geraldo Rivera that: "I see those six ladies in the jury putting themselves … in that housing complex that has just been burglarised by three or four different groups of black youngsters from the adjacent community … I submit that if they were armed, they would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did."
The parable of the village wall, in its starkest telling, makes the village elders sound simply foolish for tearing down the fence that ensures their citizens' welfare. But if the moral is seen as a caution about due process and the structures of reconciliation that preserve us as a polity, then the story illustrates the bewitching ease with which we sometimes get cause and effect precisely backwards.
In "post-racial" America, statistics are in many ways worse than they were in the 50s, particularly as to the so-called war on crime and its targeting of black neighbourhoods. As Michele Alexander's excellent book The New Jim Crow has documented, our disparate enforcement of drug laws, as well as stop-and-frisk policies that target African-American neighbourhoods exclusively, are creating a caste system sustaining expectations and assumptions that all but licence the outcome in the Zimmerman case.
But this is a tale that is complicated by, but not exclusively about, race: for along with the slashing of funds for social safety nets and public accommodations of all sorts – from public housing to public education and law enforcement – we seem to be entering a war of worlds where each of us will be subject to the assumed, rather than legislated, justice of whichever of one's neighbours has the biggest-barrelled gun.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/19/killing-trayvon-martin-business-as-usual
There's an old tale about a village that existed on the edge of a precipice. Villagers were perpetually tumbling into the abyss, until one day the elders addressed the problem by building a fence. People stopped falling to their doom, and all was well. Indeed, things went so well that the villagers decided the problem no longer existed. So they tore down the fence.
George Zimmerman's exoneration in the killing of Trayvon Martin strikes me as being the result of this kind of foolish, shortsighted and circular thinking this parable exemplifies. For a while in America we were engaged in something like a serious conversation about the costs of racial profiling: there were studies, proposals, acknowledgments and suggested legal recourse. Then, within the last 10 years or so, we seem to have completely lost any sense of direction. Not just anti-profiling policies but the entire edifice of civil rights laws has been attacked, eroded, torn down.
In Zimmerman's trial, the judge explicitly barred any discussion of racial profiling. At the same time, his entire defence was precisely and explicitly premised on how much Trayvon Martin "looked like" a big, black "thug", and how reasonable it was to be suspicious and alarmed when Trayvon – doing nothing more than walking toward his father's house – resembled someone who "might be" a "predator" engaged in a "rash" or a "spree" of crime.
What else can we call it but pervasive racism when confronted with the overwhelming social consensus that so easily and completely displaced the real, unarmed kid carrying candy and a soda with ugly projected fears of much more?
And so, in a country divided down the middle about race – in a country where a young black man dies at the hands of police or security guards nearly every day of the year – we have decided that if we were to just stop talking about it so much, racial division would melt away. According to this logic, we don't have any problem that the dismantling of civil rights laws won't cure.
The civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s brought about some of the most effective structural transformations in race relations in US history. Since then the backlash has slowly swelled and regrouped. With the election of Barack Obama, there were those who insisted that the country had been "cured" of racism, and that we had achieved our long-hoped-for, colour-blind, "post-racial" apotheosis. If only.
Over the past few years the supreme court has aggressively restricted laws meant to redress the legacy of segregation: it has held that it is in and of itself racist to consider race, even for purposes of remedying inequality. It has made proving discrimination nearly impossible by all but barring data about disparate impact. Just last month it gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, placing a nearly impossible burden on individual citizens to show that state officials had invidious intent in restricting the opportunity to vote. It has made class actions, the very staple of civil rights cases, almost completely unavailable.
What makes the exoneration of Zimmerman particularly frustrating – to at least some of us in the United States – is that the killing of Trayvon Martin was in many ways business as usual, the continuation of a long and bloody history – except that in a "post-racial world", we are not supposed to talk about it.
Zimmerman was found not guilty because of a sequence of unquestioned habits of thought: from the prejudgments that clouded his vision on that dark and rainy night; to the Sanford police department's casual reaction to the crime scene, failing to preserve evidence or conduct a thorough investigation in a timely fashion; to the anonymous juror who has declared that Zimmerman's "heart was in the right place". We are afflicted with the kind of "common sense" that turns one black kid into all black men and all black men into criminals – and, most worryingly, all criminality into a black male "thing".
This is an insidious progression of reasoning, but how else to explain comments like the statement of the TV pundit Geraldo Rivera that: "I see those six ladies in the jury putting themselves … in that housing complex that has just been burglarised by three or four different groups of black youngsters from the adjacent community … I submit that if they were armed, they would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did."
The parable of the village wall, in its starkest telling, makes the village elders sound simply foolish for tearing down the fence that ensures their citizens' welfare. But if the moral is seen as a caution about due process and the structures of reconciliation that preserve us as a polity, then the story illustrates the bewitching ease with which we sometimes get cause and effect precisely backwards.
In "post-racial" America, statistics are in many ways worse than they were in the 50s, particularly as to the so-called war on crime and its targeting of black neighbourhoods. As Michele Alexander's excellent book The New Jim Crow has documented, our disparate enforcement of drug laws, as well as stop-and-frisk policies that target African-American neighbourhoods exclusively, are creating a caste system sustaining expectations and assumptions that all but licence the outcome in the Zimmerman case.
But this is a tale that is complicated by, but not exclusively about, race: for along with the slashing of funds for social safety nets and public accommodations of all sorts – from public housing to public education and law enforcement – we seem to be entering a war of worlds where each of us will be subject to the assumed, rather than legislated, justice of whichever of one's neighbours has the biggest-barrelled gun.
Riversco
Footballguy
timschochet
Footballguy
cstu
Footballguy
How about not getting into altercations with people, whether or not you think they have a gun?
timschochet
Footballguy
Here is another great article from this morning, this one demonstrating (as many posters here already have) that much of my earlier suppositions about George Zimmerman were false and based on faulty media reports:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/21/how_media_lies_have_distorted_a_tragedy_119311.html
A week after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the backlash continues, with nationwide protests and calls to boycott Florida. President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s reaction must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage.
This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.
This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman’s history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia. Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that “Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.” Actually, only six calls—two of them about Trayvon Martin—had to do with African-American men. At least three involved complaints about whites; others were about such issues as a fire alarm going off, a reckless driver of unknown race, or an aggressive dog.
In this narrative, even Zimmerman’s concern for a black child—a 2011 call to report a young African-American boy walking unsupervised on a busy street, on which the police record notes, “compl[ainant] concerned for well-being”—has been twisted into crazed racism. Writing on the website of The New Republic, Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford describes Zimmerman as “an edgy basket case” who called 911 about “the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.” This slander turns up in other left-of-center sources, such as ThinkProgress.org.
Accounts of the incident itself have also been wrapped in false narrative—including such egregious distortions as NBC’s edited audio of Zimmerman’s 911 call which made him appear to say that Martin was “up to no good” because “he looks black.” (In fact, Zimmerman explained that Martin was “walking around and looking about” in the rain, and mentioned his race—of which he initially seemed unsure—only in response to the dispatcher’s question.)
While this falsehood was retracted and cost several NBC employees their jobs, other fake facts still circulate unchecked: most notably, that Zimmerman disobeyed police orders not to follow Martin (or even, as Cobb and another guest asserted on the NewsHour, not to get out of his car). In fact, there was no such order. The dispatcher asked if Zimmerman was following the teenager; Zimmerman said yes, the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that,” and Zimmerman replied, “Okay.” (Just before this, the dispatcher had made comments that could be construed as asking him to watch Martin, such as, “Just let us know if he does anything else.”)
No one except Zimmerman knows whether he continued to track Martin—or, as he claims, headed back to his truck only to have Martin confront him. No one but Zimmerman knows who initiated physical violence. Both eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence, including injuries to Zimmerman’s face and the back of his head, supported his claim that he was being battered when he fired the gun. It was certainly enough to create reasonable doubt. Yet accounts that deplore the verdict often fail to mention Zimmerman’s injuries. Thus, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says only that an unarmed “skinny boy” could not have been a serious threat to “a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds”—nearly doubling the actual 27-pound difference between Martin and Zimmerman and omitting the fact that Martin was three inches taller.
The false narrative also makes it axiomatic that a black man in Zimmerman’s shoes wouldn’t stand a chance—especially if he had shot someone white. Never mind examples to the contrary, such as a 2009 case in Rochester, New York in which a black man, Roderick Scott, shot and killed an unarmed white teenager and was acquitted. Scott, who had caught 17-year-old Christopher Cervini and two other boys breaking into a car, said that the boy charged him and he feared for his life.
What about general patterns? In the New Republic article, Ford cites a report in the Tampa Bay Times showing that “stand your ground” self-defense claims in Florida are more successful for defendants who kill a black person (73 percent face no penalty, compared to 59 percent of those who kill a white person). But he leaves out a salient detail: since most homicides involve people of the same race, this also means more black defendants go free. Nor does he mention that another article based on the same study of “stand your ground” cases noted “no obvious bias” in the treatment of black defendants—or mixed-race homicides: “Four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free.”
Liberals and disenchanted conservatives who decry fact-free ideological narratives, true-believer hysteria and willful reality-denial on the right should take a good look at the left’s Zimmerman Derangement Syndrome. Some far-right blogs have spun their own baseless theories depicting Martin as a criminal; but in this instance, their misdeeds are dwarfed by far more mainstream liberal “faux news” (meticulously documented on a dissenting left-of-center blog, The Daily Howler). As a fiction, Zimmerman the white supremacist rivals Obama the Kenyan-born commie Muslim.
Obama is right that our racial history—a history in which, a few decades ago, young black males in much of the country really could be murdered at will for looking at a white person the wrong way—gave Trayvon Martin’s death a powerful and painful resonance for black Americans. That made it all the more incumbent on the media to be scrupulously truthful and responsible in their coverage. At this, they have spectacularly failed, with deplorable consequences.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/21/how_media_lies_have_distorted_a_tragedy_119311.html#ixzz2ZgyRl0np
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/21/how_media_lies_have_distorted_a_tragedy_119311.html
A week after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the backlash continues, with nationwide protests and calls to boycott Florida. President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s reaction must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage.
This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.
This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman’s history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia. Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that “Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.” Actually, only six calls—two of them about Trayvon Martin—had to do with African-American men. At least three involved complaints about whites; others were about such issues as a fire alarm going off, a reckless driver of unknown race, or an aggressive dog.
In this narrative, even Zimmerman’s concern for a black child—a 2011 call to report a young African-American boy walking unsupervised on a busy street, on which the police record notes, “compl[ainant] concerned for well-being”—has been twisted into crazed racism. Writing on the website of The New Republic, Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford describes Zimmerman as “an edgy basket case” who called 911 about “the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.” This slander turns up in other left-of-center sources, such as ThinkProgress.org.
Accounts of the incident itself have also been wrapped in false narrative—including such egregious distortions as NBC’s edited audio of Zimmerman’s 911 call which made him appear to say that Martin was “up to no good” because “he looks black.” (In fact, Zimmerman explained that Martin was “walking around and looking about” in the rain, and mentioned his race—of which he initially seemed unsure—only in response to the dispatcher’s question.)
While this falsehood was retracted and cost several NBC employees their jobs, other fake facts still circulate unchecked: most notably, that Zimmerman disobeyed police orders not to follow Martin (or even, as Cobb and another guest asserted on the NewsHour, not to get out of his car). In fact, there was no such order. The dispatcher asked if Zimmerman was following the teenager; Zimmerman said yes, the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that,” and Zimmerman replied, “Okay.” (Just before this, the dispatcher had made comments that could be construed as asking him to watch Martin, such as, “Just let us know if he does anything else.”)
No one except Zimmerman knows whether he continued to track Martin—or, as he claims, headed back to his truck only to have Martin confront him. No one but Zimmerman knows who initiated physical violence. Both eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence, including injuries to Zimmerman’s face and the back of his head, supported his claim that he was being battered when he fired the gun. It was certainly enough to create reasonable doubt. Yet accounts that deplore the verdict often fail to mention Zimmerman’s injuries. Thus, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says only that an unarmed “skinny boy” could not have been a serious threat to “a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds”—nearly doubling the actual 27-pound difference between Martin and Zimmerman and omitting the fact that Martin was three inches taller.
The false narrative also makes it axiomatic that a black man in Zimmerman’s shoes wouldn’t stand a chance—especially if he had shot someone white. Never mind examples to the contrary, such as a 2009 case in Rochester, New York in which a black man, Roderick Scott, shot and killed an unarmed white teenager and was acquitted. Scott, who had caught 17-year-old Christopher Cervini and two other boys breaking into a car, said that the boy charged him and he feared for his life.
What about general patterns? In the New Republic article, Ford cites a report in the Tampa Bay Times showing that “stand your ground” self-defense claims in Florida are more successful for defendants who kill a black person (73 percent face no penalty, compared to 59 percent of those who kill a white person). But he leaves out a salient detail: since most homicides involve people of the same race, this also means more black defendants go free. Nor does he mention that another article based on the same study of “stand your ground” cases noted “no obvious bias” in the treatment of black defendants—or mixed-race homicides: “Four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free.”
Liberals and disenchanted conservatives who decry fact-free ideological narratives, true-believer hysteria and willful reality-denial on the right should take a good look at the left’s Zimmerman Derangement Syndrome. Some far-right blogs have spun their own baseless theories depicting Martin as a criminal; but in this instance, their misdeeds are dwarfed by far more mainstream liberal “faux news” (meticulously documented on a dissenting left-of-center blog, The Daily Howler). As a fiction, Zimmerman the white supremacist rivals Obama the Kenyan-born commie Muslim.
Obama is right that our racial history—a history in which, a few decades ago, young black males in much of the country really could be murdered at will for looking at a white person the wrong way—gave Trayvon Martin’s death a powerful and painful resonance for black Americans. That made it all the more incumbent on the media to be scrupulously truthful and responsible in their coverage. At this, they have spectacularly failed, with deplorable consequences.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/21/how_media_lies_have_distorted_a_tragedy_119311.html#ixzz2ZgyRl0np
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
Courtjester
The Town Drunk
Again Tim, I agree with you on some points and Obama was probably told he needed to make a statement, but when he makes a statement like, "If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different."
Then that is irresponsible on his part and only divides and creates anger.
timschochet
Footballguy
Obama speech was bad on so many levels. He politicized getting rid of SYG laws to help prevent incidents like this from happening again, when the SYG laws was not in play here. His statements about if the roles were reversed is complete hogwash and just bigoted as stats show the SYG laws are used effectively by blacks at a higher rate than whites. The fact that Holder is still investigating this is nuts, they have already over investigated this case and have nothing yet. A complete abuse of power and very much against the principle of equal treatment under the law. The fact that Obama patted everyone on the back for doing a good job except the jury is a major slap in the face to people who did their civic duty to the best of their ability and came to the same verdict as almost all non-rabidly biased experts thought. The speech stunk on so many levels. Tim just loved it because it agrees with his false narrative.
timschochet
Footballguy
Carolina Hustler
Footballguy
George Zimmerman needs to change his name to Ben Ghazi, that way the White House and the media will ignore him.
MaxThreshold
Footballguy
squistion
Footballguy
timschochet
Footballguy
If he did that, all of the conservatives around here would repeat false narratives about him that anyone with common sense would regard as sheer nonsense. Oh wait...I guess it wouldn't make any difference...
Politician Spock
Footballguy
I agree. I'm only pointing out your racist fueled hypocrisy, as racism has nothing more to do with the Martin/Zimmerman case than government spying does. Your faulty racism alarm clouds your ability to see things logically, which produces your hypocritical positions on different matters.
timschochet
Footballguy
There are millions of Americans who believe, strongly, that racism has everything to do with this case. I just posted an article which expresses the frustration about this much more eloquently than I can. (Post #24631).
There is one person (you) who apparently thinks that government spying needs to brought up here. There is no analogy. There is no connection. The two situations are not even remotely comparable. If you want to discuss the death of Trayvon Martin intelligently, please do so. If your sole intent is to try to make me look hypocritical by making silly comparisons that have no relevance, please don't bother. Nobody cares; nobody wants to hear it.
I pointed out significant problems with the speech. I guess it is ok if you don't mind a president who misrepresents facts to stir the pot and advance an agenda. It is great as long as it is your guy I suppose.
Witz
Footballguy
Why did he reference a white male specifically? Why not a hispanic male? Why not an asian male? Why not a native american male? Why not an Indian male?
So this is the case that is supposed to drive a discussion on race relations in this country? Since giving that speech (if it was to drive the discussion), has Obama or his administration done anything to further this discussion?
identikit
Footballguy
Witz
Footballguy
and it was irresponsible of him because by those comments alone, he's condemning not only the law enforcement agencies in this country but also the legal system and it's operators by saying that those entities, in his presidential opinion, treat races differently as opposed to treating everyone equally.
Thank you for this one. I truly think this is the part of this tragedy deserving the most attention right now. The media butchered this from day one, and are the ones most responsible for fanning the flames (or, in some cases, simply reporting flames where none exist)
There are millions of Americans who believe, strongly, all sorts of colossally stupid things. I don't know that this helps your argument that this case was about racism. The only racism in this case is the media's portrayal of it.
timschochet
Footballguy
More than one.
First, we should all be willing to acknowledge when we were wrong, and be willing to accept new information whenever it appears, even if it is contradictory to our pre-conceived notions. I was wrong in my original analysis of George Zimmerman's racism. Sources whom I normally believe convinced me that this was so, and the only people who denied were people whom I generally distrust (with good reason.) Turns out the latter were right, and my trustworthy sources were wrong. This makes me trust them less, obviously. I should have waited to get the right information. I have to add that it distresses me that so many people who agreed with my original analysis are ignoring this information and continuing to repeat stuff which is not true. I won't do that if I can help it.
But I also have to add that I do continue to believe that GZ is guilty of racial profiling that night- which is very separate from calling him a racist. I don't consider myself a racist, and I engage in racial profiling sometimes, as does everyone I know. It's an awful thing, something we need to discuss and hopefully purge from our society, which is why I posted the excellent guardian piece. And of course, I continue to believe he committed the crime of manslaughter that night.
Another lesson to be learned from the posting of this article is that personal insults are usually always as unwise as they are rude. You are one of a few people around here have made a habit of stalking me from thread to thread and attempting to rip me for stupidity and rigid thinking, mainly because you disagreed with my beliefs. Maybe you need to take a look in the mirror.
identikit
Footballguy
LOL @ stalking.
There's very few threads here to go to without running into one of your 60k+ posts.
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Pots
Footballguy
spreagle
Footballguy
Profiling is OK, review the video of the minority store clerk who also profiled Trayvon that night (give that man a raise, I've never seen someone work so hard to sell skittles and ice tea).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6axQq4B42U
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Joe McGee
Footballguy
The media is lightening pictures of Trayvon Martin to make him look less black? Really?
Dr Oadi
Footballguy
Nothing racist about that.
Looks like it. The media also spent a lot of time using pictures of him when he was several years younger to shape the story.
Unless you are one of those people who thought it was racist for the media to darken pictures of OJ Simpson.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
The fact that there are millions of people who think illogically about things does not mean what they believe is logical.
The fact that the media milked their illogical belief for as much profit as they could does not make it logical either.
The fact that the president stirred the pot on the illogical belief does not make it logical either.
The only logical conclusion I've seen regarding the case showed racism was not involved.
You're free to believe what ever you want, even when it's not logical.
squistion
Footballguy
Politician Spock
Footballguy
To a degree he has. Racial profiling is racist. And he believes Zimmerman racially profiled Martin.The irony is he has to racial profile Zimmerman in order to believe that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin, because the evidence doesn't show that he did.Hell, even Tim has given up on the racism angle.
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BustedKnuckles
Footballguy
The ABS investigation revealed that 128 of the 150 students surveyed from Atlanta area colleges and universities—including Georgia State, Spelman, Morehouse, Valdosta, Clark-Atlanta and the Art Institute of Atlanta—openly admitted they often use clothing to judge strangers. Even more surprising, 107 of these students (black and white) said clothes that look threatening on a black person look acceptable on people of other races. In other words, a black male dressed in a hoody comes off as more threatening than an Asian or white male in the very same hoody.
Many of the young black males at the surveyed colleges and universities also shared with ABS that they often strategically decide what they will wear, when they will wear it, and where they will wear it in order to avoid being stereotyped by other races.
While Geraldo Rivera was thoroughly bashed for suggesting in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder that black males should stop wearing hoodies, the ABS investigation suggests that black males are already making such calculations on a daily basis.
In order to assume Zimmerman was racially profiling, you would have to conclude that wandering around strange neighborhoods acting like you are drugged out is exclusively a black trait.To a degree he has. Racial profiling is racist. And he believes Zimmerman racially profiled Martin.The irony is he has to racial profile Zimmerman in order to believe that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin, because the evidence doesn't show that he did.Hell, even Tim has given up on the racism angle.
RBM
Footballguy
Poor guy just trying to earn a paycheck. I imagine he's had to deal with alot of bull#### from dopes that look or dress like Martin
The Commish
Footballguy
To the bolded, yes. At least as it pertains to Florida. I learned a lot, especially from our FBG Lawyers.
5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
The Commish
Footballguy
I see you have acquired the move-the-goalpostitis like some others here. There are a ton of things that could have happened and we will never know. A sucker punch is certainly possible. Just as "reaching for his phone" could have been "reaching for his gun". My comment was specifically to your assertions #1. that it was for certain a sucker punch and #2. that there was no time for Zimmerman to have acted differently than he did.Are you saying you can adequately defend yourself as you reach into your pocket for your phone and then look down when you realize there is no phone in your pocket? Don't be a fool, the fact that there are words exchanged does not negate the possibility of a sucker punch.
A punch that takes your enemy by suprise, possibly knocking them out.
Comes from them being a sucker for not having their guard up. Also known as a ##### move (rhymes with ditch).
