I'm not surprised that this happened. Hunting is considered a white man's sport. There isn't room for other races.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Apropos of which, here's the story of Chris Lollie, who was tasered and arrested for being black in a whites-only area refusing to comply with requests from a private security guard ("go away from here") and a police officer ("stay where you are").
On Friday (7 Nov), St. Paul Police announced that the Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission had "exonerated" the three officers who arrested Lollie on charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct and obstructing legal process, charges that officials dropped after Lollie's arrest.
So it turns out you can attack an unarmed man with a banned move, on camera, have the coroner declare it a homicide and go free because you're a cop and the suspect is black.
So much for putting cameras on cops to reduce abuse.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
The sad truth of the matter is that this is how justice has always been, we're just finally actually hearing about it. It's certainly no coincidence that the rise of cameras everywhere and citizen journalists have seen the rise of people hearing about this abuse. The news media actively sides with the racist cops often publishing articles sent to them by cop organizations (without revealing who actually wrote it), pushing bogus stories and turning a blind eye when abuse happens.
A good older example is the crack baby epidemic which was completely fabricated by news organizations at the behest of the DEA so they could lock up black women and further divide black culture from whites so that whites would feel the abuse was justified.
It's ok gais, he feels sorry that choking a black guy to death was something he "had to do" according to the police union president. And color me surprised, the killer has been accused at least twice of racially motivated misconduct, but don't worry the New York tax payers foot the bill when the NYPD settled out of court to keep it off the record.
To tripple post, there's an interesting trending Hashtag, #crimingwhilewhite
With lots of white people sharing their stories of being let off the hook by police even though they were clearly guilty of serious crimes. Other stories about how in a group only their black friends were harassed.
The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.
America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizens—the physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiers—might actually just be that they’re more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that’s OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.
Policing in America is not broken. The judicial system is not broken. American society is not broken. All are functioning perfectly, doing exactly what they have done since before some of this nation’s most prosperous slave-murdering robber-barons came together to consecrate into statehood the mechanisms of their barbarism. Democracy functions. Politicians, deriving their legitimacy from the public, have discerned the will of the people and used it to design and enact policies that carry it out, among them those that govern the allowable levels of violence which state can visit upon citizen. Taken together with the myriad other indignities, thefts, and cruelties it visits upon black and brown people, and the work common white Americans do on its behalf by telling themselves bald fictions of some deep and true America of apple pies, Jesus, and people being neighborly to each other and betrayed by those few and nonrepresentative bad apples with their isolated acts of meanness, the public will demands and enables a whirring and efficient machine that does what it does for the benefit of those who own it. It processes black and brown bodies into white power.
That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it.
This is our original sin, and it goes back to slavery. This country has been systematically racist from the day it was founded. It was predicated on the notion that black lives simply do not matter as much as white lives, and that belief has continued to inform the way the country has functioned ever since. We may try to pretend that we've moved past this or that our electing a half-black president absolves us of the sins of racism, but the simple fact is that the judicial system of this country is and always has been systematically racist. It simply does not value black lives as much as white lives. Until people start voting out politicians who tolerate conduct like this nothing will change.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
This has all been said before, I'm sure. But as someone living (right now, thankfully) in the UK rather than America, I find it disturbing to imagine how any police officer can end up killing someone.
Our police are, barring unusual circumstances, not armed with guns. They deal with violent altercations all the time. They arrest people who may be carrying knives or other weapons. But they rarely, if ever, kill people. Circumstances where someone is unarmed and killed are simply exceptional.
It's staggering to imagine how there haven't been bigger outcries before now.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
I seem to remember a time not too long ago when there was a lot of uproar of police overuse of Tasers. Seems like there was a lot of news reports of police using tasers at the first sign of resistance or noncompliance. Now they seem to be foregoing nonlethal means all together and go straight for the gun. Maybe the uproar was because they were using the tasers on white people. "Don't Tase Me Bro!"
In the case of Ferguson, if the officer had used a taser on Brown then it would have likely stopped the altercation without a death. This, even if Brown was the aggressor as the officer claims. There's still a chance that a taser can be lethal, through cardiac arrest or cranial injury from falling/convulsing, but much less likely than a barrage of bullets. It's not a solution by any means since police will still resort to tasers too quickly and then over use them by repeatedly shocking downed suspects. But at least it is something.
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Why am I naked and sticky?... Did I miss something fun?
So... that means that he was more comfortable with the option of using lethal force on any suspect that he would be unable to subdue with his bare hands and baton, assuming he had one of those? That's easier for him than carrying an extra nonlethal weapon in case he decides to arrest Hulk Hogan or a large black kid.
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Why am I naked and sticky?... Did I miss something fun?
I don't think it was posted here and I can't remember who posted it on Twitter, but there was a statistic floating around the other night to the effect that police in Britain have shot fewer bullets in the past two years than Wilson shot into Michael Brown.
Also, there was a response to #crimingwhilewhite pointing out that it was, once again, making it all about White people. I don't know if it has died down since then or whether it was just people in my feed who stopped reposting.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
This has all been said before, I'm sure. But as someone living (right now, thankfully) in the UK rather than America, I find it disturbing to imagine how any police officer can end up killing someone.
Our police are, barring unusual circumstances, not armed with guns. They deal with violent altercations all the time. They arrest people who may be carrying knives or other weapons. But they rarely, if ever, kill people. Circumstances where someone is unarmed and killed are simply exceptional.
It's staggering to imagine how there haven't been bigger outcries before now.
Our police are armed, but every time any of them kills anyone it raises questions, sometimes in parliament. It helps that it's a small country of course, but it is also the sense that something is very wrong if cops shoot a suspect for any reason, even if they shoot first.
I've always been struck with how much the US police resemble the Israel soldiers, police and border police in the occupied Palestinian territories. I don't think it's a coincidence that the comparison is made so often and that so many Palestinians have come out in solidarity with Ferguson. They recognize it.
That the USA is guilty of many and serious human rights abuses is a frequent charge levelled by lefties, enemies of democracy and other troublemakers, but this is the first time I have heard that charge coming from such an eminent and conservative source as the UN.
The times they surely are a-changin'
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... it's just an idea
Last edited by mickthinks; 12-05-2014 at 09:47 PM.
Belgian Zwarte Piet in Brussels. This is what will happen here. Belgium is ahead of the pack now. That's gonna make us feel worse than anything else could...
(Although in the article in De Standaard it says that the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok) is accusing the organization of the Sinterklaas celebration and the Prime-Minister of the cityprovince of Brussels of a 'cowardly attitude' and 'going along with the mass hysteria in the Netherlands').
Re: More blithe racism
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