Trayvon Martin Disgrace

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been all over this. There are some righteous discussions over there.

Sadly, there is not much difference between a gun and: a rope, or a pickup truck, or any of the other forms of horrible things done to preserve the status quo.

spyder: Seriously? You think Martin would now be dead if Zimmerman had been carrying a rope?

Has anyone considered that George might be telling the truth? That he got into a fight – however it started – the 6’3 Martin was smashing his face in, G. cried for help, none was forthcoming, and the only thing he could do short of taking more blows was to shoot Martin? I suppose he could have said, while on his back, “I’ve got a gun!,” but is that the kind of thing you want to say while you’re on your back? Or he could have just waited for the beating to stop and prayed for no permanent damage, but how many of us would make that choice?

Wasn’t this kind of accidents the *purpose* of the Florida law: reenacting the Wild West from the movies (with half of the reenactors being not voluntary)? I read about it well before this happened, and people warned about its consequences (see Porrofatto’s comment).

In this sense, I am less prone to blame the cops here: first, they followed the spirit of the law, and second, by experience they knew that prosecuting the killing would probably been futile (so, why waste time and effort)?

“Justice means more than just the Feds showing up the Sanford PD for a bunch of Skoal-using morons who couldn’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag. Justice means actual freedom for Trayvon Martin to walk down the street and not be in danger of losing his life to someone with no badge and a gun. Not just hypothetical freedom, like the kind of voting rights black people used to have before the 1950s and 1960s. Real freedom.”

True. But charging Zimmermann with murder and the Sanford PD with obstruction of justice and violations of civil rights would be a decent start.

Steve, I did not say or imply that the cops were blameless

You did that by setting up a blame/not-blame scenario.

Except that by any reading of the so-called self-defense laws, Zimmerman’s actions didn’t fall within them. Also, how do you tell at the crime scene, immediately, whether such law is applicable? And aren’t, I dunno, things like judges and juries supposed to make that judgement?

And do you really truly honestly believe that had Zimmerman been black and Martin been white, the police would have thought “oh, no point in even arresting the guy with the smoking gun, or bothering to take the most cursory of steps to identify the victim, since obviously the state’s self-defense laws will apply”?

“And aren’t, I dunno, things like judges and juries supposed to make that judgement?”

No. Prosecutors make that judgment. The first step is to determine guilt, then press charges.

Don’t worry bjk, McMegan has chipped in to defend the indefensible:

But could there be a scenario where he–wildly inappropriately–followed this guy, and brandished his gun, and then much to his surprise, the teenager tried to wrestle the gun away, and in the ensuing struggle, he got shot?

Does that seem the most likely explanation to me? No. Could I rule it out? Also no. And that’s reasonable doubt.

Thus extending by one the number of topics on which she is willing to share her ill-informed opinions on.

Does that seem the most likely explanation to me? No. Could I rule it out? Also no. And that’s reasonable doubt.

No, it isn’t. That you can imagine some other scenario, however improbable, that might explain the facts does not create reasonable doubt. If there was evidence for that scenario, that might be reasonable doubt. But based on what I’ve read, Zimmerman did not claim that the gun went off when he and Martin were struggling over the gun. He said that Martin attacked him and he shot him in self-defense.

And no, Zimmerman is not telling the truth. The idea that Martin overpowered Zimmerman, who weighed 100 pounds more than him, is nonsense. Zimmerman followed Martin in his car, while the latter was on foot, exited his car, and provoked a confrontation with a kid who was scared because he was being followed by a stranger for no apparent reason. Then he shot that kid. He didn’t have to follow him, he didn’t have to get out of his car, and he didn’t have to shoot him. You don’t get to claim self-defense when you pick the fight.

Does that seem the most likely explanation to me? No. Could I rule it out? Also no. And that’s reasonable doubt.

I have to admit, McArdle surprised me on this one. I didn’t think she could sink any lower in terms of her lack of basic humanity, her complete ignorance of the subjects she writes about, or her blithe abandonment of “libertarian” principles whenever they conflict with the prerogatives of the powerful. And she manages all three in a single blog comment.

Zimmerman weighs nearly twice as much as Martin did, has a history of confrontational behavior, is on the 911 tape referring to “fucking coons”, and pursued and engaged Martin after the 911 operator tried to discourage him from doing so. Even if Martin had managed any moments of victory in struggle against Zimmerman – and there’s no evidence that he did – it would have been genuine self-defense against calculated racist aggression.

I find it fascinating that McArdle (Sorry, the basic facts of the case are so appalling I haven’t really figured what to say or what it means about the grand scheme of things) has already decided she would have to find the guy NOT guilty. I can understand the other way around, insisting you would put that piece of scum in jail for the rest of his life but who decides they would have to release him?

No matter how much McArdle pretends to, she certainly doesn’t know the law well enough to make a decision like that. There’s common law, the technical meaning of the written law, and other considerations she shouldn’t be prepared to make. She certainly try to guess the directions of the judge who’s going to tell a jury God knows what. I can understand saying, “whatever the law or judge might say, I’m voting to convict” but the other way around?

Really, we should be talking about Trayvon Martin’s horrible death and the ways in which his murderer was aided by the local government.

Agreed, and I’m sorry for the part I played in sidetracking the thread.

What I want to know is, has anyone asked a spokesman for the police or local/state government, is it actually the case that you are, in florida, free to kill anyone at any time and are immune from prosecution if you just say the magic words “self-defense”?

Because that seems to be the theory they (and bjk and Manta1976) seem to be operating under: Not just that the law permits deadly force in certain circumstances, but that it prohibits the police from investigating whether those circumstances apply.

Also, thanks to Belle for sharing some horrible details about this horrible story that I did not know, like the drug tests of Trayvon’s body and the “correction” of the witness. i wouldn’t have thought it could be any worse, but it is.

I find particularly compelling how people are identifying Zimmerman as Hispanic, as if that somehow will defend him against a charge of racism.

I believe the precise technical term the police use is “shitbird.” As in: “that’s the shitbird wannabe that tangled with Bob down in the 3rd a couple of years ago. Watch his ass. ”

they rode him to the station in the back of a police cruiser

Harsh, they usually let those types ride up front.

on the other hand, i happened to listen to springsteen’s “american skin” today (aka the “41 shots” song). there’s that one heartbreaking verse where bruce imagines a black mother giving her son some amadou diallo based advice:

you got to understand the rules
if an officer stops you
promise me, you’ll always be polite
and that you’ll never ever run away
promise mama you’ll keep your hands in sight

and yeah, what sort of heartbreaking advice would black mothers be giving their sons in the wake of this thing? i cannot even begin to imagine.

turns out that might have been wrong.

But only because we happen to have people in power in Washington who were willing to launch a Federal civil rights investigation. So we still live in a country in which even delayed and inadequate stabs at justice in a case like this may only take place when a particular party is in power or, more to the point, another particular party is NOT in power. Incoherent rage is pretty much the only appropriate response to that.

The defense law seems like an enormous distraction in the discussion of this case. First, it just restores the common law understanding on self defense that had been undermined by court rulings over the past thirty or so years. Second, it doesn’t say anything like what it’s attackers here seem to think. Third, self defense is an AFFIRMATIVE defense. That means roughly that after a prosecutor proves his case beyond a reasonable doubt, if a defendant wants to raise a self defense claim the burden is on the defendant to prove it up. Fourth, claiming a killing was self defense has long been one of the easiest ways for a killer to sow confusion about his acts–long before the Florida statute. Fifth, the statute has approximately zero to do with this case. The killer was pretty clearly not acting in self defense.

It is the fact that the police didn’t investigate this crime, with an obviously dead body and sketchy story, that is a horrible and racist set of actions. Trying to turn this into a side attack on an irrelevant Florida law is missing the point completely.

After looking into this, and listening to one of the tapes, you can hear that there was shouting, then a gun shot, then screaming, then another gunshot. I don’t know what happened, but hard to square that with self-defense.

There is also this article on the topic: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/03/why_george_zimmerman_trayvon_martin_s_killer_hasn_t_been_prosecuted_.single.html
(yes, I know, it is Slate, but the content seems good):
“And yet as the Hernandez and Martin’s case shows, Stand Your Ground laws often lead prosecutors to decide against so much as bringing charges. According to the Sun Sentinel, “In case after case during the past six years, Floridians who shot and killed unarmed opponents have not been prosecuted.”

Does that seem the most likely explanation to me? No. Could I rule it out? Also no. And that’s reasonable doubt.

As a former prosecutor, I was often encouraged to say to the jury that reasonable doubt is not the same thing as any doubt. The law isn’t super-precise about the difference between reasonable and unreasonable–but we have Zimmerman’s pursuit of Martin (confirmed by Zimmerman’s own admission as well as by the boy’s girlfriend); the high-pitched screams; the statement of one witness that she heard the boy screaming. Throw in “fucking coons” (which is certainly what the relevant tape sounds like), and I think you’d have to be Megan McArdle to aquit.

we still live in a country in which even delayed and inadequate stabs at justice in a case like this may only take place when a particular party is in power or, more to the point, another particular party is NOT in power. Incoherent rage is pretty much the only appropriate response to that.

This, in addition to everything else, is really bizarrely depressing.

A person who uses force as permitted in s. 776.012, s. 776.013, or s. 776.031 is justified in using such force and is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force… As used in this subsection, the term “criminal prosecution” includes arresting, detaining in custody, and charging or prosecuting the defendant.

…DETAINING IN CUSTODY. what. the. fuck.

IANAL but the “who uses force as permitted” is not the same as “who claims to have used force as permitted.” Arrests for violent crime are still made in Florida, no?

As obscene as that law is, a plain reading, and common sense, suggest that Substance and JW Mason are correct- if the Sanford cops and prosecutor cite it, it’s as an excuse, not a valid reason, for their inaction.

Yeah, I’m a bit relieved to find the next paragraph in 776.032 clarifies this:

A law enforcement agency may use standard procedures for investigating the use of force as described in subsection (1), but the agency may not arrest the person for using force unless it determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful.

I think that we may reach an agreement: the Florida law is terrible, and the police used it as an excuse for not doing their job.
Do two wrongs make a right?

I think that we may reach an agreement

Yeah, 56 sums it up (though I prefer the emphasis of Katherine’s summary).

I think I am going to fly to Florida and start walking through gated communities with an iced tea and an upside-down American flag. Or something. Does anyone know of an organization preparing to raise a titanic and ongoing stink that I could donate to? maybe the ACLU or…?

Belle and Steve: re McArdle, I think I respectfully disagree. She won’t, alas, go away if we ignore her.

What we’ll need is fewer words, and more pies. Or maybe eggs. Maybe we can start mailing her eggs. “I was considering throwing this at you in protest of your atrocious apologism, but I decided to mail it instead, so that when you receive it, it’s almost as rotten as you.” That could be funny.

The duty to retreat was later add on in some but certainly not all common law jurisdictions. You just don’t know what you’re talking about and screeching as if you do. But again, duty to retreat wouldn’t have helped the police analyze this case at all, Trayvon was persued and had done no wrong. Complaints about the Florida law just don’t have anything to do with this case and are a distraction from the very real racist failure to properly investigate the murder of a black man by a white man. Whatever the merits or demerits of the Florida self defense law they just don’t have much to do with a case where the police seem to grab any excuse to not investigate.

Jerry, reasonable does not mean what you think it does. The jury will judge whether someone had good grounds for believing they were in danger. If someone jumps out in a dark alley from behind a dumpster, the law should recognize that regardless of their intent you would probably believe yourself to be in danger.

It has nothing to do with what I think and everything to do with actual court decisions and the results of actual trial outcomes, which you can read all about here before you go lecture me about people jumping out of alleys or whatever.

…when in doubt, mistrust the person who uses words like “screeching” and “silly” traditionally reserved for dismissing vocal women, in order to characterize others’ responses. Steve there’s really not even a need to reply.

I think I am going to fly to Florida and start walking through gated communities with an iced tea and an upside-down American flag. Or something

And the body armor. Don’t forget the body armor.

One of the things that really first got to me was where the murderer says “It’s raining, and he’s just walking around looking at houses.” And I can just imagine this poor kid who left to get some snacks (“Yeah dad, I’ll come straight back”) and is a bit lost and looking for the right house in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

ascholl, the Florida police agree with you: from one of Jerry’s links

Miami’s police chief made a prediction shortly before the law took effect:
“Whether it’s trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn’t want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house,” Chief John Timoney told the New York Times, “you’re encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn’t be used.”

and

One of the law’s biggest critics is Willie Meggs, the state attorney for six counties in the Panhandle. He says he’s a strong believer in gun rights but thinks the law is just another valuable tool for killers. The old law was working just fine, he says. He petitioned the Legislature to address the law last year. Nothing.
“Gangsters are using this law to have gunfights,” he said. “That’s exactly what this law breeds.”

But look at the bright side: Floridians can now enjoy a bit of the old Far West.

“I was considering whether or not to fly to Florida to throw this at you, in the spirit of citizen protest at your outrageous willful negligence, but I decided your department is likely to be incapable of distinguishing traditional acts of contemptuous protest like that from actual acts of terror or violence (acts which I, a committed peaceful person, would never commit). I feel nothing but sorrow for any individual who resides in or visits your jurisdiction, whose lives are continuously endangered by your willful incompetence. Expect one egg from me, with another copy of this note, each week until the firing and/or resignation and/or retirement of all officers and superiors who had a hand in denying Trayvon Martin, and indeed all of us, justice. Smelly past-due eggs can only begin to match the stain you have placed on all law enforcement. Wear them with honor. With love, and compassion for those whom you continue to endanger, Sal.”

Justice means actual freedom for Trayvon Martin to walk down the street and not be in danger of losing his life to someone with no badge and a gun.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that justice means actual freedom to walk down the street and not be in danger of losing one’s life even to someone with a badge, but the original version would be a step in the right direction, yeah.

Mostly I think the original post is excellent, but I don’t understand the weird digs at Latinos at the end. Racial categories change over time and vary across space, Latinos have been subjected to a lot of discrimination (including, for example, being kept off juries in Texas until 1954) in U.S. history and still are over-represented in prisons and in poverty. Some Latinos identify as White, and many don’t. That seems irrelevant to whether or not George Zimmerman, based on racial stereotypes, killed someone (which Zimmerman clearly did).

If it’s an isolated incident atrributable to a bad law then it’s a one-off – a tragedy that ended one life and is bound to ruin others.

Coming on the heels of the slaughter of 17 Afghans it barely registers. Is ‘stand your ground’ preemptory self-defense a case of as above, below? We invaded a country based on what it might have been able to do to us. Hundreds of thousands of deaths later we still haven’t prosecuted anyone for what amounts to the same thing that Zimmerman is hiding behind: He felt threatened and shot someone.

We felt threatened and destroyed a civilization, or two. We have serious discussion about whether it’s a good idea to attack Iran and kill more people because we need to draw a line in the sand, or stand our ground, or be better off safe than sorry.

What’s the difference?

To clarify a bit: Thanks for the information about the gated communities. This post adds to my understanding of the racial factors that could have led to this nightmare.

I did not think that you meant to dig at Latinos but I couldn’t figure out what your point about the US government is. If your point is that Zimmerman’s actions were racially motivated–whatever his parentage–that makes sense. But you seem to want to say more.

“but the plain sad fact of the matter in America is that only one thing matters: are you black or not?”

I don’t know about that. How about if you’re Muslim, or an Arab with a Muslim sounding name, or white with an Arab/Muslim sounding name?

Race may or may not be an ontological category but these days there are consequences to other things than race, no?

I find it striking that both Sebastian and McArdle instinctively know which side to jump on and that, even in an appalling case like this one, it’s the side of the racist authoritarians (for even worse versions of the same stuff, see any pro-Repub site). Truly, the word “glibertarian” was invented for a reason.

Jerry, the case you linked to was about non-deadly force, not deadly force. The argument we have is whether the plain statutory language in 776.041(2) makes the self-defense defense moot if the invoker initiated the confrontation. There’s also a question about what reasonable means. Here it means not unfounded, and the prosecution can always introduce evidence to show that the defendant was unreasonable in his belief. (Why not truth? Because determining if someone was really going to hurt you if they hit you with a fist, or just cause thousands of dollars of damage to your teeth is a bit much to ask in the heat of the moment)

bjk, even if the facts are as you state them, 776.041(2) seems to squarely deny Zimmerman the defense.

bjk
“This isn’t a question of, what side are you instintively on”

Well it appears to be in your case. You came out all guns blazing on post 7 saying:

“Has anyone considered that George might be telling the truth?”

It was only by post 43 that you decided to actually read up on the situation:

“After looking into this, and listening to one of the tapes”

So forgive me personally for not taking what you have to say particularly seriously.
Having said that I haven’t been following the case the last day, so fill me in on a few things; have the stories fundamentals changed? (, Zimmerman taking it upon himself to follow Trayvon after being told not to) Are there any accusations that Trayvon was doing anything more than going to the shop? Is Zimmerman still the only one that had a gun?

If so then what exactly is your argument, that the kid ‘stood his ground’, at best that the shooting was ‘accidental’? (Not premeditated but happened during a fight)
If Trayvon did react to Zimmerman following him then so what, what does that change? At 17 I would have done the same, would you not?

g-d, but you’re nasty. By this standard, if somebody was mugged, and turned the table on their mugger, the mugger would be justified in using killing their victim.

Could you please direct us to where you’ve held this view when the victim was white?

No, it doesn’t only matter whether one is White or Black in the United States. Race in the United States developed through slavery AND the genocide of American Indians AND xenophobia. (Latinos fell under two of those, often.) It has never been the case that it only mattered whether one was White or Black–it would be more accurate to say it mainly mattered whether one was White or not. And, if Latinos will be seen as White some day soon, I haven’t yet seen evidence of it. People are still making laws primarily aimed at Latinos. Latinos are still among the poorest paid and least well educated people in the United States. Studies routinely find discrimination against Latinos in hiring and housing and court cases. And Latinos are also over-represented among those killed by police.

None of this in any way excuses Zimmerman, but I think one can point out how ridiculous it is to say “he can’t be racist, he’s Latino!” without oversimplifying racial politics in the United States.

bjk @90 sez:
………….
………….
………….
…Ignore my other comment up thread

Thanks, I’ll be doing that on general principles with all your other comments going forward as well.

John @89

I find it striking that both Sebastian and McArdle instinctively know which side to jump on and that, even in an appalling case like this one, it’s the side of the racist authoritarians (for even worse versions of the same stuff, see any pro-Repub site). Truly, the word “glibertarian” was invented for a reason.

Wait, is Sebastian jumping in on the side of racist authoritarians? Here he is in 41:

Fifth, the statute has approximately zero to do with this case. The killer was pretty clearly not acting in self defense.

It is the fact that the police didn’t investigate this crime, with an obviously dead body and sketchy story, that is a horrible and racist set of actions. Trying to turn this into a side attack on an irrelevant Florida law is missing the point completely.

His point seems to be principally that the question of the appropriate law on self defense is irrelevant to this case, which doesn’t seem to me to match your characterization particularly well.

Gah, the paragraph starting with “It is the fact…” also is a quote from Sebastian.

Glad to oblige, snuh.

http://www.examiner.com/charleston-conservative-in-charleston-sc/zimmerman-was-on-the-ground-being-punched-when-he-shot-trayvon-martin#ixzz1pxxPV7PF

Although, or maybe because, I am practically incandescent with outrage over this story, I agree with the folks who say it’s important to get the facts straight, to wit:

The “fact” that Trayvon’s body sat in the morgue for three days has been repeated everywhere. I know this because I went looking for corroboration of it after I read it here, and the reason I went looking is that when I mentioned it to my daughter, she said that she had heard the father say he’d been notified of his son’s death the morning after it happened.

The interview where he says that is the second of the three at this link, the one with the little headline “Family seeks justice for slain teen”:

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/17/10732812-family-911-calls-show-shooting-of-black-teen-was-not-self-defense

I suppose Tracy Martin could have been notified on Monday and not allowed to actually identify his son until three days later. But still, all this business of not looking at Trayvon’s phone, etc., seems just made up in light of what the father says. What seem to be the agreed-upon facts of the story are bad enough, they don’t need any embroidering for the point to be clear.

You want a different kind of troll?

To me, this is just another “teachable moment” or politics-by-scandalous-media-event like Terry Schiavo or “white woman gone missing” or soldiers pissing on corpses or SS flag or Breitbart methods or DSK or Polanski or etc etc. A way for liberals to form phony bonds of temporary outrage and performative pseudo-activism exactly to avoid the hard slog of structural observation and analysis and extended organization that might get the system actually changed.

Anybody remember the black dragged with chains in Texas years ago? No? Ancient outrage. Nothing changed.

Okay, you might get limits on vigilantes and out-of-control watchbigots. Structural institutional racism will find another outlet.

A way for liberals to form phony bonds of temporary outrage and performative pseudo-activism exactly to avoid the hard slog of structural observation and analysis and extended organization that might get the system actually changed.

Since, in this view, even being sneered at doesn’t inspire “liberals” to do anything that might get the system actually changed, what is the true self-defined-as-effective activist’s point in wasting time sneering at them?

Perhaps it’s a way to form phony bonds of self-congratulation on their own meta-ineffectiveness? So many teachable moments used for teaching that doesn’t get the system actually changed, much less contribute to the hard slog, etc.

Turtles all the way down.

The stand your ground law has gotten so much attention because police used it as their excuse for not arresting Zimmerman, and before other facts came out it wasn’t clear that they were mistaken. Plus, it’s a really horrible law.

Interestingly, in 2010 there was a sort of reverse Trayvor Martin case. An unarmed Iraq War veteran was shot and killed in a public park in broad daylight in front of his daughter. The shooter walked because of the stand your ground law. The victim was white and the shooter was black.

http://www.ksdk.com/news/article/311679/28/Widow-says-Floridas-Stand-Your-Ground-law-is-free-pass-for-murder

The one big difference is that unlike Zimmerman the shooter was still arrested at the scene and subsequently tried.

Respectable people attended…

…and had picnics and sent postcards about it to their friends…

http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

The classic perfect historical model for blogosphere dramatics is of course l’affair Dreyfuss

After their despicable betrayal of the Commune and the deaths and deportations of tens of thousands, French liberals and intellectuals found a cause! A way to make a difference and fight the system! In a singular instance of identity injustice and a trivially easy place to drive a wedge between the discredited military and the new bourgeois, liberals proved, after great struggle, that the system really worked after all. Voila! Long live the system.

And by focusing laser-like on these media moments in a form of discourse that plays well on talk tv, I think the liberal blogosphere, unknowingly maybe, innocently not so sure, is perpetuating and protecting the problem. Justice to evil dude Zimmerman! The system must work, will work, does work. We don’t need no stinkin revolution.

Then on to the next headline on headline news.

Gone now. You bore me.

I love you Bob. I really, really do. But it should be possible for a black teenager to walk to the local 7-11 for an iced tea and a bag of Skittles without getting shot by some busybody wannabe mall-cop before the revolution. And for us to be outraged by same. Especially when the local authorities treat it as no big deal at all. And without being called “liberals.”

I think Bob might have made a mistake. “Liberals” do not necessarily desire a socialist revolution or similar the same way noted left wing agitator Richard Seymour would, and it seems clear that there are differences in their reality structures (Or whatever the term for them is) between liberals and socialists. Thus chastising liberals for not being revolutionary enough and trying to detroy the entire system kind of misses that liberals aren’t necessarily wanting to destroy The System, but merely reform it.

The fact that the guy wasn’t even arrested is what really kills me. From what I understand they even let him keep his gun. Maybe there is more to this case than meets the eye but to not even take the basic step of treating the shooting death of a teenager as something worthy of serious investigation is unacceptable.

President Bush claimed the Schmittian sovereign power to create a state of exception, a place where the law did not hold—Guantanamo. These castle or “hold your own ground” laws seem to create (and may actually be meant to create) a space of lawlessness around the black male body such that a black man, qua “death bound-subject” (Abdul JanMohamed), can be killed by anyone “with impunity” (Giorgio Agamben).

hartal, the KKK doesn’t need an excuse to bash in some heads. If you want to talk about police racism, let’s talk about the racism that makes 10 murders in a weekend OK on the South Side of Chicago. Let’s talk about how our society doesn’t give a damn that boys as young as 12 are selling cocaine and getting shot up over it. But if you think that a law saying that you have the right to defend yourself against violence against your home is racist, you probably don’t get that blacks are victims of violence every day, violence which the police ignore. Of course the policeman wants you to be dependent on him for safety. It makes him powerful.

Jerry, we can’t keep guns out of the ghetto now, what makes you think we ever will? Did you know that DC v. Heller decreased robberies in DC immediately? It turns out that robbers think twice when they think you might be armed. But regardless of that, the point is that racist police and people always have the means to murder and excuse murder, be it with gasoline and a tire, or a rope and a tree, or a gun. If the police are in league with your would-be killers, your only friends are Smith, Weston, and Colt.

133

How does that square with “Robbery is up more than 30 percent in the District in 2012, a jump that has forced police to redeploy resources, shake up tactics and urge residents to provide tips and act as witnesses in investigations.”?

This case is international news now – I’ve been reading about it on US blogs for a while but now it’s been on the radio news bulletins in Ireland .
The most powerful and affecting piece I’ve seen is here. (hat tip: http://www.racialicious.com/)

= = = Watson Ladd 03.24.12 at 9:01 pm “harrtal, the KKK doesn’t need an excuse to bash in some heads. If you want to talk about police racism, let’s talk about the racism that makes 10 murders in a weekend OK on the South Side of Chicago.”

Actual homicide statistics for Chicago:
2000: 628
2001: 666
2002: 647
2003: 598
2004: 448
2005: 449
2006: 467
2007: 442
2008: 510
2009: 458
2010: 435
The South Side makes up about 40% of Chicago’s population IIRC, and teenage boys 7/65 of that population. Things must have really gone bad in the neighborhoods where I used to live if 520 South Side teenage boys alone are being offed every year out of a total of 550 homicides for the entire city of 3 million.

Cranky

PS What ever happened to the preview function? I fear that this post will not format the way I hope…

139: So something like this could never happen in upper-class certain areas of Port-au-Prince, Sao Paulo, Lagos, Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai?

I thought about a test involving standing scruffy in front of the Odom/Kardashian home, then running with something in my hand when the SUV came around, but I doubt I would survive the Taser.

“Upwardly mobile 30-40 somethings with newly acquired property and children are among the scariest most dangerous people on earth”

This is obviously true though, and for some reason entirely unreported.

I can easily picture Zimmerman gunning down a “suspicious” white teenager in a hoodie. I can definitely picture a black guy using the stand your ground law to get away with shooting a white guy, as I linked above to just such a case. For that matter lynching was by no means limited to blacks or the American South; in 1933 two white men were lynched in San Jose, CA. That said, to deny that race was a factor in the Martin case or in the history of lynching is to be willfully blind. At the least I doubt a dead white kid would have had such a lackadaisical murder investigation, and I strongly suspect race was an aggravating factor in Zimmerman picking his target.

Oh, and “bourgeois” can be perfectly well used as a noun, though it is then generally preceded by an article (I think).

Yeah, but that doesn’t hold a candle to Watson’s “Smith, Weston, and Colt” (133), does it?

Point taken. I knew that sounded wrong.

Since The Charleston Conservative Examiner piece linked above looks like what we’re going to hear a lot of from the Tea Party, I feel compelled to respond.

1. This is national news because (presumably) unlike the Chicago shooting mentioned there was no serious investigation of a fatal shooting. That’s an egregious miscarriage of justice.

2. Pointing out that Martin was a “towering” 6’2″ ignores his weight being around 130. I’m 5’4″ and 160; Martin had to be a beanpole.

3. Hispanic is an ethnic category and not a race so it can definitely overlap with white. Just read any US Census form.

4. Zimmerman made over 45 calls to the police in the previous year. He was bound to get lucky and hit an actual crime in progress eventually.

5. The black neighbor Ibrahim Rashada did say there had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood. He also said that Zimmerman made him nervous enough that he did not take walks in his own neighborhood. Both statements are in the same linked Miami Herald article.

6. The ‘overlooked’ witness said that he thought the guy on top doing the beating was the one who ended up dead. However, he also said the one on the ground being beaten was wearing red, which was what Martin was wearing.

5. A five day suspension could be for all sorts of things, many of them non-violent. The Miami-Dade Code of Student Conduct lists cheating, instigative behavior, profanity, and possession and use of tobacco products among the infractions that can be punished with suspension for 1 to 5 days. For all we know Martin was suspended because he was caught with a stack of Playboys.

http://miamieducatorsalliance.com/CSCSecondary.pdf

Hm, did Henri V manage to earn the banhammer? My attempt to reply to him got lost in the server problems this morning, and now his original comment (frankly, more worthy of Andrew Ti’s sort of response than mine) appears to be gone.

Am I imagining things, or did Sebastian post a comment replying to JQ earlier? I can’t see it anywhere .

1. The Sanford police and city government were scared about being sued by Zimmerman if the kept him or investigated.

2. Zimmerman has been in trouble before and is a general pain in the ass

3. Zimmerman’s father is a lawyer

3. What DOES Zimmerman the Younger do for a living? Blank silence on that

4. Connect 1-4

The Department of Justice is investigating, and we should wait for the results of that investigation before rendering judgment. At present, as best I can tell, the facts are that an unarmed Martin was returning to the home of a friend of his father’s from a local store where he purchased some snacks. An armed Zimmerman saw him, called the police, and proceeded to follow him. What happened next is – crucially – unclear. An altercation ensued, and by the end of it Zimmeran had sustained a minor wound to the back of his head and a bloody nose – and Martin had been, in addition to any other injuries he may have sustained, shot. How did the altercation start? What happened during the altercation? What were the precise circumstances at the point at which Martin was shot?

As to the ensuing police actions, that Zimmerman was not arrested does not mean that the matter was uninvestigated. The DOJ is looking into this aspect of the case as well.

It does seem likely that Zimmerman’s – to put it charitably – overzealousness, at a minimum, contributed to the existence of an altercation in the first place. But it is too soon for calls of arrest, or accusations of racism, or cries of police misconduct. We need more facts. And then, perhaps, an arrest, accusations of racism, and cries of police misconduct, will be fully justified.

You are comprehensively wrong, Andrew F.

First off, we’re not rendering judgement in a legal sense at all, ever, unless we’re called to a jury or something. We are forming opinions as private individuals and as communities. It’s not only necessary that these often precede legal judgements, it’s highly desirable, because public pressure does shape legal actions, for good as well as bed.

That said, you’re tossing out a bunch of relevant considerations. Zimmerman, the shooter, has a history of violent and aggressive behavior. Martin, the victim, did not. Martin was perfectly entitled to be when and where he was, unless someone can show that the neighborhood had a curfew for non-resident relatives of residents. Zimmerman used racial slurs – “coons”, in particular – in his communication with the please, and was looking for confrontation – he referred to frustration at how they “always get away”. The 911 operator tried to discourage him from further action, and he ignore dit.

(Someone unaccustomed to bureaucratic usage might misunderstand “we don’t need you to do that”. But Zimmerman has been calling them nearly every week for more than a year. He has extended familiarity with such usage.)

Nor do you seem to care about the fact the police literally didn’t investigate. Zimmerman is at large, and there was apparently no question of ever taking him into custody even temporarily. Martin’s body and possessions went unexamined for days. Action is happening only because the feds are making to step in.

The fact is, there is no set of facts or possible conflict details that can make Zimmerman the defender, or justified in shooting Martin. The conflict exists because he sought it out, and he was wrong to. Nor can anything Martin might have done excuse what the police did with regard to his remains and to Zimmerman.

To use a term of art, fuck off and take your racist whining with you.

Damn, the blockquote should encompass the entire bottom portion of the above post.

I’ll try again since the comment seems to have vanished in the server problems.

John Quiggin, normally I’d ask for better trolls, but since you’re a front page poster here, I’m at a bit of a loss. (Unless of course you’re a troll impersonating Quiggin in which case I’ve been uber-trolled). What I actually wrote was:

Fifth, the statute has approximately zero to do with this case. The killer was pretty clearly not acting in self defense.

It is the fact that the police didn’t investigate this crime, with an obviously dead body and sketchy story, that is a horrible and racist set of actions. Trying to turn this into a side attack on an irrelevant Florida law is missing the point completely.”

Somehow out of that you jump to: “I find it striking that both Sebastian and McArdle instinctively know which side to jump on and that, even in an appalling case like this one, it’s the side of the racist authoritarians.” I’m not sure how you turn my comment into support for the racist authoritarians when it seems clear to me that it is an attack on racist authoritarians, but I’d at least appreciate a thumbnail sketch of the logic behind the statement. I’m sometimes unclear, but not usually that unclear. You seem to be stereotyping libertarians in an especially strange way. Maybe you thought I was wearing a hoodie.

My basic argument is that talking about the Florida self-defense law (which as I point out is well in line with the common law for federal self defense in the past hundred years or more and with the majority position of the individual states) is basically accepting Zimmerman’s bullshit at face value and accepting the transparently dismissive police ‘investigation’ as if it were real.

Under the Florida law, given the best evidence we have about what really happened, Zimmerman’s actions don’t even come close to qualifying as self-defense. If anything, Trayvon, if he had killed Zimmerman, would have a valid self-defense claim not the reverse.

Zimmerman CLAIMS self defense, but a lot of lying sacks of shit do that when they kill someone. It is the job of the police to investigate the killing and figure out if they have a valid claim or not.

The police manifestly DID NOT DO SO.

They ‘corrected’ a witness to make the story match Zimmerman’s.

They didn’t bother to identify the body for 3 days even though they had access to Trayvon’s cell phone, which upon inspection should have revealed that he was talking to someone minutes before his death; that the person he was talking to was his girlfriend; that he told her he was being followed; and that she counseled him to run.

They didn’t take away Zimmerman’s gun.

They didn’t listen to the 911 tapes, which certainly problematize Zimmerman’s bullshit story.

They appear to, at a minimum, not bothered to do even the most cursory investigation into a black man’s death. And they may have actively covered it up, because their actions are almost shockingly incredibly as mere negligence.

They reached for whatever tool was necessary to dismiss the need to investigate. The content of the Florida self-defense law is irrelevant *because they didn’t give enough of a shit to actually investigate to see if it was applicable*. Focusing on the content of the self-defence law is buying into their racist bullshit. I don’t see any reason to do so.

Now I hope that is crystal clear that as someone who has strong libertarian tendencies, who by definition mistrusts government exercises of power, I’m NOT defending the racist authoritarians. At a minimum I hope they don’t get continue working as cops anywhere. I’d hope for more, but police immunity over investigations is ridiculously strong, so I don’t expect much.

@Sebastian The law, the mentality that drove Zimmerman and the police complicity after the fact in his actions are all part of the same package. It’s absolutely clear who the NRA have in mind (at each end of the gun) when they promote “stand your ground” laws and similar.

It turns out that the law can’t be confined to the intended beneficiaries quite as neatly as hoped, but unintended consequences are the way of the world.

More generally, though, I’m just pissed off by the “Yes, but I still need to defend my ideological corner” attitude shown by you, McArdle and (from the other end of the spectrum) Bob McManus on this.

Which ideological corner am I defending? The racist authoritarians? I think it is relatively clear to any fair reader that I’m doing no such thing.

“The law, the mentality that drove Zimmerman and the police complicity after the fact in his actions are all part of the same package. ”

No. They most certainly aren’t. I know you want to assert that they are (you aren’t even really bothering to construct an argument about it). Florida could have a self defense law that fit every single thing that you wanted from a self defense law, and it wouldn’t have mattered because the particulars of the law are completely irrelevant to a police force that doesn’t want to bother to find out what the circumstances of killing this black man actually were.

I find it somewhat weird that you claim to be ‘pissed off’ by the need to defend your ideological corner type of thinking when you paint with such broad strokes as to construe my comments as a defense of the police when I’m absolutely attacking them. I expected you to just say you read my comments at the same time you were thinking about Megan’s and got them confused or something. But instead you double down. Just weird.

I’ll repeat what JanieM said @110. The existence of the law was relied on by the police in their decision not to investigate. Their decision was given a color of plausibility by the fact that the law has led to the acquittal of numerous murderers in the recent past. If the law had not been changed to remove the duty to retreat, it would have been very difficult, even for the a thoroughly racist police force, not to arrest and charge someone who shot and killed an unarmed victim. Your claim that

Florida could have a self defense law that fit every single thing that you wanted from a self defense law, and it wouldn’t have mattered because the particulars of the law are completely irrelevant to a police force that doesn’t want to bother to find out what the circumstances of killing this black man actually were.

is entirely unconvincing to me. We have plenty of racist police in Australia, but I’m absolutely confident that the facts of this case (even as presented by the Sanford police) would have produced an arrest and charge under our self-defence law. So, I found your rush to defend the law as irrelevant quite objectionable.

That said, it was unfair to lump you in with McArdle, who not only defends the law but the police and Zimmerman.

fyi–Outside of San Diego in In El Cajon, Shaima Alawadi, 32 & mother of 5, was found by her daughter lying in a pool of blood inside their home with a note warning the family to “go back to your own country.” She died Saturday after three days in the hospital.

After Treyvon and hearing the woman at Santorum’s gun club appearace yell “pretend it’s Obama” and the recent firebombing of a Democratic state senator’s office in Texas–among so many other things–it really seems to me that the incendiary rhetoric of the far right insurgence is quite possibly manifesting itself in permission to kill.

“The existence of the law was relied on by the police in their decision not to investigate.”

No. I don’t believe that. The existence of the law was used as an EXCUSE not to investigate. They were willing to take Zimmerman *at his word* that it was self defense. They were willing to contradict an eyewitness and correct that person to match Zimmerman’s story. They were using any EXCUSE available not to look closely.

The funny thing about my take on the story is that it makes the police officers look MUCH WORSE than your take on the story (that they were legitimately ‘relying’ on the law). Yet I’m not the one accusing you of trying to offer support to racist authoritarians.

So long as they were willing to take Zimmerman at his word [a la, oh dear I was so very very afraid for my life /sotto voice], and so long as there was any normal sort of self defence law of any sort, and so long as they were willing to actively mar the investigation by changing witness testimony and utterly failing to follow up on even super-obvious leads, the particulars of the law aren’t relevant *because they don’t want to charge on this murder*.

I’m not ‘rushing to defend the law’. I’m merely pointing out that the law is utterly typical, has been a feature of US jurisprudence for more than a hundred years at both the federal level and in a majority of the states, and yet somehow doesn’t produce these kinds of cases on a regular basis, at least so far as we know. Now I’m certainly not saying that it is impossible to dredge up misapplications of this law, or any other law in a jury system. I’ve seen horrible misapplications of all sorts of perfectly clear and seemingly rational laws.

I’m suggesting that the problem, for people who actually want to wrestle with the facts, is not in this very typical law, but in the fact that a pernicious faction of institutionalized racism in the police force/law enforcement units is allowed to thrive in at least that city, probably that county, and maybe a large portion of that state.

I’m suggesting that hand wringing about the particular law that they used as an EXCUSE is a stupid way of trying to deal with the problem of a police force that seems to have a big strain of institutionalized racism in it because they can find another EXCUSE if we don’t root out the institutionalized racism.

And I’m REALLY irritated to find myself accused of supporting the police force when I try to make that point just because you insist on having some hang up about the particulars of this utterly typical law.

“No. I don’t believe that. The existence of the law was used as an EXCUSE not to investigate. They were willing to take Zimmerman at his word that it was self defense.”

So, we’re agreed, the existence of the law provided the racist police (and, for that matter, Zimmerman himself) with the excuse they needed. If the law had not been changed (or, if you insist, restated in line with 19th century precedents) the excuse would not have worked, even on Zimmerman’s obviously bogus account.

There’s plenty of racism to go around here. Zimmerman is a racist killer. The Sanford police are racist and complicit in his crimes. But the NRA, which pushed this law, is cut from the same racist cloth. Defending them on an occasion like this is putting yourself on the wrong side of justice.

Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford …article from Tampa Bay Times

Brown, a 40-year-old single mom who says she is “mostly black,” moved into the Retreat at Twin Lakes last year. She chose the gated subdivision of identical townhomes because it is racially diverse, lots of children live there and, she said, “it seemed so safe.”

Retreat is Not so upscale, 250k or so.

Sanford itself is majority/minority, 30% black, 20% Latino, 4% Asian. Anybody know the racial breakdown of the Sanford PD? Going through the city website. One of four city commissioners is a black woman. City manager is black, graduate of Rutgers, brought in from Topeka Ks in 2011. Median and per capita income a little higher than my own town of about the same size, poverty a little higher.

Here’s the City Magazine nice St Pat’s picture with “Luis O’ Peña [IT], his assistants Maria Garcia and Vandell McCoy [Community Development],”

Look, the South is not what it was in 1950. It is much more integrated by race, across all income groups.

Bruce @163: leaving aside your – what is to me anyway – laughable accusation of racism, let me focus on the substantive points;

1 – my point is not that we need wait before forming a legal judgment, but that as citizens we lack sufficient information to judge. I raised, in particular, questions we need answered before rendering a reasonably well supported judgment of the matter.

That Zimmerman was not arrested does not mean that the police did not investigate. We do not know the extent of their investigation – this is but one of the relevant facts which, hopefully, shall be produced by the Department of Justice’s investigation.

As to the issue of Florida’s self-defense law, its particular form will likely but not necessarily be relevant, depending on Zimmerman’s freedom of movement when he fired. It is, again, premature to draw any firm conclusions.

Ultimately, I suspect the facts would support a charge of manslaughter, but the case would be a difficult one. And that’s simply a suspicion. Perhaps in a few weeks we’ll have a fuller report.

See, I live this every day. I live in a majority-minority community, maybe 30% black, 40% Latino, 5% Asian and ME (I saw veils in the grocery store), all with children, maybe 20% older whites like me.

There are a half-dozen neighborhoods, some very new and nice developments, also totally mixed. The neighborhoods run from 1/2 million dollar houses to 50k houses to cheap apartments. They all go to school together. They don’t wander around places in a higher income bracket where they aren’t known well.

I’ve seen someone (particularly, Sebastian) claim that the Florida law was irrelevant to what happened. So, let me review some facts:
1) When the law was enacted, police officers warned, among other things, that it would encourage vigilantism
2) A vigilante shoot Trayvon Martin
3) The police did not arrest him, claiming that the law explicitly forbids arrest

Notice that the shoddy investigation has only partial bearing on 3): without the law, with the same lack of investigation, Zimmermann would have been arrested.

I’m finding it hard to discern bob mcmanus’s point, but I have the horrible feeling it is that Zimmerman didn’t kill Martin because of his race because he lives in a area that contains black people and therefore wouldn’t be suspicious of a black person walking around. Because bob mcmanus “lives this every day” and sees veils in grocery stores with children.

I’m thinking Zimmerman’s use of the work “coon”, in a phone call to the police complaining that said “coon” was walking around just looking at people’s houses, should be a clue here.

@Henri Vieuxtemps: I’m assuming that the comment disappeared because of technical issues, and if so, I’d be glad to hear your response. About the white 50 something dude, sure, but also in general, whether you can see the difference between racism and profiling that takes skin color into account.

I’d rather not because I only half remember your comment and I don’t want to impute to you something you didn’t write and I don’t want to get sidetracked here. Sorry.

The class argument makes it sound as if people in gated communities – and their children! – always dress according to their station. It ain’t the case.

“[The American Left] can’t understand how an armed citizen can walk away from a fight in order to keep from having it escalate out of control. Anti-gun schemers also don’t understand the self-reliant and self-assured know they are capable of acting properly if forced to defend their own life, or to stand down when it isn’t necessary. “(http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/node/5556)

Were it reasonable to expect that every armed citizen carries the burden of lethal force as seriously as he or she transports their concealed weapon through a public sphere simmering with petty personal grievances, one may realistically hope that tragedies like the killing of Trayvon Martin would be extremely rare. I fear that this is a false hope.

“Every handgun owned in America is an implicit declaration of war on one’s neighbor. When the chips are down, its owner says, he will not trust any other arbiter but force personally wielded.”
Don B. Kates, Jr., Public Opinion: The Effects of Extremist Discourse on the Gun Debate

193: Rich people like Lebron wear hoodies! I wear a hoodie.

As I said above, Zimmerman thought Martin was the wrong kind of black, the kind that get hassled every day in America. Poor.

194: That is public knowledge, and easily available at Wikipedia.

Darn it, that is what class is about, there came a time when upper and upper middle class whites wanted themselves and their property to be separate and protected from poor and working whites.

Why would upwardly mobile blacks be immune?

John Quiggin doesn’t need me to defend him, but authoritarianism aside, one of my first thoughts on reading (a) Sebastian’s comment was: typical of a libertarian to insist that statute, precedent, etc., don’t matter, and to insist on reasoning everything out for themselves from first principles. @177 even suggests that the reason the police were wrong is that they failed to reason everything out for themselves from first principles (they used the statute law as an “EXCUSE” for not doing their real duty). In fact, the presumed intent of the law was to remove an obstacle to a perception, shared widely enough to influence elections and public opinion, that people could not defend themselves from a criminal class, or were at risk of being punished by the government for defending themselves from criminals (which the government, of course, should have swept up, and didn’t, because liberals)—a perception itself tied largely to a belief that it is easy to distinguish between “criminals” and others, largely because “criminals” are perceived as black, urban, identifiable by their dress and their refusal to behave as “good” minorities like the ones Zimmerman persuaded not to go out on the street—and there is every appearance that the police acted according to the spirit of the legislation. The only difference between the argument further up the thread and typical Usenet libertarian stuff is Sebastian’s evident ability to muster a series of actual legal arguments in favor of his position’s being adopted.

Working Link

“GMA Joe Oliver” if that doesn’t work

Probably the strongest sign of racism on the right in this controversy is what has NOT happened. There has never been a shooting in recent times that raises outrage – such as the Virginia Tech massacre – without the right responding, in chorus, that it only proves that we need more firearms. That we must be armed to protect ourselves. But in the face of a black kid in a hoodie, there is … silence. Almost like conservatives don’t want to arm black kids. Huh, it makes you wonder… Although not really a lot, since the idea that conservatives in the U.S. are not by and large a racist lot depends on a bad faith that is as big and broad as the mighty mississippi.

Sebastian:

I have no problem with many of your other arguments as far as they go (“some judges” were trying to change the law as it had existed for decades at least, and make it more liberal, though, is another story), and if the Florida statute doesn’t make the law in Florida different from the law anywhere else because everybody else already permits the same support for people who claim to have killed in self-defense, that’s pretty strong.

I was just struck by the fact that you chose to post in support of shutting down discussion about legislation, because (you say) in this case legislation didn’t matter. It just seems to turn out that, when libertarians argue, in every individual case legislation turns out not to matter, which seems not too plausible.

And for all the bipartisan-sounding talk about racism, your argument just happens to be that what matters in the case is the character of the individual police officers carrying out their duties, which just happens to be the argument of people who say we don’t need government to enforce explicit legislation because this would prohibit “men of good character” from following their conscience.

Everybody is under an obligation to show good judgment, at all times–fine. Statute law doesn’t change that obligation—fine. Statute law doesn’t change whether an act that demonstrates poor judgment can be prosecuted—that’s ridiculous.

a number of talking heads want to use this incident to attack “stand your ground”

No talking heads on this thread and I haven’t seen what you describe—why not either cite what you’re referring to or explain how what you said actually engages with what was said on the thread even if in other words.

I don’t know whether Zimmerman sincerely (if stupidly) thought he was acting in self-defense, or whether the police thought he reasonably could have been, or whether the police were influenced by what they would have done in a similar situation, or whether the police liked Zimmerman or despised him. (Which sincere if possibly stupid beliefs may well have been informed by racism, and likely were.)

I don’t know what the police did, only what they announced publicly. I don’t expect the police to provide me (or journalists, to filter down to me) a fully descriptive account of what they did and didn’t do so that I might make a decision about how to judge their actions and what political steps I ought to take next.

I do know that according to members of the police themselves, the effect of the law would be to get people who did what Zimmerman did off the hook (unless you think “vigilante” means something different), and that would clearly make things easier for police who wanted to do what the Sanford police did here.

“using the law as an ‘excuse’ because it is absolutely obvious that the law don’t excuse Zimmerman’s actions”

Are you saying that when an excuse seems like obvious bullshit to us, it’s no longer an excuse? That seems like wordplay around the definition of ‘excuse’ to me. Would you rather we use a different word? If so, which word?

If you don’t like stand your ground, fine. Argue against it in a case where it was actually applicable”

You’re kidding, right? Joking around? The #1 problem I have with “stand your ground” is that citizens are highly likely to misunderstand it and misinterpret its scope as broader than is actually the case, leading them to commit acts they think of as legitimate vigilantism. The #2 problem I have with “stand your ground” is that a cold-blooded person is much more likely to commit a crime, knowing that they can attempt to pass it off as an instance where the law would exculpate them, leading them to commit acts they can attempt to paint as legitimate vigilantism. So this is basically exactly the sort of situation where either #1 or #2 applies.

No, I’m saying when an excuse is obvious bullshit, it is obvious bullshit and shouldn’t be taken as a serious argument.

We just live on different planets, is the problem. On my planet, people get away with all sorts of crap by means of obvious bullshit, so working to bullshit-proof your laws as well as you can is part of building a responsible society. I swear to god, you’d be the one arguing in 1871 that lynching and arson and stuff are obviously totally illegal already and excuses for not investigating or making arrests are obvious bullshit, so, like, why are we wasting precious Congressional time this Civil Rights Act thing?

very thoughtful reflection on the tragic murder of Trayvon Martin. It is by one of the other great American criminologists in the US, Jonathan Simon. I cited Garland above about the history of lynching. Simon suggests the ways in which the history of lynching distorts the dynamics of the neighborhood watch.

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/03/26/whose-public-safety-trayvon-martin-and-neighborhood-watch/

It appears that there is now, surprise surprise, an active campaign to smear Trayvon Martin. I did think that the pro-Zimmerman comments here didn’t quite pass the sniff test.

Argh, formatting fail. The last sentence was me responding to bob mcmanus’s earlier sentences.

Anyway, it was all contributing to a pointless derail, so please ignore.

Such weak, half-hearted trolling on this thread, even that linked to off-site (McArdle, feh). I dare not quote, but for the real thing (post title gives a hint, but there’s more, oh yes there’s more) check out Roger Kimball: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/03/27/thomas-sowell-on-geraldo-on-hoodies/.

216:Which has what exactly to do with Martin’s death? Oh, that’s right, nothing.

Well, the murder could have taken place on a backroad in rural Mississippi by some sheriff’s deputy…

…or inside a majority-minority gated community by a publicly-approved Neighborhood watchman

You know, this dedicated abstraction from contingency and concrete details (“they are all racists! Sanford PD is racist! “Hoodies are thugs”) in order to create politically ideologically useful stereotypes is why, yes, I have contempt for both sides

I don’t know, seems like my half-hearted trolling was pretty dead accurate. This story will now be conveniently forgotten ASAP.

@Bob McManus And of course, entirely coincidental that this tirade against sloppy bourgeois individualism turns up in the comments thread of a post by one of our female members.

True, he is indeed a better class of troll, and there are some rank amateurs in this thread.

Oh heck with it I can’t write on a iphone

I am finding hard to find a reliable source that explains what “coon” means and why is it used and to indicate what exactly

This seems a little hard to believe. The first two entries the Bing search engine offers are these:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=coon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon

It’s not that complicated.

******

And since I came back here……Trayvon Martin’s school records are relevant to the fact that he was murdered for walking with Skittles and iced tea?

What Steve LaBonne said @4.

Google search for “coon”

(Hope this works. Could comment preview come back?)

What he seems to be saying is that the people who profit most from the management of a capitalist economy can maintain their control of the economy only by keeping the people they manage in perpetual conflict with each other. The conservative managers bait their conservative supporters with horrific narratives of a communist revolution, while the liberal managers bait their liberal supporters with horrific narratives of a fascist revolution. So that the same set of circumstances (an unarmed black teenager killed by an armed white vigilante patrolling the privatized boundaries of a relatively affluent ghetto) can be interpreted to support diametrically opposite conclusions. Which in turn can be utilized to prevent the people managed by their managers from forming an alliance dedicated to the mitigation of the misery which compels an armed white vigilante to kill an unarmed black teenager who happens to be strolling through the privatized boundaries of a relatively affluent ghetto.

Yes I get that it’s an insulting term but it must mean something, right ?

Having stupidly bitten this hook once, I can only say, the second time around: who the f*ck cares? Why would anyone come into a conversation on a topic like this one and obsess out loud about a nitpicking question in historical linguistics?

In my view, Katherine, it’s less the “both sides do it!” argument and more the “class is the root of all evil!” angle. We shouldn’t be focusing on the obvious racial inequalities and history of racist violence in the USA because M**xism! It’s a variant on the “lie back and think of the revolution” argument being peddled in defense of Assange.

who the f*ck cares?

Sorry for making an effort to understand completely what people say it when they say it. Btw I am not sure what you mean by “hook” but I didn’t mean to be disrespectful of anyone’s emotion or opinion or of the facts themselves, really. Only just trying to understand.

I guess where I come from insults are always a bunch of colorful words that always do mean something very precise. Ok, I get it, nobody cares, I’ll end up right here.

I’m a Canadian, where we’re all about “peace, order and good government”, so I guess that colours my view of all this….but I honestly just don’t get why a guy like George Zimmerman is allowed to carry an assault weapon. Or “stand his ground.”

I was taught that the state is supposed to have a monopoly on the use of force. And in exchange the rest of us get to walk around and go about our business in relative security, without having to have bodyguards and stuff. I’m perfectly willing to suffer the indignities of backing down, retreating and failing to stand my ground, because I figure we’ve got the police. And no, I don’t like or trust the police a lot of the time, but rather the police (yes, with the brutality, incompetence and stupidity that seem to infect all police forces to some degree, not the least our own RCMP) than leaving myself open to the GZs of the world.

Why isn’t there more debate about the idea that the use of force, and the use of assault weapons by anyone other than a police officer, to go after any alleged wrongdoer, is just out and out crazy, intolerable and should in all cases be illegal? (there may be some very narrow exceptions)

(That’s not to say that the failure to prosecute GZ and the demonization of the teenage victim isn’t also indicative of endemic racism and bigotry, not to mention mind-blowing meanness and insensitivity.)

I’m a Canadian, where we’re all about “peace, order and good government”

I think that’s “we were all about…”