Timex
2021
3 incidents did not lead to this. This has been brewing for some time now, and it just hit a boiling point. You don’t wake up with this kind of response overnight. And just because they haven’t formulated their demands or thoughts together, doesn’t mean the issue isn’t real. Occupy Wall Street was another example of primarily young people organizing but not really having an end game. That doesn’t mean some of their issues weren’t valid.
You are making a circular argument here. You’re discussing whether the response is justified, and whether racism is as pervasive as some suggest on campus, and then as an argument you are stating that the response couldn’t have occurred unless racism is pervasive.
You were the one who went off topic with the generic “Because History of Racism” argument. If you can use that here, you can go up to any company run by someone who is not black and use it to get them to resign for no reason other than “USA has a History of Racism”.
I agree that the football team forced the issue, but a year from now i think they might be kicking themselves as it is seeming like they protested based on questionable events.
Djscman
2023
So our latest police shooting in Minneapolis isn’t pretty. The Sunday before last, police shot a man, Jamar Clark, who later died. Jamar Clark is, or was, a black man. Many witnesses say this man was handcuffed at the time a police officer summarily shot him. “Execution-style,” according to one witness. The police came back saying, no, of course he wasn’t handcuffed, those eyewitnesses are wrong (with the subtext that shooting a handcuffed man would be a monstrous act). The victim, according to the police, was actually trying to stop paramedics from treating his girlfriend that he had been beating when he started reaching for an officer’s gun. Further, the police are refraining from releasing any video from this event—not body cams, not dash cams, not cell phone cams, even if they would show whether Clark was handcuffed or not.
Since then, people have been protesting at the nearest police precinct. Both the police and the protesters have been angry at times. Plenty of protesters found themselves maced, and police claim that bottles and other debris have been thrown at them. At one point the protesters walked onto an interstate and stopped traffic, which was a reasonably effective tactic during our last police shooting of a black man, though it certainly doesn’t endear them to non-protesters. Even worse, videos of local white supremacists have been posted to the internet of young angry white men brandishing pistols heading to the protests with the aim of fomenting bullshit. Nothing happened Sunday, but this morning two or three of these white men, acting oddly, were chased off from the protests. As they ran away, they shot five protesters. The new batch of wounded protesters are expected to survive, thank goodness. But it’s not getting any prettier here.
Day to day racism is horrible but hard to report on. It’s death by a thousand cuts, not one huge event that be painted into a gruesome story.
For the sake of discussion, I’ll concede that the few reported incidents that were described were not, in and of themselves, sufficient justification for everyone freaking out. If there was no other racism and just a few isolated incidents caused by disturbed individuals then the response by students seems completely disproportionate now doesn’t it? I see two possibilities for this disparity:
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The students, drunk on their own power and reckless sense of entitlement, forced out a university official over trivialities.
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There was a really serious problem with racism and the administrations handling of issues, that didn’t get fully reported either because it’s extremely difficult to substantiate a million little incidents well enough to report or because some of the media reporting it had some reason to downplay it.
Given that students and administrators took very real risks with the security of their own positions, I’m vastly more inclined to believe #2. I suppose one could make a reasonable argument for #1 with some research and effort, but I haven’t seen anyone try. Instead I;ve seen crap like people picking up the wealth status of the kid on the hunger strike. That leaves a sour taste in my mouth because that’s a classic tactic to defend the indefensible, to make the horrible seem okay. Just pick an irrelevant or minor detail and shifting the focus completely to it and start tearing it apart to discredit it, By extension it let’s people rationalize discrediting the the entire situation.
LMN8R
2025
So white supremicists are literally committing acts of terror now, but yes fascists please go on telling us how we need to identify and track Muslims and prevent refugees from entering the country.
So bring up our history is off topic?
You are so very very odd. As to nonblacks guys should resign because of racism, as my argumentbis clearly a stretch. That people in the US feel like they are victims because of their racism is pretty legitimate and has been for a very very long time. That these protesters singled out this president because of his lack of response to nearby events and the general vile culture that is missouri (known to be one of the most racists states in the union) see about right.
That you say there is nothing wrong or that the events are petty or that racism doesnt exist because rich black people is insane.
Scuzz
2027
Nice attempt to conflate two different subjects. A couple idiot white guys shooting into a crowd and people who in Paris at least proved capable of killing over a hundred people in a planned, deadly attack. Oh yea, same thing.
Tortilla
2028
I thought it was a fairly cogent point. Yes, we all realize that the white supremacists who fired at protesters were far less organized and pre-meditated than the Paris attacks. Trying to keep out refugees to prevent the possibility of something like this happening is clearly pointless and irrational however, as it demonstratably already does happen here. Hell, in the good old US of A the shooters typically go to schools. Rock concerts would be an improvement.
LMN8R
2029
The point is that Republicans are suggesting literally fascist policies directly sourced from the Nazi regime despite the fact that the refugee process could not be more prolonged and careful than it is right now, and despite the fact that we have plenty of domestic terrorism being ignored as it is.
What do you think the Republican candidates would be saying if armed militant black men stormed a protest full of white people and shot five of them?
Tortilla
2030
Well they’d be proposing strict gun contro . . . . sorry I was laughing too hard to finish typing the sentence.
Scuzz
2031
They would blame the democrats of course.
And from quotes I have heard from government sources our vetting of refugees may not measure up to the standards you think they do. How does one prove they are not a threat? We have people here already on “watch lists” who we do nothing about.
I am not in a panic about this. I know California has already taken in over 200 refugees and my area has welcomed many of them. But America will be hit again, and if the perpetrators happen to come from this pool of thousands of Syrian refugees it will be bad for everyone who follows.
5 Black Lives Matter protesters were shot (none life-threatening) by 3 men who are not black last night. Apparently they were masked and acting suspiciously during the protest and a couple of BLM folks tried to escort them away and the 3 turned on them and at them near an alley, and used racial epithets while doing so and as a reason for the violence.
I have yet to hear one of our conservative voices in the country advocate for the BLM protesters to carry guns as a deterrent to that kind of violence.
Nesrie
2033
What does being on a watch list actually mean though? Rewind a bit and think about how many Civil Rights leaders would be on a watch list if they were around by the definition we use today, and if they were… what do you think the government should have done about it? Throw them in jail. Keep them under surveillance (they clearly did that)? Stop them from flying (seems to be one known result).
I realize it’s not exactly apples to apples here since we’re talking about foreign nationals to many that were citizens back then, but I am cautious about someone being on the watch list as somehow an automatic guilt mechanism. It’s a balancing act between doing what’s right as humans for fellow humans and trying to stay safe. These groups live for terror. We can’t let them destroy our values in an effort to feel safe. That’s how they “win”.
Anyway, this is probably a better discussion for the other topic.
Somewhere along the line, the media and the public conflated “being on a watch list” with “being a member of a terror cell.”
You get put on a watch list specifically because there is not enough evidence for law enforcement to take any action. They don’t know if you’re a bad guy or not, so they’re going to… watch you… to try and learn more. If there was enough reason to do something about a person on a watch list, then they’d be taken off of the watch list and placed on the “do something about this guy” list.
Nesrie
2035
But it has to be something slightly more than that right? People get put on surveillance all the time for various reasons, but they’re not all on a so-called “watch list.” I mean being on a watch list keeps you from flying which is how we wind up with five year olds not able to fly and senators for having the same name as someone else. That is doing something but not actually arresting right?
You are right though, the media and public equate anyone on the watch list as “bad” without actually bothering with evidence… which I assume if we had they would be in jail or prison.
Scuzz
2036
Weren’t the Boston Bombers, or at least the older one, on the “watch list”?
As for what was done during the Civil Rigts movement, yea, the FBI bugged them and kept files on all of them. RFK authorized much of that. But I don’t think anyone back then pictured someone from that list showing up at a concert venue with automatic weapons. Of course, based on what the cops did to the Black Panthers in Oakland and that group in Philly I am not so sure.
The police are all over this one, for obvious reasons. They know if they aren’t seen taking it seriously there could well be riots.
They’ve already made some arrests in face.
I’m more disturbed by their unwillingness to release video footage of the shooting that started this whole mess. Regardless of the protocols involved in investigating something like this, it looks bad. Like the authorities have something to hide.
The elder brother was placed on two lists; one for customs, and another for law enforcement/intelligence. Those only triggered alarms if he left the country, which he did while on them. However, the law enforcement/intel list (TIDE) didn’t get triggered because of issues with how his name was spelled. The customs list did go off, but his stay on that list actually expired because of the length of time he spent overseas.
The shooters were allegedly trying to incite a riot, as well as wearing bulletproof vests:
“these four white guys walked up … They had masks and they had a briefcase. I thought they were there to donate [something].”
Brown said that someone in the crowd pointed the men out as suspected agitators and the crowd started to chase them away, heading north on Morgan Avenue.
The men got as far as an alley just north of the precinct house when they started shooting, Brown said.
“When we turned around they started to shoot at us from behind,” Brown said.
The shooters appeared to be wearing bulletproof vests under their clothing, she said.
“It was all scary. You wouldn’t expect anything like that. We didn’t have a security details. Everybody here was peaceful. We didn’t expect these psychos.”
Quaro
2040
The account before the video:
“He’s got a 100-yard stare. He’s staring blankly,” [Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat] Camden said of the teen. “[He] walked up to a car and stabbed the tire of the car and kept walking.”
Officers remained in their car and followed McDonald as he walked south on Pulaski Road. More officers arrived and police tried to box the teen in with two squad cars, Camden said. McDonald punctured one of the squad car’s front passenger-side tires and damaged the front windshield, police and Camden said.
Officers got out of their car and began approaching McDonald, again telling him to drop the knife, Camden said. The boy allegedly lunged at police, and one of the officers opened fire.
McDonald was shot in the chest and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:42 p.m.
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2N6_jLAgA (You may not want to watch.)
Shot 16 times.
