Zimmerman Inserts Himself Again
Soul Zilla
153 Posts
When will this man stop? As if being acquitted of calculated cold-blooded murder was not enough to keep this man inside, again the psychopathic, cynical Zimmerman thrusts himself onto the scene. This time he again steps out of his vehicle (fire extinguisher in hand) after coming upon a traffic accident. An overturned Ford Explorer occupied by a family of four including two children were helped to safety by Zimmerman and another motorist. Early reports don't indicate the ethnicity of the family inside the vehicle, but I will go ahead and predict that they were not black. Because of course, were they, Zimmerman, the racist, would not have helped. He would have a good laugh and then go on about his day. Taking a black girl as his date to his high school prom was purely meant to confuse people later on down the road. Evil genius, he is. Oh the humanity. Please let's lock this man up for good, he is a threat to the general public's danger. We must stop him at all costs!
To paraphrase the cry of the countrywide rallies, "Screw the justice system and the rule of law, We gonna take justice into our own hands, Vigilantism in the 21st century!! Mob Rule!!!" "We don't ever want to let racism die, it is our birthright and by remaining victims we gain leverage that we wouldn't otherwise have. And where it doesn't exist we will fabricate it. The Civil Rights Movement, the Civil War, the innumerable deaths both black and white associated with them, desegregation and the reversal of Jim Crow laws means nothing to us. We take their names in vain. We sully their memory. We mock their accomplishments. If it's a black man dealing with the police or vicariously through another then it must be racism. End of story!!!!"
http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2013/07/22/zimmerman-helps-save-family-of-four-from-overturned-vehicle/
http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/22/george-zimmerman-grabs-fire-extinguisher-pulls-family-from-overturned-suv/
http://abcnews.go.com/US/george-zimmerman-emerged-hiding-truck-crash-rescue/storynew?id=19735432
To paraphrase the cry of the countrywide rallies, "Screw the justice system and the rule of law, We gonna take justice into our own hands, Vigilantism in the 21st century!! Mob Rule!!!" "We don't ever want to let racism die, it is our birthright and by remaining victims we gain leverage that we wouldn't otherwise have. And where it doesn't exist we will fabricate it. The Civil Rights Movement, the Civil War, the innumerable deaths both black and white associated with them, desegregation and the reversal of Jim Crow laws means nothing to us. We take their names in vain. We sully their memory. We mock their accomplishments. If it's a black man dealing with the police or vicariously through another then it must be racism. End of story!!!!"
http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2013/07/22/zimmerman-helps-save-family-of-four-from-overturned-vehicle/
http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/22/george-zimmerman-grabs-fire-extinguisher-pulls-family-from-overturned-suv/
http://abcnews.go.com/US/george-zimmerman-emerged-hiding-truck-crash-rescue/storynew?id=19735432
Comments
Or just add it to the Martin thread.
God damn.
Or just add it to the Martin thread.
God damn.
Or just add it to the Martin thread.
God damn.
Or just add it to the Martin thread.
God damn.
SoulStrut, I hardly know ye anymore.
Agreed. Thanks Reynaldo. Exactly the point of my post. Your one word summary for the disposition of the large community of attendees for the Justice for Trayvon rallies. Those that look hard to cast this case in a mold of racism to be shattered with a hammer blow of miscast civil rights revivalism. It only parodies and blemishes the beautiful work of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and the millions of oppressed minority. How dare they distort their legacy.
But don't leave it to me to bungle words in expressing my thoughts. Rather, here is an essay from the black intelligentsia that eloquently makes the case. A distillation so on the money that because of the way things are, had the writer been white, everyone on here would dismiss it and say it's racist. White self-loathing and white guilt are the accepted norm that serves no purpose to the formerly oppressed except to extend and inflame the period before complete social integration. Ask yourselves, can only white people be racist? If you answer yes then by definition and careful comprehension of the question you will find that you are indeed racist. Works in any historical context too.
Oh but the deep thinkers on this board make snap, impulsive conclusions like one-word replies and the liberal use of "troll" stem words. Great food to satiate the hunger for comedy and it's bedfellow irony. Think about that before you reflexively and thoughtlessly accuse someone of terrible things. Just because the truth doesn't fit the euphemistically acceptable narrative as preached by the newsmen as some sort of tolerable kowtowing to the past that bears no culpability for the life you've lived, you shouldn't dismiss and overlook the obvious. Truth is truth. The purity is cathartic for the truth-seeker and rewarding for the mind. Call it like it is. The only shred of racism in this case if you must contort enough to find the dust mote on the floor would have to be racial profiling. And that's a whole other topic. But to infect your mind with a little daily nagging let me offer this: You as a human subjectively profiles other humans constantly, consistently, for your whole life. It is innate in you, it's not learned. If you allow yourself to notice this about yourself you would be hypocritical to criticize profiling. Racial discrimination is wrong, profiling is smart, natural, and inbuilt.
Anyways, this man's thoughts need to be more widely known. From the Wall Street Journal, take it away, Mr Shelby Steele:
The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.
On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."
Today's black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and '60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago???to name only one city???by another black teenager.
This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself???not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).
The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.
Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks???a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.
The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth???one that, of course, serves one's cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.
In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager???Skittles and ice tea in hand???can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth???the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.
The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean???the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.
And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed???hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.
One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?
There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.
William Saletan:
Trayvon Martin is dead, George Zimmerman has been acquitted, and millions of people are outraged. Some politicians are demanding a second prosecution of Zimmerman, this time for hate crimes. Others are blaming the tragedy on ???Stand Your Ground??? laws, which they insist must be repealed. Many who saw the case as proof of racism in the criminal justice system see the verdict as further confirmation. Everywhere you look, people feel vindicated in their bitter assumptions. They want action.
But that???s how Martin ended up dead. It???s how Zimmerman ended up with a bulletproof vest he might have to wear for the rest of his life. It???s how activists and the media embarrassed themselves with bogus reports. The problem at the core of this case wasn???t race or guns. The problem was assumption, misperception, and overreaction. And that cycle hasn???t ended with the verdict. It has escalated.
I almost joined the frenzy. Yesterday I was going to write that Zimmerman pursued Martin against police instructions and illustrated the perils of racial profiling. But I hadn???t followed the case in detail. So I sat down and watched the closing arguments: nearly seven hours of video in which the prosecution and defense went point by point through the evidence as it had been hashed out at the trial. Based on what I learned from the videos, I did some further reading.
It turned out I had been wrong about many things. The initial portrait of Zimmerman as a racist wasn???t just exaggerated. It was completely unsubstantiated. It???s a case study in how the same kind of bias that causes racism can cause unwarranted allegations of racism. Some of the people Zimmerman had reported as suspicious were black men, so he was a racist. Members of his family seemed racist, so he was a racist. Everybody knew he was a racist, so his recorded words were misheard as racial slurs, proving again that he was a racist.
The 911 dispatcher who spoke to Zimmerman on the fatal night didn???t tell him to stay in his car. Zimmerman said he was following a suspicious person, and the dispatcher told him, "We don't need you to do that." Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda conceded in his closing argument that these words were ambiguous. De la Rionda also acknowledged, based on witness and forensic evidence, that both men ???were scraping and rolling and fighting out there.??? He pointed out that the wounds, blood evidence, and DNA didn???t match Zimmerman???s story of being thoroughly restrained and pummeled throughout the fight. But the evidence didn???t fit the portrait of Martin as a sweet-tempered child, either. And the notion that Zimmerman hunted down Martin to accost him made no sense. Zimmerman knew the police were on the way. They arrived only a minute or so after the gunshot. The fight happened in a public area surrounded by townhouses at close range. It was hardly the place or time to start shooting.
That doesn???t make Zimmerman a hero. It just makes him a reckless fool instead of a murderer. In a post-verdict press conference, his lawyer, Mark O???Mara, claimed that ???the evidence supported that George Zimmerman did nothing wrong,??? that ???the jury decided that he acted properly in self-defense,??? and that Zimmerman ???was never guilty of anything except protecting himself in self-defense. I???m glad that the jury saw it that way.??? That???s complete BS. The only thing the jury decided was that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Zimmerman had committed second-degree murder or manslaughter.
Zimmerman is guilty, morally if not legally, of precipitating the confrontation that led to Martin???s death. He did many things wrong. Mistake No. 1 was inferring that Martin was a burglar. In his 911 call, Zimmerman cited Martin???s behavior. ???It???s raining, and he???s just walking around??? looking at houses, Zimmerman said. He warned the dispatcher, ???He???s got his hand in his waistband.??? He described Martin???s race and clothing only after the dispatcher asked about them. Whatever its basis, the inference was false.
Mistake No. 2 was pursuing Martin on foot. Zimmerman had already done what the neighborhood watch rules advised: He had called the police. They would have arrived, questioned Martin, and ascertained that he was innocent. Instead, Zimmerman, packing a concealed firearm, got out and started walking after Martin. Zimmerman???s initial story, that he was trying to check the name of the street, was so laughable that his attorneys abandoned it. He was afraid Martin would get away. So he followed Martin, hoping to update the cops.
Mistake No. 3 was Zimmerman???s utter failure to imagine how his behavior looked to Martin. You???re a black kid walking home from a convenience store with Skittles and a fruit drink. Some dude in a car is watching and trailing you. God knows what he wants. You run away. He gets out of the car and follows you. What are you supposed to do? In Zimmerman???s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn???t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone. Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin???s criminal intent that he hadn???t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.
Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a ???creepy-ass cracker.??? The friend???who later testified that this phrase meant pervert???advised Martin, ???You better run.??? She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman???s phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin???s phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.
In court, evidence and scrutiny have exposed these difficult, complicated truths. But outside the court, ideologues are ignoring them. They???re oversimplifying a tragedy that was caused by oversimplification. Martin has become Emmett Till. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is using the verdict to attack Florida???s ???Stand Your Ground??? law, which wasn???t invoked in this case. The grievance industrial complex is pushing the Department of Justice to prosecute Zimmerman for bias-motivated killing, based on evidence that didn???t even support a conviction for unpremeditated killing. Zimmerman???s lawyers have teamed up with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, inadvertently, to promote the false message that Zimmerman???s acquittal means our society thinks everything he did was OK.
It wasn???t OK. It was stupid and dangerous. It led to the unnecessary death of an innocent young man. It happened because two people???their minds clouded by stereotypes that went well beyond race???assumed the worst about one another and acted in haste. If you want to prevent the next Trayvon Martin tragedy, learn from their mistakes. Don???t paint the world in black and white. Don???t declare the whole justice system racist, or blame every gun death on guns, or confuse acquittal with vindication. And the next time you see somebody who looks like a punk or a pervert, hold your fire.
Ha! After two of those I had to google the 'tl;dr' to find out what this shorthand nonsense means. To save you time, it means too long didn't read. In other words it says I don't care about grammar or reason or thought, I just read short posts and make quick responses; if it's a long, serious post that requires thought, well then, why bother? And this is proudly, apparently, something not to live down but for some to defiantly proclaim, shamelessly for all the world on the internet. Not surprising but still a grim reality for our species. It is what we, my generation, would call a cop-out. It immediately flags you as a person whose own hubris comes before any discussion worth having in a social context.
I mean, why are you on a forum at all? Because you are saying that I don't care what others think or say, especially if it's too long for my short attention span or cognitive ability to understand, I just want to shout my egotistical views quickly then retreat. It's too much to review the facts, ponder, then make a statement. No, you say, I prefer to be bite-sized in my reading and replies. Because otherwise it might just crack my feeble mind. Fool. Cool. It may be too long and we don't want you to read on. But please, in return, don't post. Nobody wants to read zero insight. Your reply is less than zero. In math, it's negative. It takes away from the conversation, it adds nothing, except a distracting nuisance. And a stain on an otherwise meaningful post.
Dude, in the context of this "conversation", anything that takes away from it is a positive.
You never surprise. And you always seem to be the guy that has nothing to offer but has all the criticism to unload. No creativity, no original ideas. Just the guy to pass the mantle and look for easy loopholes. Sad. The worse part? The smug, self-serving, rosy self-image you have of yourself. That at least outwardly frames you as a green, young, cocky european not ignorant of history or the present but selective in his own interpretation and subsequent presentation. An overzealous, self-righteous, conceited, euroman intent on disseminating to us, the strangely successful Americans, the true knowledge of socialism and the labour party, oh please educate us, the feeble-minded yankee.
Why did we ever abandon the archipelago in the north sea? Why do we not continue to seek knowledge from the utopian society of Great Britain? Please dictate how we should conduct ourselves. This is the first salvo in an ongoing culture war, started by you but I will be damned if I should sit back and accept it. People like you stoke the fires of proud ignorance while sitting back gleefully and lazily wrapped in your own self-delusional, self-aggrandizing conceitful new-world dogma.
am I rite
Patrick you are crazy. I'm giving you too much credit by responding at all. But I do want to thank you. Thank you for providing the contrast intellectually that highlights my thoughts. In other words, without contrast we wouldn't know right from wrong, morality. Without contrast we wouldn't know day from night. Without contrast men and women wouldn't make sense. Yin and yang. And without your contrast my thoughts might be misinterpreted as diminished reality. People like you change me in the same way that careful study of Islam pushed me over the edge to atheism. People and ideas like you are a necessary evil that corrects and results in profound epiphanies.
am I rite
As well as being strangely successful I think you might have an unrequited culture war on your hands.
This is where I flash my 50% credentials!
::coquettish eyelash flutter::
::happy day::
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