Affirmative action is meant to make up for systemic biases and other forms of discrimination, not to give anyone a leg up. Are you seriously saying that black people in America don’t face racism?
From what I have read, I think shooting Laquan McDonald was morally justified. By attacking the police officer’s vehicle, he escalated the threat to the point where his surrender was the only acceptable course of action. Allowing someone armed with a deadly weapon and a willingness to use it to evade capture to keep running means accepting any injury or death he may cause once he gets close enough to someone else that carjacking or hostage taking seem like viable means of continuing to escape.
…And shooting him 16 times?
If he doesn’t drop the knife after the first 8-10 shots? Yes.
After the first shot or two, he dropped his entire fucking body.
[quote=“ITR_champion, post:18, topic:738278”]
I totally support an effort to tackle police brutality, punish police officers who break rules or laws, and generally reduce prison sentences and the overall effect that policing has on Americans’ lives. But when Black Lives Matter gets in the news, it’s usually not because of they’re doing those things. The bad stuff:
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[li]Complaing when anyone says “all lives matter”.[/li][/quote]
When people respond to BLM by saying all lives matter, they are clearly missing the point. Perhaps it would be clearer to people like that if the slogan was Black Lives Matter TOO.
I think you are only being exposed to the asshattery side of BLM.
Affirmative action gives black students a leg up, there’s is no argument to be had.
The REASON we give them a leg up is because of all those things you mention (as well as some you didn’t mention).
Plus you’d get a really memorable acronym with Black Lives Also Matter.
Yeah, they should go with that.
I was using “leg up” to mean “advantage” – AA is not meant to give anyone an advantage; it’s supposed to make up for disadvantages and get closer to actual equal opportunity.
How about
Black Lives Also Means Everyone
this “movement”, like the passive aggressive behavior displayed by the occupy wallstreet crowd, has the opposite effect of garnering support. Rev Jackson is the king of race bating nonsense and his presence alone degrades the message.
If large blocks of inner city children drop out of school then there isn’t anything that can be done to fix that.
Given the manifesto cited earlier the movement is literally attacking the one thing that would help and that’s a proper nuclear family. Well good luck with the “it takes village to raise a child” screed in the same manifesto. The current result of kids roaming the streets because there are no adults to guide them is the Lord of the Flies violence on the news every night.
How about “stay in school and learn a trade”.
The prosecutors who charged Officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder for the shooting don’t seem to agree with you.
Seriously dude, WTF? A teenager with a pocketknife who had damaged property but not attacked or threatened to attack anyone was shot in the back while trying to get away, by an officer who had just jumped out of his car behind the teenager, in the presence of at least seven other officers who didn’t consider the teenager enough of a threat to shoot.
A cop basically uses a fleeing suspected carjacker for target practice and you want to call that “morally justified”? What other instances of first-degree murder do you consider “morally justified”?
:dubious: What’s “a proper nuclear family” in your book, and why isn’t, say, an extended/multigenerational/same-sex-couple-headed family equally “proper” for childrearing purposes?
Anyway, ISTM that the BLM website’s reference to “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another” was not actually “attacking” the nuclear family, but rather objecting to the prescription that family structure has to be nuclear. Traditionally, in US law that prescription has had some severely biased consequences, as this article notes:
Objecting to a nuclear family structure requirement that punishes or denigrates other types of families, irrespective of whether they happen to be loving, stable and successful, is not the same thing as “attacking the nuclear family”.
Yeah, newsflash: protest movements are messy and liable to be disliked by people, especially the privileged they are fighting against. The fact that you don’t like it, that you disapprove, is about as relevant to the conversation as your belief that they should focus more on “black-on-black” crime, for largely the same reasons.
And ISTM that their effectiveness should be judged more by how much they change awareness and perceptions than by how likeable people find them.
Personally, three or four years ago I (middle-aged boringly conventional white woman) had basically no notion that black people were disproportionately at serious risk from law enforcement. I’d heard of “Driving While Black” and I’d seen Do the Right Thing, but as far as I remember, the notion of black people (especially men) routinely getting injured or killed when they were not posing an immediate threat, in situations where a white person would most likely not have been treated similarly, is something I vaguely believed more or less went out with Jim Crow laws. I don’t believe that any more, largely because of BLM.
Similarly, the OWS movement has brought economic inequality into mainstream discussions, to the point that even Republican Presidential candidates have been expressing concern about it. It is also often credited with a lot of the momentum behind minimum-wage-increase campaigns and other labor activism.
He attacked the police.
A bit of a double standard there. McDonald is only a “suspected” carjacker even after the police see him attacking a police vehicle with a knife, yet you’ve already decided Van Dyke is guilty of first-degree murder.
If you make a deliberate choice to attack the police or an innocent bystander with a deadly weapon, as far as I’m concerned your life is forfeit until you surrender. Don’t want to get shot by the cops? Then either don’t create a situation in which it is unreasonable to believe you are not a deadly threat to the next person you come across, or get out of that situation by showing your willingness to surrender peacefully.
He damaged the tire and windshield of a police vehicle. None of the cops there at the time considered that damage enough of a threat to shoot him. You really can’t blur “damage to property” with “threat to persons” in that way.
And when Van Dyke shot McDonald, he wasn’t even damaging a vehicle: he was moving away from the scene with his back turned.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
A bit of a double standard there. McDonald is only a “suspected” carjacker even after the police see him attacking a police vehicle with a knife, yet you’ve already decided Van Dyke is guilty of first-degree murder.
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Okay fine, suspected first-degree murder. Are you saying that if the jury convicts Van Dyke you will no longer consider his acts “morally justified”?
[QUOTE=Grumman]
If you make a deliberate choice to attack the police or an innocent bystander with a deadly weapon, as far as I’m concerned your life is forfeit until you surrender.
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But McDonald didn’t attack the police or an innocent bystander. You can only pretend he “attacked the police” by equating damage to a car with an attack on a person.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
Don’t want to get shot by the cops? Then either don’t create a situation in which it is unreasonable to believe you are not a deadly threat to the next person you come across
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But it is not unreasonable to believe that a carjacking suspect who hasn’t injured anybody and is leaving the scene is “not a deadly threat to the next person he comes across”.
You just don’t get to shoot people who are not putting anybody in imminent danger of severe physical harm. Not even if you’re a cop. Not even if you’re a white cop.