No, it isn’t. It’s either true or false. It’s not a judgement, or a moral statement, it’s a factual statement to be either proved or disproved.
No, they are not racist. The people making the statements, and their reasons for doing so, and the actions they hope to provoke by making those statements, almost certainly are. You may think this is a distinction without a difference, but I don’t.
That those statements are almost certainly false makes it much easier to say that the person uttering them is racist, but an assertion by itself, devoid of context, cannot be.
Not really. “Blacks are subhuman” is a statement that’s either true or false (spoiler alert - it’s false). “Blacks are subhuman so it’s fine to enslave them and treat them worse than animals” is a racist opinion, and a call to racist behaviour. Actually enslaving people because of their skin colour (or for that matter, doing anything else to someone because of their skin colour) is racism.
The act, the opinion, the person, they can be racist. The assertion that something is a certain way is either true or false, and by itself has no moral component, any more that “the sun revolves round the earth” does, to pick an example from further back in time.
[Moderating]
Nice try, but you’re not getting around the rule that way. “You’re a cunt” and “Other people say you’re a cunt” are effectively the same thing, as far as I (and the board rules) am concerned.
If you want to discuss this further, take it to ATMB or PM. Don’t pursue it in this thread.
[/Moderating]
Sometimes, in controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians, it’s not always law enforcement that’s in the wrong. Watch this idiot radically misunderstand his rights and get tazed and arrested as a result of it.
538 has starting looking into the issue of killings by police
FBI reports indicate that about 400 people are killed by police annually in the USA. 538 decided to look into that a bit.
538 randomly followed up on 10% of the reported deaths and determined that about 85% were clearly police caused deaths in the line of duty. Other deaths (taserings, for example) would raise that to 93%.
The original charge, smoking pot, was unfounded. She was then kept on drugs in a psychiatric ward unti she said that, and I quote:
“Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter,” and “patient’s weaknesses: inability to test reality, unemployment.”
She was employed and earning good money and Obama’s Twitter team really did follow her.The staff apparently made no attempt to verify what she claimed, after she was arrested for “smelling of pot” and never charged for anything like that.
I love that there was no apology but that she was given a $13,000 bill. That story is so fucked up it is scary, literally a nightmare scenario for most people.
From the story, it looks like she got arrested because someone thought she was mouthing off when she went to get her car.
If I was her, I’d make a condition of my lawsuit that some people are fired, i.e. “I want $10 million, but I’ll settle for $5 mill as long as X, Y and Z never ever work in law enforcement again.”