Ferguson, MO

[elucidator]

@chargerrich

I have read almost every post in this thread and have to ask a serious question about elucidator; are you just trolling?..There is a lot we do not know, but to automatically exclude every shred of evidence and information that makes that look improbable to impossible is mind boggling.

You misunderstand, but I will generously assume that it is the result of a limited cognitive capacity. I will clarify.

I don’t think he’s a worthwhile witness in any sense. His testimony shifts, and is therefore unreliable. When I first heard of him, he was saying that though he was an immediate eye-witness to the events, the police had not interviewed him. Astonishing! He then gave damning testimony as to what he saw. After he lawyered up, we get a revised version.

So, I’m inclined to chuck his story out on that basis alone. He has no real value as a witness, he is unreliable. But it seems to me that several disputants in our discussion have used his testimony to bolster their preferred scenario, overlooking this salient fact.

If I wanted to single out individual posters for a gotcha-ya, I could probably do that, but I’m lazy, have a life and my son’s X-box, so I won’t. But if I see anyone bringing him to witness, the question will be asked: do you believe him, and, if you do, which version?

What I see is a frightened young man who doesn’t want to piss off his community, and doesn’t want to piss off the authorities. I don’t blame him a bit, and I do not imply any condemnation for his unreliability, but he is what he is.

[xenophon41]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

Makes sense to me. Although you do see it happen every so often - sometimes people know things but don’t act accordingly in the heat of the moment.

I would note that earlier in this thread (post #1610, to be specific) xenophon41 seemed to suggest that it might be common for people to have cop-punchers in their families.

I figured that’s where that came from and mea culpa. My hypothetical was whether you had anyone who might “push back” at a cop. That was meant figuratively, and I’m pretty sure punching is pretty near (but not at) the extreme end of the compliance ==== resistance continuum of behavior. “Pushing back” need not include extra-verbal resistance, but is not unlikely to provoke a response from a police officer when received from a civilian he or she has stopped.

[Bricker]

Let’s test the theory.

Jonathan Boucher, the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Democratic Party, claimed in an interview that the Republican leadership in the House has refused to pass a jobs bill.

@Politifact

In that list of alleged GOP failures, one stood out to a reader, who emailed us a list of jobs bills that, he said, the Republican-controlled House has, in fact, passed.

We were intrigued and decided to see whether Boucher’s jobs claim was correct.

The list has lots of bills with the word “jobs” in the title, but that doesn’t mean the proposals would actually create jobs.

In addition, Republicans and Democrats tend to have different views on what constitutes a “jobs bill.” For Democrats, that can mean legislation expanding or creating a government training program. For Republicans, that can mean bills shrinking government or eliminating regulations to help businesses.

We decided to use a technique employed by PolitiFact National when it looked at a claim made on Facebook in 2011 that congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but “zero on job creation,” a claim that earned a Pants on Fire.

We went to Congress.gov, run by the Library of Congress. It lists the topics that a bill covers. We looked for topics related to employment and job creation. It’s not a perfect gauge, but it’s a nonpartisan guide. We also reviewed summaries of the bills and committee reports looking for references to jobs and employment.

For example, the SKILLS Act (H.R. 803), intended to streamline work-force development programs, touches on 52 topics from “tobacco use” to “sex offenses.” But it also has provisions that deal with “labor and employment,” “unemployment,” “temporary and part-time employment,” “vocational education” and “youth employment and child labor.” It passed the House on March 15, 2013.

The “Veterans Economic Opportunity Act of 2013” (H.R. 2481) deals with veterans education, employment and rehabilitation. It passed the House on a voice vote on Oct. 28, 2013.

And the “Global Investment in American Jobs Act of 2013” (H.R. 2052) is intended to get the feds to come up with a plan for increasing “U.S. global competitiveness without weakening labor, consumer, financial, or environmental protections.” It passed the House in a bipartisan vote on Sept. 9, 2013.

Some jobs bills were designed to create jobs by encouraging more energy production and distribution, such as proposals to expand offshore oil drilling or push the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which gives some environmentalists heartburn.

Others on the list from our GOP reader seemed to have little to do with directly promoting employment, and Congress.gov doesn’t list them in any employment-related categories.

When we emailed the list of “jobs” legislation to Boucher, he took issue with some of the bills, saying they weren’t really about jobs.

Boucher also argued that his statement is true because none of the Republican jobs-related legislation had been enacted.

When I wrote ‘passing a jobs bill,’ I was clearly referring to a bill that has passed into law," he said in an email statement. “A bill can’t create a single job if it’s not actually passed into law.”

But that’s not what he said in his commentary.

He said, “The Republican leadership in the House has refused to address the issues that matter the most to Rhode Island, such as passing a jobs bill.”

The House, regardless of which party is in control, cannot unilaterally enact laws. Approval by the Senate and (in most cases) the president are also required.

The bottom line: The House, under the current Republican leadership, has passed bills with the goal of encouraging employment.

Whether one thinks that the bills will do more harm than good is a matter for debate, and beyond the scope of this fact check.

Boucher’s statement is wrong, enough for a ruling of False. But because he’s making a ridiculous defense to justify it, we rate it Pants on Fire!

Therefore, the left-wing supports ridiculous defenses, and lies severely?

Certainly Boucher doesn’t cover himself with honor there.

The conclusion that the entire left wing can be sullied with his comment just doesn’t seem fair to me.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@camille

+1 From another (mostly) lurker. I’d like to see a similarly thoughtful reply from those who disagree. Unfortunately posts like this tend to get lost in the snark and grudge match frenzy.

I disagree with xenophon. Though not with much that he actually said, but with the application to the cases at hand.

His points about needing to understand other people are pretty obvious and widely accepted. (I think the Bush people didn’t so much think you don’t need to understand the dynamics in Iraq as had an incorrect understanding.) The problem is that people who focus on showing how this or that guy’s feelings are “understandable” are really trying to convey that they’re justifiable to some degree.

Because you can really understand all sorts of people. I can understand Hitler and the Nazis. But if there was a conversation about the evils of these and I focused on how I find them understandable, I think people would be rightly suspicious. Because the unspoken premise of saying something is “understandable” is that it’s understandable from the standpoint of normal human feelings and morality (as applied to the situation that the person being discussed finds themselves in). Which is a way of conveying that it’s not as much of a departure from conventional standards of morality than one might assume at first glance.

Like xenophon, I think there’s a connection between the earlier dispute about “understandable” and the later one about “victim”, but not the one he proposed. The connection is in the use of terms that are justified by appeals to dictionaries, but which in common usage in these contexts carry a different connotation.

Pay attention to this. The difference between those calling for empathy and understanding is not correlated to political ideology, as xeno suggests. It’s correlated to ideology as it relates to the specific issue at hand. The people who keep calling for “understanding” when it’s something they are sympathetic to at some level won’t be nearly as focused on “understanding” when it’s something they’re viscerally opposed to.

Because that’s the game being played. (For the most part, that is. There would be exceptions.)

[Richard_Parker]

@Bricker

OK. Here’s the problem. He made the statement in an interview. So far as I can tell, there is no policy position, no press release, no document supporting it. **For this reason, no one else is offering a comment on it. **

That statement begs the question. It could also be that no one else is commenting on it because they agree with it, or they accurately believe their primary electorate agrees with it. I personally think it likely that a substantial number of MO GOP primary voters agree with Wills. Not a majority, I hope, but enough to keep most politicians from condemning the vile comments.

@Bricker

How is that fairly described as “the right wing?”

Because the GOP is the organized political party of the right wing in America, this man leads that party in the relevant state, and the history of that party is entirely consistent with these kinds of comments. Short of a public opinion poll, what kind of evidence would possibly satisfy you that this is a right-wing position?

@Bricker

Now, it’s possible that Wills meant to say that he believed black voters shouldn’t register to vote. But since the issue he was asked about was not generic voter registration efforts, but rather the specific effort to set up a registration tent at the spot of the memorial of the death, why must his comment also be assumed to reach to black voter registration, period?

He condemned black voter registration as a response to this tragedy. That’s exactly what septimus said. Are you suggesting his comments can be read to mean he thought it was unseemly to set up registration at the memorial site instead of down the street? Because I don’t think that is a fair reading.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@xenophon41

I figured that’s where that came from and mea culpa. My hypothetical was whether you had anyone who might “push back” at a cop. That was meant figuratively, and I’m pretty sure punching is pretty near (but not at) the extreme end of the compliance ==== resistance continuum of behavior. “Pushing back” need not include extra-verbal resistance, but is not unlikely to provoke a response from a police officer when received from a civilian he or she has stopped.

I considered this, which is why I wrote “seemed to suggest”. (I also alluded to this in my response to your post at the time.)

But this is one reason your response at the time was inappropriate. Because I was specifically talking about someone who did punch a cop. To the extent that you think this being near the extreme end of behaviour is a distinction, you should not have responded to post about cop-punching with a counter-point about a vaguely defined “push back”.

[Bricker]

@Richard_Parker

Because the GOP is the organized political party of the right wing in America, this man leads that party in the relevant state, and the history of that party is entirely consistent with these kinds of comments. Short of a public opinion poll, what kind of evidence would possibly satisfy you that this is a right-wing position?

The Executive Director is not the leader of the state party – it’s a staff position. The party is led by a Chairman.

What kind of evidence? Something more than one guy’s comments in an interview. Even if he did mean that he believed it was a bad idea for black citizens to register to vote, there’s no way to fairly impute that comment to the entire freakin’ party.

But OK. I’ve already shown how Democrats are liars, at the “pants-on-fire” level, for what the RI Democratic Executive Director said.

There are 49 more states. Are you really going to embrace all the crazy shit that came out of the mouths of the party officials in those states?

[Richard_Parker]

Bricker, I almost feel the need to find a better example for you, because that’s a serious bad Politifact finding. You can’t really believe that the best way to interpret Boucher’s comment was that the House had not passed any bills which they believed would create any jobs. Only someone who had never heard politicians speak or had no sense of U.S. politics could sincerely interpret the comment that way. He very obviously meant passing a bill that wasn’t just political theater in that it (1) had some likelihood of Senate support and (2) addressed the overall jobs situation.

By Politifact’s metric, I’m a liar if I say the Senate has passed legislation to fix the Yucca Mountain debacle. Or that the Senate has failed to pass universal health care. Or that the Senate has failed to pass legislation reforming our broken entitlements.
No reasonable person would really think I’m a liar when I say those three things, but using Politifacts methods, I would be.

Anyway, on to the real point, which is whether a state party official lying about his partisan opponents in Washington D.C. should be taken as representative of his state’s party in the same way that a state party official condemning an action in his state should be taken as representative of his state’s party. I’d say, not quite as much. There’s still a pretty fair inference, absent other evidence, that his co-partisans agree with him. But I think the inference is easier to rebut in that context.

[Richard_Parker]

@Bricker

The Executive Director is not the leader of the state party – it’s a staff position. The party is led by a Chairman.

What is the distinction between being the party’s leader and being the party’s highest staff position? Is that like CEO vs. Chairman of the Board?

[not_what_you_d_expect]

Missouri cop was badly beaten before shooting Michael Brown, says source

Forgive me if this was already posted, it’s a long thread. Now there are claims that Wilson was almost unconscious. He sure shoots straight for someone barely conscious and with a fractured eye socket.

[jayjay]

@not_what_you_d_expect

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/08/20/missouri-cop-was-badly-beaten-before-shooting-michael-brown-says-source/

Forgive me if this was already posted, it’s a long thread. Now there are claims that Wilson was almost unconscious. He sure shoots straight for someone barely conscious and with a fractured eye socket.

And who happened to be standing (remarkably intact and unmarked) over Brown’s body right after the shooting, according to witness video.

[GrandWino]

@not_what_you_d_expect

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/08/20/missouri-cop-was-badly-beaten-before-shooting-michael-brown-says-source/

Forgive me if this was already posted, it’s a long thread. Now there are claims that Wilson was almost unconscious. He sure shoots straight for someone barely conscious and with a fractured eye socket.

From the article:

According to the well-placed source, Wilson was coming off another case in the neighborhood on Aug. 9 when he ordered Michael Brown and his friend Dorain Johnson to stop walking in the middle of the road because they were obstructing traffic. However, the confrontation quickly escalated into physical violence, the source said.

“They ignored him and the officer started to get out of the car to tell them to move," the source said. “They shoved him right back in, that’s when Michael Brown leans in and starts beating Officer Wilson in the head and the face.”

The source claims that there is “solid proof” that there was a struggle between Brown and Wilson for the policeman’s firearm, resulting in the gun going off – although it still remains unclear at this stage who pulled the trigger. Brown started to walk away according to the account, prompting Wilson to draw his gun and order him to freeze. Brown, the source said, raised his hands in the air, and turned around saying, “What, you’re going to shoot me?”

At that point, the source told FoxNews.com, the 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown charged Wilson, prompting the officer to fire at least six shots at him, including the fatal bullet that penetrated the top of Brown’s skull, according to an independent autopsy conducted at the request of Brown’s family.

[foolsguinea]

Was this an unnamed source giving an exclusive to the FOXNews website?

Because it’s possible, just consider for a moment, that they have graduated to making stuff up flat-out.

[xenophon41]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

His points about needing to understand other people are pretty obvious and widely accepted. … The problem is that people who focus on showing how this or that guy’s feelings are “understandable” are really trying to convey that they’re justifiable to some degree.

Well, you’ve illustrated the problem here at least. What you’ve done here is declared exactly what I highlighted; that you tend to perceive understanding motives as justifying actions. You’ve modified that by saying justification happens “to some degree” but you haven’t articulated how you know this about posters who have explicitly said they’re not justifying the actions being discussed, and you haven’t suggested any bias in those posts which try to delegitimize the feelings being “understood” by the other side.

Because you can really understand all sorts of people. I can understand Hitler and the Nazis. But if there was a conversation about the evils of these and I focused on how I find them understandable, I think people would be rightly suspicious.

Suspicious, yes. But if you’re trying to figure out effective ways of dealing with the nationalistic, authoritarian and bigoted impulses which drive those evils (because all of those impulses still exist) you might see those suspicious people as barriers to a productive discussion when they accuse you of being a closet Nazi or a fascist sympathizer.

There’s a huge difference between identifying the natural roots of behaviors and advocating the worst exhibitions of those behaviors. Pride in one’s tribe is natural and “understandable”; it metastasizes in some cases into aggressive nationalism and from there to pogroms and wars of expulsion, conquest or genocide. Respect for and need for the presence of authority is natural and “understandable” but sometimes in some people it becomes authoritarianism and acceptance of totalitarian leadership.

Fear and distrust of an armed police force in your neighborhood that is seen as an oppressive agency -by your neighbors, your friends, your pastor, your coworkers and yourself, all of whom have supporting anecdotes- is natural and “understandable” even if that perception is [arguably] exaggerated. And if I argue that point while you’re trying to delegitimize those feelings and while you’re concentrating on dealing with the undesirable results of those feelings (riots and looting) it is not to justify those resulting actions, no matter how uncomfortable I’m making you. It’s to suggest that the way to deal with the problems is at their bases not their visible symptoms.

And even if I’ve failed to offer even one suggestion as to how to directly address the fear and distrust engendered by decades of disparate treatment, my “understanding” of where these people are coming from should not be despised by hard headed realists, if they’re arguing in good faith.

The people who keep calling for “understanding” when it’s something they are sympathetic to at some level won’t be nearly as focused on “understanding” when it’s something they’re viscerally opposed to.

Because that’s the game being played. (For the most part, that is. There would be exceptions.)

Is that the game I’ve been playing in trying to explain what Officer Wilson may have been experiencing during the confrontation? And when I’ve been trying to explain how an officer who decides to use deadly force must act to stop the threat even if it makes liberals like me uncomfortable? Because I think I’m pretty viscerally opposed to the type of policing approach that the Ferguson and St. Louis County PD’s have and continue to display. But I can certainly “understand” why they’d find those practices useful and justifiable.

Skipping back a bit just to wrap up:

The difference between those calling for empathy and understanding is not correlated to political ideology, as xeno suggests. It’s correlated to ideology as it relates to the specific issue at hand.

It’s correlated to the presence of empathy in an individual, and goes across ideological lines. That’s why I suggested it’s not a philosophical difference, but a deficit in some people. We’ve seen a lot of it in this thread from some who can’t imagine why a cop would keep shooting until the person [he’s identified as an attacker] stops moving. We’ve seen it from those who just can’t believe an officer wouldn’t stop and consider each separate shot he or she fires in such a situation. We’ve seen it from people who just can’t see any systemic racial bias in police practices in Ferguson MO.

So yes, I’m well aware that this is not a problem exclusive to conservatives, despite recent political history.

[elucidator]

Brown was “6’4”, 292 lbs." Big guy. How big is the car window?

[Steophan]

@JesterX

Uhm, believe it or not but most black people actually aren’t very concerned with that, either. Even the hardest, hardened criminal (of ANY ethnic background) generally knows not to attack a cop. If, for no other reason, than most criminals know it’s a fight they just can’t win.

Strange that, just in Ferguson in the last few days, we have one person who did exactly that - it’s on the video you for some reason seem to be avoiding watching - and another (Brown) who may very well have done so. People do stupid things, especially when their judgement is impaired for any reason. That reason could be fear, anger, wanting to show off to people around them, it could also be caused by drugs or alcohol. I’m sure I could think of many more reasons.

You might actually be right that a hardened criminal is less likely to attack a cop than an 18 year old who is, at most, a petty criminal.

[xenophon41]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

But this is one reason your response at the time was inappropriate. Because I was specifically talking about someone who did punch a cop. To the extent that you think this being near the extreme end of behaviour is a distinction, you should not have responded to post about cop-punching with a counter-point about a vaguely defined “push back”.

My response was entirely appropriate to your post, which specifically focused on the lack of loss to the community from the death of anyone who would punch a cop. The key point to which I responded was your assertion that such a death is “no loss.”

And the focus of my post wasn’t on which vaguely defined acts of resistance to police authority might be justified, it was on the loss to society of its members, even those who might have done bad or stupid things. It was one of those tortured hypotheticals I spoke of which seek to make you use arcane mental skills like “empathy” to test your pronouncements.

Fortunately, you confirmed that although you might personally grieve, you’d be inclined to agree with me if I said the death of your hypothetical pugnaciously inebriated heart surgeon cousin, or schizophrenic artist sister or resentful pothead pre-collegiate son was “no loss to society” due to the nature of one of their last acts on Earth. So thanks for that.

[Neo-Calredic]

According to the well-placed source, Wilson was coming off another case in the neighborhood on Aug. 9 when he ordered Michael Brown and his friend Dorain Johnson to stop walking in the middle of the road because they were obstructing traffic. However, the confrontation quickly escalated into physical violence, the source said.

“They ignored him and the officer started to get out of the car to tell them to move," the source said. “They shoved him right back in, that’s when Michael Brown leans in and starts beating Officer Wilson in the head and the face.”

The source claims that there is “solid proof” that there was a struggle between Brown and Wilson for the policeman’s firearm, resulting in the gun going off – although it still remains unclear at this stage who pulled the trigger. Brown started to walk away according to the account, prompting Wilson to draw his gun and order him to freeze. Brown, the source said, raised his hands in the air, and turned around saying, “What, you’re going to shoot me?”

At that point, the source told FoxNews.com, the 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown charged Wilson, prompting the officer to fire at least six shots at him, including the fatal bullet that penetrated the top of Brown’s skull, according to an independent autopsy conducted at the request of Brown’s family.

If the gun went off inside the police cruiser, wouldn’t there almost certainly be a bullet hole somewhere in the car itself? Seems like that, at least, should be easy enough to verify one way or the other.

[Bricker]

@Richard_Parker

What is the distinction between being the party’s leader and being the party’s highest staff position? Is that like CEO vs. Chairman of the Board?

That’s not a bad analogy. In Virginia, the Executive Director doesn’t get an admin assistant, but the Chairman does. It’s more a COO than a CEO.

[Bricker]

@Richard_Parker

Bricker, I almost feel the need to find a better example for you, because that’s a serious bad Politifact finding. You can’t really believe that the best way to interpret Boucher’s comment was that the House had not passed any bills which they believed would create any jobs. Only someone who had never heard politicians speak or had no sense of U.S. politics could sincerely interpret the comment that way. He very obviously meant passing a bill that wasn’t just political theater in that it (1) had some likelihood of Senate support and (2) addressed the overall jobs situation.

By Politifact’s metric, I’m a liar if I say the Senate has passed legislation to fix the Yucca Mountain debacle. Or that the Senate has failed to pass universal health care. Or that the Senate has failed to pass legislation reforming our broken entitlements.
No reasonable person would really think I’m a liar when I say those three things, but using Politifacts methods, I would be.

Anyway, on to the real point, which is whether a state party official lying about his partisan opponents in Washington D.C. should be taken as representative of his state’s party in the same way that a state party official condemning an action in his state should be taken as representative of his state’s party. I’d say, not quite as much. There’s still a pretty fair inference, absent other evidence, that his co-partisans agree with him. But I think the inference is easier to rebut in that context.

Politifact is a non-partisan source.

But I agree – because I am reasonable – that while he was a bit inartful, he probably wasn’t lying. He was talking about the larger picture. I think his choosing to double-down when asked instead of saying, “I agree my words were not as specific as they could have been, but here’s what I meant,” was unwise.

But why does your lens get to focus on the absolute worse interpretation possible when you’re discussing my guy, and switch back to a more forgiving, nuanced version for your guy?