Me, too.
Negative offense. Neutral special teams.
The problem with advancing a claim about moral correctness is that it requires the postulator and the respondent to share a moral framework that can be reliably invoked to settle a disagreement.
Fair enough.
Your post 35 that started this didn’t actually accuse Zimmerman of anything directly. It just insinuated it. I apologize for mischaracterizing it.
But the point remains that Bricker is absolutely correct to point out that Zimmerman killed Martin “because Martin put Zimmerman in fear of serious bodily injury. That’s a circumstance under which it’s appropriate to kill.”
This is a simple statement of fact. He shouldn’t be shouted down for stating it simply because large numbers of people on this left leaning board wish it weren’t true.
It’s possible, but unlikely – because if that were the case, a reporter can always ask a clarifying question: “So are you saying that you didn’t hire him, but you did give him permission?”
The lack of such clarifying questions suggests that the blurring of the lines came from the writer, not the owner or Zimmerman.
In either case, though, my correct remains: Zimmerman did not, by the facts currently reported, lie to the police.
Hey, the cops didn’t find the bullet-ridden corpse of the cleaning woman the next morning, so this was a good night for Punk Zimmerman.
It’s instructive to note when one side of an argument needs to make stuff up.
If you’re reaching for a gun, I don’t have to wait for you to pull the trigger to punch you in the face.
For all we know, Zimmerman might have been drawing on Trayvon and despite being a black teenager, Trayvon knew he couldn’t outrun a bullet so he attacked this creepy guy that had been following him around in a pickup and was drawing a gun on him.
IIRC the problem is that self defense is not an affirmative defense in Florida. Under the stand your ground rules of Florida, the burden of proving it WASN’T self defense is on the prosecution.
First, there’s no evidence here that such a moral framework is missing. You yourself, in a recent post, just agreed that “Zimmerman’s judgment is horrible, and the world would be better off if he stayed in his apartment and sat on his hands rather than attempt to protect anybody or anything else.” That strikes me as sharing a moral framework with plenty of other people in this thread. It also strikes me as fairly amenable to the OP’s main point, which was that Zimmerman is once again showing poor judgment and a tendency towards dangerous vigilantism.
Second, in many cases you choose not to even discuss the issue of whether there might be a moral or political or philosophical debate to be had. Instead, you dive straight for the legal opinion, and advance it as if all the moral or political or philosophical positions staked out by the other debaters did not even exist.
If i say that i disagree with a sentence handed down for drug possession, and that i think our society’s laws against drugs are immoral and tend to fall most heavily on the poor, and especially on racial and ethnic minorities, it is not a rebuttal of my argument to state that drugs are illegal so the arrest and conviction are legally valid. And yet this is precisely the sort of thing that you do all the time.
When the subject at hand actually IS a legal issue, your contributions are usually valuable and worthy of serious consideration. And on the occasions where you do condescend to actually engage with non-legal frameworks of thought and opinion, you do so very ably, even if i don’t always agree with your position. But you are, in so much of your participation here, the archetypal guy with a hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail.
If you think it’s a good idea for this idiot to be running around with a gun looking for crime, you’re as fucked in the head as Zim.
I never once said it was a good idea.
And you fabricated the bullet-ridden corpse of the cleaning woman.
“For all we know,” many different things could have happened. For all we know, Martin could have been suddenly possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper.
But no evidence supports that claim.
Never mind, misread.
Because being followed by a man with a gun does not create good reason to fear for your life.
No, we can’t. He is entitled to the equal protection of the laws, and there is no such verdict as “Not Guilty But We Are Going to Deprive You of Some of Your Freedom Anyway”.
Or rather we can ask, but we cannot do anything if he says No.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not completely clear on what the OP’s point was. Something to do with Tim Burton?
Experience has taught me that the efforts to argue a common moral framework go nowhere. So I will either ignore it and stick to what can be objectively proved, or gaslight by announcing that my moral framework is the only correct one, leading (hopefully) to the Socratic realization that if my claim is untrue, so must anyone else’s.
If i say that i disagree with a sentence handed down for drug possession, and that i think our society’s laws against drugs are immoral and tend to fall most heavily on the poor, and especially on racial and ethnic minorities, it is not a rebuttal of my argument to state that drugs are illegal so the arrest and conviction are legally valid. And yet this is precisely the sort of thing that you do all the time.
When the subject at hand actually IS a legal issue, your contributions are usually valuable and worthy of serious consideration. And on the occasions where you do condescend to actually engage with non-legal frameworks of thought and opinion, you do so very ably, even if i don’t always agree with your position. But you are, in so much of your participation here, the archetypal guy with a hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail.
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Kinda lame objection there, Mr. Attorney. This is an arrogant and overly literal dismissal of a valid argument. The poster did not “fabricate” a corpse simply because he listed a possible consequence of Zimmerman’s vigil that did not occur. I presume you can tell the difference between an assertion of fact and an assertion of probabilities, yes?
Here, I’ll agree with what the poster said using neutral, non-imaginative sentences and see if you disagree with the opinion expressed:
Zimmerman and we are fortunate in that his evening spent watching over the store in question did not produce any confrontations with citizens who were pursuing non-criminal activities. His efforts therefore led to no gun violence and no deaths on the night and in the location in question. In my opinion, this is despite a significant increase in the risk of such a confrontation that Zimmerman’s vigilance represents, due to his previously demonstrated poor situational judgment, poor conflict resolution skills and eagerness to engage perceived threats to other people’s properties.
That is a dry and dispassionate assessment which in no substantial way differs from the more pithy and humorous assessment provided by Blank Slate.
Excellent post, mhendo.
Just of acting kinda, well, crazy.