At any rate, the whole country didn’t have it’s underwear in a bunch over it. The Martin Zimmerman situation has created quite the national circus, quite a bit more that Diallo Bell.
So, are you saying that if Zimmerman gets off, and Black Americans perceive it as an injustice, that they will riot? If so, do you consider occupied businesses, houses, and vehicles as inanimate objects?
Didn’t see this somehow?
ETA Black Americans don’t riot every time perceive an injustice, perceived injustice is often, almost always, a trigger for their rioting.
Kinda missed my whole point there, didn’t ya?
CMC fnord!
Yes, it did. Both cases were huge news, and if you either don’t remember these incidents or somehow never heard of them, you should stop making pronouncements about them. In fact you’re reading so carelessly that it sounds like you think I’m talking about one case and not two separate incidents: the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006, both by the NYPD. Both shootings were national news stories that triggered protests; in both cases all of the police officers were acquitted; nobody convicted anyone because of fear of a race riot; the Justice Department didn’t get involved; and of course there were absolutely no riots.
Where do you get off making a statement like this??? I looked them up on Wikipedia, and remembered, that’s why I deleted the first notation. I know there were two cases. Not concerned enough to properly punctuate. Diallo-Bell. Diallo/Bell. Diallo and Bell. I don’t care. It is irrelevant to **this **case.
Listen, I don’t care if they were huge, anybody and their dog will tell you that they weren’t a tenth (figurative, of course) as big as the Zimmerman thing. No POTUS called anybody involved in any of the previous a lookalike of himself. That is one of the reasons why the case is so much hotter than your pet cases.
Knock it off. You are trying to tie the previous cases into this one, and it doesn’t work.
Your cases don’t mean squat. They weren’t racially/ethnically as divisive as this case. You didn’t have the president giving his imprimatur/epitaph over any of the victims, or the officers in the other cases. Once so committed, Obama can’t easily back down. I don’t give a flying eff about who ***DIDN’T ***get charged in any of your cases. There weren’t as many hot buttons in them as there are in the current case.
[quote=“handsomeharry, post:45, topic:662201”]
… You didn’t have the president giving his imprimatur/epitaph over any of the victims…QUOTE]
Just to preclude any complaints/nitpicks, I am aware that the Roman Catholic Pope is generally, and traditionally, the one to give Imprimaturs. I was using the word figuratively.
BTW, I plugged “Diallo” into SDMB’s search engine, and the only thread with the name in it, ca. 2000, had 24 posts. The current Zimmerman/Martin thread has over 10,000.
Because you said something about “Diallo Bell” a couple of posts ago, and it made it sound like you thought it was one person.
It’s pretty relevant, actually. The caps lock and the exclamation points don’t change the fact that there are some major similarities. Even if it’s true that the Zimmerman case is a bigger deal - and I’m not sure that’s true - it’s a decent basis for a comparison.
I don’t care what anybody and their dog says, and “everybody says this is bigger!” is not an argument.
That’s it? People are going to riot if Zimmerman is acquitted because a year ago Obama said if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin did? (Which is sorta close to what you said but not really the same?)
I’m not sure where you’re getting this. I don’t know how opinions on this case break down along racial lines. I do know that Diallo was an unarmed black guy who was shot to death by four white cops, and that sounds pretty racially divisive. Regardless, there were no riots when those officers were acquitted. There’s really nothing new under the sun.
I don’t think either of those was the word you wanted.
I can believe you don’t care because again it sounds like you’re not paying attention. Police officers were charged and acquitted on all counts in both cases. There were no riots, and the Justice Department didn’t get involved.
There were plenty of hot buttons in those cases. The only concrete difference you’ve identified is that today the president is black and that wasn’t the case in 1999 or 2006.
So what? Is the SDMB proof of how big a news story is? Google Amadou Diallo and you can find some of the many newspaper and magazine covers that ran after he was killed or you can find the song Bruce Springsteen wrote about it and lots of other things. But yes, the Zimmerman thing is a really big deal unlike any other shooting.
nm
A. Don’t be a crybaby about it. You have a 400-1 (ballpark estimate) difference in the SDMB posts, and you say 'I’m not sure…" Come on. You got busted.
B. I think “everybody says this is bigger”, if true, shows that it’s a whole different league.
C. I think that you are being disingenuous. You know blamed well that Obama wasn’t ‘just saying… blah, blah’. There was significance in a POTUS getting that close to a highly charged affair of this, and you know it. And, he identified himself with some total stranger, (unless BHO and Trayvon were homies, and I didn’t know it), intimating a familiarity akin to sonship, something that George W, or Bill Clinton didn’t do (or whoever the POTUS was in either/both of the cases.) With that sort of commitment that Obama made, you know for sure that he can’t let it rest with an acquittal.
D. Yes, I know exactly what the words mean. And, as I said, it was figurative.
Dictionary.com:
*Imprimatur:
— n
- RC Church a licence granted by a bishop certifying the Church’s approval of a book to be published
- sanction, authority, or approval…**
I]
*fig·ur·a·tive/ˈfɪgyərətɪv/ Show Spelled [fig-yer-uh-tiv] Show IPA
adjective
- of the nature of or involving a figure of speech, especially a metaphor; metaphorical and not literal: The word “head” has several figurative senses, as in “She’s the head of the company.” Synonyms: metaphorical, not literal, symbolic.
- metaphorically so called: His remark was a figurative boomerang.
- abounding in or fond of figures of speech: Elizabethan poetry is highly figurative. Synonyms: ornate, ornamental, flowery, elaborate, florid, grandiloquent.
- representing by means of a figure or likeness, as in drawing or sculpture.
- representing by a figure or emblem; emblematic. *
Epitaph is the same thing. Paean, Panegyric, encomium, eulogy, same thing. This is getting old, and you shouldn’t be starting a urinating contest/nitpick.
E. I don’t care what happened in your two cases. The Rodney King Case had charges by the JD. More similarities in the national outlook. The NY affairs are in a class by themselves, because they are police brutality cases, not the black/white issue that is in this case. The reason that everybody is getting their shorts in a bunch is because of the thematic “In Florida, a white man can kill a black man and get away with it.” Same thing with Rodney King (riots).
F. Wait a minute…you’re discounting my SDMB ratios, in favor of Bruce Springsteen??? You should be blushing. And weeping with shame.
The days of race riots are hopefully in the past. And in any case, the initial reporting gave people a distorted view of Zimmerman and Martin. The trial and the coverage of the trial since has been much better.
I remember the mood right after the Diallo verdict. Lots of angry black folk posting on message boards about how they were going to riot. Even then, with tempers flaring, I knew they were full of hot air and I told them so. Rioters don’t form a planning committee right before they light it up. They just do it.
I’m not too concerned about any riots starting if Zimmerman is acquitted. Unless there are conditions in Florida that I’m just not aware of. I don’t imagine people in LA, New York and Detroit are going to riot over what happens in Florida.
No, I don’t believe there will be riots of any kind, much less race (however that’s determined) if Zimmerman’s acquitted.
What I do believe, however, is that conservative rags like the Daily Mail and Fox’s various outlets have found that it’s very profitable to keep racists and lower middle class whites scared and coming to them for their information. This gives them great numbers to show their advertisers as a basis for higher rates. OP and aceplace, your fear’s a renewable resource that’s always for sale and your only gain from it is higher blood pressure and the excitement that something might happen that you believed would happen.
I wonder if gun and ammo sales will go up in anticipation of the verdict.
“I’m not sure” was in reference to something else and I said the opposite of what you’re implying here (I was saying I was not sure you were right about something). Using posts on this board as a measurement of whether something is news is dumb, end of story. It’s that much dumber when you’re comparing the present day to something that happened 14 years ago, when the board was smaller and searching is a pain because of changes in software.
You haven’t showed it’s true.
I don’t agree with that, actually. Obama made a pretty obvious statement that extended basic sympathy to the parents of the person who died. I didn’t see much else in it.
Then you misused them.
If you use a word incorrectly, saying “it’s a figure of speech” doesn’t make it correct. Obama didn’t “approve” of Martin or eulogize him.
I understand that. I’m not sure why you’re so determined not to care or to pay attention to what’s being discussed or acknowledge any similarities or why you’re insisting they are “my” cases rather than major criminal cases and news stories, but you have indeed established that you don’t care. Congratulations. However I don’t care that you don’t care because you were not the sole audience for my comments, and I was making this point before you posted in this thread. Cases with some strong similarities did not result in riots. I think that should be noted by people who are again predicting black people will riot if they don’t get what they are assumed to want.
The Rodney King case was a police brutality case, just like the Bell and Diallo cases, and the situation in Florida is not a police brutality case. No idea where you were going with that. And there were racial issues in the two NY cases. Diallo was killed by white police officers and many people felt they were quick on the trigger because he was black.
Then how is this similar to Rodney King, who wasn’t killed? I think you’re offering a very reductive version of what people are upset about here.
It’s not one or the other. I’m discounting “your” SDMB ratios because they’re irrelevant to the point you were making. Sorry. It’s a great board, but ‘there are more posts on the Straight Dope about this than about that’ does not prove one was bigger news than the other. I mentioned Springsteen and newspaper and magazine covers to show that the Diallo shooting was very big news, which for some reason you’re loath to acknowledge. Oh well.
I think that some degree of civil disturbance is inevitable if Zimmerman is found not guilty, if only because the Rodney King riots and the fact that no looter/rioter was ever arrested, prosecuted, or punished in any way gave carte blanche for blacks to riot when they don’t like an event, have embedded rioting and property destruction in the urban black mind as an appropriate response to perceived injustice.
It’s a certainty that Zimmerman will be convicted, though, if only because no not guilty verdict will be afforded any credibility by the black community, there being no blacks on the jury. It seems obvious that there are holes in the prosecution’s case to the extent that reasonable doubt exists (in both directions). We only know that Zimmerman initiated a confrontation, that Trayvon knocked him down and beat him, and that Zimmerman shot Trayvon. If those events occured, and in that order, then Zimmerman has a quite plausible affirmative defense.
Nonetheless, they’ll convict him, because of fears of the backlash. One man’s life is nothing compared to the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of property and whatever deaths might ensue from the reaction to a not guilty verdict. So not to worry, society will cast aside the rules of jurisprudence (one way or another) and throw Zimmerman to the wolves, in pursuit of the greater good.
(Lest any of the tiny-brained folk react inappropriately to what I’ve said, I hasten to add that I think Zimmerman is a racist asshole who started a fight with a black kid because that kid was in “his” neighborhood, and that he might very well have exited his SUV with the intent of gunning the kid down. However, I think there’s only about, say, a 90% chance that that is what happened–not enough to convict based on the workings of our justice system.)
All this energy, money and divisive rhetoric expended on one case. Wouldn’t it be good if A.G. Holder and President Obama, being so well positioned, were willing to put the emphasis on all the nameless Trayvons who are killed in the inner cities every day?
I could get behind that. Maybe the public is being manipulated by the press for gain.
You don’t call the cops if you plan to shoot someone, knowing the first available cruiser takes the call. From prior experience Zimmerman had to know that potentially the cops could have arrived before he got off the phone. As it turned out, the police cruiser went to the wrong entrance. If they had phoned Zimmerman, like he asked them to when they arrived in the area, they could have been there before the shot was fired.
I want to doubt there would be rioting if Zimmerman gets off, but then I think about a riot I barely missed by being out of town