YOUR HIGHER MORALITY

[fpb]

Well, I suppose all my friends are right. We do need Zimmerman lynched. We are in need of a lynch mob unleashed by short and fraudulent media summaries to rip a man who has been judged innocent by a jury of his peers and hang him on a tree on the reports of MNBC and the rest. Because journalists never would lie and always understand everything that

Comments

[philosophymom]

I wouldn't romanticize juries (and their ability to get things right) any more than I'd trust cable news' sensationalist coverage of the whole event.

We don't need a lynch mob, but if what happened was legal (and a jury says it was), then we need better laws.

[fpb]

So you know better than either?

[philosophymom]

This is where the internet fails as a communication medium -- I have absolutely no idea what the tone of your question is. I have to tell you, though, that it doesn't feel friendly... Still, I'll answer it straightforwardly

[fpb]

Let me hear those facts that I don't know. So far you have given generalities that prove nothing. I started out thinking as you do; then I had a series of unfortunate encounters with evidence. The police photographs of Zimmerman showed that his claim of having had his head smashed against the pavement by Martin were true. Martin's own tweets showed that he was a fanatical and unmanageable seeker for trouble, who had assaulted at least one teacher and a number of other people, and that he practised MMA (mixed martial arts) style assault. Have you ever been assaulted by a trained fighter? I have. The man was drunk at the time, and he only struck a few times, but he inflicted injuries that lasted for weeks. Martin was not drunk, and he was striking with his full strength. Another thing I know - from a man who worked with me as a security guard - is that if you strike the side of the head in a particular place, you can kill a man with one blow. I regard Martin's assault on Zimmerman's head as attempted murder

[ravenclaw_eric]

A big, big part of the problem with this whole situation is that the mainstream media here in the US is heavily, overwhelmingly, dominated by one point-of-view...and is permanently mentally stuck in a time warp where every confrontation or disagreement between blacks and whites is the Bridge at Selma. To them, blacks are wronged innocents, and if a black is in the wrong, you refer back to the previous rule and do all you can to suppress the inconvenient truth

[fpb]

I heard everything you mention. Actually, I have a suspicion that the local police, thought they knew perfectly well that Zimmerman was no more guilty than the man in the moon, may well have been pleased to help the prosecutors because they remembered him from when he had taken a very vocal part in the campaign that had forced a previous police head to resign, only a year before.

[ravenclaw_eric]

That makes the whole thing stink even more.

If this goes on, I might as well move to the Norfolk Fens.

[fpb]

Don't bother. The British police is as corrupt and the PC instinct even more primary.

[frenchpresser]

I really don't give a fuck about Trayvon Martin. He was pounding a guy's head into the concrete. Provoked or not, Martin escalated what could've been a merely verbal misunderstanding into lethal force. Zimmerman ended the threat. And this is merely going off the evidence we have.

[fpb]

I agree. But what is appalling about Martin is that he represents the waste of a whole generation, perhaps two, in idiotic macho dreams and looseness of every kind - from loose language that almost consciously neglects the dignity of English to scattershot giving birth here and there just to produce more ill-suited numbers. And I doubt it's only among blacks; I have seen exactly similar attitudes and behaviours over here, at least, among the shattered and defeated remnants of Britain's former working class. And that is not Martin's fault: he'd have had to be a kind of hero to escape an environment that is so bad and destructive in every way.