| As you may already know, on February 26 2012, a 17-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin was shot to death by a 28-year-old male named George Zimmerman. This happened in Florida. Given the established facts of the case, the races of assailant and victim are completely irrelevant except to the people who choose to make them so. The facts have been hashed out endlessly all over the internet, tv, radio and print.
The most relevant as far as I can tell are:
- Zimmerman was armed, Martin was not.
- during the 911 call Zimmerman made, he specifically said "they always get away."
- Zimmerman was advised by the 911 operator not to pursue. He insisted on doing so anyway.
- a separate 911 call made by a neighbour has a male voice screaming "Help! Help" in the background.
- When police arrived, Trayvon Martin was dead by reason of gunshot wound. Zimmerman claimed self-defense.
- Florida has a self-defense clause called "Stand Your Ground" which protects you under the law if you fight back against a threat instead of fleeing.
Those are the facts of the events of that night on Feb 26. Now, what do we know about Zimmerman?
- in 2003, he helped stop a store robbery. A television, I think it was.
- he tried and failed to join the police at some point in the past.
- he subsequently joined the neighborhood watch.
- Over the past three months, he made numerous (as in, more than 40) 911 calls, some(?) of which referred to black males.
Therefore, with no speculation and no addition to the facts, we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Zimmerman followed a stranger (who turned out to be an unarmed minor), approached him and shot Martin dead. He then claimed self-defense.
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To the best of my knowledge, when you shoot someone with a gun and they die, that's called murder. Or negligent homicide. Or manslaughter. One of those.
Any arguments about race or motivation or reason or whatever can be tabled for the moment. I could make a lot of noise about those but that would only attract noise in return, ultimately clouding the issue. Zimmerman shot Martin and the boy died. Indisputable fact.
Speculation time: Was it self-defense? I'm no lawyer and certainly no cop but, when you are the one to aggressively approach someone while carrying a gun in your pocket, it seems like you've lost your future judicial high ground if violence ensues thereafter. Most of the evidence suggests that Zimmerman was the one that started things. His own words (and, of course, the boy's corpse) confirm that he finished them too.
Zimmerman was a wannabe-cop. He tried to get into the police and did not succeed. Do we know why he was rejected? I don't. Maybe that will come out in the near future. I could speculate on that but it would cloud the issue too.
That said, in my humble opinion, if someone fails to get into the police force, gets a gun and then joins the neighbourhood watch, that person is a recipe for disaster. Such a person wants to be in a position of armed authority and, having failed to gain such status by one route, seeks it by another. From what I see, Zimmerman is just such a person. There is speculation that his neighbourhood didn't have an official watch program. If true, that would make him a self-appointed sheriff.
His 911 call has him saying "they always get away." Who's "they?" The people who want to make this about race would say "they" are young black male criminals. I disagree. I think Zimmerman, as a wannabe cop, is interested in criminals, period. Perhaps he saw a lot of news stories of criminals getting off lightly or getting away scott-free. Perhaps he saw himself as a protector of the community and someone who could redress that balance. If so, he was mistaken. He did not have the training and thus the discipline that is drilled into police and military so they can judge situations and give a tiered response precisely so that shit like this does not happen!
So he's not a racist. So he's not 100% Caucasian. Those are irrelevant. So "Stand Your Ground" was in place. That's fine. I have nothing against self-defense laws. I would argue however that it doesn't apply here. The evidence points toward him having provoked a violent situation by going armed into a situation that a 911 dispatcher specifically told him to stay out of. That is not self-defense, that is being the aggressor. Zimmerman should be tried in a court of law. Bring out the evidence for and against. Try him. Leave out the race stuff and stick to the evidence. Come up with a verdict that emerges from the evidence. Sentence or set free accordingly. As things stand, he seems to be protected by the "Stand Your Ground" clause. This should not be so.
tl;dr: the evidence doesn't support self-defense on Zimmerman's part. Ergo, he shot a kid for no goddamn reason. That's manslaughter at the very least. | comments: Piss or get off the pot!   |
| Google develops augmented reality goggles. No fucks are given.
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Is it just me or does Marie Colvin look like a somewhat older Elle Driver?
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So.
Commercials. Specifically, commercials that don't feature men being complete fucking idiots who are carried by their long-suffering oh-so-very-close-to-earth wives. Been seeing a growing trend of this. Mordin approves. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| Excluding the technical excellence of the puppets, Labyrinth is a steaming pile of fecal matter. Yes, that Labyrinth. Apparently it's some kind of cult hit that girls who turned 20 in the 80s think is awesome. I, to put it mildly, disagree. It was shit. The kind of fairytale logic faerie weirdness it waa trying to portray works a lot better on the page than it does on the screen. As such, the pacing of the movie was completely borked: long stretches of nonsense interspersed with actual plot do not a fun movie make. David Bowie in ball-claspingly tight pants, lip gloss and high-heeled boots do not an appealing image make. David Bowie trying to dance in said pants? Also not appealing.
The 80s, man. Guess you had to be there. [INSERT TROLLFACE] | | comments: 1 someone or Piss or get off the pot! |
| So. House of Lies stars Don Cheadle (and his posse which includes Veronica Mars) as hotshot management consultants who belong to the 1% whose job it is to screw over the 1%. Wait, doesn't that still make them the 1%?
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Enlightenment: the most uncomfortable show you need to be watching already. Never has there been a show that so mercilessly skewers the characters (and by so doing, the viewers) without actually being mean or unfair to any of them. Granted, the well-meaning yet self-centered idiocy of the protagonist makes me want to bludgeon her throat in with a copy of The Secret, but it really helps that pretty much everyone she meets feels the same way (watch the reaction shots whenever she exits a conversation; cringes, sighs that somehow convey a lack of relief.)
It's a fucking fascinating and lovingly well-made observation of a trainwreck iterating its way through Conway-esque topologies in an ongoing attempt to turn back into a train. So far, so interesting. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| So yeah.
- internally-consistent magic systems (Mistborn, the Grimnoir Chronicles)
- The Dresden Files books and everything contained therein
- near-future technothrillers with nigh-realistic powered armor (Spears of God and FreedomTM)
- action-movie-orchestral soundtracks a la Harry Gregson-Williams and Hans Zimmer (the Modern Warfare 2 OST is especially sumptuous. So is the song "Insertion" from Crysis 2) | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| - I wonder how many Chinese factory workers finish their shift at the Apple factory then go to their other job at the Epple factory. Ba-dum-ching.
- how does one respond to being a comprehensive failure at life?
- somehow the Ranma fandom continues to go strong. Astounding.
- why am I the only one on the internet who still gives many fucks about MTCFUltra?
- New island forms in the Red Sea? I'm more curious as to who got an actual atlas for Christmas. They still print those?
- I normally do this every November. For some reason, it slipped my mind this year. By November 23 2011, I had read 51 novels (the 51st incidentally was a reread of Daniel Suarez's FreedomTM.) As of right now? 53 (the 53rd being Brandon Sanderson's Alloy of Law, a Western set in the future of the Mistborn universe.)
What a sorry state of affairs.
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One or more of these bullet-points may be connected to one or more of the others.
(That's right, I suddenly felt like posting something that had nothing to do with my subject line. We going all surrealist-lite up in here.) | | comments: 3 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot! |
| All the ways the economic situation could have hit me and it picks bankrupting the world's greatest mobile browser? Invisible fucking Hand my ass; it all bespeaks a lack of fiscal discipline decades in the making, discipline being defined as "your future self is also you"
Oh well. I'll miss you, Bolt Browser. On the plus side, this means I'll be spending less time browsing the web on my phone seeing as the native Blackberry browser is kind of shit. On the minus side ... pretty much everything else. | | comments: 1 someone or Piss or get off the pot! |
| What's it like, I wonder, in the headspace of the woman who went to a Black Friday sale with pepper spray and used it to take down almost 20 fellow shoppers? Including children?
That's ... seriously hardcore.
It's a rare kind of insanity that leads someone down the train of thought that makes such a decision make sense. She woke up that morning, laced up her sneakers, put on her warpaint, kissed her family goodbye, armed up and went bargain-hunting. She would let nothing stand in her way; that X-Box would be hers!
... ah, an update. Apparently, she had her children with her and had the pepper spray for self-defense. That simultaneously makes more and less sense.
| | comments: 1 someone or Piss or get off the pot! |
| | Why did no one tell me the sequel to The Steel Remains was out? Or, for that matter, the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep? To my great distress, the latter was not in fact named A Skyness Preposition The Noun. Thoroughly disappointing that. | | comments: 1 someone or Piss or get off the pot! |
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irate