I don’t know, Kevin Williamson, whether you can really say this with confidence:
Louis Farrakhan’s insistence that the Gulf War was the opening salvo in the Battle of Armageddon turned out to be slightly exaggerated.
For one thing, if you happen to be a citizen of Iraq or Syria, it’s a bit hard to know what might have gone worse. What surer sign of the apocalypse could there be than an actual apocalypse?
There are those of us who warned back in 1990 of the unpredictable quagmire that would result if we became the Bradley Fighting Vehicle-armed police force of the Middle East. Some of us feel justified in seeing the ensuing quarter century as one long continuum beginning with that fateful decision to look the other way when Saddam wanted to carve up Kuwait and then flipping out when he carved too much. If Poppy Bush hadn’t belatedly drawn a line in the sand, who knows? Maybe Scott Ritter never goes trolling for teen-flesh in a Burger King parking lot.
I can justifiably blame the decision to liberate Kuwait for almost everything, including that al-Qaeda thing that supposedly began to get organized a couple years previously.
In retrospect, an American president saying “This aggression will not stand” was one of the most unintentionally ironic things ever said. We’ve been stuck with aggression ever since.
But, really, if there is anything that Williamson truly misses in his assessment of N.W.A. and gangsta rap, it’s the hellscape that did emerge despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the containment of AIDS and the subsidence of the crack epidemic and the great reduction in violent crime.
According to Wikipedia, law enforcement shot and killed well over 600 people last year. And I wouldn’t call this “normal” exactly. They list one-tenth that number being killed by police in 2009, which happened to be the peak year of the Great Recession.
I don’t know why the police are out of control at the moment, but it’s one reason why the message that N.W.A. brought to the people in 1988 still seems hugely relevant today.
There is a simple reason for the increase in police killings. Uncertainty.
It used to be, 5 years or so ago, that a gun in the hands of a person meant that the person was a criminal. There were in addition far fewer guns floating around. Thus, the gun led to specific actions, and the uncertainty was low – gun meant criminal, usually.
Today, there are guns everywhere. This has greatly increased the uncertainty and inability of police to make decisions about the intentions of persons. In addition, many of the 2nd Amendment Open-carry wackos make a point about carrying to INCREASE the lack of clarity of the meaning of the weapon.
Since Seattle (3 cops killed while eating donuts), NYC (2 cops in the squad car), last month (2 cops killed during traffic stops), and so forth, the killing of cops seems to be on the increase.
These work together. Cops are unable to tell what people are going to do with the gun. The gun may be used to kill the cop, and cops do not want to get killed, although they are in the line of fire every day. Uncertainty and stress lead to quick decisions, which often mean that the cop shoots first, asks questions later.
Note that this notion of increased stress is not an excuse for cop killing, and I reject the notion that I am justifying cop killing. I am advancing a line of reasoning as to why it happens.
How to reduce the killings? Better training, yes. However, the current trends of more guns everywhere mean that my prediction is increased cop killings.
well, you’re the Data Guy.
How about some data on cop killings?
This is not about data. It’s about cop thinking. If I was a cop, I’d be on edge all the time. If I sit down to have a coffee, is some person going to come along and kill me?
Uncertainty leads to stress, and stress leads to the need to reduce stress, by quick decisions.
My thoughts do suggest that more cop killings will occur when gun laws get looser. I might look into that.
Please do, and post a diary when you have, even if there s no correlation. Some data, as opposed to political/racial prejudice is sorely needed. Now that BLM is exposed as a racist organization (in SF) we can no longer trust anything coming out of them.
You think you can trust and what you can’t. You don’t speak for me so there is no we here.
Where you getting this from:
Same source that labels feminists as nazis, etc.?
Considering what AAs have been subjected to in this country for over three hundred years, we white folks are pretty fucking lucky that AAs haven’t availed themselves of every opportunity to kill many of us.
BLM isn’t like the NAACP or CORE, it’s more like OWS, a slogan and message without an organization. Not that there aren’t individuals that would like to step into that leadership vacuum and turn BLM into an organization. But sure seems as if there are some working to prevent that from happening and spreading fear among white folks — even self-identified liberal white folks are easy to fearmonger.
No, I get it from their words as reported at Daily Kos. “You are all white supremacist liberals” shouted at the audience of the Social security event in San Francisco.
And second of all there was some dispute if that is what was said. Third of all there is also quite a bit of dispute if those women were working with the very loosely organized blacklivesmatter organization at all. Finally there were plenty of people, black and white, who said their tactics were wrong even as they understood why they feel so desperate.
One person, a self-identified BLM Seattle founder. (Note: It was an event in Seattle. Getting facts wrong is not how one builds credibility.) Was she speaking for herself or a faction within subset of the AA community? Who knows. Is such a sentiment wholly without merit? No — but it sure scares the bejeezus out of white folks.
It’s just words. Do I think it was helpful to the Black Lives Matter message (specifically the disproportionate (unlike most Americans, you do have the math skills t understand percentages/ratio, etc.) shooting of black men by LEOs)? No. But reacting to her incendiary language hasn’t been helpful to liberals either. Let those so inclined howl at the moon.
Have you joined a group fighting unwarranted LEO violence against white people? Or do you consider that as so rare, it’s like collateral damage? If your use of #White… is nothing but a reaction to BLM, it’s more white supremacy crap. Shame on you for using this.
teenager Zachary Hammond.
http://http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/justice-department-zachary-hammond_55cbc046e4b064d5910a6f
3b
“The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post, among other news outlets, picked up the story last week following substantial outrage on Twitter, largely from supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“Black nonviolence activist Jack Logan, of Greenville, South Carolina, has scheduled a “rally for justice” for Hammond for Aug. 15 in downtown Seneca.”
That doesn’t seem the actions of a racist group who doesn’t care about police brutality across the board.
That must have been quite a thing to see. How many people are in the BLM movement anyway? To think of all of them standing there together and speaking out with one voice: “You are all white supremacist liberals.”
rate me simply because I asked you politely not speak for me. You specifically posted “we” as if everyone on this site was in agreement with you. I simply pointed out that I wasn’t and I would prefer if you didn’t use we.
get da phuq outta here with that bullshyt.
Actually, being a police officer is not a particularly dangerous job at all. The top 10 deadliest jobs in the U.S. are:
Well you see the responses to my encouragement of your idea? Now, I say, “Don’t waste your time.” The racists have their minds made up. Every white is a devil. every black is an angel. A cop is never justified in shooting anyone, unless the person shot is white.
Booman did a front page post last week speaking of the rift between white liberals and blacks. I dismissed it, but sadly he is right. We have to recognize that the Democratic Party is the party of people of color and white people, unless they are rich like the Clintons, are only tolerated if the apologize over and over for their whiteness. Social security, trade, wage inequality, the cost of college, these are all trivial issues to them. the only issue that matters is race race race and collective white guilt.
People like us should switch to the Republican Party and try to take it back from the corporations and racists instead of staying in the Democratic Party and fighting a losing battle with the corporations and racists.
And your assumption that you were speaking for everyone here. Getting good data is of course necessary. The problem is many a local jurisdiction in this country has proven that they don’t report officer involved shootings accurately. This has especially proven to be true when a minority in involved.
Acknowledging that is not calling every white racist. It is simply acknowledging a truth.
As for your other contention that none of the economic issues matter to people in the Democratic party, I disagree with that as well. The point that many of us, black, white, Latino, etc are trying to make is racial injustice is JUST AS important of an issue. It isn’t simply a matter of a rising economic tide will lift all boats because that has been proven to not be true in the past. It is a matter that racial inequality has to be addressed as an issue in its own right. Not just as a “oh yeah that will be taken care of if all of these other issues are addressed.”
There you go with that “we” again. Maybe it’s because of where I live or the sites that I read, but this is not my experience at all.
Not that there aren’t people out there who think straight white men are the bad guys, but they really aren’t that influential.
Fair enough, but I hope you’re also going to factor in the rather crucial point that cervants made:
In other words, if cops are so jumpy because there are guns everywhere, why are they shooting unarmed black men rather than heavily armed white ones?
Problem with that is that they don’t shoot white guys even when they do have guns, and they shoot black guys even when they obviously don’t, including in the back while they are running away. White men can parade around town toting semi-automatic rifles, black men can’t walk on the sidewalks in their own neighborhoods.
as “trigger happy” with non minorities. For example they let oath keepers walk around Ferguson with their semi automatics out and proud and didn’t bother any of them.
It could be messaging to the nation as a whole, since revolutions come when large swaths of people feel like they have no opportunities, no options, and no hope. Message being, bluntly, “We’ll fuck you up.” I mean, bankruptcy “reform”was passed about 2 years before the bottom fell out of the economy, I wouldn’t be surprised if the prognosticators see a looming problem with the proletariat and are getting in front of it.
You could be on to something there. It seems like there are a lot of incidents where the civilian ends up dead or injured after the situation is secured and any potential threats to the cops no longer exist. It’s more like “We’re going to put the fear of the Lord into anybody who might even think about giving us lip.” That’s the mentality of occupiers.
I don’t know why the police are out of control at the moment, …
We don’t know that they are. The data on violence perpetrated by cops over the past fifty years doesn’t exist. Currently could be up, down, or the same. That’s why the new data collection by The Guardian and others is so important, but it also means that we won’t know for a few years.
Amadou Diallo was killed sixteen years ago.
There does seem to be some confusion between legal rights and prudence. I have the legal right not to be molested if I walk down a dark alley in high heels and mini-skirt at two o’clock in the morning. Could do so safely most days but is it worth the risk?
Conservatives are so good at projection? …”But the striking thing was the comparison of gun deaths in Detroit vs Windsor Ontario just across the border river: hundreds in the former; almost none in the latter. And the one big difference turned out not to be racial diversity, poverty level, or even rate of gun ownership but simply the overall level of fear.”
And April Glaspie would not be a controversial figure in the matter.
And Nayirah al-Sabah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States would not have punked Amnesty International. Interesting how counterfeited intelligence keeps showing up in in Bush-neocon operations, even when a Bush is not in power.
What is not yet being reported in US media because it’s not about US:
Did Ayatollah Sistani just save Iraq from Iran-backed militias by pushing Gov’t Reforms?
Sistani has been a consistent peacemaker from the very beginning of this war. He likely has Sunni counterparts in Iraq who are submerged under the Salafist/Wahabist religious politics.
National Review has been for the apocalypse ever since William Buckley promoted the Cold War.
Meanwhile Ray Odierno scotches another attempt to put the apocalypse back in the box by plumping publicly for partition. Hasn’t he done enough damage already?