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 is going on, and are in fact fountains of virtue and sagacity, and we may confidently hate those whom they tell us to hate; whereas the jury that has spent weeks being exposed in detail to everything that could be retrieved of the facts are too stupid, ignorant and racist to make the right choice. We need more demos. We need more shouting. We need more threats.

Comments

[philosophymom.livejournal.com]

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.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

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.

They were careful to run, at first, only a picture of Martin that had been taken several years before his death, and made him look angelic, while the picture of Zimmerman they used did not, to say the least, show him at his best. Unfortunately for their preferred narrative, the more facts came out, the less Zimmerman looked like the second coming of Bull Connor, and the more of a hoodlum Martin turned out to be.

This apple-cheeked lad had been in that neighborhood in the first place because he'd become a discipline problem at his school---as in caught with burglary tools and women's jewelry for which he had no explanation. Unfortunately (for Martin) the school was under heavy pressure to bring down the numbers of its black male students who were leaving the place in handcuffs, so he was merely sent to live with his father.

Also, Martin's social-media entries came to light, and were soon to be seen all over the internet, and the more of them that appeared, the more of a gangsta-wannabe (at the very, very least) he looked like.

Zimmerman almost certainly wouldn't have been charged but for fear of riots, thanks to the professional demagogues who are seen as "leaders of the black community." Even if I thought he was as dirty as hell and deserved to fry, I'd rejoice at his acquittal, merely because I detest the sight of juries and courts being swayed by threats of mob violence.

And, ironically enough, Zimmerman himself was, at least before all this hoo-rah, almost a caricature of an Obama voter. He'd held the local cops' feet to the fire some years previous over their treatment of a homeless black man, he'd helped tutor black students, he was a good liberal...until Obama had to throw him under the bus to please the race rabble-rousers.

[stahlhelm.livejournal.com]

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.