Red Mosquito

Kaius wrote:It's sad. A life taken, suddenly and forever. Is it too early to draw conclusions? Is it ever too early to start shooting? It doesn't seem like it.

No humanity. No protection. No aid. Just threat prevention and self preservation under the guise of cleaning up the streets.

There's always a justification for this, though. Just follow the orders. Just know the rules. Just stay calm and don't make a mistake.

I try to stay out of these discussions on FB, because my bro-in-law is a cop, but it's always a challenge to keep quiet with the bad ones.

Peeps wrote:i think a lot of white america is sickened by what is happening but unfortunately that isnt what plays out in the media

simple schoolboy wrote:

Kaius wrote:It's sad. A life taken, suddenly and forever. Is it too early to draw conclusions? Is it ever too early to start shooting? It doesn't seem like it.

No humanity. No protection. No aid. Just threat prevention and self preservation under the guise of cleaning up the streets.

There's always a justification for this, though. Just follow the orders. Just know the rules. Just stay calm and don't make a mistake.

I try to stay out of these discussions on FB, because my bro-in-law is a cop, but it's always a challenge to keep quiet with the bad ones.

That cop got home for dinner, and in the end, isn't that what matters?

Its a shitty terrible compromise, but how about any cop that shoots someone without that person firing first gets retired? A one free murder per cop rule. It wont help much, but every once in a while you come upon this cop that shot 3 or 4 people. This person is an outlier already, but whats the chance that any of those were truly justified?

Orpheus wrote:This shit should not be happening and the fact that white America grasps at straws to defend it is fucking sickening. If the cops aren't going to brought to justice, ever, then what is the endgame? Vigilante revenge? Prosecute these motherfuckers so this stops happening.

pepperwhiteMFC wrote:

Peeps wrote:i think a lot of white america is sickened by what is happening but unfortunately that isnt what plays out in the media

Yes, sir. This ^

At the expense of friendships I've been vocal about how sickening it is.

Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!

The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.


The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work that way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase “black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.