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from the "All-lives-matter."-President-Obama dept.
Snipers in Dallas: [5] Cops Dead; [6] More Cops Wounded
The Atlantic reports:
Two gunmen shot eleven police officers in Dallas, Texas [at 8:58 PM July 7], killing at least four of them.
[...] At a Thursday night press conference, Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown said [...] officers had one of the suspects "cornered", but did not offer further details.
"Tonight, it appears that two snipers shot ten police officers from elevated positions during the protest/rally", Brown said in an initial statement. "Three officers are deceased, two are in surgery, and three are in critical condition. An intensive search for suspect is currently underway." The police department later said an eleventh officer had also been injured and a fourth officer had been killed.
[...] The shootings occurred during a protest against police killings earlier this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hundreds rallied in downtown Dallas, near the corner of Main Street and Lamar Street. Local news footage captured what sounds like several gunshots being fired, and the crowd scattering.
[...] No motive has yet been established and it's unclear whether the shooting was related to the protest.
The New York Times just broke the story about the latest in the police killings of black men. It seems the tide has been turned. [Five] Dallas police officers were killed tonight at a protest in that city over these shootings.
I am not surprised, nor am I particularly shocked. No doubt there will be more to come on this topic as the evening progresses. Hopefully something good comes out of this, but I am inclined to doubt it.
takyon: Some more details: One suspect was killed by an explosion intentionally caused by a police robot. He reportedly told a negotiator that he was upset about Black Lives Matter, the recent police shootings, and wanted to kill white people, especially police officers. He said he was not affiliated with any groups and acted alone. Other suspects have been arrested, and a "person of interest" (often identified as a suspect by the news media) was arrested early in the night after he was photographed with his unloaded AR-15. He handed his weapon to an officer shortly after the shootings, and later turned himself into the police for questioning.
President Obama spoke about the shootings shortly after arriving in Poland for a NATO conference. In part, he mentioned that, "When people say 'black lives matter,' that doesn't mean blue lives don't matter, it just means all lives matter — but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents [...] This isn't a matter of us comparing the value of lives. This is recognizing that there is a particular burden that is being placed on a group of our fellow citizens. And we should care about that. And we can't dismiss it. We can't dismiss it."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday July 08 2016, @04:26PM
A journey consists of many steps, each nearly meaningless by itself. Help the blacks, beginning in the 1960s, with well-intentioned affirmative action programs: putting people in places where their skills are inadequate, thereby damaging employability for the entire group. Support the unemployed with generous social programs, meaning they have little need to gain an education and work skills in the first place. Then the "War on Drugs" that puts millions of young men in jail, thereby destroying the black family, and creating a culture of single moms raising young barbarians.
Having few skills, little education and no respect for authority, young blacks turn to violence and crime [youtube.com]. The police begin to regard every black as an imminent threat, and turn up the brutality. The blacks feels oppressed, because they now are oppressed, and become ever more combative, making the police ever more ready to use lethal force.
And there you go. The problems have developed over 2-3 generations, driven at each step by the best of intentions. Any possible fix would take just as long, but might be possible with a strong leader. Obama would have been ideal, because he is himself black, but he hasn't even tried. Who else is there? Hillary, who is only interested in more payola for the Clinton foundation? Trump, who plays to the (entirely justified) fears of middle class whites?
It's depressing. Many neighborhoods are already nearly ungovernable. The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the burring of American inner cities.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday July 08 2016, @05:40PM
I wouldn't say they had the best of intentions. Banking practices in the 1950s and 1960s set up the black slums based on the self-fulfilling prophecy that black people in the neighborhood drive down real estate prices. Urban renewal programs were suppose to benefit everybody, but tore down primarily black neighborhoods because they were the ones with poor land value that needed renewing. Social programs were originally incentivized to support mothers to stay at home, but were upended to get mothers in the work force for moral reasons that speak, again, to prejudices primarily about black families (if it were for economic reasons they would have put more money into government-subsidized child care). And we have high-level politicians from the Nixon era on record saying that federal drug enforcement ramped up specifically because it would give them an excuse to mess with both anti-war demonstrators and African Americans.
No, this has all played out because of the worst of intentions. These problems exist because African Americans have been systematically terrorized for decades, nay, centuries; there hasn't really been a reprieve of abuse going all the way back to when their ancestors were first brought to America. We have had these societal problems with Irish Americans, with Italian Americans, with all sorts of ethnicities in America, and they all faded over time. Why? Because when they tried to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they faded into the rest of middle class white America, and those that didn't faded similarly into working class white America. But African Americans aren't allowed to do that. They are specifically exempted from fading in, from properly assimilating.
If people in power had good intentions for multiple generations of African Americans, the problem would get better instead of worse. There may be hope if poor whites realize that they too suffer from all the stereotypes about poor people in America when some always-black caricature represents all of them. But what we really need is to focus on being good, on being nice, on loving our neighbor. The unfortunate thing is that the one group in this country that believes in those ideas, the religious, have become a force for a whole different set of backward agendas that they can't win in the long term. And not that it will make any difference to say so here, but I implore the political Christians of America to put even more effort into fighting racism as they have put into fighting abortion, and not just by government. You don't have to be a Christian to believe in love and goodness; I just happen to know that that's what Jesus cared about, and I know that means a lot to some people. Help people directly. Change perceptions in your local community. Bend our culture towards good, rather than towards tradition. Y We need more "love your neighbor" everywhere, and we need it now.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 08 2016, @07:35PM
I'd mod you up further if you hadn't already hit the +5 Insightful limit...you have both a way with words and a good grasp of the hidden or subtle issues that certain people, whose names rhyme with, for example, Slay Norris and The Shitey Uzzard, don't or won't consider.
(Uzzard is a word; it is a third-generation bastard, i.e., a bastard by a bastard out of a bastard.)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @11:32AM
For someone who seems likely to self-identify as a "progressive", you sure do have an obvious hangup about the question of whether or not the marriages of your detractors' parentages were legitimate.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 10 2016, @05:19AM
Given the baggage that word has acquired...no, no I do not. And I like words that do double duty; in this case, it's more about his personality than his parentage, though I wouldn't be surprised if he has absent daddy issues too given some of his previous posts...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:18PM
Careful now - your own prejudices are showing through.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 10 2016, @05:18AM
Prejudices against what, thoroughgoing assholery? Barely-contained sociopathy? Believe me, their own words damn them far more thoroughly than I ever could.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday July 08 2016, @08:57PM
If people in power had good intentions for multiple generations of African Americans, the problem would get better instead of worse.
If only people didn't have this power at all.
The unfortunate thing is that the one group in this country that believes in those ideas, the religious, have become a force for a whole different set of backward agendas that they can't win in the long term. And not that it will make any difference to say so here, but I implore the political Christians of America to put even more effort into fighting racism as they have put into fighting abortion, and not just by government. You don't have to be a Christian to believe in love and goodness; I just happen to know that that's what Jesus cared about, and I know that means a lot to some people. Help people directly. Change perceptions in your local community. Bend our culture towards good, rather than towards tradition. Y We need more "love your neighbor" everywhere, and we need it now.
I will continue to try to get religious people and nonreligious people to oppose murder, slavery, and theft, most of which is practiced by the state which then turns around and gets us to blame each other instead of itself.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @12:11AM
"Having few skills, little education and no respect for authority." Maybe, but more likely they are unemployable due to the very racist War on Some Drugs. This has led to calls to 'ban the check box' for felons on employment applications. But you can't deny their marketing & financial skills, as demonstrated by the size of that industry. If you kick someone permanently out of the 'white economy', don't be surprised if they start making a living in some 'black market'. And they aren't the only ones with 'no respect for authority.' In fact, if you support 'authority' these days you end up supporting killer cops who skate.