Land O’ Lakes, still getting slammed.
Another meme, still struggling to write…
Pervert Justice
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Land O’ Lakes, still getting slammed.
In a case that can’t seem to get appropriate coverage inside the USA, Canada and the UK are publishing important stories detailing the lynching of a Black jogger by a white ex-cop and his son just as fast as any published by the national press inside the USA. The best review of the footage of the actual killing is probably in this story, by a local news station in Jaxonville.
So what happened here, why are prosecutors declaring this behavior acceptable, and why do I call it a lynching?
So, while on the webchat with PZ et. al. earlier, a comic on The Nib came up. It’s titled “I Exist” and it’s by Breena Nuñez. In it she writes about her Blackness as an Afrosalvi (someone from African descent who grows up in El Salvador). The whole thing is quite interesting, and I enjoyed her self-portraits and her insights equally.
Please do go read it and tell me what you think.
Passover is a time to think about slavery, and for many of us to think about race because of the deep connection between the two topics. Two years ago I wrote one of my best-loved pieces The One Drop Rule. Not only do traffic logs show that both of my readers read the post twice, but apparently one of them still comes back a few times per month to read it again right up until today. Since it’s also a post about which I’m proud, and since I’m also struggling with kidney stones right now, I thought I’d take the opportunity of this year’s Passover to bring it back for new readers. It turns out that I’m not up to messing around with 301 redirects to create all the appropriate aliases, so instead I’ll link it here and encourage you to go read the original if you haven’t or if you’ve forgotten it. If you like, you can pretend that post is your reward for finding the afikoman. I’d make a chocolate joke here, but Bootsy Collins told me I can’t fit it between the 1s:
Yes that’s the same video I included in one of my earliest blog posts ever, but as long as we’re headed down memory lane, we may as well take the funk railroad. I hear it even has a stop in Mixed Metaphorville.
Apparently two white supremacists shot bullets, at least two shots, at two bi-racial siblings (16 yo and 12 yo) who were walking on a footpath that is property of a local church and intended and maintained for public use. The evil white supremacists arrested for those shots are James Reidnauer and Brent van Besien. They don’t claim that the fired no shots, but they do insist that they fired the shots because the children were “meth heads”.
There’s little mystery about their future defense: they can claim erratic behavior on the part of the children that scared them, then invoke stand your ground. We know that Zimmerman claimed he thought Martin might have been high. We know that Zimmerman, despite being a violent, horrible jerkface ended up being found not guilty at trial. Why should the white supremacists neglect a winning strategy?
This. This is the evil that your government encourages when it passes a stand your ground law. Every single such law should be opposed in every single jurisdiction that has passed or considers passing such a provision. Do not retreat from this fight. Go on offense. The mere existence of stand your ground laws is a threat: treat it as such and never back down.
are the private prisons of the US.
I can’t even write about this. Go read, maybe I’ll recover enough to join you in the comments later.
A while back Mano posted about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a younger woman running against an establishment Democrat (also the 20-year incumbent) in the NY-14th’s primary. For a number of reasons her candidacy was considered a minor referendum on the DNC’s willingness to run away from its base in selecting and supporting candidates.
Ocasio-Cortez was given little chance of winning, but win she did. The real questions now are, will the DNC take any lesson away from the loss of Rep. Joseph Crowley in this primary, and if so, what will they learn? Vox’s commentary on the race concludes with this bit:
There’s a relatively slow-motion hit-and-run occurring on Tohono O’odham Nation land that’s been recorded and now viewed several hundred thousand times. It’s bad enough, though the victim Paulo Remes is reported to be recovering reasonably well by Tuscon.com. The SUV that hit Remes was an Immigration & Customs Enforcement vehicle that drove down the road approaching Remes’ house, turned around, then came back toward Remes who had just walked across the road and was still on the edge of it when struck. This has all the makings of a felony:
Well, I missed it by two days, but let’s do this anyway: Fifty-one years ago on Tuesday, a mere 99 years, 11 months and 3 days after we passed a constitutional amendment requiring states to stop with the racial discrimination already, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that yes, Virginia, there are limits to constitutional violations and stop Freuding persecuting the Lovings already, okay?