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No Cash For Hate, Say Mainstream Crowdfunding Firms (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online fund-raising sites are turning their backs on activists looking to offer financial support for James Fields, the man accused of driving his car into counter-protesters at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday. GoFundMe, Kickstarter and other mainstream crowdfunding firms have policies that prohibit hate speech or abuse, the latest example of technology firms making it harder for far-right groups to organize online. Fields is accused of killing one woman and injuring 19 others on Saturday after the rally in Charlottesville turned violent. Supporters of Fields, who was denied bail at a court hearing in Virginia on Monday, have turned to the internet to raise money for his legal defense. GoFundMe, one of the two leading crowdfunding firms, said on Monday it has removed multiple fundraising campaigns for Fields, because the company prohibits the promotion of hate speech and violence.
It doesn't. You can find BLM projects on GoFundMe. Nation of Islam too. The usual Marxist/Socialist movements too. This is a one sided ban. Virtue signaling.
Because pointing out the greater likelihood of being shot by police if you're black than if you're white is clearly hate speech...
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Some day an innocent man is going to set up a crowdfunding campaign for his defence and is going to get it shut down because he's been pre-emptively judged guilty. It's that old "first they came for the (x)" story, except this time they came for the Nazis, and it's all that more seductive because the Nazis deserve it.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It's an easy call to make for a corporation:
On the one hand, you get free publicity, and most people give you credit for being moral.
On the other hand, you might alienate the few remaining Americans who support racist violence.
In terms of raw numbers, the choice is easy. On the other hand, you'd like these funding things to be apolitical, not appointing themselves judges. It would be kind of interesting to see how many people actually would be willing to donate to his defense fund. Does that fool actually have any chance at all in court?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Public defenders are always available.
That's a false equivalency. BLM may have some incidental violence (like many protest groups), but the goal of the movement is to reduce violence.
To make it an accurate equivalency, you'd have to find someone who was anti-white, tried to kill a bunch of white people, and then GoFundMe decided to allow a defense fund.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So now it's up to crowdfunding sites to decide who can and who cannot get good legal representation?
This isn't about supporting hate speech - it's about giving a guy a proper lawyer so the courts can do what they're supposed to do.
The courts can do exactly what they're supposed to do... appoint a lawyer if the defendant can't afford it. Show me a law that says this is Kickstarter's responsibility.
I think it's pretty hard to target the Black Lives Matter group because its not really a group as a whole, but a collective of smaller groups that have almost no connection other than they operate under the same banner. It's very similar to the group Anonymous in that there really isn't any central command and anyone at all can decide that they want to operate under the banner.
When you have a structure like that, it's really hard to treat them as a monolith. For example, one city's BLM decided to have a cookout with their local police to try to have a friendly dialog and voice their concerns. Even if you're generally against the movement as a whole, it's pretty hard to condemn trying to come together on good terms and build understanding. On the other hand it's hard to support the BLM member who has allegedly defrauded the University of Toronto for almost $300,000 dollars even if you generally support the movement as a whole.
In general, most things are a mixed bag, but typically you're dealing with an entity that is ultimately answerable to a single person or a small group of individuals so you can still form a cohesive opinion of the whole, but I don't know if that's really possible with BLM since it's completely decentralized. I suppose it's possible to argue that the "good" parts of BLM should rebrand or distance themselves from the "bad" parts, but as a brand BLM is attractive under the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Even if you are one of those "good" parts of the movement, you can use the negative publicity as a foil to highlight the positive of your own particular subgroup within the movement.
Black Live Matters isn't a hate group.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The ACLU defended the Unite the Right group in Charlottesville when the city revoked their permit to demonstrate. So is the ACLU a supporter of hate speech and thus needs to be purged?
Such a simplistic approach to the problem.
There are many times that white people have contact with the Police when they are doing something wrong, and normally they will just get a talking to and move along. A minority has a higher chance on getting arrested for the same problem.
Being in a culture where the law enforcement will not treat you justly means the local communities will put the law into their own hands, with often poor results. Thus escalating the minor offence to a bigger one.
In short growing up white you are allowed to make mistakes, if you are black the same mistake will affect you all your life. The ones who make it, normally have to live their life in full consciousnesses that they can't do anything wrong. While for the someone who is white, then most of it will fall under kids will be kids.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Being more-likely to be shot if you're X than Y isn't impacted by how much of the total population are X or Y. If the two values aren't equal, something is different.
Being more-likely to be X or Y if you're shot is impacted by how much of the population is X or Y. If it's not proportional to population, something's different in those too situations.
That doesn't suggest what the difference may be. Likewise, there are other interesting comparisons: are you more-likely to be accused or convicted of a crime under one set of circumstances than another, given similar circumstances otherwise? E.g. if you're black, white, rich, poor, living in Detroit, living in San Francisco, or whatever, and a certain set of circumstances occur which lead you to be a suspect in a crime, do those circumstances also lead to conviction equally as-often? (We can't ask if you're found guilty of the crime more-frequently when you're not guilty because the courts determine that, and so the answer is of course not to the best of our knowledge.)
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That's looking at the wrong statistics. What you'd want to consider is police shootings per encounter with police in order to see if there are any differences. Here's a study that does an excellent Baysian analysis of the data, which does show that black people are being shot by police at a greater rate than other racial groups.
It should be noted that this doesn't control for a lot of other factors that typically factor in to likelihood to commit crime such as socioeconomic status or family status. Being poor and from a single-parent household are two of the largest contributors to disposition towards criminal acts and these conditions are disproportionately seen in inner-city black communities. Those factors explain why blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Being black has almost nothing (there is still some unexplained parts of the gap between blacks and other groups, but that may just mean there is some factor not being controlled for.) to do with committing crime.
That line about the US having the best justice system money can buy is meant to be sarcasm. Isn't "putting their finger on the scales of justice" what you do when you introduce money to this situation, not when you remove it?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
A dollar that goes to ensuring he gets a free trial is a dollar that doesn't fund acts of racism in public.
I sued a telemarketer once. I did everything I could to load up their legal bill. Since the lawyer was in Phoenix and the company was in Florida, I'd send a response to the one who didn't send me the petition. If Florida sent me something, I'd mail the response to Phoenix.
I won $300 by the end of it because they gave up. Talking to their lawyer I said "I know they paid you a lot of money. That's all that matters." Of course he thought it was funny. He got paid. It didn't matter who got the money as long as it was removed from the company.
Removing money from racists to pay a lawyer is a much better use of the money of racists than anything else they'd come up with like idiot signs or idiot flags. Or bus fares to their rallies.
Work Safe Porn
If it's not ok to fund white bigots then it's not ok to fund non-white bigots. It's pretty obvious the KKK et al, BLM/antifa, and BAMN all have self-serving agendas aligned along various lines, all under the guise of making the world a better place, of course.
Anyway, it's a little more complicated than you suggest.
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pu...
Of reported persons who died during the process of arrest, 95 percent were male. About 42 percent were white, 32 percent were black/African American and 20 percent were Hispanic or Latino. More than half (55 percent) were between ages 25 and 44, and juveniles (persons under age 18) were about three percent of all arrest-related deaths.
Among persons who committed suicide during the process of arrest, 60 percent were white, 20 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 15 percent were black/African American. About 12 percent of persons who committed suicide during the process of arrest allegedly committed homicide during or prior to the arrest.
Of reported arrest-related deaths by intoxication, black/African Americans were 41 percent of persons who died, whites were 34 percent and Hispanic or Latinos were 21 percent. During an arrest, females were more likely than males to die of intoxication (16 percent compared to 11 percent) and natural causes (12 percent compared to five percent).
This one does contradict but only when the suspect is drunk.
Over the seven year period when the arrest-related deaths were reported to BJS, the FBI estimated that state and local law enforcement officers made nearly 98 million arrests.
5000 arrest related deaths over 98 million.. Not nearly as bad as the media makes it out to be, but I'm sure we can agree that we'd like it closer to 0.
Show me the law that says hiring a lawyer amounts to hate speech....
He was seen marching with a white supremacist group (Vanguard America) and was seen wearing one of their shields early in the protest. Couple that with statements by others who knew him that he espoused white supremacist views, I don't think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to draw the line, unless you're intentionally trying to make a group like Vanguard look less loathsome than they are by making the absurd claim that he had nothing to do with them.
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It's a private company and they should have freedom of association. People like to think its a one-way street where the company suddenly has all this power, but you are just as free to boycott or not associate with companies that take actions or hold positions that you do not support.
Crowdfunding sites aren't the only way for others to support individuals. Even before the internet existed, I remember plenty of local fundraisers at churches or through other organizations like the VFW back in the day to raise money for people who had fallen on hard times or experienced other financial hardships. Those were mostly for people who were diagnosed with cancer or had a spouse die suddenly or tragically instead of some skinhead scum driving a car into a crowd of people, but that hardly matters. People were able to raise money for other people long before sites like kickstarter or indiegogo existed. I think they'll still be able to manage if they really want to do so.
You need to remember the biblical admonition against throwing pearls before swine. GP knows exactly WTF this guy did, and is being a parrot. Your effort is wasted on him.
I'm sorry.
He's being charged with the crime of driving a car into a group of people. Nazi or not that's still a crime. If he's guilty of killing someone, it doesn't matter much what his beliefs are.
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No, BLM is recognised as a Black Power movement. 93% of Black homicides are committed by black people (84% of homicides against white people are committed by whites; while this is only a 10% difference, in the population sizes, a vast amount more white people are killed by non-whites than the other way round.
If Black Lives Matter, then to get the biggest return, they need to address the (probably cultural, gangsta, edgy, which is so popular it's practically mainstream) issues in their own community first.
But that'd not get any political points and headlines. So nobody does it, or is even allowed to speak about it.
That being said, it's pretty much a no brainer to block this (as you intimate). To my thinking, and addressing earlier in the thread, it's not because he has any particular political ideology (it's not about that), it's because the complete arse chose to drive his car straight at people. All observations are that this was a deliberate act of murder, and needs to be treated as such. We've had such things over here in Europe, and each one has been tied to extremist organisations (and planned). I suspect that this wasn't planned, but a spur of the moment thing, but it's in the same league as terror attacks. There is, quite simply, no excuse for that behaviour. There are points that you turn round and say "yeah, this is no longer political, it's legal", and what would be real bad for business is showing support for murder.
If the right want to crowd fund, sure.. Let them. If the left, or BLM want to crowd fund, sure.. They're all extreme, but it gives a useful trail on who is doing what, which may inform intelligence communities, which is useful. It also keeps them quiet (well, less violent, and more talky, which is generally a good thing).
I'm largely centre politically, with odd steps to the right of Attila the Hun, or left of Lennin (all depends on the matter at hand), and there's no way in hell that I'd want to be associated with this.
Now if they allow crowd funding for legal funds of black people accused of murdering other people, with this weight of observable evidence in the public domain, then they get strung up for hypocrisy, as you rightfully put.
And what actions are those? The leaders of the movement have been quick to condemn any violence done in BLM's name. You are literally just making shit up to try to create a false equivalency.
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BLM doesn't advocate violence in pursuit of their objectives. In fact, they don't even have any objectives. Many activists don't understand that to be effective, you need to have clear actionable goals. As an example of this, look at the two movements that arose in reaction to the 2008 financial bailout: Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party. One had clear goals, the other did not. Occupy Wall Street accomplished nothing, and has mostly faded away. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is running the country.
What it is though, is inaccurate and unfair.
Life isn't fair though, so quit bitching about it. You get to post on the internet instead of slowly dying in a diamond mine in a country that largely doesn't even have electricity. If your biggest problem in life is that the media or businesses aren't perfectly objective, I think that you've got it pretty good on the whole. But if you're really that upset about it, start your own media organization. There is nothing outside of your own control that's stopping you from doing so.
BLM has a clearly defined goal: to draw attention to black deaths by policemen being higher than white deaths. You may say that there are reasons for this, and you did say that it's a "black power" movement, but look at the results:
As a result of BLM protests, municipalities across the country have gotten police cams, which have served to reduce police violence. Secondly, a lot of municipalities have gotten de-escalation training, with good results. These things are good for everyone, not just black people.
So you could say that as a result of BLM, Americans of all races have benefited.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except he wasn't....
http://www.snopes.com/george-s...
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BLM advocates nonviolence and loving engagement. When people associated with BLM have engaged in violence, the organization has denounced their actions.
Can you cite any white supremacist organization that has denounced the actions of James Fields in Charlottesville?
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise BLM, but comparing them to Nazis is absurd.
Here. Or do statements by former classmates and teachers not satisfy you?
If that is the case, where is the crowdfunding source for all the public defenders? Not for this one high profile case.
There is an irony to your statement that I don't think you intended or are aware. The public defenders office very expensive.
https://news.vice.com/article/...
Because people who are poor (of any race) are more likely to get caught committing crimes, and black people are more likely to be poor. So if you want to support the hypothesis that black people are inherently more crime-prone, then you need to take away the skew that economic effects introduce.
In any case it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The equivalency argument concludes that to consistent, if campaigns like this one are disallowed, then no campaigns by BLM whatsoever should be allowed.
But that logically holds only if anything that anyone does under the label "BLM" is morally equivalent to murder.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're right, it's not a case of "the cops hate minorities"; it's a case of the cops viewing themselves as soldiers and the rest of us -- white, black, or whatever -- as the enemy. There's a very real problem with hyper-aggressive, militarized police in this country, but BLM obscures it behind a cloud of identity politics.
Gotta admire a man who will stand up for assault and battery.
So you equate punching someone who is there deliberately to provoke an incident at a political rally (documented in a hit piece on the candidate the rally was for) with Nazis who drive a car into a crowd? Wow. That's what you say when you claim that Trump has said he'd pay for the defense of this Nazi ("these people"), when the truth is that "these people" refers to a very different group.
Oh, good grief.
My point was that Trump has supported violence before. He said what he said - that he would pay th elegal bills of his supporters who committed violence agains those he opposed.
But yes, you are correct, he did not specifically say that he was going to pay the legal bills of James Alex Fields Jr., the guy who drove his car into a crowd of protesters. You'll also note that I did not specifically say that Trump would pay for the legal fees of James Alex Fields Jr.
I said he can. Since y'all are parsing lame jokes, I figured that I would make that part very clear. As for Trump's saying he would pay people who engaged in violence, I guess you could say "FAKE NEWS!"
But are you denying that? All of those statements he made are out there for teh finding, either in print or in video. Or is your love of dear leader so strong that nothing can shake your fealty?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Black Lives Matter is not a hate group with a mission of violence. I have nothing good to say about any religion, but there' also nothing inherently violent about the Nation of Islam. There's no reason whatsoever to compare any of the things you mention to neo-nazis, unless we accept the tacit assumptions of your poisonous mentality.
In fact, any political movement is almost certainly fine SO LONG AS THEY AREN'T OPENLY ADVOCATING VIOLENCE. Like, seriously, do you REALLY not even see the fucking difference? Seriously? Scary fucking times.