I hereby, as a prior serviceman who swore an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, pledge my rifle if Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Mayer, CEOs of Facebook and Yahoo respectively, come out with the truth of the extent of violation by the government against the privacy of the citizens of the United States of America. And herby pledge my rifle to the their defense, the defense of the Constitution and freedom of speech if either is arrested, charged and sentenced for treason in regards to the matter of the NSA's unconstitutional espionage on U.S. citizens. This is a reminder that the government is to serve the People, not the other way around.
***
U.S. CONSTITUTION : AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION : ARTICLE IV "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Government agencies not specifically sent this message that reading this, please
And if you use that rifle you'll be branded a terrorist and become the excuse they use to remove more rights.
Unless you're in a movie violence against a government is rarely an effective strategy.
Case in point. St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Have a look at some of the outrage there. Drunk students during frosh week sang a chant that's been going on for a couple of years. "Young, Y = Your sister, O = Oh, so tight, U = Under age, N = No consent, G = Grab that ass, St. Mary's boys like them young".
The students that took part in the chant were sent for sensitivity training. It seems like everyone and their dog wanted these kids expelled and sent to jail for conspiracy to commit a criminal act. Anyone that says, it's a bunch of stupid drunk teens out on their own for the first time is met with accusations of being pedophiles and death threats.
Read the comment section, there are tons of people throwing outrage and expect the boys to be castrated, despite the fact that more than half of the participants were female.
Almost 900 comments so I didn't check much, but I checked the newest, and the most popular, and saw only one advocating expulsion. Maybe you saw a different grouping but almost all the ones I saw were critical of the students but measured, the angriest tended to just complain that the article didn't refer to sex without consent as rape. I'm sure someone said something about jail or even castration somewhere but they were the minority.
As for the criticism the kids actually DID receive I think it's fully warranted. There's a lot of peer pressure for incoming 1st years, and they've just been told that guys having non-consensual sex with young girls is a legitimate and cool part of the culture. I would actually be surprised if girls (under age or not) hadn't been raped as a result of the chant in previous years.
Martin Luther King Jr. lived in a vastly different time.
It's 2013 and a black guy's President. Not that black people - or rather, people in general - should not be on guard for it... But the current media frenzy over making every single goddamned thing that happens a racial issue? Time to put Sharpton and Friends into the closet. Keep picking at a wound and it won't heal. Keep pretending we're still in the 60s and we'll never leave them.
Things are far better than they were in the 60s.
But all other things being equal, do you really think you'd do just as well if you were black instead of white? The fact we've come a very long way doesn't mean we're at our destination.
Part of the whole thing about treating women equally is giving up on the ridiculous concept that women aren't interested in sex and that, as a result, sex jokes are only appropriate around males. Women have tits, men sometimes stare at them, pictures that catch them in the act is funny. There's no reason women shouldn't hear this joke, or feel threatened by it.
The problem isn't that these people weren't "acting as adults." The problem is that a society that freaks out when a boob is shown for half a second in the middle of the superbowl aren't acting like adults. It's a fucking body part. It's not going to scar children for life. They've all seen it before and sucked upon it.
It's about context. Telling sexual jokes in a comedy club when they're expecting and receptive to it is fine. Telling sexual jokes in a tech conference where women are already an objectified minority who are dealing with a lot of unwanted sexual attention is not.
Sorry, but no. There was a question about the 2000 election, but Bush still won when the media conducted their own recounts*. What "controversy" are you referring to in 2004? Or are you just disagreeing with the outcome, again?
Also noted was a purge of over 54,000 citizens from the Florida voting rolls identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-Americans. The majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.
[...]
The number of ballots marked for Buchanan in Palm Beach County was oddly large. Early reports had Buchanan receiving about 0.8% of the vote in Palm Beach County (a total of 3,407 votes), significantly outperforming his state-wide vote share of 0.29%.
[...]
Representatives of Buchanan's campaign and the Reform Party estimated Buchanan's true vote total at between 400 and 1,000 votes
[...]
A later review of discarded ballots in Palm Beach County by the Palm Beach Post showed that 5,330 ballots were spoiled with votes cast for both Gore and Buchanan, and 1,631 for Bush and Buchanan.
You can't know precisely how the numbers would balance out, but I think the evidence is pretty convincing that of the people in Florida who were both legally allowed, and willing, to vote more would have voted for Gore than Bush. The 'hanging chads' took the focus because they were the only mechanism that you could fix afterwards, but when you look at everything that went on it's pretty clear it was very messy, and messy in a way that likely favoured Bush by more than the margin.
Well, I can't speak for the original poster, but in my book anyone who can't even figure out the name of which candidate they intend to vote for doesn't deserve to have their vote counted.
This is the main reason why I support removing party affiliation from all ballots. If someone can't be bothered to learn the name of the person that they're voting for, then they shouldn't be voting. Increasing voter turnout is only a worthwhile goal if the voters actually have some idea of what they're doing.
This isn't like the US where they're generally voting on party lines, but can break ranks. In a parliamentary system they always vote the party line and knowing the candidates names is almost an academic exercise. Candidates for the major parties are generally well qualified sane people, and they'll go to parliament and vote along party lines just like every other MP in their party.
Some higher ranking candidates get a position in the cabinet or shadow cabinet, and in that case their views actually matter (at least to the party), but for the most part all they really do is help out constituents and vote along party lines.
I'm Canadian and I've actually voted for 3 or 4 different parties at the federal level, and each time I put in a lot of research into making my decision, but only once actually cared about one of the candidates (who was unusually qualified and influential). I don't think anything less of the voters who didn't know the name of the Liberal candidate because the name of that candidate didn't really matter.
And obviously stupidy non-sensical correlations are up. Wow.. talk about ridiculous. Libs want to ban guns because they are so dangerous.. the number of guns going up is actually a direct correlation according to DoJ and dozens of studies showing that the number 1 thing that causes a criminal to NOT commit a crime is the potential presence of a gun. Same reason that Crime is up in all but two small townships in the UK,.. and that the groundswell there is to re-legalize guns.. Number one argument?.. so that people can defend themselves. But that's okay... disregard the facts (as most libs do) and inject your semi-witty banter.
Yes, instead of my witty banter lets rely on your unimpeachable data consisting of a cherry picked example that doesn't even seem to be right, unnamed "studies", and reports by a non-scientific government agency (I'll trust their stats, but not their analysis).
Here's the one quick bit of info I found that suggests that there's isn't much correlation either way. Which isn't surprising, in most cases I'd expect guns to be dwarfed by socio-economic factors when it comes to crime, and it's hard to remove confounders from the data. Still, there's a piece of actual data for the null hypothesis.
Look at NYC and especially Chicago, thugs do carry guns, I think Chicago gov has restricted them beyond legal use. (Need to further research) criminals thrive there however.
Unfortunately there's not much that can be done at the city, or even the state level to keep guns away from criminals since they can just buy them out of state. You need a controlled border that guns can't easily be carried across en mass.
Lots of kids smoke pot, and talk a lot of gansta BS.
And AFAIK the only fighting we know Martin did is the fight with Zimmerman.
Zimmerman had a checkered past too, he was charged with assaulting an officer; accused by his cousin of molestation; his ex-girlfriend had a domestic violence restraining order against him, his marriage was in trouble and wife had just left to stay with her father. Is it that hard to believe the person with a violent documented history and current emotional distress could have instigated the fight?
You realize that even if you do everything that the guy with the gun says, he might shoot you anyway, right? You want to live in a world where only criminals have guns.
Criminals don't just conjure guns up out of the ether. All those guns are manufactured legally and often enter the marketplace legally as well. You can get the guns away from the criminals but it's going to involve taking them away from the law abiding citizens too.
You're free to presume that, but I think the evidence is inconclusive at best. People around a lot of guns are people who feel threatened, some are more cautious, but some react to threats with aggression. Some will avoid confrontation because of how quickly they escalate, some will escalate more readily because the last one to escalate dies. You can spin whatever narrative you want but you need actual evidence.
OH REALLY? Willing to bet your life on the kindness and willingness of strangers, especially when they don't know who is in the right?
Actually the bystander effect doesn't apply here. It kicks in when there's a bunch of bystanders, none of whom have a clear responsibility to intervene, so none take the initiative to be the one person who steps out from the crowd. It's much different with a small handful of people.
You consider the fear that you may be killed reasonable enough to be scared, but not reasonable enough to defend yourself with the only weapon you have? I don't think that we're going to get anywhere with this: our views on self defense are clearly irreconcilable.
Maybe. We don't know how aggressive or out of control Martin really was, that goes a long way to determining if Zimmerman's fear would have been rational or just panic. But I think it's unlikely that an unarmed Zimmerman would have been a dead or seriously injured Zimmerman.
But even if those didn't exist, you cannot reasonably compare a controlled fight on a special stage with doctors and judges standing around to stop the fight if it gets out of hand with a street brawl on concrete and no one there.
But there were bystanders around who had called the police. They very well could have stepped in if the fight got out of hand.
A stranger is on top of you, bashing your head on the ground with no sign of stopping. You don't think that it's a reasonable fear that you're going to lose your life?
Reasonable enough to be scared? Definitely.
Reasonable enough to kill them. No.
But then again I could panic and I think I'd be perfectly justified in doing so, which is why it's probably a good thing I don't carry a gun.
Well you definitely flunked out of medical school. And even if he wasn't, permanent brain damage is reason enough. And even if that wasn't, then you still cannot say that a reasonable person would not fear for their life in that situation.
It happens but as evidenced by the lack of dead MMA fighters it's not that common. And I'm not saying that a reasonable person wouldn't fear for their life, I don't think it's a reasonable fear but reasonable people panic all the time.
Even if your ugly characterization is accurate that doesn't actually make his death something other than a tragedy.
People make bad decisions which can cost them their lives, and in a sense its a tragedy, yes, but not a tragedy in the sense that "we have to make sure noone can defend themselves with lethal force".
That's the problem with the "Trayvon" designation for the asteroid, it has nothing to do with Trayvon Martin. It's just a way to signal that you're against racial profiling and guns if you think Zimmerman is guilty, or a way to signal that you believe in self defence and gun rights if you think Zimmerman did the right think. Only two people really know what happened, one of them is dead, and no one really cares anyway except as a proxy in a political debate.
There was absolutely no evidence that Zimmerman initiated the fight considering that Trayvon did not have a mark on him except the fatal gunshot wound.
All that the injuries show is that Martin was winning, and outside of Zimmerman's testimony we don't really have evidence that Martin started the fight either.
Considering that it was not until Zimmerman was being "ground pounded", quoting the prosecution witness testimony, it seems pretty obvious what happened here: Zimmerman was overzealous while following a suspicious person walking through his neighborhood, who confronted Zimmerman and then attacked him after not liking whatever response followed, if any.
Assuming that happened the response could be part of an initiation.
Had Zimmerman been looking to follow and kill a black guy, then he would have pulled his gun before the beginning of the fight, and he would have lost it after having his head repeatedly thrown against the pavement, which would have been Zimmerman's last moments alive on Earth because you do not bash someone's skull into pavement repeatedly to say hello.
Not many claim that "Zimmerman been looking to follow and kill a black guy". They claim he followed Martin for no reason, somehow instigated or didn't try to avoid the confrontation (knowing he had a gun), then shot Martin when his life wasn't really in jeopardy.
And really, especially with the other people around Zimmerman wasn't in realistic danger of being killed due to the ground pounding. Though I'll forgive him for panicking and freaking out that his gun might come into play.
Most likely Martin was a teenager who had some issues and was way too ready to start a fight. A guy pissed him off by following him, and a fight started. Martin went in with the objective of beating him up, instead the guy panicked and shot him.
Martin was deserving of some community service and some counselling. He didn't deserve to die.
Even if the kid hadn't been a dope-smoking, fight-starting, gangsta-wannabe thug who lacked the foresight to consider the lack of wisdom in physically attacking a random stranger in a southern state with both concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws in effect, what scientific potential did he embody (forget actually accomplish) to warrant his name being carried into astronomic posterity?
Even if your ugly characterization is accurate that doesn't actually make his death something other than a tragedy.
Though I agree that giving asteriods politically charged names is generally a bad idea.
Yes, let's name all of the asteroids after attempted murders who got justice. Nothing political or controversial about that. I'm looking forward to smoking some illegal drugs, putting on bulky clothing and going out an shoplifting some stuff, then attacking the first cracker that gives me a dirty look. All the evidence of my motivation can be suppressed, and I'll get a space rock named after me too.
Wow. I hope you realize your version goes a lot further than the court verdict.
The court found that there wasn't sufficient proof that Zimmerman initiated the fight, or that he didn't have reasonable grounds to fear for his life.
That's a long way from determining that Martin, initiated the confrontation, tried to kill Zimmerman, shoplifted (first I heard of this), or was going to smoke drugs that evening (irrelevant even if true).
The original Bin Laden al-Qaeda is practically non-existent, its Islamist affiliates are too busy trying to win over regimes in the mideast, Hamas is trying not to piss off the US considering that Obama has been much more pro-Palestinian. Hezbollah....maybe. We're talking about a few tens of thousands of eligible individuals here, most of them with Hezbollah and Hamas.
I have serious doubts that this is anything other than the Three Letter agencies trying to project a Cold War interpretation ("big centralized nation-state entity out to get us") onto a set of data that only shows small, disparate groups who are all actually too busy trying to avoid being smashed by the US, Israel, or the Arab League.
I doubt there's much in the way of deliberate infiltration.
The NSA isn't just a bunch of mathematicians, crackers, and sysadmins, they need a ton of people who can understand and contextualize the intelligence they receive. I'd expect the NSA to actively recruit from the same pool as their targets, it's inevitable that a few of those potential hires will turn out to be too close for comfort.
Snowden has stated that he took his job with the plan from the start to steal and leak classified information. To do that he would have to have lied to get his job, lied to get his security clearance, and lied to get access to the data. You only consider him "trustworthy" because you agree with his crimes, the ones that can actually be found in the law as opposed to the placards of activists.
If he had been some outsider who decided to infiltrate the NSA and dump all the info I'd have some doubts about his motives.
But he had worked for the NSA in various capacities since 2006. It's not so much joining a company to leak whatever docs they might have, it's switching jobs in a company so you can leak the docs you know they have.
Despite the fact that the sender has no real way of knowing if the recipient is operating a vehicle unless they are in the vehicle with them, and on top of that, the text is a non-time sensitive communication like a physical letter. The only reason to read it the moment you get it is because you want to, otherwise you just wait until it's convenient, nobody is in any way forcing you to read it now.
As to the morons in NJ, they said "...know, the recipient will view the text while driving". I guess the statement of "I didn't know he/she was stupid enough to text while driving." suddenly becomes a valid defense.
Ok, jerk passenger in the back knows the driver has a habit of checking texts while they're driving. So the passenger waits till they're in a really complicated traffic situation, then, wanting to cause a little mayhem, they send the driver a text knowing they'll read it at that moment. The driver does as intended and an accident ensues.
I think a good claim could be made that the passenger is also liable for the accident.
Slashdot Mirror
I hereby, as a prior serviceman who swore an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, pledge my rifle if Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Mayer, CEOs of Facebook and Yahoo respectively, come out with the truth of the extent of violation by the government against the privacy of the citizens of the United States of America. And herby pledge my rifle to the their defense, the defense of the Constitution and freedom of speech if either is arrested, charged and sentenced for treason in regards to the matter of the NSA's unconstitutional espionage on U.S. citizens. This is a reminder that the government is to serve the People, not the other way around.
***
U.S. CONSTITUTION : AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION : ARTICLE IV
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Government agencies not specifically sent this message that reading this, please
And if you use that rifle you'll be branded a terrorist and become the excuse they use to remove more rights.
Unless you're in a movie violence against a government is rarely an effective strategy.
Yeah, there's a fine line for sure and you need to be careful in how you handle it.
Case in point. St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Have a look at some of the outrage there. Drunk students during frosh week sang a chant that's been going on for a couple of years. "Young, Y = Your sister, O = Oh, so tight, U = Under age, N = No consent, G = Grab that ass, St. Mary's boys like them young".
The students that took part in the chant were sent for sensitivity training. It seems like everyone and their dog wanted these kids expelled and sent to jail for conspiracy to commit a criminal act. Anyone that says, it's a bunch of stupid drunk teens out on their own for the first time is met with accusations of being pedophiles and death threats.
Read the comment section, there are tons of people throwing outrage and expect the boys to be castrated, despite the fact that more than half of the participants were female.
Almost 900 comments so I didn't check much, but I checked the newest, and the most popular, and saw only one advocating expulsion. Maybe you saw a different grouping but almost all the ones I saw were critical of the students but measured, the angriest tended to just complain that the article didn't refer to sex without consent as rape. I'm sure someone said something about jail or even castration somewhere but they were the minority.
As for the criticism the kids actually DID receive I think it's fully warranted. There's a lot of peer pressure for incoming 1st years, and they've just been told that guys having non-consensual sex with young girls is a legitimate and cool part of the culture. I would actually be surprised if girls (under age or not) hadn't been raped as a result of the chant in previous years.
Martin Luther King Jr. lived in a vastly different time.
It's 2013 and a black guy's President. Not that black people - or rather, people in general - should not be on guard for it... But the current media frenzy over making every single goddamned thing that happens a racial issue? Time to put Sharpton and Friends into the closet. Keep picking at a wound and it won't heal. Keep pretending we're still in the 60s and we'll never leave them.
Things are far better than they were in the 60s.
But all other things being equal, do you really think you'd do just as well if you were black instead of white? The fact we've come a very long way doesn't mean we're at our destination.
Mixed audience? What is this, the 1950's?
Part of the whole thing about treating women equally is giving up on the ridiculous concept that women aren't interested in sex and that, as a result, sex jokes are only appropriate around males. Women have tits, men sometimes stare at them, pictures that catch them in the act is funny. There's no reason women shouldn't hear this joke, or feel threatened by it.
The problem isn't that these people weren't "acting as adults." The problem is that a society that freaks out when a boob is shown for half a second in the middle of the superbowl aren't acting like adults. It's a fucking body part. It's not going to scar children for life. They've all seen it before and sucked upon it.
It's about context. Telling sexual jokes in a comedy club when they're expecting and receptive to it is fine. Telling sexual jokes in a tech conference where women are already an objectified minority who are dealing with a lot of unwanted sexual attention is not.
Sorry, but no. There was a question about the 2000 election, but Bush still won when the media conducted their own recounts*. What "controversy" are you referring to in 2004? Or are you just disagreeing with the outcome, again?
Newspapers' recount shows Bush prevailed
* It's worth pointing out that the hotspot for that controversy about the "chads" took place in a county controlled by Democrats.
There were a lot more problems than 'hanging chads'
Also noted was a purge of over 54,000 citizens from the Florida voting rolls identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-Americans. The majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.
[...]
The number of ballots marked for Buchanan in Palm Beach County was oddly large. Early reports had Buchanan receiving about 0.8% of the vote in Palm Beach County (a total of 3,407 votes), significantly outperforming his state-wide vote share of 0.29%.
[...]
Representatives of Buchanan's campaign and the Reform Party estimated Buchanan's true vote total at between 400 and 1,000 votes
[...]
A later review of discarded ballots in Palm Beach County by the Palm Beach Post showed that 5,330 ballots were spoiled with votes cast for both Gore and Buchanan, and 1,631 for Bush and Buchanan.
You can't know precisely how the numbers would balance out, but I think the evidence is pretty convincing that of the people in Florida who were both legally allowed, and willing, to vote more would have voted for Gore than Bush. The 'hanging chads' took the focus because they were the only mechanism that you could fix afterwards, but when you look at everything that went on it's pretty clear it was very messy, and messy in a way that likely favoured Bush by more than the margin.
Well, I can't speak for the original poster, but in my book anyone who can't even figure out the name of which candidate they intend to vote for doesn't deserve to have their vote counted.
This is the main reason why I support removing party affiliation from all ballots. If someone can't be bothered to learn the name of the person that they're voting for, then they shouldn't be voting. Increasing voter turnout is only a worthwhile goal if the voters actually have some idea of what they're doing.
This isn't like the US where they're generally voting on party lines, but can break ranks. In a parliamentary system they always vote the party line and knowing the candidates names is almost an academic exercise. Candidates for the major parties are generally well qualified sane people, and they'll go to parliament and vote along party lines just like every other MP in their party.
Some higher ranking candidates get a position in the cabinet or shadow cabinet, and in that case their views actually matter (at least to the party), but for the most part all they really do is help out constituents and vote along party lines.
I'm Canadian and I've actually voted for 3 or 4 different parties at the federal level, and each time I put in a lot of research into making my decision, but only once actually cared about one of the candidates (who was unusually qualified and influential). I don't think anything less of the voters who didn't know the name of the Liberal candidate because the name of that candidate didn't really matter.
And obviously stupidy non-sensical correlations are up. Wow.. talk about ridiculous. Libs want to ban guns because they are so dangerous.. the number of guns going up is actually a direct correlation according to DoJ and dozens of studies showing that the number 1 thing that causes a criminal to NOT commit a crime is the potential presence of a gun. Same reason that Crime is up in all but two small townships in the UK,.. and that the groundswell there is to re-legalize guns.. Number one argument?.. so that people can defend themselves. But that's okay... disregard the facts (as most libs do) and inject your semi-witty banter.
Ohh the humanity! Look at all that Crime in the UK!
Yes, instead of my witty banter lets rely on your unimpeachable data consisting of a cherry picked example that doesn't even seem to be right, unnamed "studies", and reports by a non-scientific government agency (I'll trust their stats, but not their analysis).
Here's the one quick bit of info I found that suggests that there's isn't much correlation either way. Which isn't surprising, in most cases I'd expect guns to be dwarfed by socio-economic factors when it comes to crime, and it's hard to remove confounders from the data. Still, there's a piece of actual data for the null hypothesis.
Look at NYC and especially Chicago, thugs do carry guns, I think Chicago gov has restricted them beyond legal use. (Need to further research) criminals thrive there however.
Unfortunately there's not much that can be done at the city, or even the state level to keep guns away from criminals since they can just buy them out of state. You need a controlled border that guns can't easily be carried across en mass.
Lots of kids smoke pot, and talk a lot of gansta BS.
And AFAIK the only fighting we know Martin did is the fight with Zimmerman.
Zimmerman had a checkered past too, he was charged with assaulting an officer; accused by his cousin of molestation; his ex-girlfriend had a domestic violence restraining order against him, his marriage was in trouble and wife had just left to stay with her father. Is it that hard to believe the person with a violent documented history and current emotional distress could have instigated the fight?
You realize that even if you do everything that the guy with the gun says, he might shoot you anyway, right? You want to live in a world where only criminals have guns.
Criminals don't just conjure guns up out of the ether. All those guns are manufactured legally and often enter the marketplace legally as well. You can get the guns away from the criminals but it's going to involve taking them away from the law abiding citizens too.
Smartphone ownership is UP
Violent crime is DOWN.
Cat videos on Youtube are UP
Violent crime is DOWN.
Justin Beiber album sales are UP
Violent crime is DOWN.
Google it yourself.
Pretty simple. Looking for a rough correlation in two variables in one country is almost meaningless.
You're free to presume that, but I think the evidence is inconclusive at best. People around a lot of guns are people who feel threatened, some are more cautious, but some react to threats with aggression. Some will avoid confrontation because of how quickly they escalate, some will escalate more readily because the last one to escalate dies. You can spin whatever narrative you want but you need actual evidence.
OH REALLY? Willing to bet your life on the kindness and willingness of strangers, especially when they don't know who is in the right?
Actually the bystander effect doesn't apply here. It kicks in when there's a bunch of bystanders, none of whom have a clear responsibility to intervene, so none take the initiative to be the one person who steps out from the crowd. It's much different with a small handful of people.
You consider the fear that you may be killed reasonable enough to be scared, but not reasonable enough to defend yourself with the only weapon you have? I don't think that we're going to get anywhere with this: our views on self defense are clearly irreconcilable.
Maybe. We don't know how aggressive or out of control Martin really was, that goes a long way to determining if Zimmerman's fear would have been rational or just panic. But I think it's unlikely that an unarmed Zimmerman would have been a dead or seriously injured Zimmerman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalities_in_mixed_martial_arts_contests
But even if those didn't exist, you cannot reasonably compare a controlled fight on a special stage with doctors and judges standing around to stop the fight if it gets out of hand with a street brawl on concrete and no one there.
But there were bystanders around who had called the police. They very well could have stepped in if the fight got out of hand.
A stranger is on top of you, bashing your head on the ground with no sign of stopping. You don't think that it's a reasonable fear that you're going to lose your life?
Reasonable enough to be scared? Definitely.
Reasonable enough to kill them. No.
But then again I could panic and I think I'd be perfectly justified in doing so, which is why it's probably a good thing I don't carry a gun.
Well you definitely flunked out of medical school. And even if he wasn't, permanent brain damage is reason enough. And even if that wasn't, then you still cannot say that a reasonable person would not fear for their life in that situation.
It happens but as evidenced by the lack of dead MMA fighters it's not that common. And I'm not saying that a reasonable person wouldn't fear for their life, I don't think it's a reasonable fear but reasonable people panic all the time.
Even if your ugly characterization is accurate that doesn't actually make his death something other than a tragedy.
People make bad decisions which can cost them their lives, and in a sense its a tragedy, yes, but not a tragedy in the sense that "we have to make sure noone can defend themselves with lethal force".
That's the problem with the "Trayvon" designation for the asteroid, it has nothing to do with Trayvon Martin. It's just a way to signal that you're against racial profiling and guns if you think Zimmerman is guilty, or a way to signal that you believe in self defence and gun rights if you think Zimmerman did the right think. Only two people really know what happened, one of them is dead, and no one really cares anyway except as a proxy in a political debate.
Your macho, thug tirade just convinced me to donate to zimmerman *again*.
If every thug who ever ambushes a stranger and does the "ground and pound" dance gets shot and killed, the world will be a better place.
I don't like living in a world where people start fights.
But I like living in a world where fights end with someone getting shot even less.
There was absolutely no evidence that Zimmerman initiated the fight considering that Trayvon did not have a mark on him except the fatal gunshot wound.
All that the injuries show is that Martin was winning, and outside of Zimmerman's testimony we don't really have evidence that Martin started the fight either.
Considering that it was not until Zimmerman was being "ground pounded", quoting the prosecution witness testimony, it seems pretty obvious what happened here: Zimmerman was overzealous while following a suspicious person walking through his neighborhood, who confronted Zimmerman and then attacked him after not liking whatever response followed, if any.
Assuming that happened the response could be part of an initiation.
Had Zimmerman been looking to follow and kill a black guy, then he would have pulled his gun before the beginning of the fight, and he would have lost it after having his head repeatedly thrown against the pavement, which would have been Zimmerman's last moments alive on Earth because you do not bash someone's skull into pavement repeatedly to say hello.
Not many claim that "Zimmerman been looking to follow and kill a black guy". They claim he followed Martin for no reason, somehow instigated or didn't try to avoid the confrontation (knowing he had a gun), then shot Martin when his life wasn't really in jeopardy.
And really, especially with the other people around Zimmerman wasn't in realistic danger of being killed due to the ground pounding. Though I'll forgive him for panicking and freaking out that his gun might come into play.
Most likely Martin was a teenager who had some issues and was way too ready to start a fight. A guy pissed him off by following him, and a fight started. Martin went in with the objective of beating him up, instead the guy panicked and shot him.
Martin was deserving of some community service and some counselling. He didn't deserve to die.
Agreed.
Even if the kid hadn't been a dope-smoking, fight-starting, gangsta-wannabe thug who lacked the foresight to consider the lack of wisdom in physically attacking a random stranger in a southern state with both concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws in effect, what scientific potential did he embody (forget actually accomplish) to warrant his name being carried into astronomic posterity?
Even if your ugly characterization is accurate that doesn't actually make his death something other than a tragedy.
Though I agree that giving asteriods politically charged names is generally a bad idea.
Yes, let's name all of the asteroids after attempted murders who got justice. Nothing political or controversial about that.
I'm looking forward to smoking some illegal drugs, putting on bulky clothing and going out an shoplifting some stuff, then attacking the first cracker that gives me a dirty look. All the evidence of my motivation can be suppressed, and I'll get a space rock named after me too.
Wow. I hope you realize your version goes a lot further than the court verdict.
The court found that there wasn't sufficient proof that Zimmerman initiated the fight, or that he didn't have reasonable grounds to fear for his life.
That's a long way from determining that Martin, initiated the confrontation, tried to kill Zimmerman, shoplifted (first I heard of this), or was going to smoke drugs that evening (irrelevant even if true).
or actual infiltration?
The original Bin Laden al-Qaeda is practically non-existent, its Islamist affiliates are too busy trying to win over regimes in the mideast, Hamas is trying not to piss off the US considering that Obama has been much more pro-Palestinian. Hezbollah....maybe. We're talking about a few tens of thousands of eligible individuals here, most of them with Hezbollah and Hamas.
I have serious doubts that this is anything other than the Three Letter agencies trying to project a Cold War interpretation ("big centralized nation-state entity out to get us") onto a set of data that only shows small, disparate groups who are all actually too busy trying to avoid being smashed by the US, Israel, or the Arab League.
I doubt there's much in the way of deliberate infiltration.
The NSA isn't just a bunch of mathematicians, crackers, and sysadmins, they need a ton of people who can understand and contextualize the intelligence they receive. I'd expect the NSA to actively recruit from the same pool as their targets, it's inevitable that a few of those potential hires will turn out to be too close for comfort.
Is whether he used wget.
Snowden has stated that he took his job with the plan from the start to steal and leak classified information. To do that he would have to have lied to get his job, lied to get his security clearance, and lied to get access to the data. You only consider him "trustworthy" because you agree with his crimes, the ones that can actually be found in the law as opposed to the placards of activists.
If he had been some outsider who decided to infiltrate the NSA and dump all the info I'd have some doubts about his motives.
But he had worked for the NSA in various capacities since 2006. It's not so much joining a company to leak whatever docs they might have, it's switching jobs in a company so you can leak the docs you know they have.
Despite the fact that the sender has no real way of knowing if the recipient is operating a vehicle unless they are in the vehicle with them, and on top of that, the text is a non-time sensitive communication like a physical letter. The only reason to read it the moment you get it is because you want to, otherwise you just wait until it's convenient, nobody is in any way forcing you to read it now.
As to the morons in NJ, they said "...know, the recipient will view the text while driving". I guess the statement of "I didn't know he/she was stupid enough to text while driving." suddenly becomes a valid defense.
Ok, jerk passenger in the back knows the driver has a habit of checking texts while they're driving. So the passenger waits till they're in a really complicated traffic situation, then, wanting to cause a little mayhem, they send the driver a text knowing they'll read it at that moment. The driver does as intended and an accident ensues.
I think a good claim could be made that the passenger is also liable for the accident.