amused wrote:Shit was indeed started.
There was no need to start any shit at all.
If Zimmerman had just remained in his car, there would be no shit starting and there wouldn't be a dead kid today.
And if the police didn't encourage neighborhood watches, Zimmerman wouldn't have been in the position to be involved in the first place. Police encourage and cooperate with neighborhood watches because they're so severely outnumbered by criminals. This doesn't mean that Martin was one (though subsequent evidence proves that he was), but it justifies the existence of people like Zimmerman and their presence in under-policed neighborhoods. He had a right to be there, he had a right to be doing what he was doing. Maybe Martin did, too.
To reiterate something I mentioned a while back, there are at least 4 possibilities that are left open by the available evidence. Zimmerman was right/Martin was wrong, Zimmerman was wrong/Martin was right, both Zimmerman and Martin were right, both Zimmerman and Martin were wrong. There is no conclusive evidence available to date to justify an assertion of certain knowledge as to which of these possibilities is true, as far as I know. Maybe that evidence will appear later, and I hope it does. But an intellectually honest person would, at this point, simply admit that s/he doesn't know. Anything else is just an expression of bias, whether racial or political or whatever.
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
