It’s a synonym for “harmless” if the other guy’s got a gun.
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Is this a rhetorical question?
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I guess it is, but I wish it wasn’t.
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Has anyone else noticed that the law and order supporters (aka news media) are focusing on Brown while the world is focusing on the police reaction to the protests?
They are creating a narrative that this is about a single isolated incident while the people of Ferguson are talking about decades of systemic abuse at the hands of police and have demonstrated such by allowing us to see how the police react to citizens being upset over police killing another one of their youths.
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Even if it were a single isolated incident, the fact that they seem to have forgotten the ‘law’ in ‘law and order’ is notably unimpressive.
Even if the victim were an arbitrarily unsympathetic scumbag, it isn’t the cops’ job to shoot him unless they’ve run out of options and are in a situation of immediate necessity.
If they actually cared about ‘law’ rather than ‘order’, every case where somebody gets gunned down by the cops rather than delivered to the judiciary would be scored as a defeat. This is…not wholly the case. Go figure.
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Which is a huge mistake: small dogs bite a lot more often than pitbulls or other large dogs. Yes, it’s true that a large dog can cause more damage, but since one of the biggest problems with animal bites is infection of some type, the size of the wound isn’t usually the biggest issue.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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Yeah, but no one gets killed by a poodle, even if they are more likely to bite. It’s a risk assessment, but there is some cognitive bias for it. It’s like how there is a push for assault rifle bans, even though they are used in a small minority of crime. Or how people fear lions, even though hippos kill more people per year.
I think the reason for that is that people with big dogs have to be much more careful to train them not to attack humans. I imagine that, while you could try to get a chihuahua put down as a dangerous dog for nipping your ankle, you’d be more likely to be laughed at than to be successful.
Relatedly, “fighting breeds” such as pitbulls tend to not be aggressive towards humans at all- they were bred to attack other animals, and it was in the breeders’ interest to breed out any tendency to attack people. Of course, there are some that will, but that’s down to the owner not the breed and often due to people having been extremely cruel to the dog to make it attack people against its natural temperament.
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Unfortunately the answer is obvious: the police have deadly weapons, have even, as we’ve recently been reminded, been given deadly weapons and other items by the military.
We’re all familiar with the principle that if all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail. It seems to be equally true that if you give someone a hammer and a bunch of nails they’ll start seeing things that need to be nailed.
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The problem, I think, is that “unarmed” can easily be confused with “not dangerous,” and that people with an axe to grind are playing up this confusion for their own purposes. We’ve often heard the term “armed and dangerous” and I would posit that because of this, we have a bias to pair them together, and a related bias to pair their opposites.
I’m trying to withhold my own judgment, but failing–I think all of us have our own biases. Some of us reflexively side with the police, and some of us reflexively side with their victims. I fall in the former category, so that you know my own biases.
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Bullshit. Plenty of examples of unarmed individuals disarming people carrying guns, and occasionally unarmed individuals even killing gunmen after disarming them (bonus…in St. Louis, apparently):
A gun certainly gives the person using it a huge advantage over someone who is unarmed, but the idea that someone who is unarmed is therefore not dangerous is absurd.
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All of these are, in fact, lethal weapons. They are generally less lethal than a bullet fired from a gun, but each of these alternative technologies have resulted in deaths.
I agree that it sounds like racist nonsense; this sentence is a disclaimer that I’m mostly playing Devil’s Advocate here. Some of the things said here I agree with–and I won’t go into what, because I know it would go over like a fart in a diving bell, no matter how logical it is–but most of it is pants-on-head stupid. Having said that, I’m plowing on with things that we’ll probably see in the rabidly right-wing media real soon now.
What we’re discussing here is the statement of a Woman of Color, and we’re saying that she’s wrong to state that a 6’4" man with a history of wrongdoing is a danger to society. That’s really what we’re saying here, that a woman is wrong to state that a man is a danger to her by default. And while Not All Men are a danger to society, you really cannot tell by looking at them whether they are or not. I mean, let’s take a bowl of M&Ms, and poison 10% of them. Go ahead, eat a handful.
Why do liberals hate conservative women? Is it because they don’t believe the things they’re told they’re supposed to believe?
note: I threw up in my mouth a little at that last bit
"I feel like an idiot "
Derp derp derp
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No, what is being said is that 1) it is not misleading to describe an unarmed teen as an “unarmed teen”, and that 2) pundits are setting out to mangle this plain, unarguable fact, in this case, because of racism
http://www.theonion.com/video/judge-rules-white-girl-will-be-tried-as-black-adul,18896/
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The fact that unarmed civillians keep getting killed, is absurd.
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Large men?
I wonder what Divine would have to say about that?
Lady Divine and her new friend Mink being hassled by a cop.
“You’re talking to a lady! You better watch your language pig before I turn you into a piece of bacon.”
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You’re right, it does happen. After all, a moisture farmer from Tatooine managed to take down a planet-destroying superweapon.
We live in a dangerous world, where anything is possible, and plucky police officers are occasionally able to murder unarmed black men through sheer determination! Miracles, dude. Miracles.
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Obviously you missed the training where officers were told that non-lethal weapons are designed to be used against non-violent protesters, not against shoplifting-suspected large men.
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