The screen grabs support my views. If you think the information they contain is false, that is another matter for discussion. Whatever you think of the website, the post I linked is only presenting information. Information that can be verified via Twitter etc. The truth is that these groups (MORE etc) organized protests in Ferguson - paid people to protest there. Now the protestors are upset that they haven’t been paid yet and have been occupying MORE’s offices…lol. This is a fact - the #cutthechecks hastag etc.
Sadly at the “teens attending party” age, this is probably just a particularly bad example of what they already know. Cops are not on their side, justice is not for “them” (and by “them” I mean black kids), and they’re pretty much on their own…
But but… what if she was hiding a tactical nuke in that bikini?
Bullies tend to pick on those least capable of fighting back. If you’re a grown male police officer, are you going to pick on an exceptionally large teen male who has a chance of fighting back, or are you going to take down a weaker teenage girl in a bikini to show everyone you mean business?
And I’ll tell you what the answer is (short of the general population not tolerating this sort of thing and using numbers and whatever weaponry is available in an all-out civil war): The “good cop” pulls a gun on the out of control guy and makes him submit then arrests him, or tases him into compliance etc… As long as behavior like this is tolerated from within, they’re all “bad apples”.
How are sensationalist right-wing identity politics sites an antidote to sensationalist left-wing identity politics sites? Seriously, you are trapped in the Howard Sternification of political “news.” It is all crap built to get you mad. Stop reading them. They’ll turn you into a tribalistic moron who reflexively roots for his “side” over the other guys because [insert-bad-thing-that-the-other-team-did-once-that-really-doesn’t-matter-at-all-while-never-saying-anything-bad-about-our-team].
When I’m feeling masochistic, I’ll read Salon, Slate, Townhall, Drudge or Redstate (because I’m an equal opportunity masochist, but even I won’t touch HuffPo with a 50 ft pole). Otherwise, I just read actual news sites.
Scanning Breitbart right now, there is literally nothing meaningful or important on there. It is nothing but someone-said-something-outrageous, some-scary-thing-may-happen, look-these-people-are-scary and obama-bad. It is intellectually at the level of celebrity tabloid magazines.
Oh, wait. Breitbart, Breitbart for crissakes, has an out-of-context video or some kids fighting and some other kids breaking up the fight and this some how justifies this pig cop assaulting a little girl? What is wrong with you?
I was interested in learning more about this story and about how it was being reported and commented on.
I went onto the NPR website and their site is actively moderated. It’s clear from the comments that there are people who are getting deleted. There’s a lot of commentary both pro and con for the officer’s actions. Here’s their story and comment thread:
And over in Fox land there is a not too dissimilar comment thread except for one thing - it’s not moderated and there is plenty of openly racist comments allowed to remain. I also could not find an article about the original video - only followup stories. Maybe someone else knows how to navigate their site better than me can find that story.
It’s not the police’s job to chase people out of neighbourhoods in a free country because some racist white woman thinks there are too many black people in the area that day. Existing as a black person doesn’t become a crime just because you are in a “white neighbourhood”. What right does the police officer have to tell people to leave if they are not breaking the law?
(I understand that, as a practical way to avoid violence, obeying the police might be a good policy. But when the police are this racist, you can do everything right and it will still end badly for you.)
Here is the Rolling Stone retraction and report on their in-depth large scale investigation of what went wrong with their UVA story. Did you even bother to look before insinuating there wasn’t one? Not sure how that dodge relates to Breitbart’s history of race-baiting, but it tends to undermine your credibility.
But to follow on that note, let’s see the list of retractions from Breitbart…Here’s how they are currently “retracting” a nasty takedown of Loretta Lynch which was almost entirely premised on the erroneous assertion that she was a Clinton attorney in the Whitewater case (the original version has vanished). And here’s an image of the original article with their first version of the retraction.
Evidence from Breitbart supports confirmation bias, nothing else. Take a step back and try to look at the situation objectively:
An Officer knelt on facedown black teenage girl in bikini for an extended period of time.
An Officer charged, with gun drawn and pointed, after two obviously unarmed teens in bathing suits with towels
There’s no need to know anything else about what happened before. It’s clearly inappropriate behavior.
But if you want to go look into what happened before…there’s a lot of pretty clear evidence it didn’t happen like the convenient stooge you link to says it did. Let’s watch and see if 1) Benet Embry actually exists, 2) whether what he says is corroborated 3) whether he was actually there (note “his statement” doesn’t assert that he was…) 4) whether other assertions by other people who were there (like the person who took the viral video) are corroborated.
Maybe they were trespassing or something, I don’t know.
Running from the cops is a bad idea in general but it was a pretty predictable response considering how poorly the cops seemed to be handling the situation.
Even if the officer felt threatened that feeling needs a legitimate sounds and I didn’t see any, all the tension and panic was coming from the officers themselves.
Yes Boingboing does hate cops. That doesn’t mean there are situations like this where the cops were way in the wrong and should be subject to discipline and possible termination.
If the headline’s interesting enough and I don’t see the coverage elsewhere, then I’ll read HuffPo. But generally it comes across like an arch supermarket tabloid.
The issue with Brietbart isn’t the facts (though knowing Breitbart I wouldn’t trust them to be accurate), it’s the narrative.
The essence of the Brietbart piece says “We have people saying the police were supposed to be there, therefore the leftwing media is wrong”. But the criticism wasn’t that cops shouldn’t have been there at all, it was that when they came they were completely out of control. Brietbart is trying to win the argument by changing the argument.
