Shit that Pissed me off – 9/23

Tulsa Police Officer Shoots an Unarmed Black Man with Car Trouble

I mean holy shit.  The guy has car trouble and he is clearly standing with his hands up talking to the cops.  He goes back to his car for some reason (arms still up) and they shoot him.

He’s dead.

Now, the good news is that this is being treated like a criminal investigation because the officers murdered someone.  The bad news is the inevitable backlash that will come as people say things like “well, he shouldn’t have been walking back towards the car” or “I wasn’t there so even though there is video, there is no way for me to really understand happened” or, of course “I’m going to withhold judgement until we have all the facts.”

We do have all the facts.  He was unarmed. He had car trouble.  He was black.

And now he’s dead.

Gene Wilder is also dead. But that is where the similarities end.

Oh yeah, and people have dredged up his criminal record that does not include any capital offenses as a means to justify the fact he was sentenced to death without benefit of a judge or jury.

How many more times does this need to happen until people stop trotting out the same bullshit arguments instead of acknowledging that there is a systemic problem?

This is not about that police officer friend or relative of yours who is a great person.  They probably are.  This is about a clear problem with the training of police officers when it comes to escalation and a problem with how our justice system is set up to excuse this kind of behavior when it occurs.

It isn’t that police officers are sometimes exonerated.  It is that they are almost never charged and even when they are charged, they are almost never convicted of doing anything wrong.

Minnesota Restaurant Sees Business Go Up After Posting “Muslims Get Out” on Their Sign

This weekend, a muslim man stabbed several people in a St. Cloud mall.  Which is tragic.  Th only person who is dead as a result is him.  Which is fortunate.

He was stopped by a “good guy with a gun” so that’s a big win for the NRA.  Way to go, guys!

Of course, he’s now dead so there is no opportunity to really understand what sent him off the deep end so in the absence of any information, we are just going to assume that he is a terrorist and not some guy who freaked out and used radical Islam as an excuse for an act he would have committed anyway.  I mean, we know he mentioned Allah when he was stabbing people so clearly terrorism is the only possible answer.

Since that is, apparently,  the only plausible narrative, a racist restaurant owner, emboldened by a racist Presidential candidate, felt like he could display his racism for everyone to see.  And he is being rewarded for it.

Way to go, America!

A Couple of Police Officers Accidentally Record Themselves Faking Charges Against Someone

Since guy suing the police officers is an open carry advocate, I’m expecting most conservatives who think it is totally OK for Terence Crutcher to have been shot will be completely appalled by this story.  I think it’s great when conservatives and liberals can really get behind the same issue.

For example – both liberals and conservatives love cheese!

Because there really isn’t any way to interpret this situation as anything but a dramatic abuse of authority.  I’m a little depressed Scalia passed away because watching him engage in the mental gymnastics required to justify this behavior would have been wildly entertaining.

On the one hand, the guy was protesting government overreach.  On the other hand, the police should be allowed to do anything to catch criminals.  Even criminals who aren’t actually doing anything illegal. I feel he might have short circuited.

Donald Trump Admitted Barack Obama was Born in America but Blamed the Original Rumor on Hillary Clinton

It’s like Trump exists in a world where he can say any bullshit thing and his followers won’t care.

Oh.  Right.

So given the number of people pointing out that he has been a birther advocate for many years, Trump apparently realized that he needed to leave that crazy conspiracy theory behind to be taken seriously.

Not that being taken seriously has ever been any kind of concern of his.

Still, he came forward and said that Obama is an American.  And then he blamed the whole conspiracy theory on Clinton.  Which you have to admit is pretty fucking ballsy given there is literally not one shred of evidence to support it.

So now people actually believe it happened.  They actually believe Trump was only aping Clinton and the whole birther conspiracy started with her (it didn’t).

And look, even though a few Clinton staffers forwarded e-mails questioning Obama’s citizenship, it should be made clear that if they were caught, they were fired. They also didn’t start it.

And I realized that by including “Clinton” and “e-mail” in the same paragraph, I just generated fifteen thousand pages for Wikileaks.

So Trump basically found a way to blame his own nut job conspiracy theories on Hillary, thus creating a new nut job conspiracy theory.  Which is great for him because a lot of his followers really seem to like nut job conspiracy theories.

This Week’s Meme that Pissed me Off

This week we have a meme that is, in fairness, completely accurate*.  And that’s what makes it particularly insidious.

See what it did there?  It suggests that the way black people are doing it now is completely wrong!

I mean never mind that the Black Lives Matter movement is not looting, burning, or attacking.  Because rioters are angry about the same thing, we need to wag our fingers at them and remind them that there is one black guy we white people can totally get behind.

Also, since when was the world changed only by non-violent guys?  Abraham Lincoln changed the world and I’m pretty sure a whole lot of people died as a result of his decisions.  Maybe he didn’t burn Atlanta but he sure didn’t discourage Sherman from doing it.  The attack on Pearl Harbor changed the world.  I’m not gonna mention Hitler even though I totally just mentioned Hitler.

Fuck.

If “changing the world” is your only criteria, there are lots of ways to do it.  You can engage in a system of nonviolent protest.  You can fly a plane into a building.

Both acts changed the world.  So don’t pretend that this is about changing the world.

It is about telling people of color there is a right way and a wrong way to get the attention of white people.  Ironically, however, it is doing so by using a picture of a man whose methods pissed white people off so much, one of them killed him.

So please, stop using Martin Luther King to shame people of color into reacting the way you want them to.  Otherwise, the next time sports fans tear up a street when their team wins, I’ll just post this:

*Unless when you say “attacked no-one,” you are talking about attacking no-one physically.  Because we all know that Dr. King engaged in more than a few verbal sparring matches in his day.  So I mean, he attacked people a lot.  Just not with his fists.  And that’s what this meme means…right?