I note that even with Oprah being so reckless and uppity with her platform, not only does Your Boss not know who the clerk was, Your Boss DOESN'T BELIEVE OPRAH ANYWAY.

Wait: I have a new theory. Your Boss is real stupid, right? He might think Switzerland has like 300 people in it so they all know Hilda down at the bag shop.

Someone arguing that TM having stolen jewelry changed his culpability in what happened to him is a much different argument than whether or not the jewelry was stolen.

A reasonable position is "yep, he probably stole that jewelry but that doesn't change anything". But you have yahoos like Phill arguing the backpack pawn shop angle, which deserves to be mocked.

I believe that Oprah asked to see a bag and the clerk didn't show it to her. I don't think she made the incident up? I question assigning definitive motivation to the clerk for why she didn't show her.

That's not my position at all. It's that, given there are reasonable non-racist explanations and we have little but speculation to go on as to what would have happened if Oprah were white, we can't be particularly certain that racism was involved. In my examples, however, we've got elections held in the same states, on the same day, between candidates that are broadly similar except for their races. It's about as close as we can possibly get to a natural experiment. Yet in the Cain thread, you were suddenly the epistemological sceptic, opining about how we just can't know whether race was a factor, coz like maybe there were all sorts of important differences between the candidates and campaigns that we weren't controlling for, so it'd be just unfair to leap to such a drastic conclusion. But heaven forbid I be slightly sceptical in a situation with far less information.

5% race bump sounds reasonable to me. I'd imagine that there is a cohort of conservative blacks who vote dem as a very close call, and who would be predicted to vote R on issue surveys. These folks could be along the lines of "gimme a reason to do it [vote gop], and so help me I will." It's a relatively straightforward empirical question.

I have a black client, a private investigator, who makes fun of me for being such a liberal. I don't know how he votes, but he's all about pull yourself up from your bootstraps and hatin hood rats. His son is at a decent law school.

What is the Low Key/Giz references and how is it important? I assume they're a couple who met here or something but how is relevent to anything and why does pilkain think its an appropriate rebuttal to the seemingly numerous claims that he's a racist?

Just trying to understand some of the subtext in the thread.

Racists aren't the smartest bunch.

You assumption that the two are "broadly similar" is a blatant example of assuming your conclusions. How did you arrive at that? Are you quite sure that their opponents were broadly similar? There are any number of factors that could have affected a small subset of a subset of voters -- how much variance do you suppose there is in an election like this?

Somehow, all the usual painstaking rigor that Nickles expects from everyone else gets thrown out the door here. It's just obvious that black people voted for the black guy --what other explanation could there be?

A laughably poor, and bizarre, ad hominem attack. Giz looks like an attractive woman, he's probably just jelly. Should pass once he loses his virginity.

Trayvon Martin was found with jewelery. It was not matched up with any reports of stolen jewelery, and Martin was not charged with a crime or disciplined in any way. But, he's black, so 99.9% chance it was stolen.

"I don't always fabricate probabilities out of nothing but my own prejudices, but when I do, I prefer to look as racist as possible. Stay racist, my friends."

Nice.

got it. black skin totally trumps the fact that any other fairly run-of-the-mill middle class family can afford jewelry for their kids. i feel like i can more accurately adjust my judgement tuner now.

That's one version of it.

He was found with 12 pieces of womens jewelry, including multiple wedding bands, diamond earrings, a mens watch, and a flathead screwdriver the county/schools police department described as a "burglary tool". The officer, instead of filing a criminal report, listed the jewelry as "found items" and put them in an evidence room. It should be noted here that the officers for Dade County schools were being pressured by their Chief to bury things like this to help the crime numbers. That's all in sworn testimony from the officers, and the Chief later resigned.

If a white person has a screwdriver, is it described as a "burglary tool" or just, you know, as a ****ing screwdriver?

I'm not a cop and didn't write the report, so I don't really know the answer to this, but I'm assuming it's a lot less dependent on the color of the persons skin and more with the broader context of them having it, like maybe being in with a bunch of jewelry?

So itt your boss is the racist version of cockcock?

Not to bring up a mostly dead issue, but I've been making a number of large cash deposits at a bank in the inner city of my town, which is quite large. Had to go make a late deposit last night. Don't like sleeping in the house with loads of cash laying around, since I live in the ghetto and all.

There had been a shooting at night at the place we went to not that long ago. Pie of guys shot a lady and took her groceries and purse. Or took nothing. I can't recall.

Anyhow, we went in and made the deposit without incidence. While we were leaving we first heard and then saw a group of people that made me feel a little uncomfortable. They were being quite loud and boisterous, hence why we could hear them first. They were walking toward the store as we were leaving, and they were on the next row over of parked cars. Still, I was really uncomfortable about them being there and wanted to get in the car quite quickly. Heck, even once we did get in the car, I wanted to leave the area as quickly as possible. Cuz, you know, locked doors are one thing, but bullets tend to be able make their way through glass if they so choose.

Anyway, it was something about the way these guys were acting and were dressed, just made me uncomfortable. After all this talk of wookie's experience with the issue, I have to ask, Am I racist?

For the record, the group in question was wearing camo patterned shorts, black tshirts with the sleeves cut off, they had long, unwashed looking hair to match their dirty looking clothes, and they were, of course, white, like me.

You live near Huntington beach?

Not near anything with the word "beach" in the name

Honest question. Why wouldn't you give strong weight to the description by the person who was there, Oprah?

I've laid out various times why I think she is a credible observer. And BTW she said she repeatedly asked to see the megabag.

She didn't want to stoop to playing the "I'm a big shot" card, and that's one of the points, she shouldn't have had to.

i bet you're one of those dumbasses that totally bought in to all of that "lean" bull****, aren't you?

re: The screwdriver bit - what always bothered me about it was that it seemed to me that it was being offered as justification for shooting Trayvon and that it was evidence that GZ acted appropriately.

I offer that even if the jewelry was stolen... it was not something that GZ would have been aware of and would have had no part in GZ's decision making. It would be one thing if GZ knew TM and was aware that he had a history of selling stolen jewelry and because of that he was trying to keep an eye on TM until the cops showed up.

But that's not the case. It appeared to be literally people trying to justify why its okay to profile a black kid and at least partially excuse him being shot.

If I profiled some guy as a child molestor because he looked like some creepy guy from the show Criminal Minds. And if I shadowed this guy, got into a confrontation and killed him. Any evidence that the guy did something rotten in the past wouldn't justify my actions. The fact that some guys who look creepy might have done criminal things doesn't mean I'm right in assuming all creepy looking people are criminal. (you'd think this would be obvious)

So I don't get the tactic of looking into TM's past, text messages and carrying around screwdriver/crime tools is any justification for what happened since, again, none of that was available to GZ.

Which leads me to believe the people who find the screwdriver story so relevent are still justifying the racist behaviour of profiling. "Hey, he profiled the kid and he actually was a thief. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with assuming blacks in your neighborhood are probably criminals!"

Maybe read my posts? I don't think it's relevant to the case at all.