Newsworthy continued: EEEEEEEENINp'ts!

[eastmidswhizzkid]

On average, roughly three black people are killed by the police in America every week. More than 400 people have been killed by US cops this year alone.

Do you know how many people the police in the UK have killed this year?

.
.
.

Wait for it...

.
.
.

None.

not true....but nothing compared to the US.

[EvilBastard]

not true....but nothing compared to the US.

This is one of the reasons they use to argue against arming the police in the UK. If skells know that they're not likely to come up against an armed copper, they're less likely to use guns themselves. The ones that do use them know that they'll meet SCO19 and that it will almost certainly end badly.

Cops in the US, however, know that there's a strong likelihood that the skell will be armed. The danger ramps up where handguns are illegal (or at least, mind-bogglingly difficult to obtain legally) - skell figures that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, so doesn't flinch from using (or threatening to use) the weapon. At which point the cop unleashes a blizzard of leaden death.
Which leads to cops being on edge and hyper-sensitive to any and every threat - like a 12-year old carrying what certainly looks like a real weapon:



What's to blame - a culture of gun violence? Gun worship? The concept that carrying a gun makes you tough, "a man", a "gangsta"? A lack of personal responsibility? Institutional racism within the police service? I don't know the answer. What I do know is that we're not likely to see a solution any time soon...

[markfiend]

not true....but nothing compared to the US.

I stand corrected. I should fact-check "statistics" I see on twitter a bit more closely. Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa.

EvilBastard your analogy breaks down when you consider the killers of Lee Rigby. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were both shot by British armed police in the course of their arrest (given that they were charging at the police armed with a cleaver and a gun, in this case I don't see that the coppers had much alternative) yet they both lived to face charges.

Anyone, knowing history of such occurrences, is surprised by this decision?

Surprised? Maybe not. Although I did think there might have been a chance that Darren Wilson would face a kangaroo-court similar to the one that acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin's murder.

[markfiend]

Talking of gun culture though... where are all the Second Amendment gun fetishists? They like to tell us that they need to fondle their huge weapons so that they can raise an armed insurrection in case the US ever descends into tyranny. So, here you go, Ferguson Missouri is effectively a police state where citizens can apparently be shot by government actors at will. Why are the weapon-wankers not manning the barricades and taking pot-shots at the cops? It's almost as if... they're lying about why they want the guns.

[Pista]

If you're denied diced onions on your breakfast sandwich, throwing a snake at the counter staff isn't going to help your plight.

[Bartek]

"The CIA’s post-9/11 embrace of torture was brutal and ineffective – and the agency repeatedly lied about its usefulness".
Don't know what you think about that, but i'm sooo shocked, to read this.

[markfiend]

"The CIA’s post-9/11 embrace of torture was brutal and ineffective – and the agency repeatedly lied about its usefulness".
Don't know what you think about that, but i'm sooo shocked, to read this.

I was listening to some CIA arsehole repeatedly refer to "enhanced interrogation" on the radio earlier.

No. Be honest. Torture.

[EvilBastard]

"The CIA’s post-9/11 embrace of torture was brutal and ineffective – and the agency repeatedly lied about its usefulness".
Don't know what you think about that, but i'm sooo shocked, to read this.

I was listening to some CIA arsehole repeatedly refer to "enhanced interrogation" on the radio earlier.

No. Be honest. Torture.

Silly Fiendy - it's only torture when they do it (for a given value of "they"). Just like it's only "terrorism" when they do it, it's only a "war crime" when they do it - when we (you know, the "coalition of the willing") do it it's "enhanced interrogation", "surgical strikes", "shock and awe". When we supply weapons to the Contras, or the Mujihadin, it's "arming freedom fighters" and "fighting oppression". When they use those same weapons against us, then it's terrorism.

And this - I don't recommend reading over a meal, though. It's not pleasant.

[nowayjose]

After Abu Ghraib, these revelations are hardly surprising.

[markfiend]

After Abu Ghraib, these revelations are hardly surprising.

not surprising, no.

[EvilBastard]

After Abu Ghraib, these revelations are hardly surprising.

There is a difference between Abu Ghraib (which was sold as "a few bad apples going off the rails") and systematic, institutionalised, torture which was were deliberately concealed from oversight, where the value of the intelligence gained was over-egged, where compliance was coerced using fabricated evidence, and promoting a climate of fear in which titular allies were coerced through the threat of the withdrawal of intelligence sharing.

This goes way beyond gross violation of human rights and lack of compliance with international law - this leads to some very serious questions about the way governments deal with each other, and will put a dent in legitimate intelligence gathering for years to come.

[markfiend]

We-e-e-e-ell...

It now appears that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of the "systematic, institutionalised, torture" and the people who were accused (and in some cases convicted) of them were actually scapegoated and took the rap for the CIA.

And no, I don't know why anyone is surprised, except if they take USA propaganda at face value. The "land of the free and the home of the brave" is a country forged out of genocide of its native people, built from the labour of another genocide (which, let's be fair, generated a hell of a lot of Britain's imperial wealth as well)—a genocide that is still ongoing: Trayon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice are just four names that I can name off the top of my head. The USA now has a larger disparity between the median black income and the median white income than did apartheid South Africa. The USA now has a larger proportion of its black population in prison than did apartheid South Africa.

The whole blood-drenched history of the USA gives the lie to the noble ideals on which it was founded. The USA is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. Concentration camps were used by both sides in the American Civil war. The USA used waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques in the Vietnam war. The Tuskeegee syphilis studies. The Iran/Contras scandal. The South American juntas. Grenada...

Make no mistake, when the USA falls—as it will, all empires fall—it will be seen in history alongside Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

[million voices]

I certainly don't think History will see the USA as a beacon of light and a template on how things should be done.
But to make a straight comparison with Hitler's Germany seems somewhat excessive.
If you were one of the "untermensch" in either of those Empires surely you would prefer to be living in a ghetto in Detroit than one in Warsaw.
And if you were at the other end of the spectrum the responsibility for 50 million dead in 12 years - a lot of them due to a systematic programme as opposed to (I don't know the figures) but a hell of a lot less due mainly to bungling and incompetence.

[markfiend]

A database compiled in the late 1990s put the figure for the transatlantic slave trade at more than 11 million people.

... although I have seen estimates as high as 60 million killed or enslaved.

Figures for the genocide of the Native people are harder to come by (and contentious) but it's possible that as much as 90% of the population was killed, either directly by invading Europeans or indirectly by disease.

I would argue that the ongoing oppression of African-Americans is a systematic programme, not "due mainly to bungling and incompetence". Repeated failure to (for example) indict policemen for killing unarmed black people shows that.

[million voices]

"the bungling and incompetence" was somewhat flippant

But the horrors of the slave trade is one in which no European country is innocent

In fact many African countries sold other Africans in exchange for goods and weapons

So it is not something that can be laid squarely at the feet of the USA

[iesus]

"
But the horrors of the slave trade is one in which no European country is innocent

my country is innocent of that trade blame those who actually did it

[million voices]

What about all the chaps who rowed your triremes?

[markfiend]

It was mostly British ships carried the slaves across the Atlantic, and British Caribbean colonies were the destination for most of the slaves who didn't end up in the USA.

[iesus]

What about all the chaps who rowed your triremes?

Wrong they were mostly citizens, especially in the classic "gold" period according to most scholars Who were the crews in Athenian naval forces?

now that i am thinking about it, whenever in human history there was a great achievement there were free citizens that did it not pityful human beings chained up and whipped to death...

Even the pyramids!

[million voices]

jesus - but Athenians had slaves

mark - It was probably mostly British ships because there were more British ships and there were more British Colonies. But there were also Portuguese, French, German, Spanish etc


To go back to my original wittering. I still think it is wrong and it also lessens the atrocities of the Third Reich to make the direct comparison to the USA. It demeans the suffering of the Holocaust victims and it lessens the horror that was / is Nazism when one says "well it's only the same as the USA"

[markfiend]

I still think it is wrong and it also lessens the atrocities of the Third Reich to make the direct comparison to the USA. It demeans the suffering of the Holocaust victims and it lessens the horror that was / is Nazism when one says "well it's only the same as the USA"

OK I see your point. But (e.g.) Michael Brown is just as dead as any Holocaust victim.

[rien]

Haven't yet got round to reading the previous posts/discussion, but I had to share this (and it was a toss-up between this thread and Joke Of The Day... or that Sisters kitchen puns thread):

China bans puns on the grounds that they may mislead children and defile cultural heritage:
"There’s no censor sensibility to the law, and it seems likely to cause Confucian and dis-Orientation among punks and pundits alike in its wonton disregard for personal freedom and attempts to bamboo-zle the public. It’s safe Tibet that dissidents who just Taipei single pun online will end up panda price and facing time in the punitentiary or even capital punishment – but those Hu support the government can Maoth off as much as they want and still wok free. I Canton derstand how people wouldn’t realize that this homophonbic bigotry raises a bunch of red flags. In the end, one Deng is clear: when puns are outlawed, only outlaws will have puns."

[EvilBastard]

It was mostly British ships carried the slaves across the Atlantic, and British Caribbean colonies were the destination for most of the slaves who didn't end up in the USA.

True, but there's this great myth about the slave trade, that whitey just showed up and kidnapped huge numbers of Africans to take them off to slavery. Which isn't exactly true - African tribes had been trading slaves for years among themselves. So when "we" showed up, and offered to buy the slaves, no-one batted an eyelid. True, we did it on an industrial scale, but this concept of simple folk running around all happy and Elysian until "we" turned them into slaves just doesn't bear close scrutiny. The evidence points to Africans and Arabs being just as big a bunch of bastards as we were.

Make no mistake, when the USA falls—as it will, all empires fall—it will be seen in history alongside Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

What about Britain's, or France's empire? I don't disagree that the USA has been responsible for some naughtiness, but I would argue that your outlook is unnecessarily bleak. Yes, the USA has done some heinous things, but it has also done some good things - it wrote the book on civil rights at a time when Britain still had signs saying "Room to let - no blacks, no coloureds, no Irish", its largesse was principally responsible for mainland Europe not becoming communist in 1945 (the relative merit of that notwithstanding, it's difficult to argue that the Marshall Plan wasn't the solution that was needed), its commercial environment has encouraged technological advancement and attracts some of the brightest minds from all over the world.

I can't agree that the US empire should be seen in a worse light than anyone else's. We (Britannia) gleefully robbed and raped our way over what, 2/5ths of the world? We got the population of China hooked on opium, our presiding over the divvying up of parts of the world has directly led to some of the major problems that we have today, but I don't see our being compared to Hitler or Stalin. How many Indians, Afghans, Zulu, Africans, Australian and American aboriginals died so that we could put tea in our pots, tobacco in our pipes, wool on our backs, gold in our pockets, fancy stuff in our museums and felons a long way away? I'm going to hazard that in per capita terms it makes the Native American and Jewish genocides look like a Sunday School picnic.

But history is written by the winners - I'll bet that had Hitler triumphed we'd be reading about the wonderful medical advances pioneered in Belsen rather than the Final Solution. When the US hands up its crown to China (or possibly India - the jury's out), I'm sure that history will be kinder to them than is has been to Uncle Joe and Adolf.

[iesus]

jesus - but Athenians had slaves

Yes, indeed they have at that time 1,700-100 B.C. but
a) didn't export slaves to USA
b) didn't participate on transatlantic slave trade (truth is that i know some people that believe they did in 1,200-400B.C. , but you don't want to be like them and believe all the things that they believe)
c) i thought the african holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade are of a later period than many European countries didn't even exists, at least at the SouthEast part we had big problem with islamist invaders since 14th-15th century

[markfiend]

...I would argue that your outlook is unnecessarily bleak...

Yeah. I'm on a bit of a downer about it all at the moment. I probably need to put this in a bit of perspective.