George Rebane
The memory of Treyvon Martin has now been honored by everyone from the President to the punks smashing windows and setting fires to demonstrate their outrage at the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the nation’s legal system. In doing the latter I’m tempted to join them.
According to our legal system as exercised in Sanford, the evidence showed that Martin was a young thug trying to bash the brains out of the man who finally shot him. Since the shooting, both the press and the police have done their best to hide Martin’s past because he was a black minor. Well, more than a minor. As Zimmerman’s prosecutors characterized him, that evening Martin was an ‘apprehensive child’ trying to reach safety and the warmth of his home and family while suffering a ‘child’s worst fears’ by being ‘stalked in the night’.
Since then, a bit more has come out on the background of that child pictured nearby. The Miami-Dade police and school authorities had to jump through hoops not to arrest the young man for burglary and possession of stolen goods. And there’s even more coming out that you will not see in the lamestream which has spent the last year calling for Zimmerman’s head, but this blog with appropriate links is as good a place to start as any.
So the Sanford court delivered its justice, and found that even lying down, with his head being pounded into a concrete sidewalk, Zimmerman had every right to ‘stand’ his ground, draw his weapon, and kill Martin in order to save his own life. But in our system of jurisprudence, one that used to eschew double jeopardy, this is not the end of it. As we discovered in the OJ Simpson case, being acquitted of murder does not end your jeopardy. You can be re-indicted on civil charges, just as if you had committed the act of which you were found innocent, and then be adjudicated into financial oblivion.
But wait, there’s more. With the Zimmerman case we have launched into the era of triple jeopardy. Those ever stalwart men of God and minders of the plantation, the Revs Jackson and Sharpton, have joined with the NAACP to plan a very nasty future for George Zimmerman. First they convince Holder’s DOJ to file criminal charges against Zimmerman for violating (seat belts please) Martin’s civil rights. And then, whether that works or not, they will go after him in a civil lawsuit a la Simpson. And on top of that, thanks to the lamestream’s ample coverage of the acquittal and follow-on demonstrations of rage, Zimmerman will wear a bullseye on his back for a very long time.
In the meantime, Holder is pandering to the NAACP, promising to review the nation’s stand-your-ground laws as being the newly discovered basis for the (diminishing) gun violence in the land. Oh yes, speaking of race, did anyone give a big rat’s ass for the ongoing stream of black-on-black murders in Chicago (46 blacks killed there during the trial) and other big cities in this interval. Or did you notice all the demonstrations against the two Georgia black teen-agers who killed a baby by shooting him in the face and wounding his mother during a robbery? Who honored the memory of 13-month-old Antonio Santiago?
I don’t think we have to look too deeply through the progressive smoke screen to see real racism practiced daily in America.
[21jul13 update – corrected] As President Obama continues to fan the Zimmerman trial flames evident in dozens of cities across the nation, I definitely feel that he has a deeper agenda for which the trial’s verdict can serve as fuel. Of the many statements in his “deeply personal” speech about the event that could have used a big dose of silence, he stated, “… if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”
That he introduced the potential justification of an armed Martin shooting Zimmerman for no more than following him in a neighborhood where Zimmerman was volunteering as a member of the neighborhood watch, raises more than eyebrows. Asking us to consider the two acts as somehow being equivalent or having an “ambiguous” answer throws the entire issue of stand your ground into a cocked hat, and goes on to support the nationwide protests already rejecting the Zimmerman verdict and looking for all manner of hypotheticals to continue focusing on race and civil rights violations as being the cause of Martin’s being shot that now requires additional judicial action.
The immediate beneficiaries of the President’s hypothetical are the attorneys for Dunn, who from his car gunned down a black teenager in another car, an unarmed teenager who had no physical contact with Dunn or made no move to threaten him (here). Dunn’s defense before the President’s remarks was tenuous if it existed at all. After that presidential demagoguery I can see Dunn’s attorneys dropping to their knees, raising their hands in gratitude, and shouting ‘Thank you, thank you Lord!!’
The facts of the matter, that no one wants to address about Zimmerman’s actions or that of Jesse Jackson’s equivalent assessment, are that according to DoJ statistics –
• Blacks make up 13% of the population,
• Since 1975 blacks have committed more than half of ALL the nation’s murders;
• And 93% of murdered blacks were killed by blacks.
Now I know that progressives have had more than a little trouble reasoning, especially when it involves elements of numeracy – that has been academically corroborated (more here and here). I challenge a liberal to draw the Venn diagram for that situation without first going back to ding-dong school. Of course a few rightwingers may also struggle 😉 But if you brought the teachings of the good Reverend Bayes to bear on these statistics, then it becomes apparent that beating the drums on the Zimmerman case is an ongoing smokescreen raised by the liberal elites to hide their massive failures in social policies (economic and educational) that for the last 40 years have been promoted to help the black population. Their effect has been exactly the opposite, beginning with the destruction of the strong black family ethic in the 1960s.
Now we holler and wail about ‘stereotyping’ and the injustice it causes. It does no such thing when considered on an individual decision level. As I have attempted to illuminate in these pages, stereotyping (intuiting the correct Bayesian conditional posterior probability) is one of the most powerful survival mechanisms that humans and ALL critters have evolved over the eons. What we pejoratively label as stereotyping is fundamental to Bayesian decision making, which is demonstrably the most powerful and effective approach to dealing with problems in an uncertain environment. And without going into the numerical weeds that surround the above quoted statistics, those numbers themselves advise an extra dose of caution when encountering a young black male on a lonely dark street, whether he be an opportunistic thug or a young neurosurgeon like Dr Ben Carson (by his own report).
Were you asked to bet you assets on the intentions of such a black man, you would wisely vote with the Rev Jesse Jackson. Were you instead asked to bet your ass, you would definitely make a run for it before seeking any more edifying information. And starting with the numbers, that sad state of affairs is what underlies the entire problem of racist stereotyping. The real crime is that the national black leadership refuses to address the existential problem of the behavior of young black men staring them in the face for the last several decades. (I was heartened to again hear Jason Riley of WSJ eloquently agree with these conclusions.)
[26jul13 update] Bill Whittle of PJMedia presents an excellent summary of the Trayvon Martin case in this video, and contrasts it with the reprehensible ‘coverage’ given in the lamestream.
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