So they are burning and looting in Baltimore tonight

Joe's entire post 315 is a waste of his time, but this one item has some thread relevance:

Well, by amazing good luck it seems to have been accurate, so moving on: It seems to be that everyone agrees that the KKK has never at its worst lynched more than about 10%, more or less, of the number of black men murdered by other black men for ordinary reasons, in the US.

And so the significance of KKK lynchings far outweighs their number, illustrating the larger point: that not all killings are equally significant, even for reasonable people.

Police killings are far more significant than ordinary murders. They not only receive, but deserve, far more attention than ordinary murders. There is nothing wrong with that. Agreed?

Nothing shocking there. You are aware of position black women have been put in, by hundreds of years of racial oppression? By "the same situation" you seem to mean a reporter's interview with white women in the US as it is - but that is not the same situation at all. To have the "same situation" you would need to invert the larger social context of bigotry as well.

A more comparable situation involving white people would be something like the French under German occupation in WWII: French women who refused on principle to mate with German men were not doing something shocking to you, surely?

The frequency with which Americans talk about racial matters as if each new specific situation were isolated, as if we were somehow assessing whether racism were a factor without considering the surrounding circumstances, history, or environment, is startling.

 

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There is considerable friction between the aboriginal Hawaiians and the recently immigrating whites. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120431126

And others: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...rces-hawaii-high-school-to-temporarily-close/

 

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LOL, and by amazing coincidence, you can't prove any of your assertions.

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You lied.

 

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The state's attorney in this case has sued to keep Mr. Gray's autopsy findings secret. This is just her latest reversal. After promising transparency before the crowds, she has been anything but transparent. First by refusing to allow Mr. Gray's knife which she had claimed to be legal be examined, and now by refusing to release the autopsy findings. Oops, so much for transparency.

At this point I fully expect most, if not all of the officers she has charged, will be acquitted. Not because the officers are innocent, though some may be, but because of her incompetence. I think she has put herself between a rock and a hard place. That's why all the promised transparency has quickly faded into oblivion.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-freddie-gray-mosby-20150505-story.html

 

When there are thousands of black on black murders we do not hear about those statistics as much as the few hundred police killings of blacks which many times are justifiable. So those who rise up and speak for the black community aren't heard much when it comes to trying to prevent black on black murders but seem to gravitate to only where they can spread fear and hate whenever a police officer kills a black person. This is a very sad way to stop black on black murders to me and I would only hope those black leaders who point out police shootings of black citizens will one day put the same effort into stopping black on black murder.

 

I regard correctly performed arithmetical calculations as solid evidence. If I have done my arithmetic wrong, made dubious assumptions, etc, feel free to correct the calculation, and post your own.

I handed you the best time frame - the year 1892, featuring the peak of the lynchings and the low US murder rates common before the early 1900s. You can use the same data I used, reason as you please, and figure out for yourself why exactly you think KKK lynchings were a much greater proportion of the murders of black men in the US than was the case. Because right now you haven't got a clue why you think that, or even if you think that.

Then you can try figuring out why you posted the fact that some of the accused police in Baltimore were black as if it were evidence against the apparent racism involved in Gray's treatment by the police. Hint: it's the same reason you keep telling us you can't see any racism in the Ferguson shooting.

Look: it's obvious you've got some kind personal stake in all these police issues that handicaps you in posting reasonably or making sense, but I'm going to report every time you claim I lied from now on. You need to quit doing that.

Why is it some unrelated black "leader's" job to deal with ordinary murders? Isn't that everyone's job? All leaders's job?

More effort is due police killings because they are far more significant and injurious to the community. Like KKK lynchings, their effects far outweigh their statistical proportion of murders.

 

LOL, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you, “correctly performed arithmetical calculations” requires correct data. Data which you don’t have, data which after much evasion, you have finally admitted you invented (i.e. for which you do not have a source).

Except you haven’t provided a credible source for your claims, you invented stuff. You made stuff up. You cannot support your beliefs with evidence as you have claimed. That’s intellectually dishonest.

More intellectual dishonesty, why am I not surprised? You have been told many times now, what I believe to have occurred in Baltimore and why. I believe what happened to Mr. Gray had more to do with class prejudice than race. Because the Baltimore Police Department, as evidenced in this thread, have abused whites as well as blacks and because the officers accused of abusing Mr. Gray were both white and black in equal measure. And the officers accused with the most egregious abuse were black.

And with respect to Ferguson, yeah, it all boils down to evidence and reason and you consistently have none.

Hmm, so you think evidence and reason are unreasonable? Threats will not protect you from your intellectual dishonesty. You have consistently lied. You claimed you provided data necessary to support your assertions, and after more than a week of obfuscation and dumping reams of non-relevant data, you admitted you didn’t have all the data required to support your assertions and you just made it up.

You said the DOJ investigation of the Brown shooting supported your belief Officer Wilson drew his weapon in order to accost a young black man who was merely jaywalking. When pressured to support your assertions with specific text from the DOJ report, you obfuscated because the DOJ investigation and the DOJ report doesn’t say the things you claimed it said. You made general references to material which didn’t support your assertions. You couldn’t provide specific text from the DOJ document which supported your assertions. You were either intellectually dishonest or you lied. You have consistently been intellectually dishonest throughout this discussion.

Eventually, you took two sentences from an 86 page DOJ document, misrepresented those sentences and explained that contrary to your previous claims, you couldn’t provide the specific text because it was beyond the scope of the DOJ investigation and all the while ignoring the other 86 pages in the report and the DOJ conclusion that Officer Wilson acted reasonably in his decision to shoot Brown. You lied. You were intellectually dishonest.

You have claimed Mr. Gray suffered from lead poisoning and that alleged poisoning was evidence of police racism. I haven’t seen you provide any definitive evidence of Mr. Gray’s alleged lead poisoning, much less how it could be construed as evidence of police racism. As pointed out to you, I am white and I probably have several orders of magnitude more lead in my body than Mr. Gray has in his. So does that make me the victim of racism?

Personal stake, I have a personal stake and you don’t….and what would that personal stake be exactly? Here is one of your many problems Ice; I am not the one who has been intellectually dishonest here whereas you have been consistently dishonest. If you could support your beliefs and assertions with, you know, facts, you might have a case. But you can’t. Evidence and reason are not on your side. If they were, you would not have to lie. You would not have to be intellectually dishonest. You would not have to ignore mounds of evidence and reason as you have consistently done throughout this discussion. You wouldn’t need to obfuscate as you have done. Instead, you could be honest.

You have me scratching my head here. What does that mean exactly and how is that relevant to this discussion? And who said, “some unrelated black leaders job to deal with ordinary murders”? Who said or even intimidated that everyone doesn’t have an obligation to address ordinary murders? Those sound like straw man arguments to me. And I still don’t understand how this is relevant to the discussion.

So police use of lethal force is similar to a KKK lynching? A police officer exercising his or her right to self-defense is somehow injurious to the community? I don’t suppose you have any evidence to back up that assertion? Don’t look now, but your cognitive biases are showing.

As previously discussed, no one knows exactly how many people are killed each year by police officers. But the self-reported average is round 400 per year, police use of lethal force rarely generates the kind of attention we saw in Ferguson. There were other factors in play in Ferguson which were identified in a subsequent DOJ report which better explain the public reaction we witnessed in Ferguson to the Brown shooting. What happened in Baltimore wasn’t self-defense. Based on what is now believed to be known, it was either gross incompetence (i.e. reckless disregard for Mr. Gray’s safety) or willful homicide. And there is absolutely no evidence Mr. Gray's race was a factor in his treatment by Baltimore police officers, half of whom were black.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ow-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/

You cherry pick, you ignore evidence and reason, you obfuscate, and you make stuff up (e.g. Mr. Gray's poisoning is evidence of Baltimore Police racism, claiming you have presented all the necessary data for conclusions and calculations, asserting the DOJ Brown shooting report states things it clearly doesn't, etc.). You are not intellectually honest.

 

No, what you did was dump a lot of non relevant data. You provided no statistics on KKK lynching. You provided no data on the race of the murders, all of which are essential to rationally support your assertions. You have repeatedly failed to produce the kind of data one needs to logically arrive at your conclusions. You made stuff up, based on what you believe. Basically you did a turd dump. At best you are being intellectually dishonest.

 

Well here is the thing Bells, how is a police officer defending himself injurious to the community? In all those other cases you cite, assuming they are truthful and you have divulged the complete truth, and that is a big assumption with you, was the police officer defending himself? You have a penchant for ignoring and inconvenient facts and leaving them out of the story. I guess you would rather have police officers murdered.

Police officers have abused their power in the past. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to self-defense, or that their use of self-defense is injurious to the community, nor does it mean every use of self-defense is an abuse of power. Self-defense isn’t a justification for the abuse of power; you don’t seem to understand the difference. Self-defense is something we accord to all residents, not just police officers. There is nothing injurious to the community in allowing people to defend themselves, including police officers. The abuse of power is an entirely different story.

Further, there is nothing dishonest with fact and reason. Just because you don’t like the facts and logical discourse, it doesn’t mean they are dishonest.

LOL, personal attacks and threats are not a substitute for fact and reason. You want to make a federal case over a typo...seriously? I think that speaks volumes for the vacuous nature of your argument.

 

Did I say I think “they are all fake”? I think you need to reread my post. I said those cases are not relevant to this discussion and that you have a penchant for leaving out material information and misrepresenting the facts. We have been down this path before in which you cite a plethora of cases all the while ignoring critical bits of information and divert the discussion from the topic at hand.

That may or may not be true. I am not familiar with the Walter Scott case. But this isn’t the first time you have tried to divert discussion from the topic at hand by injecting a lot of irrelevant material into the discussion. When we went down this road before, I found you forgot to mention a lot of material facts in the cases you cited. In any case, the Walter Scott case or any of the other cases you mentioned aren’t relevant to Mr. Gray or the Brown shooting in Ferguson or to Ice’s assertions, you know the topics under discussion. The facts are different, the circumstances are different and the people are different. Ice and I were discussing what happened in Baltimore and Ferguson and more specifically Ice’s assertions. Nothing in any of the cases you cited are in the least bit relevant to what occurred in Baltimore and Ferguson or Ice’s assertions. You Bells are obfuscating, trying to clutter up the discussion with irrelevant material. Perhaps you would rather explain how Mr. Gray’s alleged lead poisoning is evidence of Baltimore Police racism as Ice has asserted and which is a topic under discussion? Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.

The self-defense defense may have been used inappropriately in the past by police officers, which is why we have juries. But in Ferguson, and contrary to your assertions, the DOJ found Officer Wilson was justified in his use of lethal force. And in the Baltimore case, self-defense isn’t even on the table. So how is it even relevant to this discussion? Baltimore Police officers have never asserted self-defense. So why you think it is relevant here, in this discussion, is mystifying, unless of course, you are trying to distract the discussion.

Where did I say you would rather have police officers murdered? You are making stuff up again Bells. I asked you a question. You Bells are being dishonest yet again. If I had slandered you, I would apologize. But I haven’t. I asked you a question. Questioning isn’t slander. You began your last post with a question to me? Have you forgotten? I said you don’t seem to understand the difference between self-defense (e.g. Ferguson) and police abuse (e.g. Baltimore). You have attacked the conduct of police officers in both departments on similar grounds (especially Ferguson). Ferguson as previously pointed out was a case of self—defense, as the DOJ investigation concluded. In spite of all the evidence, you refuse to recognize the self-defense claim in Ferguson was found to be valid by the DOJ. From day one, before the investigation had been concluded, you believed Officer Wilson to be guilty of murder. There are several posts in which you have attacked Officer Wilson before the investigation had been completed. A rational person waits for the evidence before drawing conclusions.

When you first accused me of intellectual dishonesty you slandered me and you have repeatedly done so. In another post, you accused me of being a racist. The truth is the only people who have been intellectually dishonest here are you and Iceaura. And the only person who has slandered anyone is you. I think you owe me an apology for your slander and you have engaged in conduct unbecoming a moderator. I suggest you retract your slander and apologize to me. I await your apology and retraction.

Well funny is funny and the expression of emotion is not in and of itself unintelligent. However, personal attacks are.

Oh, just because you don’t like the words I use, it doesn’t make them unintelligent. You want to quibble over the spelling of a word rather than the relevant facts. Given the vacuous nature of your argument, I guess I can understand why you have that penchant. One misspelling out of thousands and you want to make a federal case of it? Do I quibble over your misspellings and grammatical errors?

Relevant material facts do not constitute personal attack. But irrelevant facts and false deductions based on those facts can constitute a personal attack. You are being more than a little disingenuous again.

PS: If you want to discuss the other cases you referenced, please start another thread. Those cases are just not relevant here.

 

Chinese wages have been increasing by double digits for many years - China is no longer where factories go for low wages. Even China imports the low value added components it once made. This is why China's trade to shifting somewhat to other Asian nations like Vietnam - I. e. they now earn yuan with their exports to China and buy the higher value items China makes with them.

When I lived in Baltimore and sailed my small sail boat, usually between its dock on Middle River, near the Martin aero-space plant* to the inner harbor I saw the huge Bethlehem steel factory on the harbor's east side. I know it is gone now and think Martin is too or at least not much of an employer. What about Domino Sugar? Do they still import via Baltimore harbor and make 5 pound bags of sugar for sale? Or are they gone too? I bet Baltimore may have lower real wage average now than 35 years ago! As in general US real wages are at best stagnate and more jobs are bigMac jobs now, I suspect the increasingly bad economy developing in Baltimore, may just be an early warning for much of the US. When people have little to lose, they do get destructive. - A negative feed back system that makes problems worse.

* A graduate student friend worked for them each summer, and rented a room (from "Pop Shipley") which included use of small dock. I let him use my boat after work but not week-ends and he paid any dock fee for me. I stayed in my cheap apartment room on St Paul street year round - very short walk to JHU. During winter, my boat was in Pop Shipley's yard, without charge. A nice old man - long gone now I'm sure.

 

Unless they are tied to Ferguson or Baltimore, no, and the cases you cited are clearly not in any way related to Ferguson or Baltimore. As, repeatedly pointed out to you, the cases you cited are not in any way related to Ferguson or what happened to Mr. Gray. And a handful isolated cases of police abuse is not evidence of the systemic and ingrained abuse you have asserted.

I suggest you look at the title and the OP and the discussion which has ensued. Just what do the cases of alleged police abuse you cited have to do with Iceaura’s assertion that Mr. Gray’s alleged lead poisoning is evidence of Baltimore police racism? Cases of police brutality have nothing to do with question I asked you, and which you have evaded answering. I asked you if you believed police officers are entitled to the right of self-defense.

Except that isn’t true. A quick review of some of your alleged cases of police brutality reveals one to be a case of a suspicious suicide which is under DOJ review and another involves an accidental shooting during a police raid in which a judge dismissed the charges citing a lack of evidence. Unfortunately for you Bells we do believe in rule of law here. And evidence does matter. And contrary to your assertion, in the cases you cited, the police didn’t always use self-defense. One is officially recorded as a suicide…oops. Unfortunately for you Bells, for most people, evidence and reason do matter.

Actually, at its heart, we were not discussing “inherent racism”, we were very specifically talking about what happened to Mr. Gray and the Baltimore Police Department. You are being dishonest. A broader contest would not involve a discussion of individual cases. Because individual cases would be irrelevant, in order to make the broad sweeping assertions you have made you need a lot of cases, not just the handful of cases of alleged police abuse you cited. You don’t seem to understand the illogical nature of your argument; either that or you are not being honest.

The irony here of you accusing someone else of being intellectually dishonest is profound. What you have done and continue to do Bells is to employ a litany of fallacious argument.
Even if every one of the cases of alleged police abuse you cited were valid proven cases of police abuse, it doesn’t follow that police abuse is institutionalized and widespread as you have alleged. I mean that is Logic 101.

Yeah, those are my words, and there is nothing wrong with them and actually you took them out of context. What you have done is point out cases of alleged police abuse and offer them as proof of systemic and widespread police abuses. In one of those cases, there is overwhelming evidence to indict the police officer and that officer has been dismissed, arrested, and indicted. One is recorded as a suicide and contrary to your assertion; the self-defense defense was never used. In the other remaining cases you cited, police culpability is much less clear. And by broad brushing you omitted serious and material facts and you misrepresented the facts. You assume unproven allegations are true. It’s what you did in Brown case, and that just proves your bias. That is intellectual dishonesty Bells. Your assertion is demonstrably false and your post is intellectually dishonest by virtue of those facts.

Some comments on the cases you cited:
The White case was a suicide which some found suspicious and is being investigated by the DOJ. Stanley-Jones was a case of an accidental shooting during a police raid and the judge dismissed the case citing a lack of evidence.

I think you know the Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and the Tamir Rice cases are your best cases for police abuse. And with the exception of Freddie Gray, police employed or are likely to employ the self-defense defense. Scott was pursued and shot in the back and killed by a police officer. The facts are pretty clear as the incident is recorded on video tape, and the police officer has been dismissed, indicted, and will likely be convicted. That is a legitimate case of police abuse.

Tamir Rice was an adolescent who used a toy gun to menace strangers and was shot and killed by police officers. I believe this case is still under investigation. And some people question the aggressiveness of the responding police officers. This case is murkier, it isn’t clear the police aggression wasn’t warranted. What if the “toy gun” turned out to be a real gun? What if police had been less aggressive and Rice had a real gun? This is a case of second guessing. What happened to Rice was tragic. In the Rice case, I think the responding police were overly aggressive. But that doesn’t mean these individual policemen were racist nor does it mean police at large are racist, nor is it proof or evidence of same. Unfortunately for you Bells, facts and reason do matter.

Undoubtedly there are legitimate cases of police abuse, the Walter Scott case being a case in point, Freddie Gray being another. But those cases do not support or prove your belief that they were racially motivated or that racism is “ingrained” and pervasive as you have asserted.

If we had the best police practices (i.e. Six Sigma processes), so called defect free processes, we would expect to see at least 300 legitimate cases of police abuse every year in the US. The simple fact that police abuse does occur, it doesn’t follow that all or even most police abuse people or that all or most police are racist or that police exercising their right to self-defense is somehow hazardous to the community. Nor does it mean we should not seek to improve law enforcement to make our law enforcement better, fairer, consistent and more equitable.

 

Ah, yeah I asked a question with respect to self-defense and I said self-defense isn’t detrimental to society. Actually, you took my rhetorical statement out of context. This is the context. This is the part you left out.

“So police use of lethal force is similar to a KKK lynching? A police officer exercising his or her right to self-defense is somehow injurious to the community? I don’t suppose you have any evidence to back up that assertion? Don’t look now, but your cognitive biases are showing.”

Iceaura had incorrectly equated KKK killings to police use of lethal force. There is a difference.
And as Fraggle as repeatedly pointed out in this thread, Baltimore’s population is not representative of the state. Baltimore’s population is nearly 2/3’s African-American. Also, as previously and repeatedly discussed in this thread, there are reasons other than race which can account for disparity like being poor (e.g. lead poisoning).

Per my previous post (#207):

“Candace McCoy is a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. McCoy said blacks might be more likely to have a violent encounter with police because they are convicted of felonies at a higher rate than whites. Felonies include everything from violent crimes like murder and rape, to property crimes like burglary and embezzlement, to drug trafficking and gun offenses.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2004, state courts had over 1 million felony convictions. Of those, 59 percent were committed by whites and 38 percent by blacks. But when you factor in the population of whites and blacks, the felony rates stand at 330 per 100,000 for whites and 1,178 per 100,000 for blacks. That’s more than a three-fold difference.
McCoy noted that this has more to do with income than race. The felony rates for poor whites are similar to those of poor blacks.”http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/21/michael-medved/talk-show-host-police-kill-more-whites-blacks/

Being poor is a better indicator than race. Statistics are useful to those who know how to use them. Unfortunately too many people don’t know how to use them, you being a case in point.
Now who is ignoring evidence? If you are not ignoring evidence, why do I have to repeat myself so much for your edification? Why have you ignored my post #207?

You said, “It is institutional and ingrained across the country”. Now how can you make that claim? A handful of isolated cases of police abuse and alleged police abuse aren’t by any stretch institutional or ingrained. The only case of institutional racism within a police department in recent years was found to be in Ferguson and based on that and the handful of cases you have cited, some of which are doubtful and most unproven, you cannot logically make those broad and sweeping allegations you and Ice have made.

I have little doubt the Ferguson Police Department isn’t the only police department which has institutionalized racist practices. But that doesn’t mean by any stretch that every police department or even most police departments are anything like Ferguson as you have alleged. Nor does it mean Officer Wilson’s shooting of Mr. Brown was not justified. The world is often more complicated than anything that can be captured in inflammatory accusations. Unfortunately we have too many demagogues of every political flavor and too few reasoned and informed people.

Actually, this is what I said, complete and within context, this is what you are omitting;

“Well here is the thing Bells, how is a police officer defending himself injurious to the community? In all those other cases you cite, assuming they are truthful and you have divulged the complete truth, and that is a big assumption with you, was the police officer defending himself? You have a penchant for ignoring and inconvenient facts and leaving them out of the story. I guess you would rather have police officers murdered.”

You do understand the meaning of “guess” don’t you? That sentence was to illustrate the absurdity of your assertion based on your previous post. And you still haven’t answered my question. The word “guess” isn’t anywhere close to the definitive you are representing it to be.

Definition of Guess:
“estimate or suppose (something) without sufficient information to be sure of being correct” http://www.bing.com/search?q=guess ...=-1&sk=&cvid=d181ea67cf604190a3f6094fe89765cf

You took a rhetorical statement out of context and misrepresented it, that is a fact.

"A rhetorical statement is typically an assertion that uses devices or methods often found in rhetoric to become more meaningful or persuasive. This can include the use of different devices that establish connections between various ideas, such as allegory or metaphor, or that create an impact through exaggeration." - Wisegeek

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-rhetorical-statement.htm

You are supposed to be a lawyer, a solicitor. You should know what a rhetorical statement is and be able to recognize it when you see it. Therefore, I can only conclude you are being intellectually dishonest.

And just because a police officer may assert the self-defense defense after the fact, it doesn’t legitimatize any nefarious or wrongful conduct by that officer. It doesn’t change what occurred. That is why we have forensic scientists, and juries as previously pointed out to you. If police or anyone else for that matter transgresses the law, they are held accountable through our judicial system. And unfortunately for you, our judicial system is based on evidence and because of that sometimes the guilty go free. I would rather that, than to imprison innocent individuals. As previously pointed out to you police are not above the law and some are now in prison because they were found guilty of transgressing the law also as previously pointed out to you. And the offending officers have been arrested and charged. Now as I previously posted, I think some of the officers if now all of the officers in the Freddie Gray case will likely walk because of the prosecutor’s apparent incompetence and because some (not all) might actually be innocent.

Self-defense isn’t a “get out of jail free” pass for police officers as you seem to believe it is. So I will put my question to you once again, how is a police officer’s right to self-defense injurious to the community? You have not answered the question. You have dumped a shit load of distractions in order to avoid answering that question.

You took my words out of context and misrepresented them. That is yet another example of your intellectual dishonesty Bells. Now when are you going to apologize and retract your claim that I am a racist?

 

Well then if that is the case, then you should be able to provide some evidence of same. When and where have I “deliberately ignored all the evidence”? You have been repeatedly challenged to support that assertion with, you know, evidence, and to date you have not done so. It is easy for you to accuse people; you do it so easily and often, especially when you don’t agree with them. Where and when have I deliberately ignored “all the evidence” as you have repeatedly asserted? Your accusations are a defamation Bells. Scapegoating others for your transgressions might make your feel better, but it certainly isn’t honest.

If you mean by “day one”, you mean I didn’t mindlessly accept unsubstantiated rumor from specious sources as gospel and which were later proven to be untrue, but instead waited for credible information to emerge (e.g. the DOJ report), then count me guilty. But I have never “deliberately ignored the evidence”. You have been repeatedly challenged to prove this accusation and you have repeatedly failed to do so. Unlike you, I waited for credible sources to be developed and for more sources of information before I developed an opinion.

“Deny my own words”…what on Earth would lead you to that conclusion? Where are the words I am trying to deny? Where are the words that would lead a reasoned person to believe I am a racist as you have alleged? What beliefs do I hold that are racist and where is your proof of same? I again ask you to support your allegations of my alleged racism with evidence. You have repeatedly slandered me. I expect a retraction and an apology.

Where did Iceaura tell me I was right? Please do show me that text. Did you not see Iceaura’s last post?

“Joe's entire post 315 is a waste of his time, but this one item has some thread relevance:”
Well, by amazing good luck it seems to have been accurate, so moving on: It seems to be that everyone agrees that the KKK has never at its worst lynched more than about 10%, more or less, of the number of black men murdered by other black men for ordinary reasons, in the US.” – Iceaura

Now how does that comport with your notion Iceaura admitted he was wrong?

After much obfuscation and more than a week, Ice finally admitted that he didn’t have a source and that he made up his “statistics” based on his personal knowledge. Ice never said he was wrong, quite the contrary as evidenced by his last post. Iceaura has never recanted his assertion that the DOJ investigation of the Brown investigation validates his claim Officer Wilson first drew his weapon in order to accost two young black men who were merely jaywalking. That is a very demonstrable lie, because as endlessly pointed out, that just isn’t consistent with the DOJ report on the matter.

Rubbish, as previously pointed out, you have taken material out of context and misrepresented it. You were asked a question, a question which you have not yet answered. The only guilty of slander here is you my dear Bells. Stop evading and answer the question Bells.

 

Well you were not asked to apologize for disagreeing with me. I asked you to apologize for your unsupported defamatory accusations. There is a difference. Just because your beliefs are not consistent with fact and reason, it doesn’t make fact and reason rubbish. It just makes you duplicitous. Your attempt to suppress fact and reason with intimidation and intellectual dishonesty is how you defend your illogical beliefs and is your means of reconciling your cognitive dissonances.

As previously discussed, you have taken words out of context and misrepresented them. You are being intellectually dishonesty Bells. You are misrepresenting a rhetorical statement which followed a question.

Below is a definition of a rhetorical statement for your edification. But if you are a lawyer or solicitor, you should know this:

“A rhetorical statement is typically an assertion that uses devices or methods often found in rhetoric to become more meaningful or persuasive. This can include the use of different devices that establish connections between various ideas, such as allegory or metaphor, or that create an impact through exaggeration.”

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-rhetorical-statement.htm#didyouknowout

This is yet another very clear and demonstrable example of your intellectual dishonesty.

Oh, so by introducing irrelevant and incomplete material into the conversation you trying argue relevant facts? Did I mention any of the cases you cited before you brought them up? No, I didn’t. At best you are being disingenuous. Even if any or all of the material you introduce were complete and as you represented, it wouldn’t have any bearing on what happened to Mr. Gray in Baltimore. Nor does it even imply racism on the part of the Baltimore Police Department or that racism was a factor in Mr. Gray’s death.

As I asked you before, how are any of the cases you cited relevant? Did any of them occur in or near Baltimore? No. They didn’t. Was the Baltimore Police Department in any way involved in any of those cases? No, they were not. Do you have any evidence those incidents were driven by racism as you allege? No, you don’t. If you were trying to be a nonbiased arbiter of fact, then why have you consistently omitted facts, you know like the other side of the story, and only repeated the inflammatory accusations which appeal to you. Inflammatory accusations are not facts. They are just accusations (e.g. White’s death was ruled a suicide) and sometimes the accusations are completely without merit (e.g. the Brown shooting, “hands up, don’t shoot”). No your actions have been far from honest. You are trying to push your personal beliefs and/or rescue Ice as you always do. If you were being an honest broker, you wouldn’t need to omit facts or deny them or misconstrue text as you have consistently done. If you were an honest broker, you would wait for all the evidence to come in before leaping to conclusions and refusing to change those conclusions/beliefs as more information became available (e.g. Brown and Gray). Instead, you and Ice kept trying to pound square pegs into round holes to the point of absurdity.

And what facts am I running away from Bells? What are the terrible facts I am running away from exactly? I expect an answer. As I have pointed out, the additional cases you cited are not relevant to the discussion of Mr. Gray’s death or the OP. Even if every case you cited was a clear demonstration of racism and police misconduct as you allege, it doesn’t mean that all or most policemen are racist or that racism is epidemic within American police departments as you have also alleged. Certainly, there are racist policemen or police practices as evidenced by the DOJ investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. There are simply bad policemen, racist or not. But that isn’t proof of the widespread racism you believe exists in American police departments. Nor is it proof Mr. Gray’s mistreatment was the result of racism – you know the whole point of this thread and the original discussion.

So in addition to being the arbiter of what is or isn’t racism you are also the arbiter of what is and isn’t a spelling mistake. I guess you have ESP then. You know what people are thinking? So people don’t repeat spelling mistakes? I think you need to tell that to the FBI, if you are to be believed, they have been doing it all wrong all these years. Because they have been successfully using repeated/habitual spelling mistakes to identify people for decades. You need to tell them they have been doing it all wrong. But don't expect them to believe you. There is a whole science behind it. It's called forensic linguistics. And if you are a lawyer or solicitor, you should know that too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_linguistics#Author_identification

This is what you have been reduced to Bells, arguing over irrelevant minutia because the facts just don’t support your beliefs. That is all you have, minutia, misrepresentation, evasion, and intimidation. You evade rational discourse with irrelevant distractions, threats, personal attacks, and a host of fallacious argument. What you cannot get through rational discourse, you attempt to get through threats, intimidation and personal attacks. That isn’t a model of rational discourse Bells and that certainly isn’t intellectually honest. It just exacerbates and perpetuates the crackpottery on this site.

Hmm, just what comments am I running away from exactly? I think that is just wishful thinking on your part. Please do show me which of my comments I am “running away from”. I invited you to begin another thread devoted to the cases you cited, something you have yet to do. And somehow you interpret that as me “running away from my own comments”? Yet again Bells, this is yet another case in which you are not being intellectually honest. That is conduct unbecoming a moderator.

Irrelevant facts and assertions are obfuscation and by omitting relevant facts and misrepresenting facts as you have done, it crosses into the realm of intellectual dishonesty. Prior to your intervention, the discussion was about whither Mr. Gray was the victim of police racism. That had nothing to do with Louisiana or any of the other cases in any of the other cities and counties you cited for all the reasons previously spelled out. And as pointed out in this post, you have made serious errors of omission when you cited those additional cases. That is intellectual dishonesty on your part Bells. My position has been that while there are racists in all walks of life and in all races, it doesn’t mean the Baltimore Police Department is riddled with racism or that Mr. Gray was the victim of racism. Because the Baltimore Police Department has victimized not only blacks but whites and the officers accused of the most egregious crimes against Mr. Gray are themselves black. My position has been and remains, is that Mr. Gray was more the victim of his social class than his race. As previously stated on multiple occasions, having worked in inner cities for a decade as an EMT between 40 and 80 hours a week, I think race understates the problem and is a distraction from the real issues at work here. And the previously referenced statistical data suggests I am correct. And you think that is rubbish and racist…seriously? Unfortunately for you Bells, relevant fact and reason are never rubbish. Just because I don’t fall for inflammatory rubbish as you do, it doesn’t mean I am racist.

 

One more thing Bells in case I haven't been crystal clear, the police officers involved in these cases may or may not be racist. But you have no evidence they are racist. Every day across the world people hurt each other regardless of race. Hurting people isn't evidence of racism. It's what people do either through ignorance, incompetence, or intent and for a host of motives. When virtually every bad thing becomes racist regardless of the facts and the evidence, you diminish the power of the word. It's like the little boy who cried wolf one too many times. And when that happens who wins? The wolf wins and in this case the wolf is the racist. Ironically, by frivolously accusing people of racism as you have done you are playing into the jaws of the wolf (i.e. the racist).