Centroids: What is undeniable in the Ferguson imbroglio is flagrant unwillingness on the part of the Left generally and black people in particular to admit the truth. Michael Brown, the evidence is very clear, was -on the day he was killed- acting like a street thug, he was violent and irrational. He had robbed a local store and bullied an employee as he left the premises, using his bulk, he weighed about 290 pounds, to shove aside the man who was trying to recover the stolen cigars. Later, Brown attacked a police officer in his car, fighting with him, throwing punches, hitting him twice,once with significant force, while trying to take the officer's gun from him. I don't know about you, but to me that, alone, justified use of lethal force against Brown. But things did not end there. After the officer was finally able to fire two shots from within his patrol car, neither of which caused much injury to Brown, one shattered a window, the other grazed the criminal, he -Brown- began to run away. Officer Darren Wilson, as he was supposed to do as a policeman, exited his car and gave chase. For whatever reason, Brown stopped, turned around, and charged at Wilson from about 30 or 40 feet. Brown ignored orders to stop and became more determined to carry though with his charge. Witnesses on the scene described all this to the grand jury and this was Wilson's calm and rational explanation for the event. It all makes perfect sense and is completely consistent with forensics evidence.
At no time did Brown put his hands in the air and say that he surrendered. HOWEVER, this is not how the Left and many (nearly all?) black people see things. Instead of admitting that Brown was a total a**hole that day and was guilty of criminal conduct, he is made into a hero. Can you believe it? That kind of irrationality is pure psychological denial, with no justification whatsoever. It is a defensive reaction, and it is ludicrous because it is patently absurd. There is a serious problem on the Left and among the clear majority of African-Americans, obvious from many interviews on television, in their inability to accept the truth for what it is and deal with it. Black reaction is so typical that personally my sympathy with the Civil Rights cause, once something that I regarded as a badge of honor, I now regard as a mistake, something that won't happen again because so many black people are not worth it, they make themselves into criminals who, if they don't get their way, riot, destroy businesses, ruin public property, and cause mayhem in their own communities if not elsewhere. It isn't just Ferguson, it is riot after riot, city after city, decade after decade. You know, I am sick and tired of it. And sick and tired of how the political Left empowers this kind of conduct, instead of doing everything possible to stop it, cheering it on, maybe seeking to explain it, but only in terms of some Marxist paradigm in which the "oppressed" should be free to go on rampages whenever they so desire. What it all amounts to is disrespect for the truth. The Left and black people generally even if there are important exceptions, hate the truth. They cannot face the truth, which is that their ideology is a total failure. The Right doesn't really offer much of an alternative, it is too stupid for that, but this is a separate issue for another time. What needs to be looked at dispassionately, objectively, and with resolve to get to the root of the problem, is that the Left is irresponsible in extremis, and utterly dishonest. It is time for the Left to reinvent itself; we need a healthy Left vs Right dialectic for democracy to work. This is impossible now because the current Left consists mostly of a bizarre assortment of malcontents who believe in an ideology based on Cultural Marxism. It is high time to totally discredit that ideology so that there can be a Left worth the name. Billy =============================== The Ferguson Fraud By _Rich Lowry_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/rich_lowry/) - November 26, 2014 _realclearpolitics.com_ (http://realclearpolitics.com) The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said don't shoot, he would almost certainly be alive today. His family would have been spared an unspeakable loss, and Ferguson, Missouri wouldn't have experienced multiple bouts of rioting, including the torching of at least a dozen businesses the night it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson wouldn't be charged with a crime. Instead, the credible evidence (i.e., the testimony that doesn't contradict itself or the physical evidence) suggests that Michael Brown had no interest in surrendering. After committing an act of petty robbery at a local business, he attacked Officer Wilson when he stopped him on the street. Brown punched Wilson when the officer was still in his patrol car and attempted to take his gun from him. The first shots were fired within the car in the struggle over the gun. Then, Michael Brown ran. Even if he hadn't put his hands up, but merely kept running away, he would also almost certainly be alive today. Again, according to the credible evidence, he turned back and rushed Wilson. The officer shot several times, but Brown kept on coming until Wilson killed him. This is a terrible tragedy. It isn't a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant ("hands up, don't shoot") and then a mini-movement. When the facts didn't back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, "You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime." They preferred to charge that the grand jury process was rigged, because St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch didn't seek an indictment of Wilson and allowed the grand jury to hear all the evidence and make its own decision. This, Chris Hayes of MSNBC deemed so removed from normal procedure that it’s unrecognizable. It's unusual, yes, but not unheard of for prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury without a recommendation to indict. Regardless, who could really object to a grand jury hearing everything in such a sensitive case? If any of the evidence were excluded that, surely, would have been the basis of other howls of an intolerably stacked deck. It’s a further travesty, according to the Left, that Officer Wilson was allowed to testify to the grand jury. Never mind that it is standard operating procedure. As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, guilty parties usually don't testify because they have to do it without their lawyer present and anything they say can be used against them. It is also alleged that the prosecutor McCulloch is biased because his father was a cop who was killed by a criminal. Follow this argument though to its logical conclusion and McCulloch would be unable to handle almost all cases, because of his engrained bias against criminality. Finally, there is the argument that Wilson should have been indicted so there could be a trial "to determine the facts." Realistically, if a jury of Wilson's peers didn't believe there was enough evidence to establish probable cause to indict him, there was no way a jury of his peers was going to convict him of a crime, which requires the more stringent standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. Besides, we don't try people for crimes they almost certainly didn't commit just to satisfy a mob that will throw things at the police and burn down local businesses if it doesn't get its way. If the grand jury had given into the pressure from the streets and indicted as an act of appeasement, the mayhem most likely would have only been delayed until the inevitable acquittal in a trial. The agitators of Ferguson have proven themselves proficient at destroying other people's property, no matter what the rationale. This summer, they rioted when the police response was "militarized" and rioted when the police response was un-militarized. Local businesses like the beauty-supply shops Beauty Town (hit repeatedly) and Beauty World (burned on Monday night) have been targeted for the offense of existing, not to mention employing people and serving customers. Liberal commentators come back again and again to the fact that Michael Brown was unarmed and that, in the struggle between the two, Officer Wilson only sustained bruises to his face, or what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo calls an "irritated cheek." The subtext is that if only Wilson had allowed Brown to beat him up and perhaps take his gun, things wouldn't have had to escalate. There is good reason for a police officer to be in mortal fear in the situation Officer Wilson faced, though. In upstate New York last March, a police officer responded to a disturbance call at an office, when suddenly a disturbed man pummeled the officer as he was attempting to exit his vehicle and then grabbed his gun and shot him dead. The case didn't become a national metaphor for anything. Ferguson, on the other hand, has never lacked for media coverage, although the narrative of a police execution always seemed dubious and now has been exposed as essentially a fraud. "Hands up, don't shoot" is a good slogan. If only it was what Michael Brown had done last August -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
