Tweet
Cross posted from Frederick Leatherman Law Blog
George Zimmerman. Photo by Seminole County Sheriffs / Wikimedia Commons.
Sometimes what you are searching for during an investigation is located in plain view right in front of your face, but for one reason or another, you don’t see it. I have been chastising myself for not seeing Zimmerman’s confession, even though it was obscured by a fog of inconsistencies and lies. Nevertheless, I should have seen it.
When Investigator Chris Serino was interviewing Zimmerman on February 29th, three days after the shooting, Zimmerman said,
“I didn’t want him to keep slamming my head on the concrete so I kind of shifted. But when I shifted my jacket came up…and it exposed my firearm. That’s when he said you are going to die tonight. He took one hand off my mouth, and slid it down my chest. I took my gun aimed it at him and fired.”
The key word “aimed.”
Notice that he did not say, “I took my gun and fired.”
Because of the ongoing struggle he was describing, I pictured him freeing his gun from his holster while lying in a supine position and firing it at point blank range into Trayvon Martin’s torso.
Given his description of the struggle between the two of them, he could not have extended his arm and hand holding the gun because there was not enough room between the two of them. Not only that, according to him, he succeeded in grabbing the gun because he pinned Martin’s left hand against the side of his chest using his right upper arm and that prevented Martin from grabbing it.
Do y’all see the problem? How can he possibly extend his elbow and aim the gun with Martin lying on top of him while pinning Martin’s left hand to his chest with his right upper arm.
If he accurately described their relative positions and what they were doing when he fired the fatal shot, the entry wound should have been a contact wound in Martin’s left side or possibly his back traversing Martin’s body sideways from left to right probably with a downward trajectory.
With Martin’s torso in the way, I do not see any way, he could have extended his arm and aimed his gun firing the fatal shot from intermediate range into Martin’s torso creating an entry wound 1 inch to the left of the midline and 1/2 inch below the left nipple with the trajectory of the bullet going mstraight through from front to back without deviating up or down or left or right.
I also do not see him him saying that he aimed his gun when he did not aim his gun.
Instead, like a Freudian slip, it appeared to slip out during his narrative of the circumstances leading up to the shooting.
If this is what happened, he did not shoot Martin in self-defense because he had already separated from Martin with his gun in his hand aimed at Martin and was no longer in imminent danger of being killed or suffering grievous bodily injury.
87 Comments
so many holes in his self defense claim
some analysis and musings submitted for your vetting
http://whonoze.wordpress.com/
Oh what a tangled web we weave … I’ll leave you to finish the rest of the proverb. At this point I find myself wondering if he’s capable of distinguishing fact from fiction.
mfi
PS: Belated thanks for response to my question in your last.
Sheesh that’s the second time today I’ve forgotten to say recommended.
mfi
on that note recommended
Masoninblue:
Your points are well taken, leaving little if any reasonable doubt that Z intentionally murdered T.
But hovering above the factual details of this case, I decided to take an in-depth, wide-angle overview perspective of a salient commonality between this and far too many murder cases.
Guns!
And if I now seem to depart from the rational and sane, well sanity is nothing, after all, but an agreed upon state of perspective and action, so here it is.
The employment of firearms in so many murders has led me to an inescapable conclusion:
All American citizens must be required by law and will suffer crippling pecuniary penalties unless they carry when in the public arena firearms which must be carried in standardized holsters and must be in plain sight at all times.
If all citizens are armed to the teeth and everyone knows that each person they meet has the instant ability by law to visit death and destruction upon them, well either people will behave themselves or we will experience a national blood bath of biblical proportions.
Of course, we surely wouldn’t want to ban the personal possession of firearms. After all, there is the second amendment to consider and the NRA and the basic human instinct and ‘god’ given right to kill anything which is considered fair game.
But, imagine a gun free United States.
Just imagine.
I and T thank you for your tireless efforts, and there is no doubt that Diogenes has indeed found in you an honest and honorable citizen of and for all of the people.
One must also extent the second amendment onto private property. Business, courts, airport, airplanes and petroleum refineries.
Especially to halls and offices of congress. It might solve the need for term limits.
overheard at the 2nd bail hearing today
1.
“your honor can little Zimmerman testify without being cross-examined, pretty please?”
2.
“your honor he is only 28, 28yos don’t think so good and he has good reason not to trust you”
What have the forensics folks said about how far Martin might have been from the muzzle?
Hmmm…The evidence does not match the statement. But that is not enough for a conviction.
However, it CAN be used in determining someones credibility. And GZ’s credibility is still the main, perhaps sole, issue in this case.
Boxturtle (He really should have consulted a lawyer before making a statement)
Heh. I’m thinking the answer to the question is “No, and he’ll be under oath and on record when examined”.
He DOES have good reason not to trust the judge. He lied in court to the judge and judges take offense at that.
If I were the judge, I’d be tempted to grant bail on the Murder 2 charge, then lock him up for contempt until the trial.
Boxturtle (You bail on the charge is $1.00, however we have the perjury to resolve…)
We agree most certainly on this matter.
I think a campaign slogan to initiate such an expansion of the second amendment should be simply Smith and Wesson’s 19th century advertising motto:
‘God made them big and God made them small but a Smith & Wesson equalizes them all.’
Who said the Wild West is dead and gone.
Term limits, no problem: Smith & Wesson to the rescue.
Thoughts on bond hearing:
It seems wrong that the passport issue was entirely ignored. That seemed to be pretty clear evidence of intent to flee by hiding the non-expired passport from the court.
O’mara really did not present anything topical other than the accountant, but that too seemed to be “smoke and mirrors” as the accountant had to admit that Zimmerman and wife also transferred money in amounts below 10,000 between bank accounts and not just from Pay Pay (“because of a Pay Pal rule”).
The prosecutor spoke very passionately during his closing remarks. What to make of the state not putting on any witnesses?
Zimmerman’s father’s testimony was not at all believable and somewhat aggressive rather than the contrite attitude one would think the father of someone who killed an innocent teenager would be. I say “innocent” because even if we believe most of Zimmerman’s story, Trayvon was doing nothing wrong that caused Zimmerman to initially follow or call the police on him in the first place and would certainly still be alive if Zimmerman had not done so.
Oh thank god. A post that isn’t about healthcare.
Thanks Mason. Great catch.
This is what I’ve been saying since we learned about the slug trajectory. There’s no way it could have happened with Trayvon straddling GZ.
I also don’t see how you could collapse both lungs and sever an artery at the heart without getting some blood on your chest, you know, if the person with the collapsed lungs and severed artery was on top of you at the time of the injury.
Doesn’t make any damn sense. I think he shot him, standing, about 1-2 feet away.
And why did the prosecutor back off when questioning Robert Zimmerman?
It seems he had him cornered when the father said that he has heard George Zimmerman screaming like that on “many” instances.
but he said “pretty please”?!!!
I wondered about that too
I have to assume that he is saving the ammo for the trial
because it looks like RZsr is going to be an awful witness
The judge has accepted this as a case of “You renewed your drivers license and misplaced the old one. Happens”.
The accountant had one duty: To assure the judge that the Paypal money was really out of GZ’s control.
The state needs no witnesses other than the judge. The judge is quite aware that the man in front of him has lied repeatedly. The judge is also aware that GZ has turned himself in twice, maintained contact while he was in hiding, will be quite expensive to protect, is not a danger to the community, and is not facing a terribly long sentence.
I think the Judge will set bond. It’ll be high enough to lock up all of GZ money except for what he needs for his lawyer.
Boxturtle (This would not be the first time I’m wrong. it would not be the first time I’m wrong today)
I have, it is not perfect, but it is beautiful
100% in agreement
especially the passport
I’m thinking he backed off because he had everything he wanted. That fellow will be a terrible witness at trial and I don’t think the prosecutor wanted to reveil any of his strategy wrt that witness.
Boxturtle (guessing)
Yes, indeed, most beautiful.
I have marveled at the 800 lb. gorilla standing in the corner laughing its head off over the never ending debate over the murder rate and violence issuing forth from the muzzle of a gun.
And why is the gorilla laughing?
The answer is so painfully obvious:
Get rid of the fucking guns!
Res ipsa loquitur – It speaks for itself!
I will be very surprised if the judge does not set bond.
However, I don’t agree that Zimmerman is not a danger to the community.
Not quite sure what Zimmerman is still capable of, but given his past history, Zimmerman being involved in this tragedy (killing Trayvon)seems almost inevitable.
Who knows what else he is capable of at this point.
Mason, I can not wait to hear your take on today’s hearing. Stop enjoying your life and write something already!!!
Admittedly, my opinion only. But I think the community is more of a danger to GZ at this point.
Yeah, somebody should have seen this coming. GZ was (is) an idiot with a gun, an attitude, and an exaggerated opinion of his own importance.
Boxturtle (Carrying a gun while on neighborhood watch?!?)
I’m sure Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft will be all over this, haw haw haw.
What’s the deal with JM at TalkLeft? Why is she so invested in this case?
I checked out her blog and it seems she deletes any posts that disagree with her conclusions.
It also seems that she ignores quite a bit of evidence that does not support her conclusions.
Is she personally involved in this case in some way?
I think I know why they held back
RZ said that he heard GZ scream in the same manner on the tape when they lived in Virginia. I believe they lived in Virginia before GZ was 18yo at which point GZ had good reason to have sounded like a teenager, aiding the the prosecution’s point.
“I say “innocent” because even if we believe most of Zimmerman’s story, Trayvon was doing nothing wrong that caused Zimmerman to initially follow or call the police on him in the first place and would certainly still be alive if Zimmerman had not done so.”
That’s a pointless argument. Following someone or calling the police is not justification for physical assault. T might be alive today had he decided not to physically assault Z and instead dealt with the problem through the police. There were two levels of escalations in this case. From following to assault and from assault to gunshot. The debate here is whether the the escalation from assault to gunshot was warranted under self defense. I can’t see the escalation going from following to assault as warranted under any normal circumstance if T was indeed the instigator. But even that’s pointless because this trial is about the last escalation, not every single chain of events that led up to it.
Hi, y’all.
I’ve been working on my next post regarding the admissibility at trial of his misconduct about the money received in the PayPal account as of the first bail hearing. I will post the article later this afternoon or early this evening after we wrap up our discussion in this thread.
I think the prosecutor did the right thing by not calling any witnesses and not grilling GZ’s dad.
He didn’t have to call any witnesses because he presented the basis for Judge Lester’s revocation of the bond in his moving papers back on June 1st. He did not have to add anything because the burden of persuasion had shifted to the defense to spin and minimize the fraud on the court.
GZ couldn’t testify without making things worse and possibly opening his mouth wide enough to shove both feet down his throat and get himself charged with perjury. This case is a textbook example of why defendants in criminal cases really need to keep their mouths shut.
Those of us who teach or have taught trial advocacy to lawyers tell them that the most effective way to deal with a heavily biased witness is to ask only one question on cross examination.
I doubt anyone in the courtroom believed him when he said he’s heard his son scream like that “many instances.” And assuming for the sake of argument that his statement is true, one might reasonably interpret the comment to mean that his son has driven a small universe of people to try to kill him.
On edit, I did not mean to demean GZ’s father. No doubt he loves his son and wants to help him. He’s probably stressed to the max as any of us would be if GZ were our son and so desperately wants to believe that GZ is screaming for help that he probably convinced himself that is his son’s terrified scream for help.
The issue of who is screaming for help does not have to be decided today. Therefore, the empathetic and respectful thing to do is to let him have his say and wait to fight that battle another day.
I don’t agree with your argument.
However, it also really is not an adequate response to my statement.
I simply stated that even if we believe George Zimmerman’s story, his father (and himself indeed) would seemingly want to give at least the appearance of being sorry for the loss of the innocent teenager’s life.
After all, Trayvon was simply returning home from the store when the actions of George Zimmerman disrupted that and ended up in taking this young man’s life.
Whether or not Zimmerman was acting in self-defense or not is another matter, but the truth remains that had Zimmerman left this boy alone from the beginning, he’d still be alive to day. He was walking home. He was committing no crimes. He was bothering no one.
In the interest of efficiency
I posted this a few days ago and it seems to perfectly respond to your casuistry
“when will we simply ask this adult to take responsibility for the whole of his preventable actions and the “perhaps” unpreventable actions resulting from the preventable actions? THEY ARE NOT SEPARABLE AND THUSLY CARRY A SUMMATIVE WEIGHT IN GRAVITY, The antecedent action carried out in a premeditated moment carries the weight of the resulting unpremeditated action’s results.
Further
It is Trayvon who is deserving of a low threshold for his actions, Not Zimmerman, why?
because:
-Zimmerman is older,
-had sanctuary, where the burden of responsible thinking is much higher
-was the only one armed, thus the burden of responsible thinking is much higher
-had instructions not to follow from the neighborhood watch training
-had instructions not to be armed from the neighborhood watch training
over and over, every time you and your ilk try to make this case about the last 10-20 seconds of the crime, implicitly sanctioning and forgetting his irresponsible and malignant antecedent behavior, we or I will remind you of how we got to those last 10-20 seconds. That behavior matters, it matters even more than the last 20 seconds to us as a society and it is as dangerous as the last 20 seconds because it can’t be divorced from the last 20 seconds. Because it is when we are supposed to be better.
you are as irresponsible as Zimmerman every time you attempt to divorce the two, you discard the same responsibility he is trying to discard now that he is caught, except he has the decency to deny the antecedent action, namely following Trayvon while you have the gall to imply that it does not matter.”
Mason said this in support of my post
“Your analysis explains the basis for the rule that an aggressor cannot claim self-defense.
GZ made a series of choices that fateful night based on an unsubstantiated hunch that an AA teenager was “up to no good” in his neighborhood and, after shooting him dead, he decided to lie about what he did and why he did it.
Looking at this case from TM’s perspective, I think he had an objective basis to believe that GZ was an aggressor who intended to harm him. Even though he was entitled to stand his ground and not retreat, he did retreat by running away from GZ.
To focus exclusively on that last 10-20 seconds excludes all of the objective evidence that led TM to run away from GZ. To condemn him for physically attacking GZ after GZ had pushed him to that point is manifestly unfair and wrong.
Well said, Tzar.”
I chuckled
You are assuming, without any persuasive evidence to support your assumption, that TM suddenly went psycho, laid in wait and decided to attack a much heavier adult male without a weapon after running away from him and successfully eluding him.
That makes absolutely no sense, especially because TM was talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone at the time.
No one has offered a plausible explanation for that remarkable change of behavior.
Instead, people assume GZ is telling the truth because his injuries supposedly verify his theory.
They do not because his injuries could have been sustained as TM was standing his ground and defending himself against a man armed with a gun who attacked him.
If one looks at the evidence dispassionately, GZ’s claim that he did not follow and confront TM simply does not pass the straight-face test.
hear hear!!
good points tzar. I was not even trying to make a legal argument for guilt or innocence, simply giving my observation that Zimmerman’s father’s demeanor was strange.
The indignant way he answered the prosecutor’s questions as if George was somehow the innocent victim in all of this, completely ignoring the fact that a boy’s life was taken as a direct result of George’s own paranoia (or other psychological maladies)…when the boy was simply trying to return home from the store.
Indeed. Other than testosterone poisoing and youthful bravado, I still haven’t heard a serious explanation for “suddenly psycho MMA fighting TM”.
Also, note what’s left out of the “suddenly psycho MMA fighting TM” spin? That, in fact, even if you want to buy that spin, TM did not suddenly attack GZ. Even after GZ watched him, followed him in his car, then chased after him on foot and apparently kept looking for him, according to both GZ’s and DD’s accounts the FIRST thing TM did when they met up ask GZ a question. He asked him a question which GZ didn’t answer and then, according to GZ, he reached into his waistband for his cellphone and THEN TM supposedly hit him at that moment.
They are feigning righteously indignation but we all know who was demeaned and insulted. You can sort of see where GZ gets his unwarranted sense of confidence.
*righteous
” he reached into his waistband for his cellphone and THEN TM supposedly hit him at that moment.”
I believe DeeDee say she heard Trayvon say “get off, get off.”
If so, it seems that George was the first to raise it to a physical confrontation.
Another question, it seemed the prosecutor today mentioned ‘other voices’ in the background of the 911 call.
I wonder if with audio amplification techniques, they can isolate George Zimmerman’s talking in the background at the same time the screaming is heard. If so, that would definitively prove that it was not George screaming.
What a noble and rational thought.
I share your sentiment, but the NRA and the right wing are so entrenched and committed to arming all citizens to protect themselves from people of color and people like you, me and most of us here at the Lake who oppose violence in all of its myriad forms and know that the power of the pen is far mightier than the sword, that I fear we will be stuck with far too many paranoid and dangerous people armed with firearms for the foreseeable future.
On the other sign of the coin, however, even though I do not like guns, I do not like the direction our government is taking toward kleptocracy and anti-democratic authoritarianism.
If we the people truly need to be armed for any reason, it may be to protect ourselves against our own government and not against ourselves with whom we have far more in common than our government and the kleptocrats it exclusively serves.
Yes she did which, of course further undermines the “suddenly psycho TM” thinking.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trayvon-martin-case-911-call-two-experts-reach-two-much-different-conclusions/2012/05/19/gIQAtuapbU_story_3.html
Having been raised in an NRA household, I can testify that the root of the attachment to the 2nd amendment is exactly what you have written.
However, the problem as I see it, is that the very people who espouse a willingness to use their firearms to protect us from our tyrannical government, are the ones who instead are more likely to be inflamed by divide and conquer propaganda, and become miss-guided storm troopers allied with the authoritarian right in the violent repression of the progressive left.
As the famous strike breaker Jay Gould once said;
“I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”
All of this is one of life’s biggest mysteries.
What struck me about GZ’s father statement about how he supposedly heard GZ scream like that many times years ago was that it was a totally unnecessary, and absurd, embellishment. Kind of like his son’s exaggerated tales, eh?
Florida still use the electric chair? Methink ol’ GZ is destined to be deep fried.
With all due respect, Mason, that’s horsehit, or at least not supported by history. Sure, ideas motivate actions so the pen has it’s place in setting the table for revolt/reform, etc. But Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin didn’t defeat the British with the Declaration of Independence or any of their other great writings. Washington and the soldiers under him defeated the British by eventually trapping them at Yorktown and pummeling them with cannon fire until Cornwallis ran up the white flag.
The French monarchy didn’t fall because the great writers of that time stood outside the Bastille and read great exhortations. The monarchy fell because starving peasants with farming implements stormed the Bastille.
Even the Soviet Union didn’t fall because of the exhortations of Boris Yeltsin. It fell because the Russian army turned its guns around and shelled the Kremlin.
I facepalmed so hard I almost rubbed my face off
Yeah, it was one of those moments when someone tells such a blatant whopper that you’re taken back a bit.
Sorry to butt in, but I’d be willing to wager that by the time those Russian soldiers decided to shell the Kremlin, they’d been exposed to some persuasive reading material.
That is not to say the sword doesn’t have it’s part to play.
Or an inadvertant admission that he had abused the young George.
Hmm, very interesting angle. I hadn’t thought of that but, even though I think RZ is spinning a tale with his scream story, I would lean toward giving him the benefit of the doubt on that issue until shown otherwise.
I’m pretty sure you’re wrong, or at least exaggerating that aspect. Although there was some loosening of the state media under Gorbachev, in the USSR it was illegal to own a printing press without a state license. I’m betting that it was more likely that those soldiers turned because they hadn’t been paid in months, and that their relatives were hurting for food and winter heating oil. As I said in a comment on another post, hungry people have a tendency to find solutions where previously none were thought to exist.
“Following someone or calling the police is not justification for physical assault.”
Following someone is threatening. When GZ, after visibly following TM in his car and then on foot, refused to answer or explain to TM why he was hounding TM in the dark on a rainy night — even in response to a direct question from TM — that is threatening. When GZ instead of answering or explaining or even asking TM who he was or what he was doing there, reached into his pants, that is threatening. GZ provoked this confrontation and he pushed it, otherwise the struggle would have moved away from TM’s home.
This is another weird contradiction that has probably been pointed out before.
“I did not know if he was armed or not,” Zimmerman said addressing Martin’s family directly. April 20, 2012.
His fear that TM was armed was never part of GZ’s multiple earlier descriptions of what happened that night.
My sister, who is a criminal defense attorney, stated that Zimmerman could very well have been charged with assault for following Trayvon in a threatening manner, and if he was charged in that way, Zimmerman very well may have been charged with capital murder because Trayvon died during the commission of the first felony (assault).
Though to it’s baffling the way the meme that it’s not unlawful to follow someone in a menacing way keeps getting repeated over and over.
“Though to it’s baffling the way the meme that it’s not unlawful to follow someone in a menacing way keeps getting repeated over and over.”
Agreed. People lose their common sense sometimes.
“Agreed. People lose their common sense sometimes.”
And oddly, during racially charged moments.
I have not had time to follow this case with the attention I would have wished to. However, if I may, I would like to interject a couple of observations.
Firstly, Zimmerman’s role in Neighborhood watch.I set up the Neighborhood watch program in my immediate neighborhood. At the meeting,set up in conjuction with local authorities, we were ALL told NOT to play policeman..we were to be eyes and ears,but NOT enforcement officers.
When Zimmerman was TOLD by police to NOT pursue Martin,and Zimmerman continued his pursuit,he was violating the number one rule of caution-don’t take the law in your own hands-that’s the officer’s job!
Secondly, I don’t know about you, but if I am in fear for my life, I don’t run AFTER my would be assailant-I would be running FROM him. WHO fears for their life and chases after the person they think is trying to kill them?
more importantly why get out of your car if you think he might be armed? why not wait for the police? what’s the rush?
I went from being mind blown to being completely disgusted at this banal and capricious meme
Welcome Gitcheegumee
the funny thing is you don’t need all the particulars of the case to come to your conclusions, just the basic arithmetic, it’s just common sense; that kid should not be dead.
If I was seated on a jury I would probably consider that statement relevant but not really damning. And I would need to hear the recording before I made up my mind, to get the full context.
GZ goes to great lengths in his police interviews to avoid admitting that he followed Trayvon. He claims that he was only walking in the same direction, but not following! At one point, the interviewer makes fun of him.
That’s very interesting – I dare you to post it at talkleft!
I’d want to see how GZ managed to get his gun out of the holster, given the situation he described, with Trayvon sitting on him. And I’d want to see how he managed to get the gun positioned so that the bullet took the observed trajectory.
Can he be required to demonstrate these things? I guess not, if he can’t be compelled to testify.
There would be no point. It would only get deleted.
Nope, a writer or a speaker may inspire a gunman but that’s about it.
Some recent examples:
My country is free today because people like my grandfather fought our war of independence and defeated what was at the time the most powerful empire in the world. I owe my freedom to him and to his comrades and to their unrestrained warfare against the British occupiers of Ireland. That’s why the republic even exists.
More recently when it comes to Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement you might like to note that once the British lost air superiority (the IRA shot down several of their helicopters) and their ability to patrol without incurring severe casualties (the IRA successfully bombed to smithereens several of their APCs and everyone in them). The sudden removal of military superiority coupled with a wildly successful IRA assassination campaign against British police, intelligence service officers, and HMC&E and HMRC investigators was what got the British interested in negotiating.
The Vietnamese won their independence from American imperialism by defeating America militarily. It wasn’t the peace movement who won them their independence from American imperialism it was the men and women who continuously dished out so much violence to the American forces that those forces broke and ultimately ran away.
The same is true of Irak it wasn’t the peace movement and their protests that forced the American invaders to run away leaving behind several billion dollars worth of “enduring bases” and several hundred million dollars worth TOE behind them. It was the resistance to the invaders who dished out constant unremitting violence to the invader troops and who endured horrific levels of casualties to do so.
You might want to read this:
Firedoglake | Shatter Their Minds.
Freedom and political power both (to paraphrase Mao) grow out of the barrels of guns.
mfi
Freedom and political power both (to paraphrase Mao) grow out of the barrels of guns….mfi
And revolutions are fought by those whose ribs are easily counted.
I’d like to see that too. His story makes no sense in light of the evidence. Any time you are involved in a situation like that, there are going to be a little discrepancy or two but in this case there are so many little discrepancies that they all add up to a giant load of BS!
Revolutions are planned and then fought by those who have had a taste of better conditions, or who grew up in better conditions than they’re currently experiencing. They are the ones who stir the often-apathetic or resigned working-class persons to revolt. The American and French revolutions are cases in point; so is the Cuban revolution — neither Che Guevara nor the Castro brothers or the rest of the Cuban revolutionary vanguard were peasants; they were all educated middle-class or upper-class young men.
As both Saul Alinsky and Crane Brinton found, it’s the middle classes that tend to be the incubators of revolutionary fervor — they’re not ground down and fatalistically hopeless like the poor tend to be, but neither are they so particularly well off that they have no anxiety about their future.
The classic scenario is for a middle class in a particular society or nation to have suffered an economic setback that was sharp enough and recent enough to have stung the memories of the middle classes with thoughts of the relative prosperity they once enjoyed. In 18th-century New England, this manifested in some economic downturns, coupled with the sudden imposition of new forms of taxation (up to that point the Crown hadn’t really taxed its colonists much at all, compared to what Britons typically paid). In 21st-century America, the decline in real wages and thus prosperity that began in the 1970s has been masked by both the deliberate expansion of credit and by the increased numbers of women in the workforce, but the decline’s still been steep enough for people to start noticing that their families, with two or more incomes, don’t and can’t have the same buying power that their parents’ one-income families did.
Here’s the problem in the US: The Americans who are fondest of guns are not exactly civilized Keynesian Socialists. Think more along the lines of the more trigger-happy troops the US sent to Irak. If there is a successful armed revolt in the US, it will result in an authoritarian régime taking over the country and making the US even more racist, ignorant and stupid than it already is.
What about Ghandi, Mandela and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
You can always get a bunch of humans to kill another bunch of humans.
The reasoning used to inspire such physicality is like a river current guiding a bunch of anecdotes. Anecdotes and reason(s) are always information, especially when the Limbaugh cortex is dominant.
I’m sticking with Pen Mightier than Sword.
Everybody, Keep Writing!
Gandhi:
“I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence I would advise violence.”
Mohandas Gandhi:
Gandhi wasn’t a pacifist per se he saw it as the best tactic to adopt in the circumstances. He supported the British war effort in:
1. The Zulu Rebellion (later came to believe he was wrong in supporting the British against the Zulus).
2. The Boer War.
3. World War I.
So successful and effcient was he as an ambulance corps organiser that the Brtish awarded him the British Empire’s War Medal. He started out as a very conventional South African lawyer with the makings of a very good political career before he decided to chuck all that up and go home to India. He felt that India couldn’t win militarily against the British but could in other ways settling on passive resistance and civil disobedience.
Mandela:
The man who co-founded “Spear of the Nation,” (Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK)) can not be described as a pacifist.
Martin Luther King:
I’ll grant you that one. :-).
By all means try peaceful means first. But be prepared to fight – and be aware that some people will emulate civilised peaceful behaviour only because they are afaid that violence will result in pain and defeat for them.
mfi
This conversation has taken an appropriate turn, some things to think about
1. how does this case, the rise of the belligerents- as described by Phoenix Woman @ 71- and the social contract, relate to each other and what do they prognosticate for the future of America and the world?
2. How does this tie in with religion, more specifically the dominance of monotheism and its cosmology, and I do not care to reduce that musing to the pedantry of church v. state, I think the more interesting road lies in the exploration of the limits and potentials of human intelligence and pedagogy?
3. Anyone ever see the movie Idiocracy?
for number 1, it may be useful to add into the analysis, the paradigm shifting rise of social media.
I thought the senior Zimmerman was a judge. It’s surprising that he’d be that awkward on the witness stand.
i have a view that both are needed. and more.
having been an activist for years, it’s easy to find people at odds with each other about methods. in my observation, we need the writers of all stripes to educate and appeal to the different segments of society who might help. we also need the guns, the civil disobedients and the people doing daring and creative actions. everyone’s needed, in my opinion, to create sanity and sustainability out of our current situation.
and. if i thought someone was armed, i’d get the hell out of there. the police had already been called.
Ghandi definitely believed in fitting the strategy to the situation. He knew that civil disobedience would work with the British because it took advantage of their fondness for the rule of law — a law that to be sure was always tilted in favor of the elites, but which nonetheless could be maniupulated by a canny operator.
As for the US: In the 1930s, we had strong trade unions and a strong set of Socialist and Communist parties, and the business interests hadn’t yet figured out how to fully implement Edward Bernays’ propaganda tricks to keep the American masses controlled. Franklin Roosevelt went to the business interests and told them something like this: “Here’s the deal: You are going to give me a small portion of the boatloads of money you possess so I can create Social Security, create at least ten million new jobs, and get this country out of the Depression, and you will do it promptly, because if you don’t the Commies and Socialists with their union pals are waiting right behind me and they won’t be satisfied with just taking a little bit of your money.”
Most business interests and wealthy people saw the truth of what FDR was saying, and fell into line. Those that didn’t — the DuPonts and a few other rich families — tried at first to organize a coup attempt (which Smedley Butler infiltrated and foiled), then contented themselves with building institutions and think tanks with the long-term goal of undoing everything good that Roosevelt had done.
It’s now 2012, and we see the bitter fruits of that sustained counterattack by the elites: Powerless lefties, a nearly-nonexistent set of Communist and Socialist parties, and the corporate-bigot alliance known as the “Southern Strategy” that uses the language of deficit hawkery and austerity as a cover for racism.
not judge, magistrate actually
He knows he is lying, hence the nervousness, I’m thinking he expected to go up there and not be cross-examined.
Ah yes, but would you “reasonably fear for your life”? Oh … wait … but that only applies if you’re the one that’s armed … Hmmmmm … Never mind.
“Ah yes, but would you “reasonably fear for your life”? Oh … wait … but that only applies if you’re the one that’s armed … Hmmmmm … Never mind.”
armed with sanctuary and no one following you
don’t forget that
Trayvon ran indicating fear and a clear reveal of his lack of a weapons advantage
don’t forget that
Trayvon was being followed by George and George was not being followed by Trayvon, ergo only Trayvon had a reason to fear for his life and assume a tactical disadvantage.
don’t forget that
All the embellishments GZ added to the story of that night to make Trayvon appear as a threat, from the car circling to the “you got me” utterance, will wind up convicting him as none of them fit the time frame or the evidence or reasonable understanding of human behavior.
it goes on and on
another gem by LLMPAPA
Zimmerman’s R/H Tale In A L/H World aka The reason why the state plans on calling gun shop range owners and customers to the stand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIi3YlWBw7w&feature=player_embedded
I know nothing about guns. LLMPAPA assumes that GZ carried his holster on his right hip but shoots with his left hand. Is it possible that he shoots with his right hand, even though he’s left-handed? If he shoots with his left hand, then why wouldn’t he keep the holster on his left hip? Am I missing something here?
He does seem to be twisting his (right) wrist strangely as he demonstrates pulling the gun from the holster. But I thought that was because he was holding his upper arm against his body (pinning Trayvon’s hand, according to him).
hence “why the state plans on calling gun shop range owners and customers to the stand.”
stay tuned, I know I will be
PS
this is fascinating
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/01/1079607/-Sanford-911s-Gaps-In-The-Armor-Officer-Involved
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/01/1079671/-Three-versions-of-Police-Report-Trayvon-Martin
Molly from wiki
I expect FDL firearm gurus may share more info soon enough