Dolphins announce they will be staying inside for anthem

Let's not get side-tracked. The point is that there was no frame of reference in your post. It would be helpful if there were. That's all.

 

You are in the wrong Galant.

 

ROFL! Okay, then I'll rephrase it. MLK would be disappointed to hear you talk that way, considering he risked and ultimately sacrificed his life in dedication to that cause.

 

They should have stayed inside until the end of the game.

 

Past transgressions don't justify being KILLED by police officers. People make mistakes and are capable of change. Yes, it would be a cause for concern if you're a police officer and heighten your awareness, but it doesn't mean you shoot someone 6 or 7 times in the back nor does it justify it in any way, so I'm not sure why people try using that, or try to mitigate these victims as "martyrs". That's not focusing on the actual issue here, the actual issue here is how and why they were killed, not things that happened several years prior unrelated to the incident at hand. That's just enabling the murderers.

These riots and messages are long overdue. Quite frankly it should have happened years and years and years ago because peaceful demonstrations don't work when you're the minority of the power struggle. Honestly, it's that stance that enables the systemic problem to persist and really prompts the need for these messages and protests. I don't care what they've done in the past; any criminal record at all doesn't justify their MURDER for an unrelated incident.

As for the Dolphins; I'm glad they're doing what they're doing. I doubt it leads to any changes because I don't believe the system wants, or will allow it to change within the so called united states of america and to me, trying to diminish these individuals as "martyr's" as it's been put here shows that IMO because its trying to diminish the actual issue at hand here, by looking the other way and pointing elsewhere. You don't have to be a saint or perfect to be a victim. I think teams decision, and the decision of athletes in general is because of how noticeable their platform is. It reaches a massive audience to try and draw attention to an issue that continues to be ignored by those who can change it. I hope they continue to do so across all major league sports until some change happens. I dont care who it inconveniences or upsets.

 

Maybe because they're painting MURALS of George Floyd in cities? Maybe because the NFL and NBA players are putting Jacob Blake's name on their jerseys? It's fine to say that the shooting of Blake wasn't justified, although I don't agree with you, but it's quite another to have Kamala freaking Harris tell the rapist that she's PROUD of him. Proud of him for what? Being a criminal? Raping his ex-girlfriend? Being stupid enough to ignore orders from the cops?

Yeah, they ARE being treated as martyrs, and if you refuse to accept that, perhaps you should take a good look at what's going on.

 

Yeah, we'll leave it at that. Thanks.

 

They are not being treated as martyrs, they are being treated as avatars. They are not being looked at as saints or people who died for a cause. They died because of something and they see themselves in those people.

 

Too bad. I'd have been interested in seeing how you could defend that sort of lionization of violent criminals who had both victimized innocent women.

 

Kamala Harris, the woman who is running for VICE PRESIDENT, told Jacob Blake (who isn't dead by the way) that she was PROUD of him. Freaking justify that. I dare you.

 

Well he wouldn't if you actually learned about the real MLK and not the one that was displayed media and history books.

Also to say that MLK would be disappointed also is negating the blood and fire done by the state. Even if MLK was completely for non violence, which he wasn't, then the violence done by the state still counts as change is done by violence.

State propaganda wants to elevate the "non-violence" type of protests because those ones are easiest to ignore and don't cause much damage.

Also, MLK was killed, so, also his blood was drawn for change.

Also, the media at the time portrayed MLK as a person who caused a lot of riots and damage and fire and blood. Like they are doing now. More things change, the more things stay the same.

 

She is proud of him for working through his pain.

In context, you are making a HUGE deal out of nothing.

 

Wonder why she hasn't gone and told the woman he raped how proud she is of her for working through her pain.

 

Oh, my bad. Did you meet him? Did you talk to him? No? Then you're getting all your information second or third hand from books and reports as well, aren't you? And you think the ones YOU read are correct and the ones everyone ELSE read are incorrect because...? Because you agree with them, right?

 

Was she at the hospital at the time?

 

Now you are just spouting nonsense.

 

I'm against police violence but for violence against rapists under any circumstances so I'm conflicted and I'll just watch the chaos.

 

ROFL! Am I? It's nonsense to ask why the books YOU read and believe are accurate and the accounts of others are not? That's nonsense? No, that's FUNDAMENTAL to determining the facts of the matter. Cite your sources and defend them. The fact you won't speaks volumes.

 

Oh, so Harris just happened to be at the hospital where Blake was? She didn't make a special trip to see him?

 

You are asking questions. Giving me an answer to those questions. Making assumptions. Then answering the assumption.

Nonsense.

You never even asked for sources or given sources. I had to look up your Kamala claim. Don't ask for something you aren't providing. Or does that not speak volumes?

 

I can give you quote after quote from MLK and his followers advocating for non-violence. Do you need me to? Have you not seen them? And everything else you said above is basically meaningless to the point of not making any sense at all.

 

Is one of those books you read "How to Argue with a Liberal and Win!"? Because that is how you are talking.

 

I don't need to read a book on how to win an argument, I'm doing quite well right now without one.

 

We had that under LBJ. We lost.

 

Please keep this thread on topic. The issue at hand is bigger than personal victories in an online forum.
Thanks.

 

If a man argues that MLK didn't actually support non-violence, he's already lost the argument before anyone else says anything. It was what the man lived and died for.

 

Either way, it's not going to advance this discussion, and that's my main concern here.

Let's do our best to try to keep this progressing and not get stuck, or start directing comments at posters.

Thanks.

 

If Miami is going to continue to play like they did today please stay inside the tunnel till the seasons over that’s was a bad showing today!!

 

So more hate and violence should counter that which its trying solve? Most of these riots are younger WHITE males that would act out anyway as some troublesome teenagers do. Most them have no idea what it means to be a different color. That being said, the only thing "systemic" about the current situation, is that we have governing bodies along with digital/media outlets pushing the fact this is somehow entrained in all of our culture. It goes against the whole idea of individuality in principal. Until we stop categorizing and labeling, none of our issues are going to be solved. The core issue is that some bodies FEED off of this negative energy and will weaponize it for political/economical gain. Which lands us the core answer, there will always be SOME humans that do things (good or evil) that will benefit them. If we truly want to end this, we need to stop labeling each other. "White-Privilege" being the trigger word of the year is so mind-bogging and hypocritical of everyone that thinks we should treat everyone the same.

 

I don't know how you have a constructive discussion with someone when you can't agree on the facts of history. If we each have our own individual idea of what actually happened, we will never agree on anything, including what color the sky is or what direction the sun rises in the morning. MLK was the greatest civil rights leader of modern history. The man understood that making African-Americans perceived as a threat by whites in the US would be counter-productive, would make them react out of fear of the "other," that which was not like them. That fear is natural, evolutionary adaptation. Instead, he shamed them by making see the results of the policies they supported and the people they voted for, made them see the police brutality and the racist violence, and made clear that the African Americans were not the ones perpetrating the violence, that they were not their racist stereotype.

It's a damned shame the lessons he taught have been forgotten.

 

I think this is precisely one of the problems that makes this issue difficult to discuss. There are distinct viewpoints some odd which are opposed and entrenched. Part of the question is how to get people on the same page or navigate around the areas that can't be resolved.

The question of racism/ black deaths is multi faceted. Clearly a lot of black people are concerned and even in fear. That needs to be acknowledged and addressed. It also seems clear that some effort is going to need to be made to improve policing methods. Then there are clearly some other groups that want to act as aggravating factors. Those are going to need to be separated out.

I think Americans are going to need to come together to find multiple points of common ground where they can press for change. A greater unity built of small victories and positive changes can bring clarity and overcome the muddy waters that most people are stuck in.

A conversation between people motivated to do that can help achieve it, I think. And it's something that can be done.

 

Don’t forget about the abuse of the bogus civil forfeiture scam that allows the police to steal money and property to add to the police war chest.

 

I never said he didn't "support" non-violence.

It is not that black and white as non-violence vs violence. He saw the reason for both of them.

He didn't live and die for non-violence. He had lived and died for his dream of racial equality. It is in his "I have a dream" speech.

Non-violence was a tactic he thought would work to get the sympathies of enough people on the side he was going for.

 

**** civil forfeiture. I don't understand why this isn't a bigger deal.

 

Are you suggesting we not try to figure out the problem of poverty in America because we failed 50 years ago?

 

That's not entirely true- at least the part about "private" prisons being the source of the problem. Nobody goes to jail if a judge doesn't send them there, and the judge doesn't do that if there aren't sentencing mandates to base his decision on.

As a former corrections officer in multiple SC state prisons, I saw kids in there for 5+ years for a handful of drugs. If it's pot, maybe it earns you 1 year...meth 2 years...coke 5 years. All for the same amounts and all mandatory minimums that completely ties the judge's hands. Only, it's not the judge sending these folks to jail...that's not how the system works (especially under COVID). You have that little baggie of coke and you're facing 5 years, and you spend 12+ months in county lockup because the bond is so ridiculously high due to a different set of mandatory minimums.

As you sit there, you lost your job, your wife, and basically anything that makes you feel normal, while the prosecutor keeps throwing offers your way. Plea to a lesser charge and we'll only give you 4 years.....or only 2.5....last chance, take this offer and go home tomorrow with time served. It's a great deal, right? So you take it. But now you're a convicted felon, and those mandatory minimums triple for a 2nd time offender.

Three years later, you're sober and have nothing to do with drugs anymore. But you're in your hommie's car and get pulled over for not 100% completely stopping at a stop sign, and the cop wants to search the vehicle. He finds a little baggie of meth and nobody seems to know who's it is...so the cop runs records and see you're a prior offender. You go to jail, your friend who owned the meth goes home, and now you're back in the game. Plea to 8 years and we'll transfer you to jail this week...what about 7 years? Five years? It's a game you just can't win even though you've never had a trial or had a judge call you guilty.

And when we make more offenders in a certain area, the problem warrants higher police protection in that area as well. So now folks are stopped at a much higher rate, they have negative interactions with the police and ultimately, more interactions turn violent. It creates this cyclone of arrests, pleas, stops and more arrests for people who aren't inherently bad...and it sends them to prison with some truly terrifying folks. If you do two years in prison, let's say, you'll come out with an entirely different belief system because of what you had to do in order to survive. You've joined a gang, you've participated in hundreds of minor jail crimes just to avoid getting your brains bashed in and your sense of right/wrong is nothing compared to when you got locked up.

Because if you say, "Woah, I'm not a convict....I don't want anything to do with that stuff," that tells everyone that you're weak, you're scared and that they can walk all over you and take everything you have at any time. After your first few beat downs, robberies and rapes, you'll quickly make the wrong types of friends to make it stop....and the guards can't protect you. If you tell on someone, there's a chance that you're going to get stabbed in the shower and bleed out before a guard even knows what happened...so there's zero avoiding a complete life-change of your moral compass, you will become a hardened criminal regardless of why you're locked up. Combine that with the new levels of difficulty you face on the streets and life as you knew it is over- minimum wage or more crime are your only two viable options, and only one pays enough to survive.

Due to mandatory minimums and shady plea deals, I knew inmates who received 5 years for driving without a license (while taking his kid to the ER), 15 years for shoplifting (after 7 or 8 plea deals- with a petty crime becoming an automatic felony for repeat offenders) and 50 years for drug possession (it was a trunk full of weed, but still...50 years?). And maybe you say, well it serves those guys right...why'd he shoplift 8 times and get caught? Because he couldn't get a job over being caught shoplifting and he had to eat! That person got 15 years for stealing a gas station sandwich and a soda due to mandatory minimums.

Our justice system turns law breakers into convicts and repeat offenders, simply because it's so ridiculous easy to violate probation or parole and you stay "marked" for life. Once you plea to that felon title, it's pretty much game over for life unless someone gives you serious tools to reinvent yourself in an entirely different area. Is that really justice? Or is it systematic abuse that creates the very criminals we're supposed to be rehabilitating...

So again- it's not private prisons creating this problem. It's the entire justice system that's extremely efficient at locking people up and ensuring they stay "in the system" the majority of their lives. The real problem is not the judges or the cops or even the lawyers, but state politicians that you don't know by name that essentially wield incredible power over criminal justice without understanding even the most basic of concepts of the laws they pass.

Now, here's the fun part...let's say you personally want to change this. After I quit working for the prisons, I met with my local state senator in the capital in Columbia and he took me out to lunch. He had a personal grudge against the head of our prison system so I was an ally, and I thought that maybe meeting with him can make a real difference. We talked for an hour and I told him all about rampant abuse within the prison system that's caused by broken laws and unfair treatment, and he told me that my issues were truly a lost cause.

Why? He explained how laws actually work in South Carolina- one senator holds relatively zero power on his own. So you have to find allies by voting on their pet projects and after several years, you may be in a position of enough power to where others actually listen to your ideas. Meanwhile, you're hearing from special interest groups and lobbyists daily with tons of money floating around to "change your opinions", meaning that these lawmaker's moral compasses aren't much better than the average inmate.

I personally thought about running for state senate over prison reform, but I quickly realized that nobody understands the basis of why our justice system is so broken. People think, tougher laws against criminals...that has to be good, right? No, it's really not. Tougher laws are horrible and it turns decent men into monsters who have to fight to survive...and that's when they're not in jail! The goal should be to truly rehabilitate and lower overall crime rates by giving these folks a future....not stripping away any hope that they'd ever have of being able to feed a family.

 

That's depressing.