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[10ebbor10]

Kinda, that's the problem of the God's plan argument. If all's part of a greater, infallible, ultimately good plan, then evil doesn't exist.

Unless you want to be hyprocritical.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It also necessitates that one accepts a perfectly deterministic reality.

[Morrigi]

There is released evidence that Zimmerman was shouting for help before Martin was shot. In addition, the house Martin was walking around had been burglarized recently, as had a number of other houses in the neighborhood. Furthermore, there were over 400 registered calls to the police from the neighborhood in question from residents, 9 burglaries, 1 shooting, and numerous reported attempted burglaries. It was also reported that these crimes and attempted crimes had created an atmosphere of fear in the local community.

With this in mind, it is not unreasonable that anyone in the neighborhood watch would be a bit jumpy, more so if yet more trespassing had just been observed. If he was not participating in unlawful activity and was in fear of great bodily harm, which several pieces of evidence point towards, then he was entirely within his rights to fire his weapon defensively.

Regardless of whatever story the mainstream media has been pushing, this is not necessarily a case based on race.

On the subject of the law, here is a portion of it from http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String&URL=0700-0799/0776/Sections/0776.013.html.

...(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

One would think that having one's head bashed into the sidewalk could possibly cause great bodily harm. There is no substantial evidence showing that Zimmerman was in fact engaging in unlawful behavior prior to the shooting, but instead inflated or in some case fabricated claims by the media, often making the fallacy of appealing to emotional outrage rather than fact or reason.

Do remember that much if not all of the televised mainstream media in America is classified as "entertainment", not "news".

tl;dr: This is a legal problem, not a racial one.

[Leafsnail]

A black guy walking down a public street near his home = trespassing

[Morrigi]

Yeah, if you consider someone's yard a public street.

[Leafsnail]

I don't think anyone actually seriously tried to push that angle (because it's bullshit), but if he was trespassing it was almost certainly because there was no pavement in the area.  "A guy is walking on grass because there's literally nowhere else to walk" can't reasonably be regarded as suspicious at all.

[Nadaka]

Morrigi... you do realize that that still damns Zimmerman? Because it means Trayvon had the right to defend himself.

[palsch]

People saying this isn't about race should be forced to read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb (one more) and the dozens of other black voices that have been speaking about why this is just one more data point in the long history of racist bullshit.

The central racial aspect (ignoring the racial profiling of Treyvon by Zimmerman, as the trial did when that phrase was banned from use during it) is the long history of black people being killed and there being no punishment for it. Of their killings being justified by their blackness and by their deviation from some impossible to follow set of rules for behaviour that us non-black people never have to think about or even know exist (despite being able to spot immediately when a black guy breaks them).

Read the articles and listen to the discussions that black people are having about this case. It's not screaming that Zimmerman was a racist. It's quiet resignation and sharing of stories. It's stuff like LeVar Burton sharing his procedure for not getting shot by police. It's Melissa Harris-Perry putting the trial in historical context of black men getting killed and the justice system meaning their killers get away without consequences, or the perspective of a black mother (related text article).

[EveryZig]

I have not really been following the Zimmerman trial, so I just heard about it secondhand last night. Apparently the prosecution was so completely incompetent that even my Fox News watching step-uncle (who is a trial lawyer) said that they should be disbarred.

[ChairmanPoo]

The truth is that I think that the whole smirking in court and showing no signs of remorse thing is kind of gross and an indicator that he was probably guilty, whether or not all of the "hard" signs were there.

Not saying that, if you get down to the nitty-gritty, they should have found him guilty.  But if you're going "haha I killed a dude" then that makes me feel somewhat worse about it.

Suddenly I remember...

I agree with him, though. Living in a world where people are convicted of crimes based on popular demand and/or the emperor's will, rather than evidence?

I meant CLEARLY a criminal. You know, the guys who laugh at police, smile in court and such? I wouldn't charge people who are NOT guilty, you misunderstood what I mean by clearly.

[palsch]

So McDonalds are going into the financial advice business.

“They start by assuming that you’re working two jobs,” Matthew Yglesias notes of the sample budget, which is based on income from roughly 60 hours a week, “and then that your monthly budget doesn’t include money for extravagances such as heat.”

Note that they also seem to be ignoring gas/transport costs (they do include car payments and insurance, at a stunningly low rate that I'm sure McDonald's will be ensuring through subsidies and programs for their workers...), food, medicine (other than the, again, stunningly cheap health insurance that I'm again sure is part of an as-yet unannounced new company policy) or childcare. Those all seem to fall under their $800 a month spending money catch-all.

Interestingly they seem to have changed it since the first posts appeared. They are now showing $50 a month for heating and only $750 spending money to cover everything. Although the Spanish version only shows $30 heating. Weird that.

LGM have an original screenshot along with notes that the 60 hour week is an underestimate if the second job is minimum wage;

As Robyn Pennacchia notes, that $1105–that’s assuming a 40-hour workweek. So McDonald’s is telling you to work another job, adding up to a mere 62 hour workweek if they live in Illinois, that land of moochers and takers. 74 hours if they are on the national minimum wage. Very Gilded Age. And when you work those 62 or 74 hours, you know what you don’t get? Heat.

[Nadaka]

Their $90 electric cost is incredibly low as well, and their rent of $600 is below the average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment on the bad side of town, and their auto cost estimate is also incredibly low.

So yes, for a single person to barely survive, they have to maintain 2 full time jobs without scheduling conflicts. This is impossible considering that their manager at each job is likely to jerk them around and change schedules randomly. This means they can not get a full nights sleep due to commute times. And it means they live for nothing other than work. This is a guide for slavery.

[Sergarr]

After all, capitalism is just a more advanced form of slavery, isn't it?

[Nadaka]

After all, capitalism is just a more advanced form of slavery, isn't it?

It is when the concept of equitable exchange between informed actors is a promised illusion.

[Helgoland]

Well, given some basic welfare it isn't - equitable exchange between informed factory owners, for example.

What I don't understand is why there still are so few criminals - prison seems to be preferrable to a life like this. Plus there's forms of crime that are very unlikely to get into trouble...