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This is another experiment isn't it

[thegoatgod_pan]

How about you look at his actions instead of just chanting "creepy-ass cracka" until someone agrees with you?

But I won’t grant that race didn’t color his judgment when it came to young black men with whom he wasn’t personally acquainted. From 3 August 2011 forward he’s increasingly — and almost exclusively — concerned with unfamiliar black males in his apartment complex. Maybe confirmation bias is more the problem here than racism, but the fact remains that the bias being confirmed is that young black males are suspects until proven otherwise. You can’t look at the 911 calls in the months immediately prior to the shooting and argue otherwise. (At least not honestly.) He transformed from a harmless nudnik into someone very concerned with the presence of unfamiliar black males, which at the very least means that by 11 August 2011 his worldview contained the category “Unfamiliar Black Male” and that the presence of people belonging to it warranted calling 911.

I'm not going to quote myself, I heard you can go blind from that (), so:

There had been a couple of burglaries in the area prior to the shooting. There was an ethnic (in this case, black) gang in the neighborhood. Gangs commit crimes. Burglary is a crime. So if you are going to suspect someone for committing a crime, it would be a gang.

Since the gang was exclusively composed of black males, sighting of an unfamiliar black male in slightly suspicious circumstances may lead someone who is hell-bent on stopping the burglaries to start suspecting said black males of being gang members and the burglars he had been looking for.

How is all that not vigilantism? Is Zimmerman batman? Because batman doesnt casually kill people and is technically an outlaw

[Loud Whispers]

How is all that not vigilantism? Is Zimmerman batman? Because batman doesnt casually kill people and is technically an outlaw

Because Zimmerman doesn't follow said black males to break their shins? In addition, batman CAN fight non-lethally. If someone jumps batman, batman can karate his way out of a situation even without any of his gadgets. Zimmerman isn't a comic book hero, he's the neighbourhood watch guy. If he was in a comic, he's the guy batman'd have to save.

Monitoring the thread, getting stuff ready for a more detailed post but I feel that a batman comparison deserves acknowledgement no matter the time. It's... It's batman.

[MonkeyHead]

Also, without wanting to be the guy that tells you that Santa and the Tooth Fairy do not exist, Batman is fictional. Zimmerman and Martin were not fictional, and a very real young man ended up dead, killed by the actions of another, as a result of choices both parties made that we can see were probably mistakes, and a law that is probably quite rightly being examined by many due to its nature.

[Knight of Fools]

Just wanted to pop in and thank Loud Whispers for correcting a lot of the stuff I've been hearing. I'd been grossly misinformed about the case before now. I didn't even know they broadcasted these trials - Is that common? Where can I find this kind of stuff?

After reading through everything, I think the entire debacle is a result of media hype and people unwilling to change their opinions based on the evidence that's been presented. If anything people should be up in arms with the media for spreading so much disinformation. Even here we're getting a lot of people just skimming or skipping the initial post entirely and posting a non-fact that's already been debunked.


Did Zimmerman make a poor decision? Well, he was emotionally charged and frustrated, but I don't see him doing anything that I wouldn't have done in the same position. I probably wouldn't have gotten out of my car in the first place, but he did stop and realize that it wasn't a good idea once the 911 operator brought it up. He obviously just wanted to make a difference and had good, if incredibly naive, intentions.

Trayvon certainly wasn't a super villain, but he made a really bad decision that lead directly to his death. Maybe his intention was to keep his street cred and simply intimidate Zimmerman, but there's no way Zimmerman could have known that. For him, I can't say that I would have ever turned around and confronted, much less attacked, a man whose only crime was following me and talking on a phone. And that's after Trayvon had gotten away.


I find it particularly frustrating that people keep calling Zimmerman a racist despite no evidence to support this. The only evidence people have is based on the color of Zimmerman's skin. Last I heard, that kind of attitude is racist.

[Lectorog]

The majority of the population is racist, even if it's not the KKK kind of racism.

[Scelly9]

I'd go further than that, and say that every single person is racist in some tiny way.
(or big way, as the case may be)

[MonkeyHead]

The majority of the population is racist, even if it's not the KKK kind of racism.

Thats a rather broad and scary assumption. Population of where?

I propose an alternative - those that are racist shout louder and get more attention than the reasonable quiet majority.

[Lagslayer]

Posting to watch.

[Lectorog]

It depends on your definition of racism. The base definition is prejudgement based on race. The mind naturally associates things. Due to what you see in daily life and the media, it's perfectly natural to associate races with certain things.
For instance, if you meet a black person on the street, you may expect them to have a particular accent, being surprised if they don't. If the news remarks often on the frequency of crimes committed in your area by Hispanics, it's natural to be slightly more suspicious of Hispanics when it comes to criminal activities.
It's just that usually this influence is so small that it doesn't play a part in daily life; if it grows to a point where the individual becomes aware of it, they realize that it's silly to be so judgmental without justification and tone it down.

I have no idea if this is backed by scientific evidence anywhere, but it sounds reasonable to me.

So it would be the population of everywhere that does not have perfect racial equality, which is everywhere that I know of.

[Loud Whispers]

The total votes on the poll is now at 47, here's the results on a graph so far [won't be recording it after this since the votes will no longer be truly blind]
I put in the two shades of the two extremes into the poll so that the people so heavily polarized or just being silly would have somewhere to vent without messing up the statistics, so it's the more central ones I find to be most useful. The extremes make up usually around a fifth to a quarter of the results, so I'm not sure if it CAN be ignored, but it is hard to reliably extrapolate much from it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The first 13 votes are in Eurasian timezone hour, at 18 there's an intersection of daylight with American hour. At 35 to 47 we reach the intersection of Europe and American hour.

What I find rather interesting is that around 1PM in the lands of America, the opinion of impartiality being neutral experienced its only big significant drop and the opinion of right-wing bias experienced its most significant increase. In addition, the opinion of slight left-wing bias also dropped during this time and only recently picked up. During west Europe to East Asia hour the opinion of neutrality increased and then around Australia/Central Asia hour the votes mostly stopped coming in. Overall, as the votes continued coming in the central opinions surprisingly maintained roughly the same percentage range of votes [all rounded to the nearest integer]:
Heavy left-wing bias: 0-0%
Slight left-wing bias: 6-10%
No/little bias, neutral: 27-37%
Slight right-wing bias: 19-22%
Heavy right-wing bias: 9-15%

And for the results I'm not sure of, if they really represent a serious opinion:
Right-wing propaganda-tier bias: 15-23%
Extreme right-wing bias: 0-0%
Extreme left-wing bias: 0-5%
Left-wing propaganda tier: 4-8%


Things I find from these results:

• There is clearly a difference in how most of the world views this and how Americans view this.
• On the extreme scales, there are a significant amount of people who picked the most extreme right-wing option available. I an unclear of whether this option was picked because a fair chunk of voters genuinely believed what I wrote was as biased as fabrications on the level of hyper-extreme propaganda, or if it was picked by virtue of it being the most extreme right-wing option available. It does say either way that for some reason, a mighty fair share of people's reported opinions were that what I wrote was insanely biased to the right.
• No one questioned why I specifically added political alignment to the poll questioning just how impartial I was.

This forum largely consists of progressives and people who identify on the left of the economic spectrum, or with the liberal democrats on the American left|right spectrum. During American hour, only 4 people voted saying they thought the OP was impartial with no/little bias. The traditionally conservative or republican news stations, radios and public figures in America are the ones who profess that Zimmerman is innocent while the traditionally liberal democrat news stations, radios and public figures in America are the ones who profess that Zimmerman is a murderer, and that this case is about race. I doubt I'll be able to make the same kind of poll on any predominately right-wing forum if I could find one, but from these results it is suggesting it to me that in America this is treated as a political issue where Zimmerman's guilt is not being determined by facts, but by the political ideology of the people judging him, and that I was right in my hypothesis - around a quarter to just under three-quarters of people in this sample had already made up their minds about the trial; who was innocent and guilty, how zealous they were going to be about it - and no matter what their opinion of the case, the majority will still treat it like a political issue and see no issue of it.

[Lagslayer]

So the whole thread was just a social experiment? This amuses me to no end. In a positive way.

[Rolepgeek]

I chose slight right wing bias. Not because I think he's guilty(I think he's guilty of idiocy, and of following someone because of their race and apparel, and of living in Florida, but not necessarily of murder), but mostly because of the way you presented it. It seemed mildly biased towards his innocence.

On an almost related note, I think the fact that the defense doesn't have to reveal any of their evidence to the prosecution is a terrible idea. Is it about forcing people to prove you guilty when they have a disadvantage, or about finding out what really happened and what the end-results of those actions ought to be to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future?

[Knight of Fools]

Remember: If you don't share my opinion, you're an extremist.


As for the race thing, there's a huge difference between inconsequential prejudice  and volatile racism.

With inconsequential prejudice, if you're X-Race I expect you to behave a certain way. It may color my expectations about you, but won't make me actively work against or dislike you just because of your skin color.

With volatile racism, a person hates people that are not Y-Race or who are X-Race with a passion. This ranges from superiority to passive aggressive attitudes to aggressive violence. This is relatively rare, but it's hard to tell since most people generally won't come out and say, "I don't like X-Race" or "This is X-Race's fault".

On an almost related note, I think the fact that the defense doesn't have to reveal any of their evidence to the prosecution is a terrible idea. Is it about forcing people to prove you guilty when they have a disadvantage, or about finding out what really happened and what the end-results of those actions ought to be to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future?

It's to protect both the defendant and the defendant's lawyer. A defense lawyer's job is essentially to protect their client. If they had to give up all of the evidence they found, they wouldn't even be able to talk with their clients without potentially incriminating them. Heck, they would be hard pressed to even do any of their own investigating. A defense lawyer could really get screwed over if they hadn't shared some inconsequential evidence and it were found out. Even if it wouldn't affect the case you know the bureaucracy would gladly screw someone up over something like that if the powers that be didn't like that person.

They wouldn't be able to look for whatever the prosecutors missed or didn't share for fear of finding something that would break their entire case or ruin their career. It's already too common for prosecutors to hold back evidence, we don't need to force defense lawyers to shoot their own clients in the back. So I think it's fine as is.

[Leafsnail]

I don't understand how you arrived at your conclusion.  As far as I can tell you started by assuming that your OP is perfectly unbiased and that anyone who disagrees with that must be deciding the case based on their politics.  Then you put in lots of options to make it less likely that people would pick neutral.  Then you arbitrarily assigned a random timezone to American users in order to try and prove that they are more "biased" (I really can't see why it turning 1PM in part of the US suddenly makes it America time).  Then you decided to ignore the extremes of your survey as jokes because they don't fit your hypothesis (only you seem to decide that actually those votes were serious later in one of your conclusions?).

Basically, it seems that you started with a politically motivated conclusion and massaged your poll and data to arrive at it.

Lastly you shouldn't start your vote percentages at the origin, it doesn't really make much sense when you're using percentages.

[mainiac]

That poll is actually an example of the bias that has tainted this whole thing.  You are assuming that people are angry about the verdict based on politics.  People were angry, long, long before the verdict.  It's the corrupt process that is the problem.  Your summery of the events barely touches on that.  Plenty of time to talk about Trayvon Martin being a thug.  No time to talk about how blacks were considered to racist to be on the jury and the part of Zimmerman's history that was excluded from the trial.  But protesting the lack of a fair process is considered left wing even though last I checked everyone supports a fair justice system.