This Blog Is Full Of Crap

I have to admit finding actual facts took a while yesterday and they're even harder to go back to today now that another layer of 'commentary' has been added on top. In fact, at this point the news is basically just covering protest and commentary.

Here's a decent story outlining the facts:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml

OK, so timeout for me and my sarcasm.

Reality time here. OK, so I am have read some on this. My standing is the justice system does quite of ten suck and take forever, but I am confused by the outrage at this moment. The kid that is in jail in there because as CNN puts it:

He has been in prison since his arrest. The judge has refused to lower his $90,000 bail, citing the teen's record, which includes four juvenile offenses -- two simple battery charges among them.

Walters reduced charges against at least four of them -- Bell, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones and Theo Shaw -- to battery and conspiracy. Bryant Purvis awaits arraignment. Charges against Jesse Ray Beard, 14 at the time of the alleged crime, are unavailable because he's a juvenile.

Why the outrage? Granted, hanging a noose up is a retarded thing to do , but does it deserve jail time? It is a sign of intimidation for sure just as burning a cross somewhere but who all did it? Who was it aimed at? I don't agree with it and I don't like it, but to throw everything into a "Hate Crime" category is crap.

Laurence was called a "Cracker" yesterday and it's not the first time it's happened. I don't see the FBI chasing down the "Cracker" commenter. To me (a Cracker), it is just as offensive as an N-Bomb (as Laurence pointed out much better than I could).

Basically what I am reading shows the "Second degree murder charge is ridiculous" argument is CRAP. So am I missing something, or is CNN reporting poorly.

Strange... there's a lot about the town's past, but not much about Bell's past in that truthout article.

http://www.kansascity.com/sports/columnists/jason_whitlock/story/284511.html

Calling a whitewash might be construed as racist or insensitive, so let's coin a new term:

blackwashing (n) - The concerted effort by modern civil rights movement leaders, advocates and mass-media facilitators to ignore or cover up significant portions of history and context in order to promote an agenda while profiting from the additional media exposure.

If anybody has any problems with a "cracker" inventing such a term (despite the fact that nobody in his Jewish heritage for generations back has ever held so much as a licorice whip, let alone a slave-owning whip), fine. Say George Washington Carver invented the term along with peanut butter.

Caleb,

Thank you for providing a link to the story. This is MUCH batter than anything I got from CNN.

If Sharpton and Jackson really want to help, they should hire these kids lawyers (real ones who will actually defend their clients) and get them a fair trial. The protests are doing nothing but inflaming passions and taking away from the real issues.

The only thing I can't seem to confirm is that the guy who was beaten actually took part a hate crime. I don't think he was involved with the noose incident, but he may have been involved with later black/white arguments/baiting during the aftermath.

Radley Balko sent Instapundit a good e-mail giving a rundown of the situation: http://instapundit.com/archives2/009597.php

Basically, it sounds like people of all races there behaved badly.

Six black students showed up to sit under a tree. They had asked the
> principal for permission to sit under that tree, a tree that white
> students sit under. They showed up and three nooses were hanging from
> the tree. This really is racism at it's worst. It shows that we haven't
> done our job properly educating our children. The teenagers that are in
> high school now are only acting the way that we as adults have shown
> them it's OK to act. Anyway, The principal recommended that the
> students who hung the nooses be expelled. The rednecks on the school
> district committee decided that it was a harmless prank and suspended
> them for three days instead. Bad move guys. Hanging a noose from a tree
> where black kids aren't normally "allowed" to sit the day after they
> sit is obviously a threat, offensive and racist. The kids should have
> been expelled, plain and simple, to send a message to the rest of the
> school system that they wouldn't tolerate it.Several months later six
> black students jumped a white student and beat him into
> unconsciousness. Are the incidents related? Here's the problem. The six
> black kids, some of whom already have criminal records were charged
> with aggravated battery as adults and now a Louisiana appeals court has
> thrown out at least one of the convictions. They should have all been
> expelled and charged as juveniles. Redneck justice is racism.
>
> --
Posted By Mickysolo to soloblog at 9/21/2007 03:55:00 PM

Laurence, what's missing is simple statistical analysis. Do the events in Jena indicate a larger problem or are they a statistical anomaly? To use an analogy, there have been cases where sharks have killed humans. Do we respond by scouring the seas clean of sharks? Or do we mourn the victim and then go back in the water?

To me, the news story here is not the protests or the crimes or the nooses or the beatings, but the absence of them elsewhere. I blogged about the lack of racist analysis that took Michael Vick and applied his case to, say, Ken Griffey Jr.

The United States most emphatically does not have a racism problem. It has a problem with the perception of one. In a nation of 300,000,000, you're bound to have some tiny subset of people who whack on others because of race. When that happens (only if it's white on black or hetero on homo) we leap upon in and wallow in it, delighting in every tiny detail of the event because it confirms what our faith knows to be true - the US is racist.

Going back to my shark analogy, a single shark attack occurs and in no time at all, we're dropping bricks of plutonium into the water to kill every last one of the things.

Laurence,

This is reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPGKnDkH2HM

Jena is an anomaly.

Proof: I took my daughter to her soccer game this weekend. There, the coaches, team moms, league officers and so on were all volunteers. They were of all races. There are tens of teams in our league (probably close to 50) and tens of leagues like this all across San Diego. The total number of people working together in a charitable and pleasant way for youth soccer alone must be in the thousands just for San Diego. This is probably greater than the entire population of Jena.

Add to this the number of people of all races working together for Pop Warner, Little League, the Special Olympics, the American Heart Association and any other charitable group you can think of. Multiply this by the number of cities larger than or roughly the same size as San Diego.

Given that total and given the total number of people involved in the racial trauma in Jena, apply Student's t-Test to the statistics and tell me which behavior is normal and which is not.

What conclusions do you draw from the reactions you see in the media and the statistics?