None of it changes the fact that an unarmed kid, who may not have been an angel, true, I already knew that, was shot dead because this guy decided to go out, armed and confront him when he was told not to.
No, the fact is that the kid assaulted Zimmerman, who in turn defended himself.
If he had not been trying to be a vigilante this would not have happened, there is not proof that the kid was up to anything. Most of this is conjecture and point of view. This guy went out with the intent to do what he did. Anyone who was not going out with the intent to stop someone with deadly force would not have been out there, he took an innocent life, a boy that may have got over his troubles and made something of himself, or not, we will never know, because he wanted to be a big shot.
Martin would be alive, today, if he'd not attacked Zimmerman.
Zimmerman has the right to confront anyone at any point in time; armed or unarmed.
If "black lives matter" has the ability to violently burst into restaurants and begin shouting at people - Zimmerman has the ability to ask a kid what he's doing, wandering around in the rain while peering through windows.
Zimmerman's injuries where his own fault, its pretty obvious that he confronted the guy and they got in a fight, pretty pathetic considering he was supposed to be some kind of martial arts expert.
He was not a martial arts expert.
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"Pollack said that Zimmerman began working out in October 2010 in order to lose weight and get in shape. Pollack said that Zimmerman trained “two to three days at most,” attending sessions between work and school.
He said Zimmerman was “a beginner” and not competent in grappling — a tactic used in mixed-martial arts.
Pollack said that Zimmerman was “very diligent” and “very coachable” but didn’t have the strength or skill to be successful in the sport.
Pollack said that Zimmerman was grossly obese when he began training. “That was the main focus of why he was there,” he said, adding “he was doing very well with that.”
Pollack also said that Zimmerman began boxing training but that he never progressed past shadow boxing. “He didn’t know how to really effectively punch.”
Zimmerman claims that he was being beaten up by Trayvon Martin before shooting him in the chest. A witness to the altercation between Zimmerman and Martin previously testified that they saw a person later identified as Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman, attacking him “ground and pound” style."
The only way people could think that this guy was not guilty of murder is if they agreed with what he did.
You see a strange person walking down the street after there have been a lot of burglaries. The police have frequently failed to respond to calls of suspicious persons.
Is it somehow wrong for you, as a member of your community watch, to ask this person what's up?
When I worked security, we walked up to suspicious people all the time and just gave a friendly hello and asked if there was something we could help them with. Lost people can look suspicious - no harm in that. But we were also watching for how they reacted to the knowledge that someone was paying attention to them. People up to no good tend to assume the worst.
I currently work for a business that contracts services inside of hospitals. I service our equipment, and have frequent encounters with hospital security and staff who want to know I'm not about to 'disinfect' a patients' blood, or whatever possible little horrors I could be up to.
Strangely enough, because I speak 'human' to them and don't decide to start punching them in the head - I've never had a problem.
I've never had a problem with police, either - and I'm a night-owl who is often out late enough to catch the eyes of law enforcement. I've been confronted quite often or had police cars follow me and stand post outside a convenience store while I got myself a soda and some slim-jim-type jerky.
It isn't rocket science.
I've had to deal with people like Zimmerman, before. The only way I would have ended up shot is if I decided to fight like a street thug (the gun was drawn only after Zimmerman was pinned and fired at point blank with Gunshot Residue collaborating a Zimmerman's testimony of firing from a pinned position).
Racism by definition is the devaluing of someone by race, you cannot dislike someone based on their colour genuinely because each person is an individual.
Race is actually a political fabrication.
That said, you didn't actually address my question.
What does that change about an individual's decisions in life?
So the world hates you because of your race or the color of your skin - or because you have balls inside your belly rather than outside your belly... whatever. If the world -really- feels that way about you - what's whining and complaining about it going to solve?
The reason the "race" card works so well is because people do not, generally, want to be racists. They want to see everyone succeed.
In America, at least.
See - I've come to realize something about the difference between Europe and America.
America isn't a race. We aren't a nation made of people - we are a nation made of laws. In a sense, that has created the "American" - but the "American" isn't a 'physical' ethnicity; rather, it is a cognitive ethnicity - a sort of mental heritage. Anyone can become an American and can live in our nation. There is no birthright requirement (in fact, I don't believe anyone should be "born American" - but that's another discussion).
Europe is different. The French are the French because they're French. The Germans are the Germans because they're German. German laws and authority for German people. Spanish laws and authority for Spanish people.
Laws and authority need to be different and "of the race."
This is partially why the EU was destined to the failure it is experiencing, today. Europe is not a continent of laws. It is a continent of governing structures making unconstrained decisions regarding the affairs of their race - their "tribe." A unified Europe is, thus, impossible until the legal structure becomes an authority that is contractually constrained.
Which would require Europeans to accept a radically different view of nationality.
Consider the Yugoslav Republic.
The reason why Yugoslavia disintegrated was because the government was not fundamentally constrained. Serbs could use the republic to arbitrarily strike at the Croatians or the Bosnians. Then you have wonderful territorial disputes like Kosovo.
The reason why a nation like America was even possible is because majority opinion was fundamentally constrained - the powers of government were limited to the degree that sweeping verdicts on the legality of your lifestyle didn't matter. The Germans could move in next door to the Austrians and there was no way for either one to use the government to stomp on each other.
When that threat of tyranny by the majority disappears - the impulse to classify other people by tribal distinctions disappears. It doesn't matter if the majority is upset with what you are doing so long as the laws are being upheld - and Americans (used to) value law above whims.
Consider for a minute that, despite centuries of killing the shit out of each other - Europeans moved to America and became so homogenous with each other that they had to be lumped together as "white" to create the illusion of racism against "blacks." Up until the 60s, most "whites" were identified by their European ancestry - Irish, German, Spanish, French, British, etc. A good portion of "African Americans" weren't even in the nation, yet, and would later come from the Moorish regions, from the Philippines, and some from Africa (yet they all had to be lumped together as "African Americans" to create the statistical illusion of racism; since breaking down the black demographic their regional ancestry shows that income and success are cultural as opposed to induced by racism).
Racism (and the lack thereof) in America is a relatively deep subject. Suffice to say that the greatest amount of racism exists in the government programs that attempt to 'fix' inequality by establishing preferential treatment standards to 'compensate.' This goes so far as to pay women, basically, to not have fathers for their children (their benefits actually go away if a male resides with them).
[video=youtube;vewsQtOBWqI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vewsQtOBWqI[/video]
You should really dive into some Thomas Sowell - he has studied economics, race, politics, etc since before I was born.
Edit: Also I came to my conclusions from watching the news and the parts of the trial that were shown in the UK, not from social media
Now, now,
Let's be honest.
How much of your own research did you do, and how much of it was just what you caught in passing between banter amongst your friends/siblings?
