A-hem.
Pervert Justice
Just another Freethought Blogs site
A-hem.
Apparently two white supremacists shot bullets, at least two shots, at two bi-racial siblings (16 yo and 12 yo) who were walking on a footpath that is property of a local church and intended and maintained for public use. The evil white supremacists arrested for those shots are James Reidnauer and Brent van Besien. They don’t claim that the fired no shots, but they do insist that they fired the shots because the children were “meth heads”.
There’s little mystery about their future defense: they can claim erratic behavior on the part of the children that scared them, then invoke stand your ground. We know that Zimmerman claimed he thought Martin might have been high. We know that Zimmerman, despite being a violent, horrible jerkface ended up being found not guilty at trial. Why should the white supremacists neglect a winning strategy?
This. This is the evil that your government encourages when it passes a stand your ground law. Every single such law should be opposed in every single jurisdiction that has passed or considers passing such a provision. Do not retreat from this fight. Go on offense. The mere existence of stand your ground laws is a threat: treat it as such and never back down.
Over on a post of PZ’s, zenlike has a particularly insightful comment. The OP is criticizing some bullshit commentary on Fox News about how trans folk are destroying the entire species of Homo sapiens:
We’re not talking about people who want to simply do a bit of reform here and there, add a new category. They want, they must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think should be.
…
[T]he trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they’re basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species.
[presented out of order, because I think it’s easier to follow the logic that way – cd]
Oy.
There’s a new paper out by Marissa Harrison (of Penn State) et. al. collected historical data on the crimes of 112 murderers who killed 3 or more people with at least one week between each murder (killing more quickly did not disqualify one so long as there were at least 3 periods of single/multiple murder that were separated from all other periods of single/multiple murder by a full week on each side). 55 of the killers were women. This is the all but 9 of the women serial killers in the US from 1821 to 2008 – at least that they could find. From the men serial killers during that period they selected “matches” of the women subjects. “Matches” here means that they were approximately equivalent to their women counterparts on certain variable which the researchers wanted to control.
Then they ran some criminological statistics on the gender-separated populations & looked for differences. The resulting research was published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology. NewAtlas, reporting on the study, tells us that:
So there’s this great conversation about feminism and who gets to count as a feminist started by Siggy & extended by HjHornbeck right here on our very own FtB!
You’ll totally wanna catch up – go catch up! Caught up? Good.
As long as I’ve been doing stories on fascist policing, I’ve been clear that one vital element of fascist policing is that the people who do the policing are unaccountable to the people they police. Despite the occasional officer arrested for sex abuse of a relative or stealing and reselling shipments of drugs, law enforcement officers in the US are almost entirely unaccountable for the things that they do in the process of enforcing the law, even when those actions are patently illegal.
Science journalism is failing us in important ways. This post will be far shorter than I might like it to be, but I want it to be readable, and in any case I plan on following up soon with more information and also, I hope, a detailed action plan.
Here I simply want to point out a single article. In another post, I’ll also be discussing an article on the dismissal of Francisco Ayala from UC Irvine and the pattern of sexual harassment that led to that dismissal. But right now, let’s tackle an interesting article with a headline that is … terrible, in ways we will investigate later. The headline reads thus:
You may remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the villainous Child Catcher character. Artist Scott Simmons took a still from the movie and reworked it to make it more … realistic:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s “Child Catcher” with Donald Trump’s face.
I wrote yesterday about US violations of the Convention Against Torture, but of course US lawlessness and evil doesn’t end there.
Let’s read about the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Don’t be confused by the fact that the UNCSR is limited to regulating the treatment of European refugees who migrated before 1952. In 1967 the UN passed an amendment that simply stated that the convention protects all refugees in any time and any place – removing those restrictions but keeping the nature of the treaty’s requirements the same. There have been additional measures put in place by the UN to add additional protections in certain geographic regions for certain times, but when those special agreements are not in place, the fundamental protections of the 1951 treaty still require a minimum standard of just treatment to be followed by any and every nation which is a signatory.
