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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Jul 25, 2009 - 09:45pm PT
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I don't recall asking how you got your username.
Must have missed it on some other thread.
So you picked the name of Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic
National Committee, any relation, your first name Howard?
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Dick_Lugar
Trad climber
Indiana (the other Mideast)
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Jul 25, 2009 - 09:57pm PT
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The real incident of racism and racial profiling was carried out by the neighbor who made the call. That is my understanding that his neighbor made the call of breaking and entering.
WTF???
His neighbor didn't recognize of the the only prominent black professors living next door to him/her?? This is part of the story that hasn't gotten any coverage but where the blame truly lies.
Crowley and Gates's egos just got the best of them and now it's totally blown out of proportion by the MSM.
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Dick_Lugar
Trad climber
Indiana (the other Mideast)
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Jul 25, 2009 - 10:17pm PT
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Just looked at the arresting photo, looks like mid-day to me Howie.
That's the problem with America today...we don't speak to or know who our neighbors are! I'm still totally dumbfounded how a neighbor couldn't ID the likely only black man on his/her block.
And no Howie, NO GOLF! It's a shame too, I was really making some progress at the beginnig of summer, the driver was consistent and more importantly, the short game (i.e. chipping) was coming into its own...I played 9 holes last Saturday, once in the last month, and it felt like I never played before, but salvaged a 45 in the end. You??
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Jul 26, 2009 - 12:16am PT
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Gates was disorderly. A crime.
Almost every state in the United States has a disorderly conduct law that makes it a crime to be drunk in public, to "disturb the peace", or to loiter in certain areas. Many types of unruly conduct may fit the definition of disorderly conduct, as such statutes are often used as "catch-all" crimes. Police may use a disorderly conduct charge to keep the peace when people are behaving in a disruptive manner to themselves or others, but present no serious public danger. Disorderly conduct is typically classified as a misdemeanor.
A person who recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally:
(1) engages in fighting or in tumultuous conduct;
(2) makes unreasonable noise and continues to do so after being asked to stop; or
(3) disrupts a lawful assembly of persons;
commits disorderly conduct. . . [1]
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Captain...or Skully
Social climber
way, WAY out there....(OMG)
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Jul 26, 2009 - 12:27am PT
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Well, it is illegal, but I'd hardly call it a crime.
Lots of things are illegal, but I do as I will.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jul 26, 2009 - 12:46am PT
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Once Gates had identified himself to the policeman, he was no longer "in public". He was on his own property, and there are many things you can (but maybe shouldn't) do on your own property that you can't do on public property.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 26, 2009 - 12:50am PT
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It is not "disorderly" or "illegal" for Gates to stand in the doorway of his own home, on his own front porch and express his opinion that Crowley was a racist. It may be rude of him to do so. It may be unreasonable for him to do so. But it is not a crime.
If the police and prosecutors honestly believed that Gates had committed a crime, and had been rightfully arrested, then they were derelict in their duty in dismissing all charges and calling the event "regrettable and unfortunate" (translation: we screwed up)--that is not something they do when they believe that a justifiable arrest was made.
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S.Powers
Social climber
Jtree, now in Alaska
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Jul 26, 2009 - 12:51am PT
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"Well, it is illegal, but I'd hardly call it a crime.
Lots of things are illegal, but I do as I will."
You go you little rebel you!
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jul 26, 2009 - 02:11am PT
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This thread seems to be going sideways.
Dr. F said "let me guess whats going on here, the repubs are defending the cop, and the libs and defending the victim
as usual, it must of been the victims fault for being black, and the cop is innocent, since its OK to over react."
You might care to read the earlier posts. There was near unanimity that both parties acted foolishly. Only recently, after the ideologues chimed in, do we have the more typical ST polarization.
Then we have the interesting quote: "Well, it is illegal, but I'd hardly call it a crime." Define illegal. Define crime. Please explain that quote in light of the previous two definitions.
John
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Tobia
Social climber
GA
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Jul 26, 2009 - 11:24am PT
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At any rate the president shouldn't have added any fuel to the fire. His uninformed remarks served no good purpose.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 26, 2009 - 12:38pm PT
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Henry Louis Gates in 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man:
Yet you need nothing so grand as an epistemic rupture to explain why different people weigh the evidence of authority differently. In the words of the cunning Republican campaign slogan, “Who do you trust?” It’s a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don’t. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they’re continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn’t be. Norman Podhoretz’s soul-searching 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem, and Ours”—one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race resentment—tells of a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author’s residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood. And yet, he notes in a crucial passage, “I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them.” That ordinary, unremarkable comfort—the feeling that “the police are working for me”—continues to elude blacks, even many successful blacks. Thelma Golden, the curator of the Whitney’s “Black Male” show, points out that on the very day the verdict was announced a black man in Harlem was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. As older blacks like to repeat, “When white folks say ‘justice,’ they mean ‘just us.’ ”
Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don’t have more than one story to tell. “These stories have a ring of cliché about them,” Erroll McDonald, Pantheon’s executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, “but, as we all know about clichés, they’re almost always true.” McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply “to show cause why I shouldn’t be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car.” Wynton Marsalis says, “Sh#t, the police slapped me upside the head when I was in high school. I wasn’t Wynton Marsalis then. I was just another nigger standing out somewhere on the street whose head could be slapped and did get slapped.” The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, “When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me that I was stealing things.” Nor does William Julius Wilson—who has a son-in-law on the Chicago police force (“You couldn’t find a nicer, more dedicated guy”)—wonder why he was stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts. There’s a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black.
So we all have our stories. In 1968, when I was eighteen, a man who knew me was elected mayor of my West Virginia county, in an upset victory. A few weeks into his term, he passed on something he thought I should know: the county police had made a list of people to be arrested in the event of a serious civil disturbance, and my name was on it. Years of conditioning will tell. Wynton Marsalis says, “My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal-justice system.” Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jul 26, 2009 - 01:04pm PT
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John wrote: You might care to read the earlier posts. There was near unanimity that both parties acted foolishly. Only recently, after the ideologues chimed in, do we have the more typical ST polarization.
John is so nice that all the white folks admit that Gates acted foolishing...yourself included.
Funny sh#t.
Howie wrote: He had no business, as an educated professor, acting like an inner city youth and then complain that he was not afforded the respect he presumably deserved.
Another whitey telling a black man how to act.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jul 26, 2009 - 01:18pm PT
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Howie your a troll. Get a life.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 26, 2009 - 03:01pm PT
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HowweirdDean: "He was not being "harassed" or "dissed" by "the man.""
Howie, you don't know that. You weren't there. Crowley and Gates give two different versions of what happened.
The two of them were in Gate's house talking alone. You don't know what happened in there and neither do I. By accepting Crowley's, you are picking sides.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 26, 2009 - 03:24pm PT
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"Arresting Gates after he became verbally confrontational may or may not have been been racially motivated...this is hard to discern as the arrest may have been motivated by a perceived disrespect to the officer's authority rather than a racist orientation."
Even among people who consider who believe in the equality of the races and think of themeselves as enlightened, race makes a difference. This is measurable statistically when looking at a range of incidents, although it is not possible to prove that it is a factor in any one such incident.
A black driver is probably 3-4 times more likely to be stopped than a white driver under similar circumstances. We know this statistically, but a black driver who is stopped cannot prove that he was stopped because he was black, and is race may not have been a factor. But I cannot blame him for suspecting that race was a factor, because statistically it "probably" was.
Is a black man pushing against his door in a white upper class neighborhood more likely to be noticed than a white man doing the same thing? I think most people would agreed that he would be. But that was the neighbor's call--what about the police?
If an older white Harvard professor had been equally disrespectful (assuming Gates was disrepectful) would he have been more likely or less likely to have been arrested?
Steyn and his fellow wingnuts at the National Review miss the point. Blacks perceive of themselves as victims in these encounters because they often are victims. The perception is based on a measurable reality.
I find it amusing to read these articles by whites critizing Gates and talking about how once they were accused by the police of something, and they were white, so it couldn't be race.
I wonder if they would feel the same if they, and many of their white friends, had been stopped 5-6 times instead of just once. And most of the black people they knew were stopped only 1-2 times. And, oh yeah, most of the police were black. They's be singing a different tune.
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philo
Trad climber
boulder, co.
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Jul 26, 2009 - 05:05pm PT
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I would be interested to know if the attentive yet apparently near sighted neighbors called in the earlier break in. Or is it possible that the neighbor is a racist and called in out of passive aggressive intention?
Once determined that this was Gates house the cop should have toned it down and said good night sir. Instead he lost control and professionalism.
I commend Obama for his condemnation of this misuse of power.
I am sick of people always blaming the victim.
Like; Gates should a just been a good (mute) niga.
Or she wouldn't have been raped if she would have worn a burka.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Jul 26, 2009 - 05:47pm PT
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Jaysus, another us versus them thread... that is the liberals versus the conservatives. I've read about the case, not at length mind you, and I have to agree that the cop did over-react to some abuse from what I could read. What would I have done in that case, I don't know but I would think that as a professional LEO I would have left the guy's house and if he pursued the matter outside off his land, then maybe arrest him. One would think that the guy had brains as a prof, but perhaps in the heat of the moment...
Obama was put on the spot, as us journalists like to do to politicians, but he should have bit his tongue, been diplomatic and made some excuse not to comment.
Another nasty affair in American law enforcement, but that said, I'd rather take my chances with a US LEO than some other authority figures on this globe.
Now to be a hypocrite, I have added to the numbers (posts) of a non-climbing thread, and just look how many posts are on the non-climbing thread "Why are those Republicans so wrong on everything". Now I have to say that the Repugs are idiots in my book, but the Dems aren't too far behind.
And what's with these Birthers idiots, ooops, I shouldn't have written that (snicker, snicker).
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jul 26, 2009 - 07:06pm PT
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Howie wrote: Bob,
That's right, Buddy, when you cannot counter an argument with valid points to refute the substance therein, simply resort to character assassinations. Good show.
What's to counter...a troll/whitey telling how a black should act while being arrested in his own house for no reason. Also, you have no character to assassinate. You are a troll.
Again...get a life.
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