Moonbox

"Police interactions" are an irrelevant statistic. You'd hope that the percentage of violent interactions were low, and it would be low even in a thuggish place like Egypt, where there's 1.5% of the population is made of up police officers. When you bring up statistics about the amount of crime committed by black people and then tritely use that to explain away police shootings, you're grossly oversimplifying a much more complicated issue - one with hundreds of years of history worth of economic and social inequality. I think you know that already. Regardless, the argument isn't even that black people get killed by police. Nobody's arguing against the enforcement of law or the police being able to protect themselves and others. The argument is that black people are getting killed by the police when they shouldn't be, and that not only are we seeing continued examples of this even in this sensitive environment, but also that we continue to see people dismiss and make excuses for it, particularly the police departments and unions.

My stereotypes are over the top and meant to highlight your hypocrisy. Both of us can oversimplify and generalize an argument unfairly. To compare the Tea Party to the current protests is beyond foolish. On the one hand, we're dealing with decades of black people being basically murdered by police, and on the other hand you have a small minority of goofs complaining about "big government". They're so far apart that a comparison is worthless. Again, nobody reasonable is supporting looting and violence, but that seems to be the argument you're making here. The mainstream media is glorifying vandals and murderers and encouraging the mob to burn it all down. I'm not doing that. Who's doing that, exactly? Please...

Well there was the attack on parliament hill, and there have obviously been large attacks spanning the breadth of the Western world. Though I do agree with your point (and two of my oldest friends are from Iran and Afghanistan), we also can't ignore that there are clear efforts to recruit and promote violence from certain hostile Islamic organizations, and they have had success. An ignorant and all-encompassing view of Muslims shouldn't dictate immigration policies, of course, but i would also be foolish not to scrutinize applicants and *gasp* be more discerning of origins with a track record of violence, trafficking or espionage.

Surely you're not comparing the deep-rooted issues behind the current protests, to a bunch of ignorant, uneducated white slobs protesting free healthcare? How many Tea Party protesters did the policy kill? Talk about being disingenuous. I read and watch a lot of news, and I've yet to see anyone "cheerleading" the violent protests. The hypocrisy of your position is highlighted by the threats from Trump etc against protests in Seattle or Atlanta, and then his overt "cheerleading" of white trash occupying statehouses and brandishing assault weapons.

It's pretty easy to just lump them all together though, right? Much less thinking involved. All the protestors are vandals, murders and thugs. The Tea Party was the picture of calm and reason...except for all of those Affordable Care rallies they crashed and derailed...sometimes violently. These protestors are also not showing up with assault rifles at state facilities. Shady you're smarter than that.

"They" are the lawyers involved. I don't think people got cellphone videos this time. Most of the footage is from a Wendy's security cam, as far as I know. Though I'll agree this situation is VERY different from the George Floyd incident, and not nearly as clear cut, I'd turn it around and say shame on you for. The officer shot a man in the back who was running to escape and nearly 20 feet away already. I think you are right about the kick though. I think that was a poorly interpreted photo and they have video of pretty much the entire incident and I don't see any kick.

Yes, so we'll wait and see how it turns out. I suspect that they're not really keen on showing a gun shot victim lying on the ground on video...it's dark and unpleasant but we'll see. You may be right, but then your own question comes back. If there wasn't a quick, the video would clearly demonstrate this and the DA wouldn't make the claim, or at least I hope he wouldn't. Lawyers aren't usually idiots and watch what they say, but they're far from infallible.

I'm not sure what you were reading, because I've seen no evidence to the contrary while I have seen pictures of the officer, standing one-footed over the body in what appears to be a decidedly kicky looking pose. The other relevant fact is that the guy was something like 20 feet away with his back turned while he was shot, and still running.

Coulter and Limbaugh are just rallying cries for the Left though. It's an invocation - a bogeyman - and just leads the discussion off on a red herring. They have their platform, and their listeners, and they natter loudly and provocatively at the dumb and the ignorant. Their business is to do exactly what they're doing and they're in no way demonstrative of the "Right" in general, just like Kim Jong is not a good representation of the Left. Both "sides" are guilty of putting their head in the sands, but the "offence-culture" has a far larger and more successful apparatus for naming and shaming on a mainstream level. Unless you're voicing 100% support for whatever progressive issue is in vogue at the moment, it's best to keep your mouth shut. Questioning the implications even are often met with public shaming, campaigns to boycott and then cowardly attempts at conflict avoidance from the wayward speakers peers (current and former) who scramble to distance themselves from what often amounts to little more than a differing viewpoint. JK Rowling hates transgender people, we'd be led to believe. Few actually bothered to pay attention to what she was saying and where her comments come from.

What is that even supposed to mean? The guy was on the ground and bleeding out, and then he got a huge kick to the side. That's what the officer was trained to do? That's the argument? Yikes. The whole purpose of training is to have officers keep a cool head and be able to think under pressure. Kicking gun shot victims is not that.

That's the problem. It aims to be much more than just an organized diplomacy system. Diplomacy, at its core, is negotiating, but in most cases the UN isn't even really negotiating anything. The long-winded "negotiations" leading up to a UN resolution are sublime examples of cynicism, hypocrisy and moral relativism. The "resolutions", at best, usually amount to nothing more than finger-pointing and empty promises - all in exchange for a lot of time and diplomatic energy. Since the majority of the member nations aren't even free democracies (I just looked it up), the needs of the organization are therefore tilted towards the needs of dictatorships that share few of our values and don't even express the will of their own people. These regimes enhance their appearance of legitimacy on the global stage by supporting resolutions against their enemies (Israel for example) or work to compromise ones that are problematic for them, all the while paying lip-service to ideals that they regularly piss on. That's not to say we should abolish the UN. As a diplomatic forum, it's worthwhile just to have a place where everyone can talk, make their concerns heard and even cooperate to negotiate inter-nation treaties. By that I mean we actually have tit-for-tat negotiating, realizing the obvious imbalances of power and not pretending they don't exist (the whole security council veto mechanism makes this implicit, but why bother?). There are obviously other benefits to the UN and its myriad of organizations, but even with examples like the WHO we can see how badly compromised they can be just on account of the transparency of its members (hey China).

True, but so can a rock. There's a reason that tazers are preferable to firearms in many cases, and it's because they're designed to be non-lethal. That's not really relevant in any case, but here's the question - With the man running away, what was likely to happen if they just let him go? He was a drunk idiot, but he wasn't holding people at knife or gun-point and there was no reason to believe he was out looking for trouble. There was a very clear and obvious path for de-escalation and every reason to believe he could be picked up later - if they just let him go and sober up. Nobody seems willing to discuss this last part, but I have to ask again, what sort of spin are we trying to put on the big boot to the chest after the guy was down and suffering from multiple GSW's?

Personally I think the UN needs a profound re-imagining. Owing to its makeup, it's a fundamentally unprincipled organization and its hypocrisy and cynicism is shameless. At this point it looks more to me like a tool to leverage the guilt of developed/western nations and promote the interests dictatorships and third-world holes. When the West finally wakes up and sees the UN for what it is instead of what they wish it was, it will be a lot more useful. Nearly half the membership is comprised of dictatorships or sham democracies, so it's naive to believe that the UN functions as some sort of unifying body. It's a global diplomatic forum.

Well both sides are guilty of this in similar degrees. This forum appears these days to lean more heavily right - much more so than 10 years ago, so the debate seems less "even". Regardless, there are key differences in how this plays out in the real world, the most important among them being the successful weaponization of "offense". Though again, both sides make efforts and have their success and failures, the Left's efforts have been far more effective. Corporations are more concerned with the bottom line and it's lower hanging fruit to avoid negative media/social media attention than it is to promote or generate the opposite. The emphasis is therefore on muzzling anyone or any comments that could be deemed "offensive", and this often leads to absurd results.

Yeah this is a truly epic thread necro. I don't think I'd even joined the forum yet...

Okay fair enough, but the guy's still running. He's holding a non-lethal weapon and he's running away. They had his ID. They had his car. He was a drunken fool and they shot him in the back while he was running away.

I didn't. I specifically said that he was a moron and shot the taser at the officer...and missed... Take a deep breath and calm down. Yikes.

Which is disappointing, because that's what we're already getting from the current federal government. Justin Trudeau - master of the bromidic marshmallow toss (I stole that term from the Globe I think). They're all wet blankets and none of them have a chance at beating Justin unless they actually offer a notable alternative.

Part of your training is how to approach situations with more than just instinct and adrenaline. That's why they do stuff like mix in fake "civilians" when doing firearm training. Just because things get heated doesn't mean you get to go shooty. For the record, the guy turned, fired the tazer clumsily, missed, and then continued running. That's when the officer drew his gun and fired...AFTER the tazer was already discharged and no longer a danger. You'll have a hard time explaining the boot to the midsection after the guy was down too. As I've said before, I don't really know everything about the training process. You could be right and the training could tell officers that they should shoot if someone so much as lobs a marshmallow at them (facetious, I know), but then we have to acknowledge there are systemic problems that need to be addressed.

Leaving unilaterally would leave you on the outside looking in. I think there's an increasingly large bloc of countries that are getting disillusioned though, not the least of which being the united states. At this point it seems more useful as a tool for third-world dictators to band together and point fingers than it is for much productive. The whole organization is so unashamedly cynical that I have trouble placing any faith in it..for anything.

Then they attempted to arrest him, Brooks got stupid and struggled, things did get forceful, and when he grabbed the Tazer and ran away, they shot him in the back. By all accounts, the entire process was reasonable and by the book...until Brooks got shot in the back with a firearm. Brooks was a moron and he even fired the tazer at the officer chasing him, but it was a wild miss (as you'd expect when shooting backwards, off-balance, while running with a short-range weapon with questionable ballistics). The pursuing officer wasn't in mortal danger, and he had back-up. The options were to let the guy run off and catch up to him later, or chase him down and taze/subdue him. He wasn't looking for trouble or to hurt anyone. He was just a dumb drunk that wanted to get away. The icing on the cake was how Rolfe winds up and kicks him after he's shot him twice in the back. Tell me there's nothing wrong with that.

That's the problem. We can't weed the bad ones out. They're protected by militant police unions and they're protected by the way the police close ranks among themselves. It's a sad state when the public needs to insist on body cams (that many officers turn off or misuse on purpose). There's very little accountability and it's only when we catch things on video in many cases that something gets done. As you say, most of the cops are good people doing good work, but that's not always the case and the public backlash we're seeing now is a result of that previously mentioned lack of accountability. If the police did a better job of monitoring and disciplining there own, we'd not be having this conversation. Seeing Rayshard Brooks get kicked on the ground after the officer had already shot him was sickening, and Atlanta police officers are showing solidarity with him via soft walk-out and not responding to calls. That's beyond the pale.

Canada has a strong economy too. Canada, US, Germany, China, UK, France, Bangladesh - all of them have different economies with their own unique challenges. Economics apply to all of them equally. We're not losing the oil sands, and I don't think you even really understand what bitumen is or what it's used for. A lot of Canadians seem to think we're pumping thick, sandy tar out of the ground and sending it to Houston to be refined into gasoline or something. It's too expensive to refine for that, so unless we go back to the absurd prices we saw back in 2008, it's mostly not worth pumping for combustible fuel. In reality, it's mainly used as a binding agent and most of it gets used for stuff like asphalt or reservoir linings, for which it's fantastic. If Alberta continues to struggle fiscally, they can do what the rest of Canada does and implement a sales tax. You'll not find a lot of sympathy from the rest of Canada for crying about budget deficits when you don't tax as much as the rest of the country. It's the same reason why much of the rest of Ontario gets frustrated with Toronto for whining about their deficits (their property tax rates are lower than everywhere else). Anyways, the oil market's collapse is a good example of why you don't make your economy a one-trick pony. For the record, I'm strongly in favor of pipelines and the Alberta oil industry, and also get frustrated how the rest of the country (BC and Quebec in particular) are being obstinate with them. From how much you were focusing on this, it seemed like you thought I was bashing it or something.

Argus I agree with pretty much everything you said there. I'm a naive white guy living in a sleepy town of 130,000 west of Toronto and I have always admired the police here. I once watched a tweaking meth-head run around the downtown core (Guelph loves its meth) screaming at the police, then climb a 5 foot wall and throw his boots at officers and scream at them for about 20 minutes. 4 of them calmly surrounded him, let him have his tantrum and waited for him to come down before arresting him. Every time he put his hands in his pockets he could have been grabbing a shuriken, but as you say, they didn't automatically assume he was going to try to kill them. That's the issue here. The training and mentality is so paranoid and confrontational in a lot of cases that bad stuff is bound to happen. The mentality that citizens are subservient to the police and instantly need to obey and grovel is wrong. That's not to say you need to be confrontational with the police, but in the GTA and Peel region I've encountered hot head bro-cops that are out and looking for trouble where it doesn't exist on numerous occasions.

Foreign money isn't what drives the economy. That you think it does clearly shows you really don't know much of anything about how this stuff works. I'm not saying that to be rude, but you're demonstrating a profound ignorance on the subject. Case and point: Compare Germany to the USA. One the one hand, the USA has BY FAR the largest trade deficit in the world. It imports loads more than it exports by about $466B each year. Germany, on the other hand, exports FAR more than it imports, by about $266B a year. By your simplistic logic, that would mean that Germany's economy is far better, stronger and more successful than the USA's. In reality, the opposite is true. The US economy dominates Germany by virtually any measurement other than net exports vs imports, and will continue to do so into the future. Why is this true? Because digging stuff out of the ground or manufacturing knicknacks and selling them abroad is only one of many ways to create wealth. Another example would be somewhere like Cuba. With all of the foreign tourism money pouring in, why does Cuba continue to struggle economically? It's because all that foreign money coming in isn't being used effectively. It's not generating dollar-for-dollar wealth and productivity increases. Its domestic economy is pitiful.