Why becauseI'm a black man!?

[AllHazzardi]

Nobody said or assumed that. The fact that we all criticize Gates for his actions prove this. And again, if you take the skin color of each person out of the equation you still have the same actions.



Oh, the irony of this statement.



And for good reason... because it shouldn't have.



Well, if Crowley isn't getting dismissed, put on probation or even getting docked for pay then why should Gates? Hell, Crowley didn't even do the publically moral thing and apologize (not that it even mattered, but the gesture would have been nice).

If anything, Gates experienced the worse of the exchange. He was taken away from his home in handcuffs. He was arrested and treated like an everyday criminal for merely voicing disdain on a process at his own home. Not sure if that ever happened to you, but that's a humiliating experience that really affects you psychologically.



A policeman can mouth off to a citizen, dream up a reason to arrest someone and in some instances assault someone and can usually walk away scott free without even apologizing. All a civilian has to do is raise his or her voice and they get arrested. Let's not ignore the obvious here just so you can hold onto your rhetorical beliefs of "equality" because to put a citizen on the same social level & status of an authority figure is ridiculous.

Actually, if an officer mouths off to a citizen for no reason, a complaint may be registered, eventually that sort of behavior gets them fired if the victims report it often enough.

It wasn't the raising of voice, or probably even the words that were spoken.

If an officer tells you to go inside and just calm down, as a civil order. If Gates probably wouldn't've blown up further, the officer would've said "Sir, return to your home, that's an order" and would've been plainly more blunt and direct, and entirely in the right. Violation of a direct order from an authority is effectively the definition of civil disobedience; You have the right to disobey any order given you by an authority, you don't have the right to disobey an order and NOT get arrested on grounds of refusal to follow the order which is given, and is normally followed if the position of the officer is currently being RESPECTED by the individual in question. Whether they are DESERVING of respect in the current situation does not matter according to the system.

If you think an officer shouldn't be, it is your position to speak out against what is wrong, and why that officer should not be in a position of power. If you are not eloquent enough for such a task; BECOME eloquent. Learn, grow, become better from your situation and the requirements of its resolution. After all, if you already knew about it, you probably wouldn't be in the situation not knowing how to get out of it.


The way our society works has a very important interaction between government and people. Government is in primary control, and people root out the corruption. The problem is, no individual today has enough TIME to do such things because we're all too busy trying to scrounge up enough for our rent, food, and quality of life. When the corrupt were ousted last time, they grew from their situation by developing new ways to be corrupt; ways to skirt the boundary. It's like a game of cosmic chicken, they're the star dipping closer and further away from an event horizon, and the black hole is the end of their ability to be corrupt because their manipulations have not gone un-noticed and are eventually fixed after being brought up by the population.

Not enough people have been digging up the rotten, so not enough good is replacing it.

Let's face it, we've flat been in denial of our basic fundamentals. We make this boistrous claim to freedom, life, and happiness, but it's all a lie. We're no more free than as we are restrained to our jobs in a slave-like workforce structure where the worker is paid disproportionately lower than the businesspeople. Where's the equality in one person having an in to a great paying job because they have family and friends and former associates getting to live their dream life of pointlessly huge houses and boats, while it would take the wage of thousands of workers to even obtain ONE of those things and keep it usable? In America, the quality of your life is not guaranteed beyond things which would pose a systemic risk to other individuals, or things severe enough to make you eligible for payment plans. In other words, you get whatever quality of life you can pay for. Given that wages are so dramatically unequal, and life and happiness is only for those who can afford it, how can this even be called equality? Much less capitalized(as in *E*quality, but yes, pun intended)?

So in other words, it's America, land of the somewhat free, but not really, it's more free to do what you need to, not so much free to do what you want to, because we're still still still still working on the "Life and Happiness" bit.

We let the big money minded people get into enough power to sway the system, and things went downhill from there, especially after they started slapping Supply and Demand on everything thinking it'd make it better.

The current Political parties are just having one big blast passing powers back and forth and making for good show instead of doing what they're supposed to and work together and with their constituents to bring about a unilateral agreement; anyone who disagrees such that they can't see how it would benefit them in any way can agree on the grounds of the "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" philosophy.

The private industry and government have been slowly altered and built upon into a form which oppresses in a whole new way. We don't keep you prisoner, we don't persecute you, we don't whip you, but our people might, and you'll be kept so busy with work and play that you won't have TIME to build a rebellion.

You know what every anti-American Frenchman is known to say? "Fucking Americans" "Fucking Hypocritical Bastards!". This is coming from the people who previously gave us a 450,000 lb statue which represented our willingness to take in any individual regardless of faith, color, origin, or mentality, in which the inscription pretty summarily states "If you have no luck anywhere else, come here and be equal". Yeah, I'm not surprised the French call us Hypocrites. That's not even counting the time when we said we'd help if they called, and didn't when they did.




Course, the cool thing is that we can always turn things around if we can all just agree to make things better.

 

[B_VinylBoy]

I pointed out what had been said, no matter how I worded it, you would have turned it around for your own benefit. I made clear, all should be held to the same standards.

I think I've been very clear about the actions of both men.
I agree with all of you when I say that Gates should have acted better. If we're just looking at this issue from a moralistic standpoint, then by all means treat both individuals like equals and say that they both messed up.

But there's a completely different angle to this story, one of which that doesn't even concern race or the moral argument. It's an issue as to whether or not Crowley overstepped his boundaries and arrested a man for no good reason. Some of you are ignoring this because you're still stuck on the moral argument or still stuck on Gates injecting the issue of race into the argument. What's funny is that some people want to argue "equality", but then won't give both sides of the argument equal scrutiny.

This is regardless of economic status, educational status, gender, race or religion or anything else.

Sounds so poetic, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, some people don't completely believe in this. Either that or they do in spirit but not in action. That's the problem with strict, moral arguments. We can believe and talk anything we want, but if you're clever enough to hide your actions then nobody notices. Just ask Governor Sanford before he got caught.

Back in the Gates/Crowley thread in the ETC. section, someone said that as an esteemed professor Gates should be treated better. That indicated that Gates should be getting a different treatment than the homeless man, the factory worker, the day laborer, the high school drop-out. Too much of that already exists as is seen with celebrities on a regular basis.

Looks as if you're looking at this from a moralistic angle as well.
We all know that we're "all human" so technically we're "all equal". But in reality, if this was the case then Crowley would have acted differently. He wouldn't have arrested Gates for "yelling".

And if the playing field is not level, then perhaps it is time to ask yourself why it is that you won't allow it to be. What are you doing to level the field?

If I went out on the streets and pretended to be a policeman right now, I could be arrested for that. Plain and simple. When it's an issue between a civilian and a policeman, the differences are blatantly obvious. We should not ignore this just so we can hold onto the moral belief that "all men are created equal". Society placed these rules in order for us to be governed and to decide, using facts and observations, what is right and wrong. We can still have our moral beliefs, while analyzing each individual issue for what it is and judge accordingly.

Going back to the start, I asked Why should we hold Gates to a lower standard, after B.C. said that Crowley should be held to a higher standard (as I showed in my previous post), which you said nobody had done. I did not ask just for the laughs, I asked because it was and is part of what is wrong with the mentality of certain individuals who seem to believe that one group must have higher standards than another. That is the sort of thinking which just furthers discrimination.

I'm sorry, but if a person wants to have the right to govern and/or supervise over another they should be placed at a higher standard than the regular civilian. Why? Because legally, civilians cannot do everything that a policeman does. That's not discrimination unless you want to inadvertently paint a picture of anarchy, saying that no policeman or government has a right to say or do whatever they like to me because we're all equal. That would mean throwing out everything we've ever formed to enforce that moral belief, including the Constitution.

Believe me, I have no problems joining you around the campfire when it's time to sing "Kum By Yah". But again, let's not ignore the obvious.

 

[AllHazzardi]

I'm sorry, but if a person wants to have the right to govern and/or supervise over another they should be placed at a higher standard than the regular civilian. Why? Because legally, civilians cannot do everything that a policeman does. That's not discrimination unless you want to inadvertently paint a picture of anarchy, saying that no policeman or government has a right to say or do whatever they like to me because we're all equal. That would mean throwing out everything we've ever formed to enforce that moral belief, including the Constitution.

Not higher standards, just different ones. The standards a civilian are held to are being civilized in society, respecting or aiding authority, and pursuing their own individual freedoms and beliefs, so long as it does not interfere with other civilians. The standards an officer are held to are maintaining civility in a society, respecting freedom only to the point where the above point of interference occurs(it's their job to stop that interference), and maintaining an individually unbiased equal perspective on the populace.

They're not higher or lower, they're just different. I would expect a civilian working at a job running a company to do the best job he or she can for the benefit of the company, not yourself. Each position has different standards, but none are higher or lower than any other, just different.

Our Equality is guaranteed by our rule of law(government). Those laws pretty much say that you respect authority figures because they're there for YOUR benefit, but are not required to respect an authority figure who isn't there for your benefit. Just because it isn't required, doesn't mean it isn't bad advice to respect anyway; if you've done nothing wrong, he's not there to get you, so respect his requests so long as they are reasonable. Likewise, they say you respect others, because if you don't stop your neighbor from being profitable, everyone is gaining, you're just not gaining as much more than your neighbor.

In our almighty Capitalistic system which allows any person to do any job pretty much guarantees that someone who ISN'T the right person to become can officer will become one at some point in time. These individuals are, in normal operation, supposed to be filtered out by the evidence of their own corruption coming to bear against them. However, that last part hasn't been happening enough lately, so not enough good people are replacing the weeds.



One of the biggest problems with being successful in one way or another, is that you start trying to say which one is "Better" than the other; neither are, they're just different with different results that may or may not be desirable.

 

[b.c.]

Why let Gates have a lower standard? That alone would scream of racism if it was a reverse situation where a black officer did the things which Crowley did to a white educator who behaved the way in which Gates behaved.

Gates has been around enough years and has given enough lectures and written enough prose to have known damned well what he was doing throughout the ordeal. He may not have expected it to go as far as an arrest. He may have just been intending to taunt the officer; he did however, know that he was behaving inappropriately at some point in their encounter. If he did not, then he is none too bright and should be dismissed from his post immediately.


I hold all people to the same standards, to do differently is wrong.

The standards I'd hold Crowley to has nothing to do with race and everything to do with his professionalism (or apparent lack thereof) as a trained officer. When civilians lose control (even professors), officers trained in law enforcement should still work both within the framework and spirit of the law. Not lose control also.

While Crowley may have had grounds under the city's rather global disorderly conduct laws (the subject of numerous online blogs such as this one)

Disorderly Conduct: Conversation About Gates Arrest Precedes Arrest

there was no real and justifiable reason why he had to arrest Gates. Most (with an objective frame of mind) acknowledge this, at least.

 

[B_VinylBoy]

Not higher standards, just different ones. The standards a civilian are held to are being civilized in society, respecting or aiding authority, and pursuing their own individual freedoms and beliefs, so long as it does not interfere with other civilians. The standards an officer are held to are maintaining civility in a society, respecting freedom only to the point where the above point of interference occurs(it's their job to stop that interference), and maintaining an individually unbiased equal perspective on the populace.

You do make a good point. Perhaps better wording on my end would have made my opinions more apparent.

 

[cdarro]

And teachers don't?

Nobody will disagree that a little kindness goes a long way. But to suggest that it always works is not true at all.

Consider yourself lucky. If this was in a different neighborhood with different cops, the result could have been much more severe. For instance, you could have been surrounded by several cop cars. They could have demanded you to put your hands up or lay down on the ground. Or they could have just grabbed you and threw you against a wall or on the ground in an attempt to "control the situation" before they even explain why they're approaching you. All for what... because you told someone to not talk on their phone in a movie theater and he called the Police? And let's not act like this doesn't happen in our country, or even in your own neighborhood.

We as civilians have to take into consideration that there are people out there that abuse their authority, and because of that we adjust our lives so we don't have to experience that. Because of that, we inadvertently excuse the cops who do such things and look at the civilian as the nuisance. Gates did nothing but yell and get snide with a few remarks. Perhaps Cambridge should be hiring cops that aren't so caught up in their own importance that they can take verbal lashings from a 58 year old man?

You don't have the be a black man living in "the hood" to be apalled at what some cops do. I am 51, white, consider myself a conservative and live in a city of less than 100,000 in western Canada and am amazed at what the city police get away with in terms of physical abuse of both native americans and whites in this city. Some of them would fit right into Himmler's Gestapo. Underpaid? Not likely! Constables start at over $50,000 per annum straight of community college. That's a lot to pay for a bunch of clerks and a few jackbooted thugs. And has no one outside Canada seen the video of the RCMP tasering and killing Robert Djerkanski at the Vancouver Airport? Both the officers involved and their supervisors were caught lying and altering statements to the inquest, and yet nothing has been done.

PS: Off topic, but teachers are paid ridiculously well here too.