You're assuming what you're trying to prove, that for the GOP it was a life or death matter. They walked into this thinking they were going to lose, their temper tantrum should have been before the election.
Sure, but even by those standards I think we're cutting new ground.
Some is the whole "didn't start mourning until after the election" bit. Most elections have the winner known weeks or months in advance. Even in 2000 both sides knew losing was at least possible. The Dems though they had it in the bag.
Some is losing to Trump, specifically. At various points in the election there was speculation that he was a Dem plant.
Having said all that, I do wonder if it goes further than that and speaks poorly for the long term stability of the country. If it's actually a matter of life or death for the top guy to be yours, then every election needs to have the rule book tossed out.
Normally Presidents are... Presidental. They skate above things with other people (often the VP) take the role of the designated bad guy.
Thing is, no one is under the illusion that Trump is a nice guy.
Or that the Dems are going to take losing to him with composure and good cheer.
I'm not sure there was any low hanging fruit there. Trump is, once again, diverting attention from things that matter (what he's doing) to things that don't matter (what he's saying).
White people generally; wealthy people without exception, want the cops to not only minimize crime, but minimize the perception of the possibility of crime.
Sure.
And that gets us right into a structural account of why cops kill black folk.
You're assuming what you should be trying to prove. The implication of your statement is police shootings are actually a white thing. That if those white people would stop being so racist then the shootings would drop dramatically. At its root, this is an emotional argument, with some of these videos being it's most powerful support. "Emotional" isn't the same as "right" or "wrong" so let's tease out the missing details.
The best data we have shows the following: Adjusted for situation, blacks are underrepresented in police killings. That implies that it's actually whites who have issues with being shot without justification. "Adjusted for situation" often means "attacking the police".
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/23614-study-by-black-harvard-economist-refutes-black-lives-matter-s-claim
The original study is below, here's a quote, "Given the stream of video “evidence”, which many take to be indicative of structural racism in police departments across America... the results displayed in Table 5 are startling. Blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely to be shot but the coefficient is statistically insignificant" (page 23).
http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force
What it comes down to is the police (even racist police) already view shooting someone as a life changing event which should be avoided if at all possible.
IMHO police reform is a good idea. I don't see the need for government unions whose purpose is to prevent accountability/reform and lobby for more government/higher taxes. Using the police as revenue raisers is a bad idea. But most police reforms won't reduce the number of dead bodies because the problems we have are different than what the emotional argument assumes.
Escalation isn’t a solution unless everyone is willing to end up dead over some stolen cigarillos.
Everyone? One person can escalate, one person can prevent deescalation, and if that someone is willing to die or kill over some stolen cigarillos, then society is faced with the problem of what to do with him.
And the police are going to be implementing for whatever society wants to do about people like that.
How about zero percent more: they wouldn’t be able to use force (or more substantively, the THREAT of force), so threat levels for them go down, making their job easier.
:Blink: Easier? Care to expand on that?
Especially as to how that works with our armed criminal element?
How you do math is different than how you use it. Ie., you’re doing math correctly, but you’re using it incorrectly.
That's a reasonable claim. So... what's wrong with what I'm doing?
The claim was that driving is MUCH more risky than being a cop (so seat belts ahead of time is fine but guns ahead of time is not). So we're comparing risk of death from driving to risk of death from being a cop (I skipped "injuries" because that's a lot more hand wavy and harder to get stats).
To calculate risk, my solution is to get the number of people who do something and divide that by the number who die from doing it. If there's a more acceptable way to calculate risk, by all means put it on the table.
And this is a side note. If we don't want to compare risks from driving to risk from being a cop that's fine, although imho there are enough similarities that it's useful.
The ugly numbers are the ones that say total number of people killed by the police is very small, so the total number of bad shoots must be smaller still... and both of those are then heavily outweighed by crime.
On the other side, we could have SWAT cops who ARE armed, and get called in when the shit really hits the fan.
Here we run into regional differences. A peaceful city can be worse off with a SWAT team.
A SWAT team needs something to do and if there's nothing then they'll look for things. They'll end up delivering warrants at gunpoint to people that could have been trivially served by a process server, and maybe shooting people or dogs in the process.
Some of the most outrageous bad shoots over the years have been carried out by bored SWAT teams.
Killing a person who’d already done something bad doesn’t really count as crime prevention.
I disagree. If you've done something bad then your odds of doing it again are MUCH higher. Killing someone is only hard if you've never done it, the same goes for lots of things.
Kazzy: The odds of being hurt or killed in a car accident are MUCH higher than the odds of a cop being injured or killed int he line of duty. So that analogy falls apart right there.
Dark Matter: Math is fun. It has the habit of cutting through rhetoric and giving actual answers. Odds of being killed in a car accident: Very roughly 32k deaths out of 320 million people. Call it one person out of 10k. Odds of a cop dying in the line of duty: 135 in the line of duty […]
Kazzy: You’re missing my point (badly) and talking out of both sides of your mouth. Not sure if either/both is intentional but not interested in tumbling further down this rabbit hole with you.
Yes, I am missing your point badly, and I don't understand the "both sides of my mouth" comment.
As far as I can tell I'm using math correctly, and I don't have any idea where I lost you.
The odds of being hurt or killed in a car accident are MUCH higher than the odds of a cop being injured or killed int he line of duty. So that analogy falls apart right there.
Math is fun. It has the habit of cutting through rhetoric and giving actual answers.
Odds of being killed in a car accident: Very roughly 32k deaths out of 320 million people. Call it one person out of 10k.
Odds of a cop dying in the line of duty: 135 in the line of duty deaths out of 1.13 million cops (about half are shooting deaths). Call it one cop out of 8k.
So the odds of a cop being killed in the line of duty are roughly the same as auto accidents (my back of the envelope says somewhat higher). However this misstates the situation somewhat because the risk is unlikely to fall evenly. A cop in a peaceful suburb presumably has a lower risk than in a non-peaceful inner city.
“Having cops keep their guns in the car means there might occasionally be a situation where a cop unexpectedly needs his gun and needs to retreat to secure it.
"retreat" translates into "he might die in the process of retreating, or people he's trying to protect might die because he's not able to do anything, or the criminals might get away".
Why should the non-cops bear that risk? ...whenever there is a proposal that increases their risk, we’re told it is beyond the pale
Speaking as a non-cop, it sounds like you're increasing my risk. If I call a cop to my house, he's not coming here to shoot me. If it's harder for him to do his job, then that's probably a bad thing for me.
My risk from crime is low but my risk of getting killed by the police is much lower.
I’m saying teach them discretion and make them make a conscious choice to bring their gun into a situation rather than having it be the default.
Police shooting deaths are absurdly rare, rare enough that you'd have to be a cop for a thousand years just to average one; That's what it means when more than a million cops kill less than a thousand people over the course of a year. So the deep default is already no one gets shot.
Becoming a nation with armed criminals and unarmed police implies there's going to be a lot more situations where the bad guy simply walks away. This sounds a lot like it's strongly encouraging criminals to be armed.
Assuming a "bad shoot" rate of 10% of all police shootings, that's less than 100 per year (a lot of these can't be addressed by your solution, because they come down to 'deliberately killed him but shouldn't have'). We have violent segments of society that impose a lot of risk on their local parts of society. The murder rate is 15k to 16k per year. Lowering the first problem in exchange for making the 2nd worst seems like a bad idea.
In other words, you're suggesting that things will be better if unarmed cops are confronting armed criminals. Obviously this is going to make some things better and other worse, but the problem you're trying to fix is very small and the problem you're going to make worse is much much larger.
if we are talking about such a minuscule percentage of interactions, why do all police carry their weapon on them at all times? Why not leave it secured in the vehicle absent real reason to remove it?
For the same reason you need to put your seat belt on before you know you're going to need it. The chances of needing it are minuscule, but the situation may not politely wait for you.
We should have a uniform standard of behavior for all police and if, for whatever reason, a given officer is unable to meet that standard… he’s either repositioned, retrained, or off the force.
This will drive the wrong behavior from your point of view. Floyd lived because in the judgement of the cop(s) confronting him, their life wasn't in danger. That's a good standard, changing that to some "uniform standard" probably wouldn't be.
Assume we set some detailed standards to micromanage what the police are supposed to do. The first time some cop gets killed following them, those standards will be changed to "prevent" that, and now Floyd, because he crossed some lines, not only *could* get shot but *should* get shot.
Note adjusted for situation, minorities are underrepresented in the 'got-killed' stats, not over represented. A true uniform standard results in more minorities getting shot or fewer whites or both, which makes the current stats even more lopsided. The root problem is the words "adjusted for situation". Police and police shootings are symptoms of society's larger issues, they're not the cause.
Except we aren’t terribly interested in actually preventing such events but in getting a greater measure of accountability.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I think "Accountability" is a problem, but it's a bit player in the grand scheme of things and I doubt fixing it will change much.
The narrative is "stop shooting us" with Mike Brown as the poster child. But I don't see how an increase in "accountability" makes Brown's family happy; They're never going to believe their innocent child caused his own death.
IMHO it's "such events" which are the problem, and fixing them has much to do with what happened before the encounter with the police and little to do with what happens afterwards.
They’re gonna get sweetheart deals from... the new Secretary of Treasury, Trump can’t retaliate,
The new SoT is Steven Mnuchin, aka Trump's long time friend and the head of finance for his campaign. Steven's boss will be Trump (the guy who hired him and who can fire him).
The whole "can't retaliate" part seems really optimistic.
Being people who interact with potentially violent people on a regular basis only gets you part of the way there.
Given we're looking at less than 0.01% (a lot less since many of those deaths are presumably forced), "part of the way there" may be enough.
My assumption is police work is a lot harder and more subject to chance than me driving a car around. So what are my daily chances of getting into a car accident? Something less than 0.01%?
I'm can manage the radio, winter roads, the occasional idiot, life-before-coffee, unexpected construction, and so forth. I can even handle all of those things at the same time... but now we're getting into risk, and even though I "control myself" and even though I don't want to wreck my car, we call it "risk" because there's an element of chance.
There are things we can do to reduce risk, there are things we should do, the odds are already so low that it's not going to make a big difference.
Maybe. I'm seriously doubtful of basically giving cops a 007 style license to kill. On the other hand I thought the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commision seemed better than the alternatives.
There's no chance in human interactions? Really? A pick up line either works 100% of the time or it never works?
One cop chooses to pull the trigger. One doesn’t. Who’s right? The answer *can’t* be both. Not if we are applying the same standards to both situations.
I used to train in the local dojo. It's master has a large number of belts in multiple forms. He can hurt you with one finger, and know when he does it how long it should last. Put him up against even a high Mike Brown and I'm sure Brown gets hurt but survives.
So... because I know a guy who could trivially control Mike, does that mean the Ferguson cop was wrong to pull the trigger?
The cops are all different from each other and the situations are different too. Amount of light, backup, experience, fatigue, history, and yes, whether or not the other guy has done the wrong things in the wrong order. High isn't the same as "violently high", hands out of sight for a moment is very different from out of sight for three and you think he's pulling a gun.
Cops don't control who they run into, so they have to make judgements on their own risk. When you put your hands out of their line of sight you're imposing risk on them, if you're in an area where twice in the last week that type of action ended up with a gun in hand, then their view of the amount of risk you're putting on them will increase (that's a 'history' example).
No one is able to put all of these factors together and try to come up with one permanent formula which is going to describe when they get to pull the trigger and when they don't. Trying to pretend otherwise seems nonsensical, as does trying to pretend that video showed all the information they had at hand.
So *yes*, the answer is *both*, even with the same standards in the same situation. The real world isn't a chess game, it's not even poker.
What we want is whatever comes after... "I screwed up. This could have been avoided if I'd..."
Thing is that probably turns a good shoot into a bad one.
In practice we're already pretty close to no fault, maybe we should just make it explicit and try to learn from these things? (I seriously don't know about this one).
So, we have very, very, very similar situations with very, very, very different responses. I’m wondering how *both* responses can be justified.
You buy a lottery ticket, normally what happens is nothing, but sometimes you get a very, very, very different outcome. *Both* outcomes are "justified", that only the common one is expected doesn't change that the uncommon one is possible.
Life is full of situations like that. Drunk driving normally doesn't kill anyone. Every act of sex doesn't result in pregnancy (nor AIDS even with the right conditions).
Even at the extremes, Mike Brown attacked a cop. He could have ended up beaten, pistol whipped, or tasered instead of dead, any of those outcomes would be "justified". It's also possible that if he hadn't been put down he would have just beaten up the cop and not killed him.
However Mike "purchased" lots and lots of lottery tickets, to the point where the expected outcome was extreme.
And while we're on this analogy, the real question we should be asking is whether being black affects the outcome of the lottery, or whether it's purely the number of tickets you buy.
American banks are unlikely to change their minds, because he’s still a bad risk and the sorts of leverage they can exert over him lessened with his assumption of office.
He's got a gun to their heads. The banking sector is heavily regulated and what those regulations are is subject to opinion, and the opinion that matters is a guy appointed by Trump.
These companies need the goodwill of politicians in order to exist. They're the same people who have enriched the Clintons by dozens of millions of dollars, doing the same for Trump is a no-brainer.
“Hey, have you stopped beating your wife yet? Hmmm? I’m not seeing any innocent explanations here, pal …”
If she's covered with blood and stab wounds and you're holding a knife, there actually *are* innocent explanations.
This is....
1) Unethical people give HRC+crew money.
2) Unethical people get serious favors/access to HRC's power as SoS.
3) There doesn't seem to be a reason for the 2nd event other than the first.
It's OK though, I'm sure that when she was accepting that money and doing those unusual favors, she wasn't doing anything that was provably criminal.
So apparently in your book, that makes her a total innocent... and as luck would have it, we're probably going to see Trump do the same thing.
Where is your qualifier that it only applies where police power is ineffective or impractical coming from?
Thus far observation. Part of this might be "cost effectiveness", but using Drones to kill people in Canada would be an act of war.
It'd be announcing to the world that Canada doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force in their own country. That's basically the definition of a failed government and/or civil war.
Moreover, what makes a given place a battlefield?
Unfortunately AQ gets a vote on that one. In practice it's anywhere where AQ has set up shop and they're too strong to be handled by the police.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Liberals are Smug”
Very, very well put.
"
You're assuming what you're trying to prove, that for the GOP it was a life or death matter. They walked into this thinking they were going to lose, their temper tantrum should have been before the election.
"
Sure, but even by those standards I think we're cutting new ground.
Some is the whole "didn't start mourning until after the election" bit. Most elections have the winner known weeks or months in advance. Even in 2000 both sides knew losing was at least possible. The Dems though they had it in the bag.
Some is losing to Trump, specifically. At various points in the election there was speculation that he was a Dem plant.
Having said all that, I do wonder if it goes further than that and speaks poorly for the long term stability of the country. If it's actually a matter of life or death for the top guy to be yours, then every election needs to have the rule book tossed out.
"
Maybe.
Normally Presidents are... Presidental. They skate above things with other people (often the VP) take the role of the designated bad guy.
Thing is, no one is under the illusion that Trump is a nice guy.
Or that the Dems are going to take losing to him with composure and good cheer.
I'm not sure there was any low hanging fruit there. Trump is, once again, diverting attention from things that matter (what he's doing) to things that don't matter (what he's saying).
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Sure.
You're assuming what you should be trying to prove. The implication of your statement is police shootings are actually a white thing. That if those white people would stop being so racist then the shootings would drop dramatically. At its root, this is an emotional argument, with some of these videos being it's most powerful support. "Emotional" isn't the same as "right" or "wrong" so let's tease out the missing details.
The best data we have shows the following: Adjusted for situation, blacks are underrepresented in police killings. That implies that it's actually whites who have issues with being shot without justification. "Adjusted for situation" often means "attacking the police".
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/23614-study-by-black-harvard-economist-refutes-black-lives-matter-s-claim
The original study is below, here's a quote, "Given the stream of video “evidence”, which many take to be indicative of structural racism in police departments across America... the results displayed in Table 5 are startling. Blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely to be shot but the coefficient is statistically insignificant" (page 23).
http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force
What it comes down to is the police (even racist police) already view shooting someone as a life changing event which should be avoided if at all possible.
IMHO police reform is a good idea. I don't see the need for government unions whose purpose is to prevent accountability/reform and lobby for more government/higher taxes. Using the police as revenue raisers is a bad idea. But most police reforms won't reduce the number of dead bodies because the problems we have are different than what the emotional argument assumes.
"
Everyone? One person can escalate, one person can prevent deescalation, and if that someone is willing to die or kill over some stolen cigarillos, then society is faced with the problem of what to do with him.
And the police are going to be implementing for whatever society wants to do about people like that.
"
I'm nervous about a policy which seems to empower criminals at the expense of the police.
Especially when the numbers suggest crime is a much larger problem than the police shooting people.
"
Agreed.
Punishment is for prisons and judges.
The job of the police is to make sure we (the voters) don't need to deal with crime.
So any "reform" you want had better be just as good at keeping crime away from me (the voter).
"
:Blink: Easier? Care to expand on that?
Especially as to how that works with our armed criminal element?
"
That's a reasonable claim. So... what's wrong with what I'm doing?
The claim was that driving is MUCH more risky than being a cop (so seat belts ahead of time is fine but guns ahead of time is not). So we're comparing risk of death from driving to risk of death from being a cop (I skipped "injuries" because that's a lot more hand wavy and harder to get stats).
To calculate risk, my solution is to get the number of people who do something and divide that by the number who die from doing it. If there's a more acceptable way to calculate risk, by all means put it on the table.
And this is a side note. If we don't want to compare risks from driving to risk from being a cop that's fine, although imho there are enough similarities that it's useful.
The ugly numbers are the ones that say total number of people killed by the police is very small, so the total number of bad shoots must be smaller still... and both of those are then heavily outweighed by crime.
"
Here we run into regional differences. A peaceful city can be worse off with a SWAT team.
A SWAT team needs something to do and if there's nothing then they'll look for things. They'll end up delivering warrants at gunpoint to people that could have been trivially served by a process server, and maybe shooting people or dogs in the process.
Some of the most outrageous bad shoots over the years have been carried out by bored SWAT teams.
I disagree. If you've done something bad then your odds of doing it again are MUCH higher. Killing someone is only hard if you've never done it, the same goes for lots of things.
"
Yes, I am missing your point badly, and I don't understand the "both sides of my mouth" comment.
As far as I can tell I'm using math correctly, and I don't have any idea where I lost you.
"
Math is fun. It has the habit of cutting through rhetoric and giving actual answers.
Odds of being killed in a car accident: Very roughly 32k deaths out of 320 million people. Call it one person out of 10k.
Odds of a cop dying in the line of duty: 135 in the line of duty deaths out of 1.13 million cops (about half are shooting deaths). Call it one cop out of 8k.
So the odds of a cop being killed in the line of duty are roughly the same as auto accidents (my back of the envelope says somewhat higher). However this misstates the situation somewhat because the risk is unlikely to fall evenly. A cop in a peaceful suburb presumably has a lower risk than in a non-peaceful inner city.
"retreat" translates into "he might die in the process of retreating, or people he's trying to protect might die because he's not able to do anything, or the criminals might get away".
Speaking as a non-cop, it sounds like you're increasing my risk. If I call a cop to my house, he's not coming here to shoot me. If it's harder for him to do his job, then that's probably a bad thing for me.
My risk from crime is low but my risk of getting killed by the police is much lower.
Police shooting deaths are absurdly rare, rare enough that you'd have to be a cop for a thousand years just to average one; That's what it means when more than a million cops kill less than a thousand people over the course of a year. So the deep default is already no one gets shot.
Becoming a nation with armed criminals and unarmed police implies there's going to be a lot more situations where the bad guy simply walks away. This sounds a lot like it's strongly encouraging criminals to be armed.
Assuming a "bad shoot" rate of 10% of all police shootings, that's less than 100 per year (a lot of these can't be addressed by your solution, because they come down to 'deliberately killed him but shouldn't have'). We have violent segments of society that impose a lot of risk on their local parts of society. The murder rate is 15k to 16k per year. Lowering the first problem in exchange for making the 2nd worst seems like a bad idea.
In other words, you're suggesting that things will be better if unarmed cops are confronting armed criminals. Obviously this is going to make some things better and other worse, but the problem you're trying to fix is very small and the problem you're going to make worse is much much larger.
"
For the same reason you need to put your seat belt on before you know you're going to need it. The chances of needing it are minuscule, but the situation may not politely wait for you.
This will drive the wrong behavior from your point of view. Floyd lived because in the judgement of the cop(s) confronting him, their life wasn't in danger. That's a good standard, changing that to some "uniform standard" probably wouldn't be.
Assume we set some detailed standards to micromanage what the police are supposed to do. The first time some cop gets killed following them, those standards will be changed to "prevent" that, and now Floyd, because he crossed some lines, not only *could* get shot but *should* get shot.
Note adjusted for situation, minorities are underrepresented in the 'got-killed' stats, not over represented. A true uniform standard results in more minorities getting shot or fewer whites or both, which makes the current stats even more lopsided. The root problem is the words "adjusted for situation". Police and police shootings are symptoms of society's larger issues, they're not the cause.
"
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I think "Accountability" is a problem, but it's a bit player in the grand scheme of things and I doubt fixing it will change much.
The narrative is "stop shooting us" with Mike Brown as the poster child. But I don't see how an increase in "accountability" makes Brown's family happy; They're never going to believe their innocent child caused his own death.
IMHO it's "such events" which are the problem, and fixing them has much to do with what happened before the encounter with the police and little to do with what happens afterwards.
On “First Spouse Problems”
The new SoT is Steven Mnuchin, aka Trump's long time friend and the head of finance for his campaign. Steven's boss will be Trump (the guy who hired him and who can fire him).
The whole "can't retaliate" part seems really optimistic.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Given we're looking at less than 0.01% (a lot less since many of those deaths are presumably forced), "part of the way there" may be enough.
My assumption is police work is a lot harder and more subject to chance than me driving a car around. So what are my daily chances of getting into a car accident? Something less than 0.01%?
I'm can manage the radio, winter roads, the occasional idiot, life-before-coffee, unexpected construction, and so forth. I can even handle all of those things at the same time... but now we're getting into risk, and even though I "control myself" and even though I don't want to wreck my car, we call it "risk" because there's an element of chance.
There are things we can do to reduce risk, there are things we should do, the odds are already so low that it's not going to make a big difference.
On “First Spouse Problems”
I think they're much more skilled at bribery. Ideally the pols write laws so that it's even legal.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Maybe. I'm seriously doubtful of basically giving cops a 007 style license to kill. On the other hand I thought the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commision seemed better than the alternatives.
"
There's no chance in human interactions? Really? A pick up line either works 100% of the time or it never works?
I used to train in the local dojo. It's master has a large number of belts in multiple forms. He can hurt you with one finger, and know when he does it how long it should last. Put him up against even a high Mike Brown and I'm sure Brown gets hurt but survives.
So... because I know a guy who could trivially control Mike, does that mean the Ferguson cop was wrong to pull the trigger?
The cops are all different from each other and the situations are different too. Amount of light, backup, experience, fatigue, history, and yes, whether or not the other guy has done the wrong things in the wrong order. High isn't the same as "violently high", hands out of sight for a moment is very different from out of sight for three and you think he's pulling a gun.
Cops don't control who they run into, so they have to make judgements on their own risk. When you put your hands out of their line of sight you're imposing risk on them, if you're in an area where twice in the last week that type of action ended up with a gun in hand, then their view of the amount of risk you're putting on them will increase (that's a 'history' example).
No one is able to put all of these factors together and try to come up with one permanent formula which is going to describe when they get to pull the trigger and when they don't. Trying to pretend otherwise seems nonsensical, as does trying to pretend that video showed all the information they had at hand.
So *yes*, the answer is *both*, even with the same standards in the same situation. The real world isn't a chess game, it's not even poker.
"
What we want is whatever comes after... "I screwed up. This could have been avoided if I'd..."
Thing is that probably turns a good shoot into a bad one.
In practice we're already pretty close to no fault, maybe we should just make it explicit and try to learn from these things? (I seriously don't know about this one).
"
You buy a lottery ticket, normally what happens is nothing, but sometimes you get a very, very, very different outcome. *Both* outcomes are "justified", that only the common one is expected doesn't change that the uncommon one is possible.
Life is full of situations like that. Drunk driving normally doesn't kill anyone. Every act of sex doesn't result in pregnancy (nor AIDS even with the right conditions).
Even at the extremes, Mike Brown attacked a cop. He could have ended up beaten, pistol whipped, or tasered instead of dead, any of those outcomes would be "justified". It's also possible that if he hadn't been put down he would have just beaten up the cop and not killed him.
However Mike "purchased" lots and lots of lottery tickets, to the point where the expected outcome was extreme.
And while we're on this analogy, the real question we should be asking is whether being black affects the outcome of the lottery, or whether it's purely the number of tickets you buy.
On “First Spouse Problems”
He's got a gun to their heads. The banking sector is heavily regulated and what those regulations are is subject to opinion, and the opinion that matters is a guy appointed by Trump.
These companies need the goodwill of politicians in order to exist. They're the same people who have enriched the Clintons by dozens of millions of dollars, doing the same for Trump is a no-brainer.
On “Impeach Barack Obama”
If she's covered with blood and stab wounds and you're holding a knife, there actually *are* innocent explanations.
This is....
1) Unethical people give HRC+crew money.
2) Unethical people get serious favors/access to HRC's power as SoS.
3) There doesn't seem to be a reason for the 2nd event other than the first.
It's OK though, I'm sure that when she was accepting that money and doing those unusual favors, she wasn't doing anything that was provably criminal.
So apparently in your book, that makes her a total innocent... and as luck would have it, we're probably going to see Trump do the same thing.
"
Thus far observation. Part of this might be "cost effectiveness", but using Drones to kill people in Canada would be an act of war.
It'd be announcing to the world that Canada doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force in their own country. That's basically the definition of a failed government and/or civil war.
Unfortunately AQ gets a vote on that one. In practice it's anywhere where AQ has set up shop and they're too strong to be handled by the police.
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