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[faith2005]

they're not complacent. they just agree with him. the growing conservatism in the black community is apart of the overall trend. the thing that makes me sad is that we as black people are digging our own graves and we don't even know or if we know, we don't care. its like that quote about the holocaust--when they came for me, there was no one left to protest...

[mivida2k]

Lacoste most government agencies will only hire a recent law school grad through one of their intern/associate programs.

Would you want someone who had no experience in economics or finances/accounting handling your investments? Would you want someone who only had experience baking cakes to build your home?  Probably not.  

Gonzalez and Dubya are systematically shutting down the Civil Rights division and civil liberties.

Faith and MD you have to remember that Lacoste is still in denial, inexperienced and has not entered the real world.  I recall we had a discussion about this 100s of pages ago.

[crazy8]

They came first for the Communists..
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews...
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Unionists...
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholic...
but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me...
and by that time...
there was no-one left to speak up for me.

Rev. Martin Niemoller

[2Lacoste]

perhaps segregated schools in north carolina should be re-instated. 

Ha.  Thanks for the personal slight.  That's like saying anti-Iraq war folks (myself included) think perhaps Saddam should have gassed more children in Kurdish regions.  Doesn't work that way.

[AshyLarry]

SYDNEY, Australia - A driver stranded on a remote stretch of Australian highway Wednesday tried to summon help by playing dead in the middle of the road, a police officer said.

A woman who was driving with her two children spotted the man and had to swerve to avoid hitting him, said Doug Backhouse, a detective with the Western Australia state police.

"She drove around the body — which didn't move at all — and got to the nearest phone," Backhouse said.

Local police arrived with an ambulance and found the man alive and well, but with car troubles.

"The best way he thought to get a vehicle to stop was to lay down in the middle of the road and pretend to be dead," Backhouse said, adding that the man didn't think anyone would stop if he were standing up.

Police said they told the man that lying in the road was "a stupid thing to do" but didn't charge him with any offense.

The incident occurred near Esperance, about 450 miles southeast of the state capital, Perth.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[pikey]

NICOSIA (Reuters) - An England football jersey gave away a Senegalese man attempting to enter Cyprus on a forged French passport, police on the Mediterranean island said on Monday.

Suspicions were aroused when the man appeared at a checkpoint supervising crossings from the Turkish Cypriot north to the Greek Cypriot south of the divided island, wearing the England shirt and presenting a French passport.

"Being a football fan, the officer found it highly unlikely that a Frenchman would want to wear an England football jersey," a police source said.

"That was his first suspicion prior to the proper check on the passport, which turned out to be a fake," said the source.

The 22-year-old man, who has not been charged, was remanded in custody for six days pending further inquiries.

[BrerAnansi]

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t

By DANIEL GILBERT
Published: July 24, 2006

LONG before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called “the wayback” all to ourselves.
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In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”

[A.]

"Being a football fan, the officer found it highly unlikely that a Frenchman would want to wear an England football jersey," a police source said.

Lol

[_BP_]

i posted this yesterday. usually people have been posting articles on the main board. I've continued to do that, even though most of the time someone posts the same article in a separate thread the next day. just like this one.

in the past it wasn't the president's prerogative. as a matter of fact, civil service posts used to be insulated from the president b/c of the worry that he would try to grab power. All of this presidential oversight is new. I don't think hiring someone without experience in Anti-trust makes sense for the DOJ anti-trust division. Similarly, if you don't have any civil rights experience, you shouldn't be hired for the civil rights division. He has probably put up some conservative civil rights attys and thats all well and good--but people who are partners in private firms don't have the relevant experience and what he's trying to do is stop complaints from being filed. I personally can't understand a black person who doesn't think that civil rights attys are important. perhaps segregated schools in north carolina should be re-instated. 

Exactly Faith....Lacoste, it may have been okay if he were hiring attorneys fresh out of law school. But if you're going to hire a seasoned attorney, shouldn't he be seasoned in the area you are hiring him for?

What scares me is the complacent attitude that some of us seem to have.  Instead of calling Bush out on his outlandish behavior, we try to play devil's advocates and "see where he might be coming from"  Hell no!  By the time we're done doing that, his actions will start to affect us, and then maybe we'll stop being so indifferent about it!

[/b]
Mdlaw, I'm making this my new sig

[crazy8]

i posted this yesterday. usually people have been posting articles on the main board. I've continued to do that, even though most of the time someone posts the same article in a separate thread the next day. just like this one.

in the past it wasn't the president's prerogative. as a matter of fact, civil service posts used to be insulated from the president b/c of the worry that he would try to grab power. All of this presidential oversight is new. I don't think hiring someone without experience in Anti-trust makes sense for the DOJ anti-trust division. Similarly, if you don't have any civil rights experience, you shouldn't be hired for the civil rights division. He has probably put up some conservative civil rights attys and thats all well and good--but people who are partners in private firms don't have the relevant experience and what he's trying to do is stop complaints from being filed. I personally can't understand a black person who doesn't think that civil rights attys are important. perhaps segregated schools in north carolina should be re-instated. 

Exactly Faith....Lacoste, it may have been okay if he were hiring attorneys fresh out of law school. But if you're going to hire a seasoned attorney, shouldn't he be seasoned in the area you are hiring him for?

What scares me is the complacent attitude that some of us seem to have.  Instead of calling Bush out on his outlandish behavior, we try to play devil's advocates and "see where he might be coming from"  Hell no!  By the time we're done doing that, his actions will start to affect us, and then maybe we'll stop being so indifferent about it!

[/b]
Mdlaw, I'm making this my new sig

Wow BP I'm honored!  I actually made your signature    Forget law school, I'm set!