We Just Broke Hanlon’s Razor
Hanlon’s Razor (or Heinlein’s Razor, depending on who you ask) is the old adage “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity“, and usually that explains National Review carbuncle Rich Lowry on most days. Today is not that day however as he gets a slot over at Team WIN THE MORNING Magazine, and goes beyond his usual simpering semi-clueless stupidity directly into pure evil territory on the subject of Darren Wilson.
The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said don’t shoot, he would almost certainly be alive today. His family would have been spared an unspeakable loss, and Ferguson, Missouri wouldn’t have experienced multiple bouts of rioting, including the torching of at least a dozen businesses the night it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson wouldn’t be charged with a crime.
Instead, the credible evidence (i.e., the testimony that doesn’t contradict itself or the physical evidence) suggests that Michael Brown had no interest in surrendering. After committing an act of petty robbery at a local business, he attacked Officer Wilson when he stopped him on the street. Brown punched Wilson when the officer was still in his patrol car and attempted to take his gun from him.
The first shots were fired within the car in the struggle over the gun. Then, Michael Brown ran. Even if he hadn’t put his hands up, but merely kept running away, he would also almost certainly be alive today. Again, according to the credible evidence, he turned back and rushed Wilson. The officer shot several times, but Brown kept on coming until Wilson killed him.
To believe this version of events, you have to be completely and with purpose, blind to basic human instinct to the point of malice. Or you could be Rich Lowry, same thing. You would have to believe that A) Wilson knew that Brown committed a crime, B) that Brown would go for Wilson’s gun, and C) that after Brown was shot and ran away that he changed his mind and charged the guy who just shot him.
And on top of all that, you have to believe that there was no probable cause whatsoever to dispute this. None. Come to think of it, nine other Rich Lowrys on that grand jury did just that, didn’t they?
This is a terrible tragedy. It isn’t a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant (“hands up, don’t shoot”) and then a mini-movement.
Yes, because the media killed Mike Brown. Barring that, what’s one more dead black person shot by a cop and left on the street for 4.5 hours? Race has nothing to do with it, you see, because we all know those people are all thugs and criminals, so it’s just one more insane savage beast being put down like the beast he was. America!
When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, “You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime.”
How can policing in America unjust, I wonder, if Lowry sees no injustice in this?
Oh yeah, evil. It’s always the ni-CLANG!s fault. Seriously. Once again, you have to believe that there’s no possible evidence in some 70 hours of testimony that any probably cause for any wrongdoing on Wilson’s part to arrive at a no true bill decision here. That doesn’t just beggar the imagination, it performs the entire Bush/Cheney/Greenspan subprime economic crisis collapse on it.
That DA acted like Wilson’s Public Defender.
This, of course, will set-up that useless DA for a run for Congressman, Governor, or Senator.
interesting that the media focuses so much on this killing, the one where the kid did rob and shove a store owner, but spends a fraction of the attention on shootings where the black kid did nothing wrong but walk with a bb gun in a store that sells bb guns, or walks through a park with a bb gun, etc. etc. Is as if the media just naturally gravitates towards stories where whites can point and say “hey the kid was a criminal!” and ignores ones where there is no ambiguity that the cop was trigger-happy. huh. imagine that.
I don’t think it is intentional (except for Fox, where it is intentional) but another example of a lazy media naturally gravitates towards the story which will further reinforce stereotypes and bigotry.
Hey, but we live in a “post racial” America! Or so we’re told.
If the racist caterwauling of the past two days shows anything it’s that when it comes to race Hanlon’s razor just doesn’t apply to conservatives, outside of a few rare outliers like Jonah Goldberg
National Review has never been anything but stone cold racist.
William F. Buckley spent the first decade of his public life fighting a rearguard action for Jim Crow.
Hell, it was even worse. Buckley even explicitly endorsed a South African style apartheid system for the US, where a white minority could impose second class citizenship on a black majority, by virtue of their being “the advanced race” (his actual words).
Their pieces on race relations are motivated by the beady-eyed malice of their late founder.
When a cop says something in a hearing about charging that cop with murder, after months of prep, and no cross examination, it’s fact. When any other witnesses make statements at the time of the event, it is ‘inconsistent.’ And this is Lowry, so of course white is right and black…well, we all know that when this county was founded, in many states blacks could not testify against whites. Case closed!
@dubo: I saw the link to Goldberg’s mild questioning of the grand jury process and suggestion that “maybe we should listen to why the other side believes what they believe” over at Sullivan’s place. So I clicked over to see what he had to say. I actually read two posts by Goldberg where he was at least in the area code of “reasonable minds can disagree”.
Then I read the comments. I don’t know how the writers at NRO, even if they reached their positions honestly, can look at what their fellow travelers say and think “I’m ok with this.”
@Cacti: Exactly. National Review is just Stormfront for the posh crowd.
I’m busy watching an FB conversation where a hippy liberal old timer friend is placating his less than liberal friend that his views that Mike Brown deserved it because protesters and looters throw rocks and he robbed a store then attacked Wilson, plus the grand jury evidence is out there so you should just go read it- are ok because he knows his less than liberal friend is a good person who would be fair on a jury. Goddamn. Break your arm excusing the misinformation and patting your pals on the back because they’re colorblind. And for the last time, the store owner says Brown paid for his cigarillos. Which meant he didn’t steal.
The fact that Starbursts Lowry has any credibility left is an indictment of the uselessness of the MSM.
@Woodrowfan: I was thinking sort of the same thing. I think that Wilson should have been indicted, and it’s certainly interesting how the narrative has been focused on Brown’s “thuggery,” while the media have ignored the video of Officer Wilson bullying a resident who was videotaping him. However, this certainly is a case where neither version of events really makes much sense, and there apparently were eyewitnesses who corroborated Wilson’s testimony that Brown was charging him.
I wish the focus instead had been on the John Crawford shooting, which still outrages me and which I still can’t believe leaves Ronald Ritchie (the 911 caller) free to move on with his life.
By the way, I don’t see how Lowry’s analysis requires Wilson to have been aware of Brown’s earlier crime.
There is no point in engaging Rich Lowrey. Or any of those cosseted buffoons.
We have to change things mayor by mayor, DA by DA, city by city.
Undoing 400 years of a racialized narrative of black otherness means decades of trench warfare. So fuck Rich Lowery and his country club shitheels.
We’ve got work to do.
It’s amazing how much a dyed-in-the-wool anti-government conservative mistrusts every possible statement of the authorities and parses it endlessly with suspicion — right up until the government announces that the dead black kid had it coming.
I’m still pretty gobsmacked that the people screeching Look at the evidence! don’t seem to have heard that there are no photos and no measurements taken at the scene. So when they claim that “evidence” shows that Brown was X feet away from Wilson when he was shot, we don’t actually have that evidence, because the police never bothered to measure it.
The “evidence” we have is the few things the police bothered to collect at the scene and Wilson’s testimony. And … that’s it.
Hanlon’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law – Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
See Also the Daily Show “Evil vs. Stupid” skit.
@Brian R.:
This a million times.
I just can’t bear this. Have no idea how black folks can even stand to get up in the morning and have to try to cope with this. And as a parent, just unthinkable.
The tactic of charging into a hail of bullets pretty much ended at Gallipoli.
@schrodinger’s cat: “The fact that Starbursts Lowry has any credibility left … ” Left?
The other infuriating thing from the cop interviewed on BBC this morning was his stating flatly that “the physical evidence proves there was a struggle for the gun.” From what I’ve read, there is physical evidence the gun was fired in the car and the Brown was injured. We don’t have any “physical evidence” that there was a struggle for the gun, just Wilson’s testimony. (What would be physical evidence of a struggle for the gun?)
This is what we get from McCullough’s soliloquy — eyewitnesses are not to be trusted, physical evidence shows what actually happened, and Wilson’s testimony is never even mentioned. Therefore, anything McCullought stated to be true must be from the physical evidence, not from Wilson, right?
Grrr…
@Hungry Joe: Not in your eyes or mine but definitely in the eyes of the Villagers. I have seen articles under his byline in Time and such.
It’s called National Socialist Review for a reason.
@greennotGreen: I understand there’s a process called “a trial” which is helpful for determining the answers to questions like that, but hey.
Oops. All of a sudden I can’t edit my comment. I meant the first fragment to be a quote from Lowry.
@Brian R.: In pretty much every arena, conservative “principles” are just ad-hoc justifications for “give me what I want.” As such, they experience no cognitive dissonance discarding them at a moment’s notice if the exact opposite will get them what they want.
@Zandar: Yeah, I’ve heard of that, too.
@RaflW:
Well, not verbally engage.
Engage with small arms and artillery, yes.
@Zandar: If there were a trial in the Brown case, it might result in Darren Wilson being convicted.
Which would be, in turn, an indictment of the Ferguson PD.
And we can’t risk that. Ever.
I wrote a plan to provide some federal oversight to licensing of police.
Since cops have the right to deprive US citizens of rights protected by the federal government, it’s logical to give the federal government a role in licensing people who can arrest US citizens and people who are licensed by states to carry firearms as part of their professional duties.
Basic requirements:
a. pass a test on civil liberties/civil rights
b. not be part of a hate group
If a cop engages in misconduct the county prosecutor is willing to overlook, there would still be the possibility of pulling the officers license to carry a firearm or arrest people.
This would be a big improvement over the status quo.
This is pretty much how the vermin of the Village operate, in a nutshell, when it comes to matters of race.
Wipe them out. All of them.
@Carl Nyberg: Not a bad proposal.
Too bad it will never fly because of “state’s rights”.
I have been obsessing about the Mike Brown case…and the John Crawford case…and the Trayvon Martin case and I just don’t understand how so many (white) people think that this state of affairs is okay! These are young American citizens being murdered! In the latter two cases when neither of them was doing anything remotely wrong! To say that somehow it doesn’t matter because they were black and you’re white…Yeah, I’m white, but I’m not allowed to care about anyone who’s black? It won’t affect me if my best friend/ brother-in-law/ cousin/ neighbor/ husband or son is killed? It’s okay to kill black men but I’ll be okay as long as the light is good and cops can see that I’m white?
None of this is okay!!!
Garth Brooks has cancelled TV appearances in response to Ferguson: http://www.billboard.com/artic.....s-ferguson
Will Fox News denounce him as a race traitor or did they already do that a long time ago?
@Brian R.:
I know your being tongue in cheek here, but the left needs to stop pretending modern day conservatives are anti-government. They are fascists, people who would much prefer America look like a militaristic police state instead of a social democracy.
@Redshift: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes they both oh yes they both oh yes they both reached for the gun the gun the gun the gun oh yes they both reached for the gun for the gun.
Zandar @ Top:
Kind of makes you wonder why Lowry even bothered to fire Derbyshire. Whatever Lowry might profess, it seems like he didn’t really have a problem with Derby’s racism – or even the appearance of it, since Lowry doesn’t seem to be worried about coming off as racist himself.
See the scene diagram below that shows that there were blood stains on the other side of Brown’s body, away from Wilson. http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....the-scene/
eta: Here is the legend for the measurements which, I think, shows that the blood stains were about 23 feet away from Browns foot. http://www.kmov.com/special-co.....1&c=y
Set aside the testimony of Wilson and at least one other eye witness that Brown turned and and ran towards Wilson – just set that aside. What are the other possible explanations for the the fact that there was blood further down the road:
1) it is unrelated blood from another incident
2) officers moved Brown’s body after the shooting
3) officers planted the blood evidence there
Are any of these more credible explanations?
This is the same yo-yo who had ants in his pants for Sarah Palin, isn’t he?
@El Caganer:
I believe he said something like “I wasn’t the only one who saw starbursts that night …”
A truly odd duck.
@ruemara: I didn’t read the grand jury testimony but did his friend testify that he took the cigarillos. Petty theft is no reason to commit murder and I’m not suggesting that it is. link to International Business Times
The youtube appears to show him paying for it.
@El Caganer: They were Starbursts, not ants.
@ruemara: if Brown paid for the cigarillo house then what was the physical confrontation about?
@patrick II:
IIRC (and this is not official, just how I remember it being explained), the shopkeeper accused Brown’s friend of shoplifting, Brown got mad and defended his friend, his friend admitted that he’d done it, and Brown paid for what his friend took. That’s why the shopkeeper came forward and said there was no robbery — Brown paid for what his friend tried to take.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Whaaaa?
I thought the shopkeeper called the police to report the incident and the dispatcher announced a BOLO for two suspects with partial descriptions.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): This is from the article I linked to
Johnson testified he had planned to pay for the cigarillos, but Brown reached over the counter and grabbed them. Brown walked toward the door and the store clerk rushed around the counter to prevent his exit. He shoved the clerk and left the store. As they walked out, the clerk said he would call the police.
@Archon: Yes but with low taxes on rich people. There is something (deliberately) misleading about conservatives claim to agin’ government. Liberals like me think taxes are the price of civilization (doesn’t mean there can’t be a question about fairness of this tax, this rate and so on); think the post office is a great thing; that public education is an incredible good; while seeing the need for a military, think it can be too big, too often and wrongly used and should be used cautiously and as a last resort; think public goods, parks, roads, public health and so on, including effective and well and justly run police forces, fire departments and so on are terrific. Conservatives hate the post office, amtrak, schools, public health provisions, parks, but love massive military forces, most of all when they’re being used against ‘them’ (swarthy foreigners); think a police force is not at its best when it both prevents and does not commit crimes of violence and has good relations with the community it serves, but when its breaking heads (‘their’ heads of course).
@beltane:
There was a lot of dislike/hate thrown his way when he released “We Shall Be Free”, because it talks about acceptance of others: “When we’re free to love anyone we choose, when there’s room enough for all kinds of views . . .we shall be free”
If he hadn’t been (at the time) the biggest star in music, the country stations wouldn’t have played it at all.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
No, the medical investigator did not take photographs or measurements and should be censured for that — but other police units did gather at least some data (examples are available).
@Steve from Antioch:
IIRC, the clerk didn’t call 911 — someone inside the store did. There has been a lot of dispute over the timing and whether Wilson could have heard the dispatcher’s radio announcement before he confronted Brown and his buddy.
@JPL:
Like I said, I’m going by memory. But I would probably blame the dead guy, too.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
“I’m still pretty gobsmacked that the people screeching Look at the evidence! don’t seem to have heard that there are no photos and no measurements taken at the scene. So when they claim that “evidence” shows that Brown was X feet away from Wilson when he was shot, we don’t actually have that evidence, because the police never bothered to measure it.”
What the fuck is wrong with you?
I posted links in the other thread showing the scene diagrams and scores of photos.
Why don’t you try to know at least a tiny little bit about what the evidence is before you give your interpretation of it.
I hate this stupid notion.
What’s even worse is that it’s supposed to be in practice one million percent for any official establishment types and never in operation for official enemies.
Cop shoots unarmed kid, oh, must be stupidity. Kid who gets shot? Thug malice.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Thanks
…in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict,…
Bullsh!t.
The USA is a country where it is famously known that a prosecutor can indict a pig sandwich if he so desires.
It is also a country where just as famously, prosecutors routinely fail to indict murderer pigs.
Google Map of the Ferguson Market (where the “theft” started) and the area of Canfield Drive where Brown was shot. See SfA’s WP linky for more details about the shooting location (apparently around 2947 or so). Someone here a few days ago mentioned that the street was “basically a cul de sac” – I wouldn’t call it that.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
@ruemara: And for the last time, the store owner says Brown paid for his cigarillos.
source please? I’d live to have it to toss back at the “he deserved it” punks.
@Woodrowfan:
Here is the incident report regarding the store robbery: http://apps.washingtonpost.com.....bery/1256/
I, too, was wondering where this “he paid for the stuff” meme came from.
If MIchael Brown had just kept running, Rich Lowry thinks Wilson wouldn’t have shot him dead. I don’t know what makes him so sure of that. What I have read recently says that police are allowed to use lethal force to stop a perpetrator of a violent felony from fleeing. Punching a cop on duty counts as a violent felony. As long as Brown kept running away, Wilson could have shot him and still been safe from prosecution.
So I’m very sympathetic to the view that McCollough’s process not right and was intended to give Wilson every benefit that he could. And I don’t want to undermine that in the least. A trial should have happened.
I also don’t discount the arguments about how Wilson could have left the scene and/or used non-lethal force. All that makes sense to me.
And I agree with everyone that the character assassination bullshit that has been flung at Brown is reprehensible.
But I do wonder what people make of some of the specific evidence. I mentioned in the other thread Witness #10 in particular. What do people make of this guy’s testimony? I read it as quite credible, I have to say. Much more credible than Wilson, of course, and also more credible than most of the other witnesses. I understand that at a trial this witness would have been cross-examined, but in my experience this kind of witness would be pretty hard to touch up on cross unless there are some big facts we are missing.
@El Cid:
For a stark illustration, see this St. Louis County PD report entered August 11, wherein Michael Brown is referred to consistently as the suspect, Darren Wilson as the victim, and the offense being investigated as “Assault on L. E. O.”
@Steve from Antioch:
I responded. Please show me the document that includes the measurements showing where Wilson was standing when he fired the gun and where Brown was in relation to that. Those measurements are not on the “not to scale” drawing you pointed me to. Nor are the numbered exhibits numbered on the drawing.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): The evidence we have are a bunch of different peoples’ photos which can be google-mapped together as Shaun King did. So there’s plenty of evidence, they just chose to ignore it.
There are so many witnesses and so much documentary evidence it’s like an avalanche. This isn’t like those killers of 60’s civil rights workers 30 years later where somebody is gonna hafta confess.
@pharniel: Blatant evil is always stupid. Clever evil rolls a long con.
@Steve from Antioch:
Also, please explain why the medical examiner who testified before the grand jury was not given the measurements and photographs before testifying despite asking for them. He seemed to think it was pretty unprofessional for them to expect him to testify without providing all of the relevant evidence.
@Redshift: He means cherry-picked physical evidence that support’s Wilson’s lies.
Witnesses don’t count because the testimony of 20 blah people doesn’t outweigh one white cop.
Now we know who is discriminated against more, Black in America or women. It takes three men in the Abrahamic religions to testify to a rape. But under historical racist laws a Black person couldn’t testify against a white person at all. And we see that their testimony is not counted.
@cckids: Hmm. For reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the San Francisco Giants, I’ve kind of gotten into country music lately. The problem is that some country is stuff that I want to run away from. Is Garth Brooks worth checking out?
@greennotGreen: I know of survivor accounts of mass killings in WWII and what they did was drop to the ground and play dead (I’m thinking of both Pacific theater and European accounts).
Don’t know if that would work because the murder cops will keep pumping until they hit that stationary target. May work in a multiple target situation.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
So you’ve gone from
to
You don’t have a clue about what the evidence was. You make stupid statements that are based on your faulty/nonexistent understanding of that evidence. Your errors are point out to you. Does that deter you? Do you think, “Gee, maybe I should look into this a bit more?” No, you just turn around and then try to pick apart the evidence that you didn’t even know existed until I pointed it out to you.
I answered your questions in the other thread, and you’re also wrong about the measurements /numbers not being keyed to scene diagram.
I’m done with your stupid self today.
@Steve from Antioch: Nope. You are dead wrong. Stop getting your news from the RW puke funnel.
A CUSTOMER called it in. The store owner did not and he adamantly denies calling or involving cops to this day. A report wasn’t done until long after Mike Brown was dead.
Once more we’re convicting the dead guy.
The thing to do is make sure you kill the person so they can’t defend themselves from these elaborate scenarios painted by the shooter.
Did the shooter say “I was in fear for my life”? Those magic get out of jail free words were central to the last case.
@Another Holocene Human:
Ding, ding, ding.
I am sure that Wilson’s story was tailored after the fact to fit a certain narrative. One detail – the alleged four misfirings of his Sig – really jumps out at me. The only way that could be explained as far as I know for the _first_ two misfires is if there was actually a struggle for the gun that moved the slide so it was out of battery. So that is either truthful or there was some very evil/clever manufacturing of testimony there. I don’t know which it is.
@Another Holocene Human:
There are a few different things here: 1) someone else called it in, 2) Brown paid for the cigarillos, 3) the clerk did not want to press charges.
The first, it seems to me is relatively unimportant. I haven’t seen any links supporting 2 or 3.
Page 6 of this (http://apps.washingtonpost.com.....bery/1256/) seems to indicated that the officer responding to the convenience store spoke with one clerk outside who pointed out where the suspects took off and then went inside and spoke with another clerk and a patron who described the alleged theft.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anything about a clerk saying “Oh no, nevermind, he paid for that stuff.” Is this in the transcripts somewhere? Or is it from another source?
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): No photos? No measurements? I think there is more to the story than you know: http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....ren-Wilson
A corollary is that stupidity is a great place for malice to hide.
@Darkrose:
You can’t go wrong with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson.
@Steve from Antioch:
Then why did the medical examiner’s investigator who reported to the scene sayi he didn’t take any measurements or photographs?
Why are the police saying that no one took photos of Wilson and his bloodied hands because “there was no photographer available”?
Why do you find the police’s diagrams and photos to be credible when we know what’s missing from them?
NRO and the putz Rich Lowry are consistently the scum of the earth.
@FrY10cK:
It’s great detective work on the part of the reporter, but he went out there and did his own measurements based on the address he could see in the photo. Those aren’t measurements that the police provided, and in fact they claimed in the press right up until they were under oath that Brown was only 30 feet away from Wilson’s SUV, when he was actually 150 feet away.
Apparently in last night’s interview, Wilson is still claiming that Brown was only 30 feet away from him when he “charged,” and no one in the press is calling him on it.
@Mnemosyne: Do you think Wilson was at the SUV during the final encounter between them? Seems pretty clear he chased Brown for a ways. Which is a questionable choice on its own, but anyway.
As for measurements and photographs, read vol. 2 of the transcript. The crime scene investigator testifies in that portion of the transcript and goes through many photographs and diagrams. The measurements are here.
@dubo:
Exactly right, with “conservatives” it is always malice, then ignorance, and two reinforce each other.
I’m late here, but I think Zandar is wrong about the number of Rich Lowrys on the GJ. IIRC they needed nine jurors to agree to indict. That suggests that only 4 Lowrys were needed on the GJ, as an 8-4 vote to indict would result in no indictment.
Factor this story into the grand jury questions — it seems that the ADA deliberately misled the jury about the law: http://crooksandliars.com/2014.....d-ferguson