May, 2020 archive
Guilty Until Proven Innocent 0
Using the killing in Brunswick, Georgia, of Ahmaud Arbery as a starting point, Jennifer Rae Taylor and Kayla Vinson explore the history of lynching in America. An excerpt:
“[The South’s] police system,” scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, “was arranged to deal with Blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.”
Even after death, Arbery was denied the status of victim, and his killers were shielded from being treated as suspects. As during the lynching era, the mere claim that the dead black man deserved what he got was enough to satisfy the authorities and absolve the undisputed killers. In hundreds of the lynchings EJI (the Equal Justice Institute–ed.) has documented, the victims’ names are not known because newspaper reports did not bother to investigate even that deeply.
I commend the full article to your attention.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
This driver was ever so polite in so many different ways.
Numbers Gaming, Reprise 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Matthew Edlund untangles the numbers about COVID-19 testing and fatalities and what they say about the Trump administration’s failure to deal with the pandemic. A nugget (emphasis added):
Lots of people died.
Now when people around the world call the CDC no one calls back.
Numbers Gaming 0
Matthew Fleischer looks at Georgia’s game of three-card monte with COVID-19 stats. An excerpt:
And yet data don’t lie. Or do they?
Thanks to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, we now know things did indeed look too good to be true.
Georgia’s coronavirus numbers looked so rosy because officials misrepresented the data in such a way it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t done on purpose.
Aside:
One of the links to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the one cited around the phrase “misrepresented the data” in the excerpt above, is broken. Try this one instead.
An Unthinkable Thought 0
I fear that El Jefe may be onto something.
From Sizzle to Fizzle 0
David discusses the how the air came out of Donald Trump’s trumped-up (you will pardon the expression) Obamagate balloon.
