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Originally posted by Strychnine
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remember back when people held smart people in high regard?"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford -
WTH? Is he even listening to the testimony? She's contradicted stuff she's already said! Even DURING her testimony.Originally posted by Strychnine View Post
Ya...no bias there, Piers."Self-government won't work without self-discipline." - Paul HarveyComment
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Is the prosecutor trying to help the defense now?sigpicComment
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Piers just says dumb shit to get his name in headlines. Most of these asshole I really don't believe they believe what they say, they are just dying for ratings. No one can be that fucking stupid. In this social aware society these days, attention is more important to people than anything.Comment
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Piers Morgan would never side with GZ even if someone had a video of TM on top of George beating the piss out of him.
George Zimmerman had a gun so Piers thinks he's the devil (well half devil/half el diablo)
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Eye hat a bloo toof ownComment
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LOL at Lolo Jones and extra points cause she is way freakin hawt!
Lolo Jones ✔ @lolojones
Rachel Jeantel looked so irritated during the cross-examination that I burned it on DVD and I'm going to sell it as Madea goes to court.Last edited by Ted; 06-28-2013, 08:38 AM.Comment
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Is anyone using another source for the live feed other than Yahoo? The audio/video at Yahoo seems to be sketchy at times.Comment
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So many Jeantel apologists out there. Holy hell.
Here's an article from Time.
Rachel Jeantel Explained, Linguistically
Trayvon Martin's friend and a key witness in the trial of George Zimmerman made a lot more sense than you think
By John McWhorter June 28, 2013108 Comments
Thursday, June 27, 2013.
Let’s face it, none of us would want to be Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel in the last couple of days. Much of the country is laughing at the “ghetto” black girl who keeps getting tripped up in her story. But Jeantel has made a lot more sense than it may have seemed.
Yes, she was dissimulating in pretending that Trayvon Martin’s referring to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” wasn’t “racial”—of course it was. Cracker is today’s “honkey,” a word now about as antique as The Jeffersons in which George used it so much. It is both descriptive and pejorative, although it’s important to note that according to Jeantel, Martin was not calling Zimmerman a cracker to his face but when trying to give his friend on the phone an update on the situation.
The origins of the word in reference to persons as opposed to snacks is obscure, but most likely started when cracking could mean bragging in Elizabethan English. Upper-crust colonial Americans had a way of referring to lower-class British immigrants to the South as loud-mouthed “crackers,” as in boastful beyond their proper station.
Pretty soon the word just referred to the people, period, with elegant Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted even casually writing in 1850 after a Florida jaunt that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes.”
Jeantel may well have heard some whites in Florida using the word for themselves with a kind of in-group pride – just as black people use the N-word that way. But surely she knows that’s a different meaning, just as anyone who claims it’s okay for Paula Deen to have used the N-word because Jay-Z does is faking it.
The important thing is that it made perfect sense for Martin to use that word to describe a white man chasing him for no reason. Few fully understand that the tension between young black men and the police (and by extension, security guards, traffic cops and just about any sort of watchman) is the main thing keeping America from getting past race. If ten years went by without a story like the Martin case we’d be in a very different country.
There are several possible reasons why Jeantel feigned on whether calling someone a cracker was racially-motivated. It could be because she wants to protect her dead friend. It could be because she’s extremely uncomfortable. Much of her irritable reticence is predictable of someone of modest education reacting to an unfamiliar type of interrogation on the witness stand. As natural as many educated people find direct questions, they are culturally rather unusual worldwide, an artifice of educational procedure. In oral cultures – i.e. most cultures— direct questions are processed as abrupt and confrontational. In that, Jeantel is operating at a clear disadvantage.
Yet one problem Jeantel is not having is with English itself. Many are seeing her as speaking under some kind of influence from the Haitian Creole that is her mother’s tongue, but that language has played the same role in her life that Yiddish did in George Gershwin’s – her English is perfect.
It’s just that it’s Black English, which has rules as complex as the mainstream English of William F. Buckley. They’re just different rules. If she says to the defense lawyer interrogating her “I had told you” instead of “I told you” it’s not because it’s Haitian—black people around the country use what is called the preterite “had,” which I always heard my Philadelphia cousins using when I was a kid.
If you think Black English is primitive, here’s a test – is it “I ain’t be listening that much” or “I don’t be listening that much”? It’s don’t, and Jeantel and millions of other black people nationwide could tell immediately that using “ain’t” in that sentence is “off.”
This was what defense attorney Don West failed to understand yesterday when he asked Jeantel:
She understands it as well as West or anyone. So now who’s the dumb one?“Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?”
“I don’t understand you, I do understand English,” said Jeantel.
“When someone speaks to you in English, do you believe you have any difficulty understanding it because it wasn’t your first language?” asked West.
“I understand English really well,” said Jeantel.
Where's the same strokefest when someone from Appalachia is unintelligible? There's not - he's a stumpfuck hillbilly speaking some sort of backwoods jargon. Or someone from cajun country? He's a coonass or a yokel or some other disparaging name and assumed to be a somewhat functional retard.
But when this girl gets up there she's suddenly a brave and misunderstood witness using her "black english."
Such bullshit. We're never going to right the ship as long as everyone keeps making excuses for other people's lack of intelligence, apathy, and general shitheadery.Last edited by Strychnine; 06-28-2013, 09:29 AM.Comment
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Wait wait wait.... It's ok because he was only describing GZ as a creepy ass cracker, and didn't say it to his face. Yet when GZ described Martin to the 911 operator as "he's black", that is racist? He was only giving a description to the 911 operator, and didn't say it to his face. You can't have it both ways. Come on people, use some fucking common sense.Originally posted by BradMOriginally posted by LeahComment
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Why the hell would the State even call this dude? He is basically backing up 100% what Zimmerman said happened. Intelligent, and seems to recount the events to the T. NOT a good witness for the State, not that any have bee....
And the defense attny sounds like Christopher Walken....Comment
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I didn't expect the supporters, we really are fucked.Comment
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