George Zimmerman to box DMX for “charity”

George Zimmerman prepares to make the second-worst mistake of his life.

George Zimmerman prepares to make the second-worst mistake of his life.

First of all, eff CNN for the lede of this story, which is not only unfunny but also applicable to pretty much any story about anything anywhere. The ellipses don’t help. Second, props to A. Ron Galbraith for again sending me a delightful link. And third, is it really such a good idea for George Zimmerman to box DMX? Obviously its a bad idea for America as a culture, but it also seems to be a bad idea for Zimmerman, who two years ago was taken down an badly beaten by an opponent he outweighed by 70 pounds. Plus DMX has announced that he intends to pee on him.

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Zimmerman’s friend says something weird

george-zimmerman-sued-security

My brother forwarded me this article from Headline News’s obsessive coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, in which Zimmerman’s friend Mark Osterman explains how he convinced Zimmerman to buy a gun. Quote:

He asked whether he should or shouldn’t—to start with—and I recommended that he should. Anybody who’s a non-convicted felon should carry a firearm. The police aren’t always there.

Dear friends: when I am on trial for murder, please do not describe me as a “non-convicted felon.” Also, great advice on the gun thing, Mark.

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Friday links! Visceral revulsion edition

The original cutline for this picture was "David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature."

We like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed realists around here, but as often as not, reason is the scaffolding that holds up raw instinct. You can’t use impartial logic for everything, after all. When you see a nest of scorpions or Newt Gingrich or whatever, you don’t start from first principles and follow reason until it brings you to your opinion; you throw bleach on it and get out of there. I’m speaking metaphorically, here—don’t get close enough to Newt Gingrich to throw bleach on him. The point is that our opinions may be enforced with logical reasoning, but the original dictate tends to come from our guts. That’s all well and good when our opinions our ours alone, but the system breaks down when we have to match opinions with one another. One man’s visceral revulsion is another man’s career. It’s Friday, and this week’s link roundup is all about the problem of things that are A) intuitively, obviously wrong and B) going to keep happening until we can find some airtight argument against them.

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Another horrible aspect of the Trayvon Martin shooting

Yesterday, the New York Times ran this article about the description George Zimmerman gave to police of what happened just before he shot Trayvon Martin. Not surprisingly, Zimmerman’s version is a desperate act of self-defense. He claims that he returned to his SUV after he lost Martin and was struck from behind, after which Martin “began slamming his head into the sidewalk.” My response to this news was I’ll bet he said that. I have already decided that George Zimmerman is not a reliable witness in the case of his own shooting of an unarmed black kid, which is A) understandable and B) a huge problem, given that I have no way of knowing what actually happened.

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