The official (and only) Ahmaud Arbery thread

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

He was NOT jogging. Stop saying that he was a "black jogger".

He was wearing cargo shorts. Nobody goes for a 20 mile jog wearing cargo shorts.

He was there to commit a theft.

no jogger wears cargo shorts! well i believe we got a sherlock holmes on our hands with this genius!

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

He was NOT jogging. Stop saying that he was a "black jogger".

He was wearing cargo shorts. Nobody goes for a 20 mile jog wearing cargo shorts.

He was there to commit a theft.

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

Was he a runner?

Ok sure. "Running" from the scene of his burglary crime, then towards the white men before he physically assaulted one of them and tried to take their gun.

"Jogging" in saggy cargo shorts, wearing Timberland boots, holding stolen tools . . . miles from home.

How often are you going to perpetuate the lie that he was 'miles from home', when its been repeatedly shown that he was only 1.9 miles from home.

Or are you just dumb.

And rojo, you found it fit to disable a previous thread limited to registered users, for this one limited to users.

Why are you not deleting blatant misinformation.

Or do you intend starting another thread?

Yes, of course. All posts that don't agree with your pro-black agenda, need to be deleted.

Did Arbery deserve to be shot and killed? Of course NOT!

But please don't paint this 'babe in the woods' picture, that he was a jogger just out on a run, when two racists shot him, simply because he is black.

That is the true misinformation.

Arbery was NOT out jogging, the videos clearly show that he was wearing cargo/khaki shorts and boots and he was walking around and later into a house that was under construction.

Because the investigator recognized him, due to Arbery's criminal history, the investigator tried to stop him.

Things went out of control and Arbery was shot. Why was he shot? Because he attacked one of the white men.

Again, did he deserve to die? NO!

But he was NOT a 'black jogger'. He was not a jogger. He was not a runner.

Please stop saying that he was. I beg you.

He was a criminal, on probation, caught in the act of yet another crime.

realist1 wrote:

"Check out a construction site"? He entered the house which is illegal and why did he? Obvious answer in a neighborhood with recent burglaries is he was looking for something to steal. Did the McMichaels know this when they confronted him?

You can't read his mind. Maybe he is interested in the construction business, or thinking of buying and refurbishing a distressed house. What could he have stolen, of value, in broad daylight, from a construction site? He certainly wasn't going to take a power tool, shove it down his pants, and continue to run. Or was he casing the joint so that he could.....come back at night in a car, park out front, and take something? That makes less sense, because he'd have to worry at that point that somebody would get suspicious.

But all this is merely speculation. The fact is, he didn't take anything.

runnerguy2016 wrote:

Something that hasn't been pointed out much is that he was over 10 Miles from his house. He was definitely not out for a jog.

Was he? That's very interesting, actually. It suggests that he drove from his house to a place closer to the site, and then began his run. I'd like to hear more about this. I thought I'd read that he didn't live far from this neighborhood; what you're saying suggests otherwise.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

realist1 wrote:

He also stole a TV while on probation for taking a gun to a basketball game. He's not some law abiding hobby jogger like our dishonest media portrays.

The father of the shooter was apparantly a KKK member so the two of them were hardly choirboys. Why isn't that fact worth mentioning by you guys?

Was he? I've seen highly suspect circumstantial evidence for that--a photo of a guy who looks like the father at a KKK rally--but it certainly wasn't proof of that. "This white guy looks like that white guy" just isn't something you can take to the bank. It's important to investigate this thoroughly. Is there any actual evidence that he belonged to the KKK? Any social media posts that clarify this?

Any such evidence would be central to a DOJ case: establishing that racial animus was an element of the pursuit.

KudzuRunner wrote:

runnerguy2016 wrote:

Something that hasn't been pointed out much is that he was over 10 Miles from his house. He was definitely not out for a jog.

Was he? That's very interesting, actually. It suggests that he drove from his house to a place closer to the site, and then began his run. I'd like to hear more about this. I thought I'd read that he didn't live far from this neighborhood; what you're saying suggests otherwise.

The notion that he was 10 miles from his house has been debunked. The notion that he was "running" in boots has been debunked.

Whether people put up disinformation for their own amusement, out of ignorance, or as a tactic to some larger goal, we can only speculate, but it's rampant on the internet in general and largely unchecked on this site. In a strategic context it is a play to people's innate biases and I would hope that it bothers you that you've been so easily played.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

realist1 wrote:

Show me a link....

Are you talking about the distance between the homes?

Arbery lived at:

140 Boykin Ridge Drive

The rednecks lived at:

230 Satilla Drive

Both addresses are in Brunswick and you can check the distance on Google Maps.

Thanks much for clarifying this. Google maps makes this run easy to visualize. He was indeed in his own neighborhood, more or less.

But there's something else at work here that has not, to my knowledge, been explored in any of the media coverage. If you take a look at crime statistics for Brunswick, there's an extraordinary gradient between downtown, which is just across the bridge from the general area known as Satilla Shores in which BOTH Arbrey and the McMichaels's lived, and Satilla Shores itself. It took me a while to suss this out.

Look at the following webpage:

As a whole, Brunswick GA has a horrendous crime problem. It ranks a 2: safer than only 2% of American cities. But crime within greater Brunswick is almost entirely localized in the downtown districts. They're deep indigo on that webpage map. But the safest place to live within greater Brunswick is...you guessed it: the Glynn Camp / Fancy Bluff district just south and across the water from downtown.

Lots of property crime downtown.

Greater Brunswick is 55% black, 30% white. I couldn't find any statistics that crosstabbed race with crime, or crosstabbed race with residence in particular subsectors of the city.

Both the Arbreys and the McMichaels's happened to live in that safe district. But here's my hunch: I suspect that for white residents of Satilla Shores, crime had an almost completely black face. I'm speaking as much about how they imagined crime and criminals as how crime and criminals actually manifested in those neighborhoods. But it would of course be worth trying to gather statistics about criminal activity in Satilla Shores in the months leading up to this episode, and about the race of the offenders, especially in the matter of property crimes.

It may be that white residents of Satilla Shores, like the McMichaels and their neighbors, were anxious about crime--and specifically about property crime committed by black men--and spring-loaded to jump on anything they saw. THIS DOESN'T MEAN THAT THEY WERE RIGHT TO RESPOND AS THEY RESPONDED TO ARBERY. We're simply trying to gain a realistic sense of why they might have acted in what strikes most of us as a plainly excessive way.

What complicates this picture, of course, is that Arbery himself lived in the neighborhood. Not that EXACT neighborhood, but only a couple of miles away. He lived.....across Rt. 17. What I don't know, and what would be incredibly helpful to know, was whether Rt. 17, which winds directly across the water from downtown, was a kind of implicit racial barrier. Perhaps the portion of Satilla Shores just north of Rt. 17, where Arbery lived, was a different sort of neighborhood, which is to say, a neighborhood dominated by upwardly mobile strivers, black folk who had escaped from downtown into a relatively safer sort of life.

None of this has the slightest relevance to the legal case. But it is completely relevant if we're trying to understand the human element, rather than residing within the comfort of stereotypes. The fact is, Arbery wasn't precisely dressed like a runner, because he was dressed....nicer than that. He was dressed like a suburbanite. Who runs in khaki shorts? But you might actually do that if you were, like him, a suburbanite and thought of yourself this way. Or, alternately, you might do that because you knew you were going to run through a white neighborhood and you sure as hell weren't going to dress ghetto. (It doesn't seem like "ghetto" was Arbery's style, but it is entirely possible that people will attempt to smear him by unearthing photos of him dressed like that. Just saying.)

For the reasons that I've suggested, mostly having to do with the very strong crime gradient that separated downtown Brunsick, only five miles away, from the Satilla Shores neighborhood where the McMichaels's encountered Arbrey, I think that we don't even have to imagine the McMichaels's as card-carrying KKK members to get a sense of how they immediately framed Arbery. They and their neighbors weren't inclined to see him and think, "Oh, he's our fellow suburbanite." They put what they imagined to be two and two together in their own minds. A gun had been stolen from McMichaels car. No idea who did it, but hey: the face of crime, downtown, was black. Hadda be somebody from up there, preying on this nearby neighborhood. Then Arbrey: walking around inside an under-construction home interior. Bang! Here we go. The city has come right to our doorstep.

There was no way, given everything I've said, that the McMichaels's were going to see him as anything other than the face of black crime, brought to life.

Absolutely nothing I've said here excuses what they did. Arbery may have trespassed, although I'm not sure about the precise legal standing of what he did, but it plainly wasn't a felony, or burglary. For all the reasons that have been adduced by others, including David French in his excellent article, the McMichaels's f----ed up. They deserve what's coming to them. Felony murder or felony manslaughter, if that exists. I'm quite sure that they didn't intend to kill him when they grabbed their guns and set off after him. But that's what they ended up doing, and if they had no legal pretext for doing so, which everything I've seen suggests they didn't, then they deserve to be convicted and sent away for a long time.

All this being said, their reasons for doing what they did, in their own minds, may be slightly more apparent if we appreciate the racialized geographies of the relatively crime-free but recently picked-upon suburban enclave in which they--and, tragically, Arbery and his family--lived, just across the water from a terribly troubled downtown.

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

He was NOT jogging. Stop saying that he was a "black jogger".

He was wearing cargo shorts. Nobody goes for a 20 mile jog wearing cargo shorts.

He was there to commit a theft.

What they hell is wrong with you man. Are you a troll or a white supremacist?

His family knows more than they are saying....

How did Arbery support himself and his family? Did he have a job?

NeverAWMDRF2020 wrote:

He was wearing cargo shorts. Nobody goes for a 20 mile jog wearing cargo shorts.

Nobody.

Runs.

In.

Cargo shorts.

realist1 wrote:

His family knows more than they are saying....

How did Arbery support himself and his family? Did he have a job?

Do you have a job? Do you support yourself and your family? Careful, you might find yourself being confronted by gun-toting vigilantes - since you obviously see some connection between those questions and being shot by armed strangers on the street.

So what are the chances of this kind of killing if it was a white guy running/ "jogging" - whatever - on a street in that town?

realist1 wrote:

His family knows more than they are saying....

How did Arbery support himself and his family? Did he have a job?

Seriously man, you need to stop. It doesn't actually matter what Arbery was doing before the altercation. What matters is that armed renegades ganged up on him and murdered him.

So the "real" criminal here is the victim. Apart from your false claims about him, it is easy to see with thinking like yours why a couple of white guys felt they had the right to pull the trigger on yet another black man. As the Mayor of Atlanta has said, it is still a "lynching"; part of the Southern tradition.

Armstronglivs wrote:

As the Mayor of Atlanta has said, it is still a "lynching"; part of the Southern tradition.

I don't think this sort of rhetoric is helpful or accurate either. Most likely those guys saw themselves as responsible citizens doing their civic duty apprehending a criminal. They gave no consideration that from the perspective of the jogger that they were indistinguishable from a couple of yahoos intent on a "lynching". The involvement of firearms turned a stupid confrontation into a tragedy.

"We're simply trying to gain a realistic sense of why they might have acted in what strikes most of us as a plainly excessive way".

I'm not sure you want to describe the killing of another human being as "acting in a plainly excessive way". What would have been an appropriate way? Maybe not to have done anything to him at all.

Your research into elements of the social geography of the area is impressive. But it reinforces the very thing you wish us to avoid, which stereotyping, because your explanation boils down to that is what the accused were likely doing - acting on a local stereotype that black men are probable criminals. You are probably right about that. It is a stereotype with fatal consequences.

I'll preempt any who might be tempted to say that I don't know how to spell the name of the white protagonists in this little drama. You're right! My previous posts err badly in that respect.

They are Travis and Gregory McMichael. Collectively they are the McMichaels. The possessive of the plural is McMichaels'.

The McMichaels are in trouble. The McMichaels' fate is dire.

Armstronglivs wrote:

[quote]KudzuRunner wrote:

I'm not sure you want to describe the killing of another human being as "acting in a plainly excessive way". What would have been an appropriate way? Maybe not to have done anything to him at all.

Your research into elements of the social geography of the area is impressive. But it reinforces the very thing you wish us to avoid, which stereotyping, because your explanation boils down to that is what the accused were likely doing - acting on a local stereotype that black men are probable criminals. You are probably right about that. It is a stereotype with fatal consequences.

I'm not describing the killing as plainly excessive. I'm describing them grabbing a shotgun and pistol, jumping in their truck, and demanding that he stop and talk to them as plainly excessive. I think they should have let the cops take care of it.

And yes: you're exactly right. They acted on a local stereotype that black men are probably criminals. It was a stereotype with fatal consequences--and origins, which I'm trying to clarify here. It blinded them.