i’m just sayin’.
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No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.
When the case went to trial, however, defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasn’t responsible for making sticky all over the woman’s sweater. He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the mess—after all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.
“She got what she wanted,” said Stokke. “She’s an overtly sexual person.”
A jury of one woman and 11 men—many white and in their 50s or 60s—agreed with Stokke. On Feb. 2, after a half-day of deliberations, they found Park not guilty of three felony charges that he’d used his badge to win sexual favors during the December 2004 traffic stop.
Park, 31, was red-faced and unable to control his twitching foot in the moments before the verdict was announced; if convicted, he would have faced prison. When he was found not guilty, he briefly embraced Stokke. In the public seating section, tears flowed from his gray-haired mother’s face. His father, a mechanic, closed his eyes and threw his head back. Outside the courtroom, surrounded by his family, a smiling Park said he felt vindicated.
Veteran sex crimes prosecutor Shaddi Kamiabipour—who’d called Park “a predator” during the nine-day trial—said she was disappointed with the verdicts. She also dismissed Stokke’s contention that the Orange County District Attorney’s office had overcharged the case. At stake, Kamiabipour said, was the principle that no one—not even a horny cop who’d once won honors for community service—is above the law.
“Park didn’t pick a housewife or a 17-year-old girl,” Kamiabipour said in her closing argument. “He picked a stripper. He picked the perfect victim.”
Hikers walk the multi-hued Danxia Landform at a geopark in Zhangye, northwest China.
Danxia landform is a unique type of petrographic geomorphology; it could be defined as “landform consists of red bed characterized by steep cliffs”. It was named in China, and was a type of physiognomy which was studied by Chinese geologists.
bonesarecoralmade: wordsandsteel:
If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he’s been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien’s child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
[more here]
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tumblangeles: delbertshoopman:
Just happened outside my office. O LOS ANGELES!
a gallery of photos from Francois Robert’s series ‘Contents,” showing people’s hands and the objects they carry.
