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Originally Posted by lungs
OMG he smoked pot at one time. That clearly points to him entering this gated neighborhood to steal in order to feed his pot addiction! And I bet he was planning on raping some white women for good measure.
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From his twitter and facebook (which is family rushed to delete immediately after this all happened), it appears he was also a drug dealer, and obsessed with gang violence, and certainly not adverse to confrontation or beating people up - at least by his words.
That's probably not any different than a lot of people that age and like I said, probably has nothing to do with what happened. But look at how much the dialogue of this case has already changed since day 1. Day 1, it was all cut and dried - Zimmerman chased down this kid, unprovoked, hunted him, and shot him because he was black and eating skittles or something. Now, at least, there's some discussion about what else could have been going on, and what level of self-defense is appropriate in different situations, etc, and what the florida law may or may not allow, and what it should or should not allow. Even if Zimmerman should and will still be charged, the dialogue is already a lot different. For some reason, so many people desperately want this case to be as "racially dangerous" as possible and desperately want the facts to be a certain way (and in some cases, take huge offense when people just raise different issues that might create prosecutional challenges to any charges).
And the media of course wants to play right into that. I'm familiar with the term "white hispanic" but was sure I hadn't heard it too much in mainstream media before this story. As it turns out, the New York Times has used that phrase 5 times in his entire history - until this case, where it's a part of every story. That's part of the story that they want to write, to appeal to their mostly white audience I guess, I think to try to make this case seem as "racially dangerous" as possible. The Times appears to believe (and I wonder if they have meetings about this), that their white audience will be less outraged if it it's a black and a Hispanic involved. And I don't even think that's true, I don't think people care that much about what Zimmerman's ethnicity is, but the Times sure isn't taking the chance, and it does expose their motives here, and why we'll hear which facts in what order.