So you know about the Knockout Kings game, right? Of course you do. Absolutely nothing has been so ferociously reported on in this city. You would think the city was at siege the way some news organizations have treated it.
Well STLToday has a story of one teen being charged for an attack in the Central West End. And holy shit, does this get ugly.
For the sake of brevity, I will try to post as many blocks of comments as I can. There are plenty of people in the comments section doing their best to defend the city, but stupid always seems to shout louder.
I don't know if John Kuthe is proud of this fact or not. He proclaims it as if he were announcing the birth of his first child via racism. Thank goodness we now know. Everyone grab your lynching ropes! Reporter John is here to tell the REAL story that STLToday doesn't want you to know!
Currently this resides at the top of tower stupid. I never understand why people seem to think violence is the best way to deal with any situation. It almost makes me wonder if Wally is going to start hunting people down or posing as a target just so he gets an opportunity to shoot someone.
You know what? I wouldn't mind something like that. I would love someone with a gun and an inflated ego to get smacked around by a group of teens. Mostly because we need that moment for people to realize that a gun would be useless in such an attack.
Then again, I'm sure the comments of that story will be filled with St. Louis county Rambos talking about how they would have handled getting sucker punched better. Just because you watched an MMA fight and own a gun doesn't mean you know what the hell you are doing. I own a wood chisel. Guess who knows fuck all about chiseling anything.
I like Billy Coby. He and John Kuthe get into it in a much longer section of the comments, but Billy is trying to fight the good fight.
This thread is all under that comment from Wally, and Billy is voicing my own concerns about the plan for everyone to own a firearm. Considering most people are too stupid to operate a mixing bowl, I too believe that violence is not the answer. The idea that pulling a gun on an attacker will have a 100% success rate is laughable. More than likely, you'll get shot while trying to figure out what to do next because your average citizen is not trained or prepared to kill someone else. Shit, plenty of soldier and police aren't prepared.
The difference between the professionals and the jackass with four hundred dollars at Cabela's is the professional has automatic responses and muscle memory. John Q. Public is a dolt half the time and dipshit the other half. It's easy to be brave in our minds, but I figure most citizens in any life threatening situation would shit themselves long before the gun cleared their holsters.
Which actually may be more effective than a gun, come to think of it.
The most offensive part of this comment thread is John's insistence that guns are the way to go, and the only alternative we have is to lay down and get beaten. These kinds of 'all-or-nothing' scenarios show a lack of critical thinking or imagination. There are plenty of things we can do as citizens to mitigate crime. Neighborhood watch patrols come to mind (the kind where you stay inside your damn car and just report in suspicious behaviors). Neighbors looking out for each other. Traveling in pairs. All kinds of things.
Nah, fuck it. Guns. Because who doesn't want to carry around a metal extension of their penis?
First off, Kevin Dougherty's use of single quotes around the word victim makes me think he doubts the person's victimness. Please learn how to use the punctuation before you slap it around with your stupidity.
Secondly, we have more people calling this a hate crime. No one seems to know exactly what a hate crime is. I could argue that all crime is a hate crime, but the commenters of STLToday want their racist blood to get warmed up.
Here's the problem with this specific way of thinking. People are under the assumption that there is one gang of kids who are perpetrating all of these crimes. As if there is an underground knockout king fight club with a hundred teens and young adults getting orders in the basement of a shitty bar to randomly punch people. These are stupid teens doing stupid shit. There is no grand conspiracy against the Great White citizens of the city. It's stupidity and random violence.
As for Paul Baker, he sure seems convinced that the Knockout Game is only black on white (or black on old Vietnamese man that one time) and not victims of convenience. He wants proof that all the victims weren't white, which will make him truly believe this isn't a hate crime. However, we already know it isn't exclusively blacks carrying out the attacks.
My question here is how many of these crimes go unreported? Do you think that random acts of punching always make it to the front page of STLToday? I can't believe that all crimes associated with the Knockout Kings are reported in my fair city. Especially since I can only recall about three or four incidents. The old Vietnamese man who died, the guy who the kids charged were released, the CWE attack...I'm missing something.
And honestly, if there are only four happenings of this occurrence in my memory, is it as much an epidemic as people seem to think?
Of course, it's rare to ever see black on black crime from the city ever reported. It's as if people think crime is a sudden occurrence because now it happened near them. Fact is, most people are blissfully unaware of the insanity constantly happening around them while they get caught up in geopolitical nonsense. Instead of focusing on problems in their own areas, they would rather watch any of the 24 hour news cycles and debate topics they have no affect on and will hardly change anything in their day to day lives.
Let me be the person to say this to everyone. Your neighborhood is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. You, and everyone around you, need to keep an eye out for one another. If you only assume the police and the Mayor are going to be around to help you out, you're going to learn real quick what neighborhood violence really is. You want things to change? Change them. Stop hiding behind aprons strings getting angry when the people trying to help get overwhelmed.
In Dungeons and Dragons terms, citizens are the Bard of the group. Most people find them fairly useless without multiclassing, but in the real world, the police and elected officials could use a buff or two.
And no, put the damn lute away.
Apparently to Justin Ross, blacks need to 'own up' to what has been happening when it comes to violence in the city. As if the entire community of black people are going to look up, be shocked by what's been happening and step forward and give a collective 'my bad' to all of the overly entitled whiteys of the city.
Justin is one of those special kinds of idiots. Not because he insisted that the black community alone do something to stop this, but because his way of retorting is to be a smug, dismissive asshole. A comment like his last one in that thread destroys all his debate and argument credibility. Please make a note of it for further discussions you may find yourselves involved in. Smug = idiot every time.
Mike keeps trying, but when Richard Garcia brought up the KKK, I would have just canceled my internet subscription and spent the rest of my life learning how to build little boats which I would put small messages of hope and happiness on before sending them down the Mississippi River.
And if you take a look at the last sentence of Justin Ross's comment to Bridget, try to remember that quite a bit of the violence happening in our city is against blacks from blacks. Are people under the impression that only white people are beaten up in the city? And how much of a conceited asshole do you have to be to ask for a march for "All of ours"? People like this need to be put on an island somewhere so the rest of us can grow and cooperate properly.
Come on, we're trying to have a society here.
Also, is it racist if I say "The chickens coming home to roost"? When did that become a thing?
Man, I wish I had access to the database STLToday does. All I can do is write a blog. I'd love to send letters. Or use packages to take care of my cat and dog droppings.
Also, my love of the English language makes me giggle here. Steve Kreder is racist in the mail. It makes me want all of his comments read like a letter in a Ken Burns war documentary while sipping mint juleps.
Screw you, Jerald Johnson. Move somewhere else. Stop disparaging my good city. Also your profile photo is laughably inaccurate compared to your actual demeanor. Run and hide if you like, but I love the city. I can name two dozen great places to eat or get a drink in a five mile radius of my house. And the words "Olive Garden" would never go past my lips during that list. The city has culture that you can't imagine, but that's fine. I don't want you down here.
In the replies to this idiotic statement, quite a few people talk about how they love south city and have never had any issues. Justin Ross of course injects idiocy back into the fray.
I don't know if all of Justin's crime statistics are correct. He doesn't go out of his way to provide anything more useful than hearsay. Everyone throws around statistics that are still covered in shit after being pulled out of their asses.
You know what? I'm fucking done with Justin for today. One more bank of screencaps and I'll let you all get back to your day.
I cringed when I saw the Circuit Attorney's Office reply in this thread. Do they not know what they are doing to themselves? There is no reason to wade into this pool of miserable human phlegm. That's what I do. Because I have nothing else to do with my time! Run away!
That's it. It's all over now. Someone who has been following these attacks for years and been working to put together cases came out with proper knowledge and facts. Bitch, this it STLToday! You get your knowledge out of here! If you start educating people, what are the pool of racists with computers and bloggers who make fun of them going to do?
But there is no going back at this point. She said it, now we have to deal with the consequences. It's her own fault.
So Richard Garcia accuses the Attorney's office of being afraid of black people because the blacks outnumber his 'people.' Again, nothing in the way of facts or evidence even touches this post. I can't imagine how Richard's brain functions when he's ready to jump straight to accusations like this. As if the thought process is running along its proper route, but there is a five car pileup on Sanity Street and he has to detour down Bat-shit Boulevard.
Reader, this bucket of crazy tipped a long time ago. I've been dancing around this post for almost three weeks waiting for the fire to die down so I could sift through the ashes and bring you these wonderful gems. This is where I found the racist bingo winner and for a while, I wanted to break it down and milk this thread for all it was worth.
But I couldn't do that. Not because of a sense of blogger nobility, but because I had to rip this bandage off all at once. I couldn't keep coming back to this well. I had to drain it on the first go. But for you, I will not poison the water. There is plenty of crazy left in those comments if you want to run around and play for yourself. I, however, am done with it.
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