re: #112 Stanley Sea Toujours

Missed this

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If that’s about Tarantino, then I’d like to add something on that score as it looks like the outrage aimed at him has not been based on the facts:

Police unions representing hundreds of thousands of policemen have announced plans to boycott Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, which will open on Christmas Day. The National Association of Police Organizations, which represents a quarter-million policemen, issued a statement supporting the boycott as a response to Tarantino’s having “bluntly referred to police as ‘murderers’.” Conservatives ought to support Tarantino — not because they like him or his movies, not because they agree with any of his political positions or because they are anti-police, but because Tarantino did not call policemen murderers. His speech — such as it was — lasted just 30 seconds. This is what he said, in full:

“Hey, everybody. I got something to say, but actually I would like to give my time to the families that want to talk. I want to give my time to the families. However I do just also want to say: What am I doing here? I’m doing here because I am a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered and I have to call the murderers the murderers. Now I want to give my time to the families.”

Tarantino never says, nor does he imply, that he thinks all policemen are murderers. In fact, given the context, it seems perfectly clear that he’s talking only about specific instances of people killed by specific policemen. In later remarks on MSNBC, he said that he was talking about the deaths of Eric Garner, Sam DuBose, Antonio Lopez Guzman, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott: He believes that these men were murdered, and that the policemen who killed them were murderers. He may have had other specific cases in mind (I imagine he did). Obviously, though, talking about a subset of police shooting is very different from saying that everyone killed by a policeman has been murdered, or that every policeman, by virtue of being a policeman, is a murderer.

Josh Gelernter goes on to smack Texas Ted Poe for his derping against Tarantino, so he does call out one of the nuts on his own side.