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From: AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org>
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech
Subject: Re: Bicycle outing with happy ending
Date: Fri, 23 May 2025 07:52:41 -0500
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On 5/22/2025 10:58 PM, John B. wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2025 12:48:25 -0500, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 5/22/2025 12:17 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
>>> On 5/21/2025 9:21 PM, AMuzi wrote:
>>>> On 5/21/2025 6:12 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
>>>>> On 5/21/2025 4:41 PM, AMuzi wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But the public reaction to several well publicized
>>>>>> instances of institutional abuse of mentally ill spurred
>>>>>> politicians to act, which was widely supported at the
>>>>>> time.  Those were horrible, and real, but not
>>>>>> representative.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The unintended consequences now punish the citizenry
>>>>>> generally more than the inmates before 1963.
>>>>>
>>>>> And that should be a lesson in why general public policy
>>>>> should not be driven by extreme outlier cases.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> OK, what's an outlier and what's not?
>>>>
>>>> Emmett Till?
>>>
>>> The murder of Emmett Till was not an outlier, which was the
>>> main point of the publicity it generated.
>>>
>>> Emmett Till's murder was an example, bringing to public
>>> consciousness a widespread practice of lynchings and general
>>> oppression of black people in the deep south.
>>>
>>> Sometimes one incident can call attention to a big problem,
>>> but that doesn't make the incident an outlier, except
>>> perhaps in its press-worthiness.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Not  unique, but the total is much less than most people think:
>>
>> https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/
>>
>> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-shows-over-a-century-of-documented-lynchings-in-united-states-180961877/
>>
>> Roughly 86 per year.
>>
>> Ohio, for example 10 white, 16 black.
>>
>> Emmet Till's murder was significant in many ways and an
>> oultier in the sense that most received no publicity whatsoever.
>>
>> There's nothing good to say about that, but Emmett Till's
>> death was a significant event toward passage of Mr
>> Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act.
>>
>> As always, one man's crucial incident is another's
>> meaningless trivia.
>>
>> p.s. The first USA lynching was of a group of Italians in
>> New Orleans. No one talked about 'civil rights' in that
>> context, and yet they did die at the end of a rope.
> 
> 
> But I wonder... how many that were hung were in fact guilty of the
> crime that they were executed for?
>   In the Italian lynching 6 of the 19 had been declared innocent.
> ( it was also the introduction of the word "mafia" into the U.S.
> dialect)
>   
> --
> cheers,
> 
> John B.
> 

That's an important observation.  And my most serious 
reservation about capital punishment.

Was there a black horse thief hanged ever? Most likely. But 
that doesn't mitigate the larger tragedy.

-- 
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971