Oops. Double post. My bad.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of the holiday here, but are you saying there is significance to the name Juneteenth? Because all I get from that article is that it's a portmanteau. Am I missing something?

Sadly, that ain't just Austin.

I just read about this a moment ago and... no, I just don't get it. What did they thought they'd achieve by killing the passenger ?

not only was the drivers friend / passenger murdered but now i suspect he / she is going to get reamed in court by the kids family.

i wonder what will scar the child more getting hit by a car or having to live with the fact that he was the reason a man was beaten to death .

And an undertone of white fear of "black barbarism." I wonder if Mr. Lariviere is a Ron Paul fan?

And this is some weak reporting. The link he gives is two sentences about the event. Here's a better one.

I don't know what to say beyond that. I don't think anyone's going to come down on the side of mob violence here, so there's no much to really debate.

You're expecting logic from an angry mob?

He might also be wise to change his profile pic, especially if he intends to call attention to himself by making obnoxious posts on the boards.

merry juneteenth everybody

Whitey being scared of black people behaving badly?

It wouldn't surprise me.

Yes, but that article quotes the police as stating there was no connection between the incident and the Juneteenth festival and places the "mob" at 4 to 5. --which really undercuts the presumptions that underlie Lariviere's article.

Wow that's exactly like the LA Riots!

I'm against mob violence 95 percent of the time

Right, so, it might be important to note that I wrote my piece an entire day before the article you quoted was written. The article I referenced never once mentioned race other than the fact that the man who was killed had a hispanic name. I made it explicitly clear that details were scarce, and I included the majority of the details that were known at the time. I cannot be faulted for failing to present information before it was available.

And, no, I'm not talking about "black barbarism". If you read my source article, you'll see it's race neutral. My article was merely trying to make a comment about crowd psychology. Was it an unnecessary story? I don't know, perhaps. That the violence happened to fall on a holiday celebrating freedom just seemed unfortunate, and I only brought that up to illustrate the point of how quickly emotions can change and escalate within a large group.

The reference to the LA riots was purely to show an example of what a large group of people are capable of: each consecutive act of violence or destruction serves to embolden other members of the crowd until the group is worked into a far greater hysteria than they'd likely ever reach on their own. I'd have used another example, but that happened to be the most appropriate piece of footage I could find at the time. To say that it's racist because I chose to present evidence that shows black people is absurd. If I had shown a group of white meatheads flipping cars after a sporting event no one would call me racist against whites. I don't subscribe to the double standard, and by reading into it in that way reflects a bias in the reader, not the writer. To suggest that I should have shown a clip of whites being destructive is flawed logic; it shouldn't matter who I show. If you set your mind to it you can view a lot of things as racist that simply are not, and as a writer I shouldn't have to go out of my way to prove I'm not racist just to write a short article.

I won't argue this is a great article; it's not. The story I read got me thinking about crowds; I wrote something up, end of story.

The ron paul comparison is uncalled for.

Re-reading the second half of my article I see that "I wonder if race was a factor?" could easily be read as a snide, snarky, *wink*wink kind of jab, which wasn't my intention. I should have said something like "with relatively few details, there's no way of knowing if other factors played a role in the violence." Coming into this article I didn't know an awful lot about Juneteenth or its traditions; the question about race was my legitimate postulation as to what could have contributed to this particular case. I wasn't trying to make any kind of underlying statement.

Sadly the Juneteenth Celebration here in Syracuse ended in violence as well.
Two people stabbed and numerous fist fights.
Allegedly a group of people arrived late and had an agenda to disrupt the event.

Fair enough.