From the article you linked to --

*getting off the merry go round*
 

This is what gave me that ickey feeling in this thread, the lynch mob mentality for this guy. I'm no fan, and I was torn when he did it cause I liked his skills, then he did what he did and I was like *great*. It's hard for us to see this, POC get this (I do at least) feeling of impending doom when we see our people in bad light, press, arrest reports. The media paints them in such a horrid light, they are convicted before they stand trial,. I don't know if you notice this when a POC does wrong, voices are altered it's more dramatized, a white man does something and voices are more sad, people seem shocked and have that sense of "wow not him, he's so homegrown or guy next door"

So when I read the responses I was wow, people are more angry that Obama called Vick than that idiots rants about Michael Vick dying for what he did. A white man calls for a black mans death and *silence* a bunch of people angrily ask he be killed, punished more, sadistic fantasies are confessed and no one is shocked or disgusted.

I don't get it, then again I do because no one calls for a white man's blood like they do that of a MOC.

AND THAT's what made this whole thread oogey and STILL does......


I hope he proves you all wrong, and that you all can see, sometimes POC fuck up, but yeah if given a chance some of us do change, I hope he is one of them, then again even then I don't think folks would be happy.
Gross.


P.S.

If any of you have not gone into the Racism thread in the Red Zone, you really really should, maybe then you would *get* why we feel this IS about...

Race...

Thank you for the dialogue.

on a lighter note...
 

you can download the book:

The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

Snow;

A couple of things:

1) A white man calls for the death of a black man. In other breaking news, the surface of the Sun is hot. Just another day, so of course there is silence.

2) Part of why many POC face-palm whenever some person of color does something that makes headlines in a negative fashion is because we know--not think but know--that at some point we are going to be asked some question along the lines of "why do black people love dog fighting". In the eyes of the majority, Michael Vick--a man who is incidentally black--isn't guilty of animal cruelty. A black man--who is incidentally named Michael Vick--is guilty of animal cruelty and since blacks, particularly black men, are held to be something just this side of a wild beast a clear and strong message must be sent. So that other blacks--men and women--will know where the boundaries are.

You and I both know that this is how the game is played in this country.

Cheers
Aj

"Best Friends Animal Society" is also known as "Dogtown"
 

Best Friends permanently shelters a number of Michael Vicks' pit bulls. In his blog, Francis Battista, the co-founder of Best Friends addresses the topic of forgiving Michael Vick. He does a much better job than I have so far.

".....He could begin with an apology to the animals. He would acknowledge that he found within himself something horrific and frightening — something that he can’t explain, excuse or defend, something that no amount of jail time or loss of public stature can offset.

It’s much easier to forgive someone who can’t forgive himself.

Francis Battista

Co-Founder, Best Friends Animal Society"


Full blog entry can be found here.

Jesus Fucking Christ how many times does he have to apologize???

Should he go to EVERY dog owner's house???

I hate this thread, it's ickey content is gross on so many levels.
 

He apologized here are some of his OWN words from his blog..

"What I did was horrendous. Awful. Inhumane. And I've no excuses for my actions. It makes my heart hurt now to think about what I've done. And I'm gonna be real honest, it took a while for me to get to this place. Sitting in a prison cell didn't make me feel remorse. It was meeting so many animal lovers, speaking with them and looking them in their eyes. Staring at them. Looking so deep into their eyes that I began to feel their pain. Allowing that pain to enter into my body is when I started to understand how bad it really was. I have been trying hard to connect with people who feel this pain,because for my whole life I was disconnected from the suffering of animals. And you might say, "come on Mike, how could you do those things to those dogs?" And you're right...I
ask myself those questions every day. What kind of person does this? How does a human-being treat dogs or any animal with such pain and cruelty? And the hard part for me is the answer to these questions. Because the answer is ME. And I am trying so hard right now to become a better person, because who I was, I am ashamed of."

*You* don't think Vick has gotten it, but in all honesty how do *you* know? like I said in my bolded post, he could prove ya'll wrong it ain't gonna matter, it's pretty fucking obvious cause a call for his death was voiced I don't see you having as much passion about it as you do an animal.

So yeah we aren't gonna agree.


Read his blog (I forgot to post it in my post)


http://globalgrind.com/channel/news/...what-ive-done/


Maybe then just maybe (I doubt it) you will be satisfied with his regrets.

Tell you what I will answer your question when you answer ours..

What would be an a good enough punishment for Vick?

You seem to have skipped over that particular question as well, as for ignoring this I am not advocating his heinous crimes, but I sure damn well am not gonna sit here quietly and watch the grossness that has happened in this thread and if you say that grossness has not happened I will point each and everyone out.

Not meant to de-rail, but rather to talk about community recognition of punishment completed, and the different standards "we" seem to have about repentance/rehabilitation:

Paula Poundstone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Poundstone
"In 2001, Poundstone was arrested on a felony warrant for three counts of committing a lewd act on an unidentified girl under age 14. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office also stated that Poundstone was charged with endangering two other unidentified girls and two boys.[11] Few details were released, but the prosecutor indicated that the charges were a result of an incident in which Poundstone was driving her children while intoxicated. She accepted a plea agreement and pleaded "no contest" to felony child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of inflicting injury on a child. In exchange, the three charges of lewd conduct were dropped by prosecutors....
Since then she has used the incident—and the resulting publicity—as the source for some of her comedic material." (my bolds)

She's on a national tour right now. Are there protests? What would the community response look like if she wasn't white? She isn't apologizing, apparently she thinks its funny?

I found this article this morning......it is a blog that was originally in The Nation

Michael Vick, Racial History and Animal Rights

Melissa Harris-Perry – Thu Dec 30, 11:29 am ET

Last night I had one of those awful television moments that sometimes afflict those of us who spend part of our life in classroom where we have 90 minutes to discuss a topic and the other part of our life on television where we are constrained to four-minute analyses. On Wednesday evening I joined The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the current flap surrounding Michael Vick and President Obama.

My goal was to offer some historical context for understanding the vastly different responses to Vick’s crime, to the severity of his punishment, and to the sense that he should be given a second chance to earn a living as a professional football player. I believe that to understand these different public responses we need to know how the Vick case evokes often unspoken, but nonetheless powerful, and deeply emotional interconnections between the rights of black Americans and of animals. Instead, having vastly underestimated the allotted time for the segment I instead seemed to argue that Vick’s acts were justified by the history of American racism. This touched off quite a flood of hate mail to my email inbox last night. So I’ve decided to make one more effort to discuss this complicated issue.

Last year I was teaching an introductory politics course at Princeton University when a campus animal rights group brought to campus a fascinating and provocative exhibit that linked animal cruelty to human degradation, imprisonment and slavery. The images in the exhibit were part of a larger international PETA effort. They were disturbing, but also very powerful.

Many African American students on campus were deeply offended, hurt and angry about the exhibit's comparison of animal suffering to the realities of the slave trade and lynching. The Organization of Black Students organized a protest and boycott. The campus animal rights group organized a teach-in. I had leaders from both student organizations in my class that semester. The tension, emotion, and analytic challenges raised by the exhibit became an important aspect of the class. A group of students even made a film about the issue for the final class project. As I sought to help guide my students through these interactions I opened up a new line of research on the politics of race and animal rights.

Recall that North American slavery of the 17th and 18th century is distinguished by its "chattel" element. New World slavery did not consider enslaved Africans to be conquered persons, but to be chattel, beast of burden, fully subhuman and therefore not requiring the basic rights of humans. By defining slaves as animals and then abusing them horribly the American slave system degraded both black people and animals. By equating black people to animals it both asserted the superiority of humans to animals, arrayed some humans (black people) as closer to animals and therefore less human, and implied that all subjugated persons and all animals could be used and abused at the will of those who were more powerful. The effects were pernicious for both black people and for animals.

Equating black people to animals was a practice that continued after emancipation. Consider the image below. It is a picture of an Alabama store during the Jim Crow era. The sign reads: No Negro or Ape Allowed in the Building.

This pair of images reminds that these comparisons continue in contemporary popular culture and often with particular relevance to American sports.

When the abuse and oppression of an entire group of people is justified as acceptable because they are defined as animals, then it stands to reason the society is suggesting that abuse and oppression are acceptable ways to treat animals. Michael Vick committed horrendous acts of cruelty. I have had dogs as pets for my entire life. I am sickened by his actions. At the same time I recognize that he is one individual in a larger society that is profoundly complicit in the abuse and mistreatment of animals. Ideologies of white supremacy have particular culpability in that attitude toward animals because it was part of the governing ideology of slavery and segregation.

Given this history we might think that African Americans would be particulalry strident animal rights activists, seeing their interests as profoundly linked. But the relationship between race, rights, and animals is more complicated. Dogs, for example, were used by enslavers to catch, trap and return those who were trying to escape to freedom. Dogs were used to terrorize Civil Rights demonstrators. In short, animals have been weapons used against black bodies and black interests in ways that have deep historical resonace.

Not only have animals been used as weapons against black people, but many African Americans feel that the suffering of animals evokes more empathy and concern among whites than does the suffering of black people. For example, in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina dozens of people sent me a link to an image of pets being evacuated on an air conditioned bus. This image was a sickening juxtaposition to the conditions faced by tens of thousands of black residents trapped by the storm and it provoked great anger and pain for those who sent it to me.

I sensed that same outrage in the responses of many black people who heard Tucker Carlson call for Vick's execution as punishment for his crimes. It was a contrast made more raw by the recent decision to give relatively light sentences to the men responsible for the death of Oscar Grant. Despite agreeing that Vick's acts were horrendous, somehow Carlson's moral outrage seemed misplaced. It also seemed profoundly racialized. For example, Carlson did not call for the execution of BP executives despite their culpability in the devastation of Gulf wildlife. He did not denounce the Supreme Court for their decision in US v. Stevens (April 2010) which overturned a portion of the 1999 Act Punishing Depictions of Animal Cruelty. After all with this "crush" decision the Court seems to have validated a marketplace for exactly the kinds of crimes Vick was convicted of committing. For many observers, the decision to demonize Vick seems motivated by something more pernicious than concern for animal welfare. It seems to be about race.

It is into this murky racial history that President Obama inadvertently waded this week. Whatever the quality (or lack thereof) of his argument about incarceration and its lifelong effects on those who serve time, I suspect the President could not be heard over the din of emotion, anxiety, and history around race and animals in this country. Last night I found myself similarly unable to articulate the difficult and complex relationships that can make it so difficult to hear one another across this divide. My goal was not to defend Vick nor to condemn him, but to try to understand our very different national reactions to him.

You used the term "that culture?" Could you define "that culture?" I'm not sure what culture you're referring to, and I don't want to make assumptions.

I think she means grew up around dog fighting. Subsequently, the dog fighting was "normalized" and he was desensitized to it. It would make sense then that he would have no remorse. (however, I think that some personality types would never become accustomed to this...especially since the message from the larger culture is that this is not acceptable behavior...so there is a place where a counter message is being presented that could make a difference).

P.S. I actually have no knowledge if Vick grew up around dog fighting...I am assuming he did based on suebee's statement.