Different Day, Same Shit.

This is what black people have to tolerate... This is what we have to tolerate... pic.twitter.com/db2vv6oD3U

— chamonille (@chamonille) October 1, 2015

Personally, I wouldn't be too bothered by any of this. Like so many others of his ilk, David Cameron's operating on a long-standing global narrative. That narrative requires national leaders to pay lip service to the Holocaust and the plight of the people who were forced to endure it, regardless of their actual sincerity. The global narrative says nothing about acknowledging the tremendous damage slavery has done throughout the world, especially when it concerns one of your former colonial holdings.

Right about now, Cameron's probably wondering why couldn't Jamaica be a good little colony and not trouble the Crown with their nonsense. After all, it did its part by putting an end to what some Yanks called the "peculiar institution":

Speaking to the Caribbean country’s parliament, the prime minister struck a defiant note as he spoke of his pride that Britain had played a part in abolishing the “abhorrent” trade, without highlighting its historic involvement in the transfer of slaves from west Africa and ownership of slaves in the Caribbean.

He called for the two countries to “move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future”.

To wit:

“While there is indeed much to celebrate about our past, it would be wrong to do so while ignoring the most painful aspects of it – a period which should never be forgotten, and from which history has drawn the bitterest of lessons,” Cameron said.

“Slavery was and is abhorrent in all its forms. It has no place whatsoever in any civilised society, and Britain is proud to have eventually led the way in its abolition.

“That the Caribbean has emerged from the long shadow it cast is testament to the resilience and spirit of its people. I acknowledge that these wounds run very deep indeed. But I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future.”

Yours truly has always taken issue with victims being told they should move on and let bygones be bygones. I'd rather let the Jamaican people decide when to let the pain and anguish of slavery and its legacy go. After all, that's something that should be done on their own terms, not when someone else tells them to.

There's a good reason why Cameron and the British government are so eager to push past slavery, whether the Jamaicans are ready to do so or not:

A No 10 spokesman said Cameron told the Jamaican prime minister that the “longstanding position of the United Kingdom is that we do not believe reparations is the right approach”.

Reparations has always been the solid brick wall that stops most attempts at righting both age-old and current wrongs cold in their tracks. While I'm not familiar with the countless losses suffered by the descendants of Jamaica's captive ancestors, I am very much familiar with those suffered by countless black Americans.

The thought of cutting countless checks for past wrongs is something that turns the blood a lot of white Americans a bit chilly. Considering America's zero-sum view of societal spoils, many whites feel that balancing out the scales of justice in the form of reparations would take a sizable sum of the spoils right out of their pockets. In other words, they believe it would personally cost them dearly and further lower their socioeconomic standing. After all, who really wants to see uppity Negros bettering themselves through the spoils that were wrenched out of the hands of hard-working white men and women?

But it's more than that. If the Powers That Be™ were forced to make a concerted effort to recompense those who have suffered most from slavery and all of its aftereffects, including the institutions it created to manage black ambition and extract black wealth, it would likely put the whole idea of America (or Great Britain) as a bastion of liberty and its very principles in question. Such an inward look, let alone an actual acknowledgement or even movement to correct past wrongs, would shake the nation to its core and likely cause a loss of identity and an existential crisis among much of its citizenry. It may even provoke a last-gasp backlash conjured from deep within the very soul of the nation, akin to a demon's final torrent of fury and rage before being finally vanquished once and for all.

For this and other reasons, it's likely that the British people and the Powers That Be™ at 10 Downing Street would rather ignore the monumental debt owed to the Jamaican people and others who've suffered deprivation at the hands of slavery and colonialism and let the gentle erosion of time itself scrub away the debt until it becomes unrecognizable to all. Hence the forgive and forget posture taken by Cameron and countless others.

However, time doesn't heal all wounds. Some wounds tend to fester until they've been properly tended to. Otherwise, the noisome sore becomes the gangrenous tissue that threatens to destroy the patient. So David Cameron and others like him can continue to ignore the issue and hope it goes away on its own, but only to their everlasting peril.

Last time on DDSS, yours truly brought to you a comparison between the criminal trial of Amanda Knox and that of Richard Hinds and James Blackston. Since then, there have been a few developments.

Predictably, Hinds and Blackston were convicted and sentenced to 5 to 10 years and 3 years, respectively. However, Hinds testified that Japanese police officials altered his statement to secure a more ironclad case:

At the Tokyo District Court, Hinds stated that Furlong had repeatedly asked him to put his hand on her neck. He says that he did so, but only used light pressure for periods of 30 seconds, and that’s what he told the Japanese police. Hinds’ lawyer is arguing that his statement was changed, and police wrote that he used pressure for periods of “two or three minutes.”

Do take care to flag and report the unsavory comments left by individuals who are absolutely tumescent over the prospect of a black male being treated at the hands of the Japanese prison system. Right about now, someone somewhere is looking up the katakana for "prison bitch."

Meanwhile, you'd think that Amanda Knox would be somewhere working out a book deal on her harrowing ordeal at the hands of Italian law enforcement while savoring her new-found freedom.

Turns out that freedom might be fleeting, after all:

Amanda Knox said in an emotional interview on Friday that news of the Italian court reinstating her murder conviction in the 2007 killing of her British roommate Meredith Kercher hit her "like a train."

"I did not expect this to happen," Knox told Robin Roberts on "Good Morning America. "I really expected so much better from the Italian justice system. They found me innocent before."

The 26-year-old shared a house in the Italian town of Perugia with Kercher, then 21, who was found partially naked in a pool of blood, her throat slashed.

Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were convicted of the crime in 2009 and had spent four years in prison before their acquittal in 2011.

However, Italy’s highest court overturned the acquittal and ordered a new appeal, saying the first was riddled with “shortcomings, contradictions and inconsistencies.”

Though she was not in the Florence courtroom Thursday when Judge Alessandro Nencini sentenced her to 28 years and six months in prison, more than the 26 years she received at her first trial in 2011, she told Roberts she watched an Italian television station online to hear the verdict.

"I needed to hear it for myself," she said. "My whole family was there and I was listening and I'm the only one who knows Italian and I'm trying to listen and then tell them."

If the conviction's upheld, Knox will likely find herself on a one-way flight back to Italy:

"I will never go willingly back to the place where I ...," she said, pausing. "I'm going to fight this to the very end. It's not right and it's not fair. ... I'm going to do everything I can."

Apparently, Knox's (ex) boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito knew what was up and attempted to book it out of Italy, but wound up being stopped short of the Slovenian and Austrian borders.

It's amazing how circumstances can change in a short amount of time.

Several months back, Amanda Knox was released from prison after her murder conviction was overturned by an Italian appeals court. She was originally convicted of murdering her roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher and served four years of a 26-year sentence prior to her release. The case was largely marked by fascination from an international audience and from most accounts, an amazing amount of overzealousness on the part of the prosecutor.

Some might say that with her being an attractive white American woman who wasn't a communist, union leader or married to a black American, Amanda Knox could afford to gain a certain amount of sympathy and support, even if there was a possibility of her being guilty.

Knox initially placed the blame for the murder on one Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese business owner, in order to escape culpability for the crime. Reminds me of another big case from way back. Rudy Guede was found guilty, but his actual guilt will remain suspect in light of spotty evidence that seems concrete, but still casts a bit of doubt in my mind, IMHO.*

If Knox had been tried for this crime in the U.S., there'd be a possibility of her being found innocent much sooner. Lumumba and Guede may somehow be deemed solely responsible for the crime. In the United States, ethnic backgrounds have a funny way of coloring the way justice is handled.

In a literal contrast, you have 19-year-old Richard Hinds and 23-year-old James Blackston, both accused of murdering 21-year-old Nicola Furlong in her Tokyo hotel room and molesting her friend in a taxi that same night. Needless to say, it's not looking good for either of them at all.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department told ABC News that Hinds has admitted to strangling Furlong, but told investigators he had no intention to kill.

Let's pause briefly here. It helps to know that Japan's justice system works a bit differently from what most Americans see on their own turf. For starters, suspects can be held for a maximum of 23 days before they're actually charged with a crime. Also consider that Japan touts a 99-percent conviction rate, not because they're "that good," but due to most suspects admitting to a crime under duress, whether they actually committed it or not. It's an ongoing problem that's long since caught the attention of the U.N., and other human rights groups.

I wonder if Hinds and Blackston had to sign a form, written exclusively in Japanese, without anyone telling him it was really a confession form.  Dealing with Japanese law enforcement isn't a walk in the park.

Not that they'd end up getting much different treatment back home, but there's always the scant possibility of the justice system working in their favor, provided they're actually innocent of this crime. All we can do is see if the skin color of these two men proves to be as much of an impediment there as it is in these United States.

*"Spotty" was probably the wrong word to use in this instance.

- Greeks are headed to the polls to cast votes that could not only affect their country's future, but also that of the Euro and the European Union. The country is in deep fiscal shit and the biggest issues are the possibility of pulling Greece out of its fiscal death spiral vs. the possibility of setting the country adrift, at the risk of sinking the entire union:

There is no mechanism to kick Greece out of the euro, and the two leading candidates say they have no intention of taking Greece out voluntarily. Greece could be forced to fend for itself if the European Central Bank decides that it is a fool’s errand to keep replenishing Greek banks that have no collateral or credibility. But the bank’s job is to protect the euro, and it has repeatedly argued that contagion from an exit by Greece could outweigh the costs of keeping it afloat.

Historically speaking, inflating its way out of fiscal jams has been Greece's go-to solution, but it doesn't have direct control over the Euro, which leaves that option a non-starter unless they bow out of the union for good and return to the Drachma. In the end, it's up to the European Central Bank, or more pointedly, the Germans, to decide if and how to resolve the financial crisis without putting the rest of the European Union in hock.

- When was the last time you saw a white guy get randomly frisked in Manhattan? Never? So it's understandable that people are a bit miffed over approximately 630,000 black and Hispanic men being stopped and about half that number being given the once-over. Yesterday, Al Sharpton held a 200+ gathering ahead of a planned Father's Day rally against "Stop and Frisk." A similar rally was held days ago by the Staten Island NAACP.

"Stop and Frisk" is a flawed policy that does little to prevent crime but a lot to not only antagonize the community, but also to perpetuate unfounded beliefs about black and Hispanics in regards to criminal activity.

Here's a lovely comment from "jimbo-2648066":

If the good reverend is on one side of an issue, I am automatically on the other.

I bet he'd make a great NYPD officer </sarc>.

- Mitt Romney predicts he will end the Democratic Pennsylvania winning streak. Good luck with that. Although with Tom Corbin at his side, there'd probably be enough Dem. voters kicked off the rolls and enough machines rigged or "malfunctioning" to make that happen. Meanwhile, Ron Paul struggles to show that he's very much still in the game.

- The President has put the brakes on deporting illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children:

Under the new policy, people younger than 30 who came to the United States before the age of 16, pose no criminal or security threat, and were successful students or served in the military can get a two-year deferral from deportation, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

A two-year deferral, and yet Republicans are crying about "unconstitutional overreach" and how this sets the stage for a general amnesty. Yes, let us ignore how the previous president also proposed sweeping changes in how immigration policy was handled.

Remember, today is Father's Day. Try giving your dad something a bit more substantive than a cheap tie and a box of cologne. Ladies, today isn't a good day to press your "baby daddy" about that back child support, either.