Objectification

Self-objectification distinguishes us from our forebears. You might say we're in an era of hyper-self-objectification (someone probably has). Social media gives anyone the opportunity to package and broadcast oneself as a crafted image, to imagine themselves as a work of art.

Popular makeup and hair for women has gone from the attempt to fake youth to unmasked artifice--it doesn't matter if you notice it; you're supposed to notice it and it's supposed to convey a message--not about sexual availability entirely or even mostly but about identity, signalling aspirational class and aesthetic sensibility, philosophical, even political affiliation--blue hair.

The average woman long ago adopted open sexual objectification, what used to be reserved for the disreputable (it is said lipstick originated among ancient Egyptian prostitutes, not to recreate youthful lips but to mimic the vagina and advertising fellatio), again, as distinct from its role in enhancing sexual attractiveness.

Broadly the trend toward popular self-objectification it goes well beyond sexual signalling, is often asexual or even ironic, parodying sexuality or sexual vigor.

What remains is the vanity, the vanity of the individual indulging the experience of objectification, which is not necessarily dehumanizing, or, the fact is "dehumanization", literally interpreted, isn't necessarily unpleasant. The high-concept fashion adopted by the serious (or obsessive) self-objectifier is an attempt to transcend physicality and biology, to de-humanize.

I thought to contrast "dehumanization" with "commodification", with the latter as a negative, but it occurs to me it that people are enthusiastically commodifying themselves, and in a wold of money worship the only concern is to be too cheaply priced a commodity--which doesn't mean people aren't selling themselves cheap. Self-commodification, quite literally, is widespread. Online an attractive woman can package and sell her image to men she never has to see. She's taken the sex out of prostitution; indeed, she seems to have transferred the degradation in the sexual transaction to the John, who is legion, anonymous and sexually frustrated.

Nobody is supposed to believe the thick eyebrows presently in vogue; they're taken up like a style of dress, off the rack. Likewise sexually enticing but outlandish effects--thick eyeliner framing rather than accentuating the eyes, ridiculously long lashes; sharp-angled effects in hair and makeup mimic the mechanical, the designed object or, I like to think, the palette, which is how the individual sees himself.

The world champion objectifiers of women are of course drag performers. Naturally the trans movement, which seeks a political identity for pathological self-objectifiers, places them in the forefront. The feminists are right about one thing: men tend to objectify more than women. What they won't or can't see is that, naturally, women seek out this very objectification--and who do they go to? Gay aesthetes. Men. No one objectifies women more than fashion designers.

The enthusiastic adoption of objectification is changing the way we live. Now the humblest specimen can find someone who will objectify her--and it is far more often her. Notable however how many men seek it now too--trans men are the biggest self-objectification whores on the planet, turning the same masculine tendency toward objectification upon themselves, belying the feminist notion it's inherently degrading. It is the highest honor.

That doesn't mean it doesn't cause trouble for women. It's dangerous. To be honored in this way can be fatal. The feminists are wrong here as they are everywhere else primarily in assigning to biologically-determined human behavior a socially constructed origin. As if the guys decided to play this trick on them one day--but of course the whole silly idea of a "patriarchy" existing as a social construct or pathology has this problem of origins. Patriarchy was born of primitive necessity, a necessity we haven't really shed, despite conventional wisdom.

The way women live now contradicts feminist theory identifying the objectification of women with misogyny.

Women seek out objectification--and they aren't alone. The profusion of self-objectification through media is human nature meeting the open-ended indulgence of capitalist technology. Indulging vanity is Who We Are now.

No Takes Night Stream

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Night Stream

New York Times op ed features comedy bit based on racial slur:



Fatal Type II error.

Another example of the "Dead Becky" phenomenon or what happens when you don't call 911 on suspicious, dangerous blacks—the 2008 murder of Anne Pressly by Curtis Lavelle Vance.

Pressly was a news anchor for KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was raped, tortured, and murdered in her Little Rock home.

Here's what Nicholas Stix wrote about it here on VDARE.com in 2009:

Lori Garner, a personal trainer at the Pro Fitness club in Pressly's Heights neighborhood, reported seeing a man whom she and a client are now sure was Vance stalking the gym three times during the pre-dawn hours. Twice, Garner was accompanied by the client. The last time, in September, the man was crouching outside of the gym exposing himself. But they never called the police.
If the reports are true and the charges hold up, my conclusion is that Curtis Lavelle Vance apparently is only interested in raping and murdering white women, with robbery an afterthought.

In an earlier time, such bravado on the part of black felons in white neighborhoods was the exception. But after some 45 years of authorities and the MSM terrorizing whites in the name of “civil rights,” it is the rule. No matter how many white females are raped and/or murdered, whites fear being treated like "racists” by police and reporters if they demand action against black strangers acting suspiciously in neighborhoods where they have no legitimate business

Does biting your tongue out of political correctness count as a Type II error? It clearly isn't the same as someone making an objective call and getting it wrong. It's compelled from without. The inner slap of self-regulating non-racists is a result of deliberate social conditioning.
It's not enough for the Current Year though. The BBQ Becky campaign seeks to intimidate whites outright into not calling the police ever on blacks. It's the outer slap.

I think we need a Type III error. An objective judgement finds a threat--real or not--but is superceded by the "inner slap" of conditioned masochism or the outer slap, the threat (there's that word again) of sanction for getting it wrong. You could be the next BBQ Becky. Or, maybe putting down the phone is itself a risk assessment--of the risk of social sanction. That certainly is the intention of the BBQ Becky cultural campaign--which has to be viewed alongside the real threat of violence evidenced in interracial crime statistics. On one end whites are criminally trangressed upon the more they come into contact with blacks, at the other political and cultural action seeks to limit what they can do about it.
That's why I say BLM and offshoots like this are sinister.

Associated Press:

The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was angered when he learned he had to undergo security screening between flights on the morning of the suicide attacks, a former U.S. Airways ticket agent says. 

Michael Tuohey of Scarborough said he was suspicious of Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day. 

Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them. 

“I said to myself, ’If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.”

Error Prone

Black Lives Matter, by fabricating a crisis of racist police brutality, seeks to shield blacks from the law at the same time a true crisis of black criminality grinds on. To the extent it succeeds people will die.
Black street violence is the sword, political agitation is the shield. This is revealed in its silly but sinister offshoot, the "BBQ Becky" fad, fabricating a national crisis out of a handful of anecdotes of white people calling the police on harmless blacks. The New York Times:

The phenomenon of white people harassing African-Americans going about their day is nothing new, but with the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, everyone can now see how these injustices are played out and lead to anxiety for and material harm to people of color. And this problem is bigger than a few unreasonable white people. Racist stereotypes are baked into our society.    

Has someone called the cops on you when you were doing nothing wrong? Email your story or video to The New York Times Opinion Video team at 844WYTFEAR@nytimes.com. Below is a list of 39 known instances just this year when someone called the police to complain about black people doing everyday activities:

Steve Sailer:

After all, these kinds of false-alarm Type I errors—false-positive calls to the cops to investigate a person who turns out to be law-abiding—happen countless times per day in this vast country of ours. So do Type II errors: false negatives of failing to alert the police in cases of a genuine lawbreaker. 

Thirty-nine false positives in a country of 320 million or so is nothing, of course. But as Sailer points out

Our ability to think statistically about the trade-off between Type I and Type II errors seems to go on the fritz when race is involved. When the participants are all white, everybody more or less intuits that if you want the cops to question fewer innocent people (fewer Type I errors), you’ll have to put up with more guilty ones committing more crimes (more Type II errors), and vice versa.

You have to wonder to what extent the necessity to think illogically about race infects our ability to think logically in general.

But the real crime of course is the lives lost to Type II errors, failure to recognize a real threat. Type II errors are encouraged, practically demanded.

So now we have what Nancy Pelosi might call Collateral Damage Cathy. The white person who is victimized because he failed to respond to a threat from a black person. How much you want to bet that number's a little higher than the Times' roll of hurt feelings?

Another example of the "Dead Becky" phenomenon or what happens when you don't call 911 on suspicious, dangerous blacks—the 2008 murder of Anne Pressly by Curtis Lavelle Vance. 

Pressly was a news anchor for KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was raped, tortured, and murdered in her Little Rock home. Here's what Nicholas Stix wrote about it here on VDARE.com in 2009: 

Lori Garner, a personal trainer at the Pro Fitness club in Pressly's Heights neighborhood, reported seeing a man whom she and a client are now sure was Vance stalking the gym three times during the pre-dawn hours. Twice, Garner was accompanied by the client. The last time, in September, the man was crouching outside of the gym exposing himself. But they never called the police.

There is an unquantified toll in white lives sacrificed to forced desegregation and forced desensitization.

But the single most fatal case of political correctness overriding the survival instinct comes from 9/11

Michael Tuohey of Scarborough said he was suspicious of Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day.  

Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them. “I said to myself, ’If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’  

Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed. 

Consider we live in a country where it's morally reprehensible to be suspicious of a black person but missing the chance to stop a 9/11 terrorist because you didn't want to be racist is entirely understandable.

Back to the unlucky ticket agent:

A few weeks later, another investigator showed him a large number of pictures and asked him to point out the men he had waited on that day. “I went right to Atta,” Tuohey said. “It’s like the skull on a poison bottle. There’s no mistaking that face.”

There may be no mistaking it, but be warned: there will be absolutely no noticing it!

Nightstream

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Triggering Point

"Excuse me. Is your baby a boy or a girl?"

Despite having prepared for this for nine months, it came as a shock. My child was being gendered--and by a cis-hetero white male.

I collected myself, realizing we could be in danger. Cradling ____ protectively in my arms I turned away from the assailant's penetrating gaze.

"Ze hasn't assigned zirself a gender."

He stared, confused. So confident in his privilege that he'd never been challenged before when engaging in gender-aggression; he didn't even know how to recognize it.

"Well," he said after a pause, "ze sure is cute."

Rage and terror vied in my breast.

"That's look-ist." I could barely get out the words. Again, the look of confusion, again the confident privilege unable to navigate a world in which white cis-hetero normativity is not centralized. And again the pause, as he formulated a new line of assault.

"What bright eyes! Looks like a smart little critter!"

The elevator doors opened, finally. He looked at me, expectantly, concealing his privileged aggression under that smug mask of goodwill. I stepped out and turned, not knowing what I would say but knowing I had to say something.

"Well, ze has shown signs of giftedness..."

Prose Story

I lost a dog that spring.

I don't remember the year. The decade was the seventies, I think; could have been as late as 1981. The dog I'd picked up years before at the riverbed. A gap-toothed Eurasian kid, I don't remember his name, and I found him as a stray. We decided to walk in opposite directions. The dog followed me, and so I adopted him.

We lost him in the same place, Melody and I, when he went into the water during a heavy rain. He came close to the edge, on the wet concrete bank, sliding in with a little wisk and like that he was submerged and gone. So quick and mild was it we sat there a long moment, processing, before Melody let out a little whimper. Easy come easy go.

I don't recall what happened next.

I don't recall her face. Can't conjure it. I remember her sweatshirt; off-white with a stylized minimalist sketch of a fly's head in thick black and red contours, like a logo. I can picture it clearly still; it was the night we met. For some reason she fell for me, I never understood why. She was safe; I was young and harmless, so shy there might as well have been a force field around her.

By the end of the summer she was in the hands of an older boy and the rest is her own little history. I wonder if she recalls me ever, sometimes. Or, more likely perhaps, she recalls some detail of her own, serving as her shirt serves for me, an indication of the vastness of the thing that seared it there in memory, first love, of its superiority to its puny players, to us, its mere material.

Soviet Stream

MyYouTube channel.
A couple of weeks ago I joked social media platforms would soon start limiting what you can type into their pane. When writing "it's okay to be white", say, you might find the last word simply won't post.

Well they're way ahead of me, of course. After last week's mysterious YouTube outage, users claim the site is now auto-censoring chat

Last night for about an hour, YouTube went dark. The popular video and streaming site came back up, but a number of users quickly discovered the platform run by Google released a brand new auto-censor for live streams.

During The Gator Gamer’s stream, users discovered just how powerful YouTube’s new censor bot was. Many believe the new censor bot was tied to YouTube’s crash yesterday.

Mild Monday

Claire Khaw and Ecce Lux join me.

My Youtube channel.

Portlando-Tyranny

Whose streets, Portland? Anarchists in control.
Travis Hund plays some music and Judas Star Chai visits. My Youtube channel.

A video of a black anti-police protester (who wouldn't have looked out of place in a newsreel about the Cultural Revolution; I'm not sure he wasn't deliberately adopting a Mao aesthetic) directing traffic in downtown Portland (as a Portland motorcycle cop watches from down the street) gives the impression the municipal government has been overthrown and a people's republic declared. It hasn't; cue obligatory joke about how you wouldn't be able to tell.



Like the bizarre middle-aged white man shouting anti-white epithets with a stranger-to-reason demeanor, protesters trying to take over the streets is par for the course here. Protesters have blocked traffic, City Hall and the Justice Center (the "Injustice Center"), a light rail train and of course an ICE office with tacit approval from the city, when Portland police refused to respond to the office's 911 calls for help and let the siege go on for a couple of months before shutting down the mini-shantytown that had been allowed to develop.

Last Saturday's street-blocking rally was the second protesting the fatal shooting of a black male.

Demonstrators blocked a section of a downtown Portland street for hours Monday where a 27-year-old man was fatally shot by police, calling for answers on why officers killed him.

About 150 people gathered near Southwest 4th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street for a vigil in memory of Patrick Kimmons. Yellow caution tape that ran from a public parking lot to a strip club blocked the street from traffic. A memorial with signs, pictures of Kimmons and candles lined the sidewalk just outside the parking lot.

A grand jury declined to indict the officers. The recent shooting appears to be gang-related

Central Precinct Sgt. Garry Britt and Officer Jeffrey Livingston were patrolling the downtown area early Sunday when a shooting occurred near Southwest Third Avenue and Harvey Milk Street (formerly Stark) and injured two people. 

This is where the strip clubs are.

Britt and Livingston at some point encountered Kimmons and fired at him. He later died at a hospital, police said. One gun was found near Kimmons and other guns were found by police in the area, according to police. Two other men suffering from gunshot wounds were taken to a hospital in private vehicles and are expected to survive.

Kimmons was spotted by rival gangbangers and exchanged gunfire with them, allegedly.

Investigators found five guns at the scene of the shooting, including some discovered in or around cars searched in the lot. It's not clear who owned the guns. 

A witness described the shooting differently than police sources. 

Ayan Aden said she was stopped early Sunday in a public parking lot near Southwest Fourth Avenue and Harvey Milk Street with her boyfriend when she heard yelling. Aden said she and her boyfriend saw Kimmons run from Fourth Avenue through the parking lot, drop a gun near the car she was in and keep running.
Aden said she heard who she thought were officers yell "stop," twice and then open fire immediately after. She said her boyfriend told her to duck down once the gunfire began. Two bullets hit the passenger side of the car, but neither of them were hit.
Aden said she and her boyfriend were ordered to remain in the car by police for several hours and were questioned if they knew Kimmons because the gun was near their car. She said they didn't know him. She said she also didn't know how many shots were fired.
"The shooting was excessive," said Aden, 18, at the vigil. "He was clearly running away and threw the gun away."

The fleeing felon rule allowing this was limited in scope in 1985 but still appears to stand in extreme cases:

A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead...however...Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. 

link text

Trauma Queen

In emotional intensity the left's reaction to their loss in the Kavanaugh fight rivalled their reaction to Trump's win. All this irrational behavior is perfectly logical. Nothing Trump has done so far has had the consequence of this, taking the supreme court away from the left for the next generation.
They were right to be desperate; that's why a few Democratic leaders thought it necessary to cultivate and unleash a moral panic among the many.
 It's that good. This could make the difference in our salvation. Sorry, but hype is in the air.

The Resistance now makes every contest or issue a proxy battle in the Trump War. Soon, subjects more broadly, perhaps. It would be in keeping with the Soviet-esque nature of the left now, if there was something like an anti-Trump theory of the brain.

Via Steve Sailer, the Washington Post health section:

The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh 

The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans. 

President Trump explicitly endorsed the theory Saturday, shortly after Brett M. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed as a Supreme Court judge, telling reporters he was “100 percent” sure Ford accused Kavanaugh in error. 

In days leading up to the confirmation vote, the same notion was implicit in the rationale of every senator who attempted to defend Kavanaugh without wholly dismissing Ford’s accusations — her vivid testimony that he pinned her to a bed and tried to rape her when they were teens in the 1980s: 

“I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life,” said Susan Collins (R-Maine), who gave Kavanaugh his crucial 50th vote. 

“Something happened to Dr. Ford; I don’t believe the facts show it was Brett Kavanaugh," said Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the only Democrat to support the nominee. 

“That would get me off the hook of having to make a hard decision,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of Kavanaugh’s most loyal defenders. “I don’t know if this is a case of mistaken identity.” 

It’s easy to forget that less than three weeks ago, when the mistaken-identity theory was first formulated, it was so widely ridiculed that a pundit who advanced it on Twitter subsequently apologized and offered to resign from his job. But for many cognitive researchers who study how memories actually form during traumatic events, the theory never stopped sounding ridiculous. 

A plot to hang the assault on a Kavanaugh look-alike capitulated to the Believe Women mood by offering it a live body where the senators had only ghosts, but no one was willing to challenge Ford's testimony directly. A defeatist policy of half-measure that was teetering until Trump "mocked" her recollection.

But the fact is she was credible enough in the eyes of many (and I genuinely care less about it than I care about restoring the nation, so my eyesight is not keen here) and it isn't inconceivable she wouldn't remember everything.

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” said Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level."

I believe that. Furthermore, a fifteen year-old girl at a party with older kids is acutely aware of who's who. Kavanaugh would have been a popular older boy in the pecking order that dominated her life.
The idea she misidentified him is not credible.

I think people felt compelled to placate the mob by recognizing her status as Survivor, daring not to challenge it.

“This story [of mistaken identity] that’s being offered here is a way of both trying to validate sexual assault and not deny it — which is a lovely change — but at the same time create a narrative that Kavanaugh couldn’t have been the person who did it," he said. "That’s just not consistent with memory research on misidentification.”

My suspicion is something did happen, but not an attempted rape. That's how you get two credible sounding people in contradiction. The gaps in Ford's memory are consistent with something else: an event that wasn't traumatic--not in the sense rape is.

Asked last week if she could have mistaken her attacker, Ford testified that she is “100 percent” certain it was Kavanaugh. She vividly recalled other details of the night — the single beer she drank at the party, music in the bedroom she was pushed into, boys laughing as she was pinned to a bed — while having no memory of how she arrived or got home.

Trump has mocked her story because of these gaps, but it’s perfectly consistent with the science of traumatic memory formation.

Key here is "perfectly consistent with", which doesn't mean it's typical or common. It's hard to imagine, for instance, not remembering the aftermath of trauma; events leading up to may fade, but you tend to remember things like the drive home after, say, an assault.

Things that are memorable but not traumatic (they can nonetheless be very negative) are things for which you don't remember surrounding detail--like the time that senior tried to feel you up against your will thirty-some odd years ago n high school. No, it wasn't traumatic. We weren't crazy in the eighties.

But it wasn't nothing either, and if something from your past becomes suddenly relevant (even, remunerative), and even a means by which the country might be saved from Trump...

Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.

That's what's missing here--the actual trauma.

Salt Stream

Kavanaugh salts the earth. Claire Khaw, Ecce Lux and Jonathan Pohl join.

Subscribe to my channel for semi-regular livestreams at around 12:30 in the afternoon, Pacific Time, all week.

Conquest and Consequence

It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of those stolid and downtrodden Indians who one sees today, peddling their rude wares in the marketplace of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is scarcely one among them above the rank of a laborer; and during the last three centuries few indeed have emerged from the abject condition to which the Conquest reduced them.

The sudden fall of an entire race is an event so rare in history that one seeks for explanations. It may be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving only the peasants who had already been serfs under their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to believe that the tremendous catastrophe which befell them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, incomparably superior in energy and knowledge, completely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the self respect of the individuals who composed it.  

--South America, James Bryce

It all sounds so familiar, except the part about the conquerors' superior intelligence and energy, but that just adds to our present humiliation--deemed inferior to foreigners morally, by virtue of their material inferiority.

Pozland Dispatch

Protests follow closely upon police shootings in Portland.

Demonstrators blocked a section of a downtown Portland street for hours Monday where a 27-year-old man was fatally shot by police, calling for answers on why officers killed him.

About 150 people gathered near Southwest 4th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street for a vigil in memory of Patrick Kimmons. Yellow caution tape that ran from a public parking lot to a strip club blocked the street from traffic. A memorial with signs, pictures of Kimmons and candles lined the sidewalk just outside the parking lot.

Newly renamed Harvey Milk Street is christened with diversity. Kimmons is the third police shooting fatality in Portland this year.

John Elfritz was  white guy having a psychotic episode and armed with a knife when police shot and killed him inside a homeless shelter. Controversy followed.
In 2012 Eric Holder's Justice Department sued the city of Portland for excessive use of force against mentally ill suspects. The city eagerly settled, instituting rules on police engagement with the mentally ill.

Sarah Michell Brown was a burglary suspect wounded in an exchange of gunfire with police, and one bad-assed Becky apparently, but as such of no interest. Tearfully recounting high school pranks before Congress is heroic, squaring off against armed men, meh...

Those are the only other two listed on the Portland Police Bureau's site. Portland State University police shot and killed a black man after his legally concealed gun fell onto the sidewalk in the middle of a melee. PSU cops have only been armed since 2014 and a permanent campaign to disarm them is enlivened.

A grand jury declined to indict the officers. The recent shooting appears to be gang-related

Central Precinct Sgt. Garry Britt and Officer Jeffrey Livingston were patrolling the downtown area early Sunday when a shooting occurred near Southwest Third Avenue and Harvey Milk Street (formerly Stark) and injured two people. 

This is where the strip clubs are.

Britt and Livingston at some point encountered Kimmons and fired at him. He later died at a hospital, police said. One gun was found near Kimmons and other guns were found by police in the area, according to police. Two other men suffering from gunshot wounds were taken to a hospital in private vehicles and are expected to survive.

Kimmons was spotted by rival gangbangers and exchanged gunfire with them, allegedly.

Police believe they were injured before officers arrived. Police haven't said what prompted the shooting that drew officers to the scene. They also have not confirmed how many shots were fired or where Kimmons was hit. Surveillance video in the area is being reviewed by investigators. 

Police sources told The Oregonian/Oregonlive that Britt and Livingston fired fewer than 10 shots. Britt, who has been with the police bureau for 10 years, and Livingston, with the bureau for one year, encountered Kimmons as he turned toward them holding a gun and fired at him, sources said.

Kimmons' received 15 or 16 wounds most or all to the back, allegedly.

Investigators found five guns at the scene of the shooting, including some discovered in or around cars searched in the lot. It's not clear who owned the guns. 

A witness described the shooting differently than police sources. 

Ayan Aden said she was stopped early Sunday in a public parking lot near Southwest Fourth Avenue and Harvey Milk Street with her boyfriend when she heard yelling. Aden said she and her boyfriend saw Kimmons run from Fourth Avenue through the parking lot, drop a gun near the car she was in and keep running.
Aden said she heard who she thought were officers yell "stop," twice and then open fire immediately after. She said her boyfriend told her to duck down once the gunfire began. Two bullets hit the passenger side of the car, but neither of them were hit.
Aden said she and her boyfriend were ordered to remain in the car by police for several hours and were questioned if they knew Kimmons because the gun was near their car. She said they didn't know him. She said she also didn't know how many shots were fired.
"The shooting was excessive," said Aden, 18, at the vigil. "He was clearly running away and threw the gun away."

That has the ring of honesty. By the way, every one who's seen old movies knows there used to be a time when police shot at fleeing suspects (I'm not entirely sure you had to be armed and dangerous). The fleeing felon rule allowing this was limited in scope in 1985 but still appears to stand in extreme cases:

A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead...however...Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force.