Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
Subject: As per the title. Please put comments on racism, systemic racism, and police brutality in the US, along with the public reaction to these phenomena, here.
Note: If you are a racism denialist, please do not post here. This discussion is not intended to debate whether racism exists but why it exists and what to do about it.
Note: If you are a racism denialist, please do not post here. This discussion is not intended to debate whether racism exists but why it exists and what to do about it.
Comments (1911)
Jesus Christ. Everyone could see he was choking the man to death. The cop knew what he was doing.
I'm just wondering because potentially this might be the first time we agree on something.
The Facebook video of the cop kneeling on a man’s neck. The bystanders could see what was going on. The man said he couldn’t breathe. He was already cuffed. So why kneel on his neck? It looks like murder to me.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears.[/quote]
But we most strongly suspect from the most bitter experience that even with published video, even with clear identification, even with a public and international outcry, justice will not be done. And then it will be time for your tears, because without justice there is no nation and no law and no civilisation, and not to hate injustice is to hate the whole of mankind.
"Klobuchar also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she declined to bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself, who shot and killed Wayne Reyes in 2006 and would later go on to shoot more civilians while in uniform."
1) Fuck Amy Klobuchar (and the shithead who's vetting her for VP).
2) Of course that cop has murdered people before. No wonder he was so calm.
3) These issues go from top to bottom and back again - street cop to senator, the whole fucking system is broken.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes.
Quoting StreetlightX
No. Check your sources: from 1999 to 2007 Klobuchar was only the Hennepin County Attorney (prosecutor).
To the broader point - in the real messy world, SLX, so long as 'police killings' are not automatically remanded to the office of the relevant State Attorney General, as former New York State AG Eric Schneiderman had pointed out in 2014 in the wake of the Michael Brown murder, every local prosecutor is compromised by the conflict of interest of having to depend on local police to investigate crimes, provide forensic evidence and testimony to facilitate prosecutions as well as to protect prosecutors from retaliation by criminal defendants. It's naïve, at best, to expect any local prosecutor - whether male or not, white or not - to act otherwise under such compromising conditions. The problem - state governors, Obama & Eric Holder had ignored Schneiderman's diagnosis & proposal; and, still ignored, the problem metastasizes. Understanding the working conditions of current & former local prosecutors like Sen. Klobuchar & Sen. Harris (as San Fran DA, not as California AG) is not the same, however, as excusing their prosecutorial failings; context - I know you know, SLX - matters.
[quote=James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)]The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.[/quote]
We can't breathe, frank. :fire:
You don't really need agent provacateurs when the racist-in-chief is threatening to shoot protesters.
From anyone whose nation became independent by enacting the phrase "Give me liberty or give me death!", admonishments against all violence ring hollow.
You don't get given political freedoms, you have to establish them. This was true in the slave colony revolts, true in America's civil war (to the extent it was about slavery), true in Malcolm X making the less radical policies of MLK acceptable to the establishment by comparison and it's true now. Let's hope their agitation is successful.
The real shame is that the troops and cops will show up to stop democracy at work, and POCs are absolutely civil when you compare that to the structural alienation from justice in which they live and have to cope with. Why, if more of those protesters were inspired by those "American patriots" the founders, they may've been much more violent in their insistence on their right to liberty.
Well, peacefully appealing to the moral sentiments of the ruling aristocracy who have made America a systematically racist shithole clearly isn't going to work. How to effectively apply other forms of pressure is an extremely difficult question. But I agree looters should be shot. Let's start with the political and financial establishment who loot the country daily both morally and materially.
I'm asking, because for the moment I have the luxury. Of course it doesn't invalidate anyone's action. But protests get infiltrated and manipulated in this country and I doubt the US authorities have been slow to learn from the experts. I'm asking, because the original murder looks set to be lost in the media frenzy and state troopers and looting and burning hysteria. I'm asking because there are so many calls on my righteous indignation these days, I think I'm not seeing the genocide for the murders.
Peaceful protesting is helpful. I don't see how violence helps anything.
Destroying the property of a multibillion dollar company that stole employee wages is hardly "violence"
And when "peaceful protesting" isn't helpful? - such as when police antagonize peaceful protesters? and a community's demands for justice are either completely ignored or bureaucratically slow-walked?
How does not violating the lives and livelihoods of those HAVES (and their agents) who exploit and violate the lives and livelihoods of the HAVE-NOTS "help anything"?
[quote=Frederick Douglass]Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.[/quote]
Gandhi, MLK Jr, Mandela et al taught that "peaceful" non-violence is only ever a tactic.
What kind of revolution are we talking about now? The HAVES are of every race. So are the HAVE-NOTS.
You focus on strategy: which is the most effective. I focus on what my actions turn me into. Your concerns are not more important than mine.
Quoting 180 Proof
Ok. What is it you want to see happen? I want to know.
May this fucker burn in hell, and all his cop buddies along with him.
More American fascism.
That was my first thought as well. For all the American wringing about "Chynah", their police state is no less effective.
Quoting Benkei
I agree but I suspect 3rd is the pragmatic choice. There's a chance he might be able to weasel his way out of 2nd, but 3rd is more likely to stick, even if any human being with a pulse would probably call it 2nd. They gotta play the justice system, not the crime.
But seriously, most people don't struggle against police officers as that will just escalate violence. And if you're black, probably doubly so. So we have a man who isn't struggling anymore but complaining about his breathing.
Change the imagery for a moment where the police officer isn't choking him with a knee but both his hands. For 4 minutes. And the other guy just stands there while he's doing it.
To be honest, in the Netherlands you can probably go for 1st degree as those 4 minutes gave him time to reconsider, sufficient time for it to be considered premeditated according to our court cases.
We had a case someone who was fighting stepped away, drew a knife and then killed his opponent. The fact he broke away to reach for a deadlier weapon made it premeditated according to the courts as it allowed a moment for reflection.
That's super interesting. I'm not well versed on these issues, but I wonder if the trade off here is thay prosecutors and can throw everything at the wall just to make sure something sticks. Not that that wouldn't be appropriate in this case.
Still this is all academic. Charging is one thing. Getting his ass thrown to the actual dogs is another. The US has a long and storied history of letting [s]killer[/s] cops off the hook at trial. Its hard to imagine that they'd do that here, but - Rodney King.
I should say: one disanalogy with HK is that American protestors here look eminantly capable and willing to actually shoot back at their oppressors. There are already videos of cops getting fucked up circulating out there. HK managed to keep it peaceful for years. Americans, wretched creatures as they are, are baying for blood. They might get it.
Yesterday it was the CNN crew being arrested, now this. Who trains these cops?
Even after an ambulance was called, code 2 raised to 3, after bystanders warned he was unresponsive, that asshole still kept his knee on George in total for over 8 minutes. That's premeditated in my book, especially where it concerns someone who's supposed to be trained in the use of force. 3rd degree charges are a slap on the wrist.
Another thing that I noticed is the number of police involved. There's an escalation that doesn't seem warranted by the circumstances.
I'm not going to talk about Twitter anymore. It's shameful.
Bunch of black guys protect a cop at a protest
How to be a decent human being
Even a Fox commentator thinks 2nd is more appropriate.
It was not only murder in the second degree, Floyd was tortured to death in what must be considered a hate crime. The third-degree murder charge is a farce. Essentially the minimum that those in charge could get away with bringing forward. It's all about protecting the officers over there. Anything short of Chauvin's head on a stick is a travesty, but he'll probably get away with 10-15 years.
I start here, where I live, tonight, with this comrade's plea for sober, critical, angry praxis:
https://youtu.be/FKc1o5mJVnQ
:up:
George Floyd
"the canons are falling
one by one"
The number of incidents with reporters surprises me. Is this just a result of the type of reporting? For instance, does HK police perpetrate similar levels of violence against reporters, accidental or not?
[tweet]https://twitter.com/tkerssen/status/1266921821653385225[/tweet]
Rioters Ruin Their Chances Of Working For $6 An Hour With No Healthcare By Destroying Target
Yeah, keep punching up. The CEO of Target and the board of directors will really get the message now. Meanwhile, you've got all the (presumably lower or lower middle class) entry-level target workers out of a job and the people of the community have one less place to shop and will likely need to travel further now and possibly pay more elsewhere. But we showed the rich!
You do realize target is made up of individuals, right? And that many of those individuals are the front-line, entry level workers who likely live paycheck to paycheck or near to it and are now out of work? And you do realize that consumers may need to pay more for goods now? But none of this matters to you, we need to burn the corporations now. It's just a matter of principle, I get it.
I don't see where you're going with this.
Go back and read my post above the Target one.
Who do you think gets hired for these jobs? It's entry level workers with likely very few other options. Our unemployment rate is absurdly high and you seem to have no problem adding to it as long as it's minimum wage jobs or lower wage jobs.... it's like impossible to reason with you because you just don't care about these individuals who are out of work now. You're just hyper focused on trying to hurt the elite.
And you think this is because what? Because people burned down a Target? You think that's why people have 'few other options'?
And there's nothing reasonable about "'there are good people on both sides" centrists. If I could pick either fascists or centrists to be all collectively drowned at sea, I'd go with centrists, because at least then everyone would know who the enemy is - and just how impossibly weak they are without the support of unprincipled "both sides" charlatans.
...because many of them are sales associates at a target. have you ever worked as a sales associate in retail? it's an entry level job.
In any case no one is really getting hired right now. They likely out of work because their workplace was destroyed. There are consequences for actions. Delivery companies which may have been already struggling now have one less customer.
nice to know that i'm talking to a reasonable person here.
My God, you really gonna miss the point that badly and make me spell it out for you? No, it's because the society you live in is so absurdly, supremely shit, that the loss of a couple of minimum wage jobs - which contribute to keeping an underclass which is murdered with impunity in place - can result in communal hurt. There are 'few other options' because America is a systemically shit place, and not because some people - angry over the public execution of a black man, one of hundreds, for whom non-violent protest has been entirely ineffective, and of which you apparently have barely anything to say - burned down a fucking Target.
And once more just because I know certain people are slow to clue in: if the loss of a Target is going to have such apparently catastrophic effects, then the loss of that Target isn't - has never been - the problem.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Yeah, not an unprincipled git.
It's a wonder that more Targets are not brunt to the ground.
there are 'few other options' for entry level worker because a) they don't have many skills or certifications and b) we're in the year of coronavirus which has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism.
but congratulations on putting more of this country's lower skilled, entry level, and vulnerable population out of work. who cares if they have one less source of income? that's their problem to deal with now - not yours or mine. you really stuck it to the man here. racial equality has been solved and the CEO of target now supports afro-socialism and dissolving the police force.
Go put more lower wage workers out of jobs by destroying their workplaces, they can always go loot another store. You're really standing up well for civilization here. Stickin' it to the man.
Y'know what? Worth addressing this - the poor in America don't have many skills or certifications - nothing to do with capitalism? Yeah make another joke. A year of COVID in which the ruling class have deemed it more important for service workers to be out there and die than wait a while and keep the shops closed for the sake of 'the economy' - thus ensuring its effects are prolonged and made worse? The most powerful nation of Earth having the worst response to it? - nothing to do with capitalism? Make another joke. Billionaire wealth soared during COVID, and you think the loss of a Target is the issue? Corporations looted more than $500 billion of the public purse while individuals got a $1200 check, and capitalism isn't the issue? Tell me another kneeslapper, comedian.
I never said it was THE issue, I'm saying it's AN issue.
But then again, it's not an issue for you or me. We haven't been put out of work because our workplace has been destroyed. We aren't responsible for feeding their child or paying their bills - that's their own problem to deal with. Maybe in your race to revolutionize the system and destroy capitalism try not stepping on the necks of some of America's most vulnerable workers by making their situation even worse than it already is.
No, that's the metaphor I'm going to use to towards who are burning down stores and assaulting business owners who try to defend their stores. The protests themselves are fine and warranted.
And the answer is not overwhelming evidence, peaceful protest, reasoned argument, or any of the other wonderful things that the mayor and the governor have praised, such as 'obeying the curfew'. It takes a nationwide riot.
So well done to the rioters, without you, this would just have been another obvious miscarriage of justice that decent people shook their heads at and then forgot to do anything about. There's nothing like a riot for getting things done. Don't calm down.
What would really get results is hitting big corporate donors, so they might buy some better politicians. In what way is another question. Anyway, yes, playing nice with folks who are stepping on your face (or neck) isn't going to get you anywhere.
Oh no people won't be able to shop why won't these protesters think of the consumer??? :groan: :cry:
You can focus on the 'systemic' part if you like. There is no other country in the developed world, for example, where a minority are routinely brutalised and murdered by police and where it is so hard to bring the perpetrators to justice. Why? And what to do about it? What is a justified response?
"Rioting is not senseless destruction; on the contrary, it is often (even without explicit intention) a deeply political challenge to property and white supremacy —two concepts intractably entwined in this former slaveholder republic. Only when rendered in the language of capital are the acts of smashing chain store and cop car windows sufficient to see a protest deemed “violent”; but this is the media lingua franca. ...If the public has more concern for the well-being of people than of property, as I hope they do, consternation about looting should pale in comparison to anger at police violence. Both liberals and conservatives decry looting as opportunistic, but I’m not sure opportunism is always such a bad thing, especially for individuals and communities for whom opportunity rarely comes knocking.
To tell a furious community that their riotous actions are counterproductive patronizes the very groups who know too well that “acceptable channels” of political engagement have failed, again and again, to deliver dignity and justice to black life. Further, it ignores, as Osterweil notes, that major riots (and the threat of more) during the civil rights era helped force JFK’s hand in calling for historic legislation: “To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-nonviolent and nonviolent action is spurious at best.”
I see. The phrase "systemic racism" has conspiracy theory written all over it. Can you imagine the level of intrigue necessary for such to be true?
Ah, no, I can imagine the level of intrigue necessary for imagining it's not true in the US today though. It simply means institutional racism, such as the police force treating black people and other minorities less favourably than white people. That's undeniable.
:up: Just downloaded Violence: Humans in Dark Times by Lennard and Brad Evans.
Quoting 180 Proof
I certainly hope so. Indeed I hope for a revolution. But I don't have enough breath to hold at the moment for pandemic reasons.
You can argue that for a Target, but those aren't the only buildings being looted and burnt. It's harder to make that case for locally owned. I think it's better to ask the people who have to live with the aftermath whether they think it's an effective strategy.
Burning precincts and cop cars should be enough to get everyone's attention. No need to destroy the rest of the community.
This is incredible dark humor :sweat:
If you want to treat police like they're all monsters I could just take the other side and treat the protesters like they're all murdering business owners, looting stores, and assaulting police officers and civilians. They've got assaults on camera.... if you want to play it that way we can play it that way.
Why not just make it simple and condemn police brutality while also condemning lawless rioting?
You don't get to decide what is and is not enough from your high chair.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You could, but then you'd be an complete fucking idiot.
Because they want a socialist revolution.
You don't live there, so you don't get to decide either.
Because police brutality is directed at people and "lawless rioting" is directed at property and guess which one I care about
Some of that property is people's livelihoods. Nice of you not to care. Why not just focus on the police?
Scorched Earth is a venerable military tactic, of proven effectiveness.
It's also an ends justify the means. It would be better if the human race didn't use that tactic.
Would you like it if you spent years saving up to start your own business and establish your own source of income only to see it burned down by rioters? This is what happened to a bar that was owned by a black fireman who spent his life saving up for it. People are out of work now due to their workplaces being destroyed and communities are being destroyed by these rioters.
Says who? "The rest of the community" needs to be threatened enough to change those laws & policies which permit, aide & abet domestic terrorism by police and self-deputized, rightwing, "stand your ground" vigilantes. History decisively demonstrates that the status quo hasn't ever changed without either violent insurrection or the credible threat of loss of their lives & livelihoods - which one is needed this time will be, as always, up to "the rest of the community" sooner or later.
That sums it up for me and why most of the objections to what's happening are ill-founded. In a situation where there is no justice, there can be no legitimate appeal to some neutral foundation of law. The law itself and its enforcers are agents of violence, both overt and systemic. The system that allows Target to exploit workers by paying them less than a living wage (half the minimum wage of most western European countries) is far more nefarious than anything a few rioters can do to their physical property. In fact, there is a good argument to be made that looting such businesses is fair reappropriation if not full recompense for the looting they've done of the labour of those under their control. (And with no good alternative options provided so will it remain).
So, regardless of specific rights and wrongs, the imposition of a skewed perspective that makes the perpetrators of major systemic violence into victims where only minor instances of localised violence forms the 'crime' against them turns the conversation into a worthless back and forth where the forest is missed for the trees. Yes, some of the localised violence is uncalled for and counterproductive and even carried out for completely the wrong reasons but that does not negate the justification for fighting back and fighting back hard against a system that wants its victims forever on their knees feeding its greed and cruelty.
:up:
Quoting TheMadFool
No, that's not the million-dollar question. And if you have nothing intelligent and on-topic to say, please exit the discussion now. Thank you.
Not MLK or Gandhi.
Pointing out that some bad things have been done by the protesters is fine as far as it goes. But I presume if police were torturing members of your community to death in broad daylight some of you might take offence and behave "badly" too. Such is human nature. But the more important question to focus on is how do we get the police (and others) in the US to stop feeling like they have a licence to brutalize and mistreat minorities (and the poor and homeless, I might add). Not focusing on that makes it look like you're not interested in what's significant here.
Another take on the validity of this uprising, from the mayor of Atlanta:
You mean like all the talk about capitalism? That's a separate issue from police racism and brutality, and yet certain revolutionaries want to make it about that.
This is my post. It's obviously primarily about racism and brutality.
Quoting Baden
But again, you seem to be here just to complain about property loss. Got anything else to say?
Yeah, I don't think a socialist overthrow of capital is going to solve the problem of racism. A nation-wide reform of police departments from top to bottom is a good start, though.
Cops with prior incidents need to be reviewed and fired or charged as necessary. There needs to be better and longer training in de=escalation. And the psychopathic power hungry ones need to be weeded out of the hiring process.
Also, further investigation into white supremacy groups inside the police. They need to be removed.
If you want to quote something in one of my posts you disagree with, go ahead. If you're capable. Because you don't seem to be following what's going on in the argument so far.
OK, that would certainly help.
Now this is a good question, and I can tell you that throwing molotov cocktails or assaulting police officers and destoying their vehicles is DEFINITELY not going elicit the response you're hoping for. You're not going to get a more compassionate police force by intimidating them. I support body cameras and transparency. Maybe encourage the creation of programs where cops go into these inner city neighborhoods and maybe coach basketball or involve themselves in the community somewhere.
I'm interested in both sides of the problem but in this thread commentators are like 100% on one side here with many commentators actually supporting the destruction of property and assault of business owners. It's completely absurd. If everyone was 100% pro-cop I'd be arguing with them.
I'll hazard a reply by quoting myself excerpted from an old post (follow the link for more context):
Quoting 180 Proof
... systemic "racial" [out-group] discrimination & violence.
Furthermore ... (mostly for emphasis)
Unfortunately, people who think like you do, as far as the extremism goes.
You make some good points, but then throw it away with the extremist stuff. I think your approach to society would be worse than what it is now. But some reforms within the current system along those lines would be good, in moderation.
Non sequitur. What else is a public official supposed to say? Make pronouncements against her office's interests? :roll:
The only extreme? Like there is no worse way for society to go?
Well shit, let's burn it all to the ground and start over.
Now you're getting it.
Imagining myself in the place of someone in a situation like this, imagining my local police had brutally murdered someone here, I find no motive in myself to go target some random business in town. Targeting the police somehow, if there’s any way I can, absolutely. Just randomly punching some nearby wall out of anger, quite probably. I just don’t understand what’s going on in the minds of people who attack local businesses etc that have nothing to do with the events they’re angry about. Are they also attacking local homes? I can’t see any motivation that I can morally sympathize with, only possibilities like opportunism that normally wouldn’t even cross my mind.
I think as a black Democrat female mayor and mother, she had full license to speak freely without real fear of political repercussion regardless of what she said. And your non-sequitur objection was incorrect, as her comments went directly to yours. Instead of responding to her comments, you hand waved them away, suggesting without any evidence whatsoever that her political bias forced her to take an impassioned position she entirely disagreed with.
That justification is absurd from a certain perspective. But that perspective is skewed as I said. I don't personally feel that random destruction of property is justified and I sympathize with any innocent small business owner who got caught up in this. But I also don't feel that in a situation where the law itself is corrupted that tactical violence against powerful interests, including corporate interests, is necessarily unjustified. You can make a utilitarian argument that weighs the material loss of large companies (like Target) against the gain of systemic change that reduces levels of violence by security forces against minorities. And you can make an inferential argument that draws a chain of causation from injury to powerful interests to political change. Now you can attack this attempted justification for some level of material violence by pointing to more effective less violent means of change, but I don't think you can attack it ethically if you accept its effectiveness. That's to say, I don't think considerations of corporate finances outweigh those of social justice. (And by the way, none of this argument relies on the idea of the overthrow of capitalism).
How many people are you willing to have die and starve for that to happen?
Unless you have evidence for that, we'll consider it just random speculation.
Is it not possible to object to both the unjust murder and the riots? Why must we choose only one injustice to notice?
Trevor Noah bloody gets it.
8m 34s: "Ask yourself when you watch those people [who loot] - what vested interest do they have in maintain the (current social) contract? Why don't we all loot? Why doesn't everybody take? Because we've agreed on things. There are so many people starving out there, who don't have ... But still, think about how many people who don't have - the have-nots - say: you know what, I'm still going to play by the rules even though I have nothing, because I still wish for the society to work and exist. And then - some members of that society, namely black American people, watch time and time again how the contract that they have signed with society is not being honored by the society that has forced them to sign it with them. ...
And alot of people say: 'what good does it do? What good does it do to loot Target, how does it help you to loot Target?"; Yeah but what good doesn't it do? That's the question people don't ask the other way around. How does it help you to not loot Target? Answer that question. Because the only reason to not loot Target before was because you were upholding society's contract. [But] there is no contract if law and people in power don't uphold their end of it".
I can agree with that, but only if it's effective and doesn't hurt people in the community who need to work and shop there, beyond an inconvenience. Like impoverishing the community if businesses move away and the local economy can't replace it.
Here’s a great paper on the subject.
http://omarwasow.com/APSR_protests3_1.pdf
They've worked before. They might work again. Didn't America's war of independence stem from riots?
I'm not going to read a paper you randomly chose from the internet without even reading yourself (unless you're a far quicker reader and a far more honest contributor than experience suggests). At least summarize your argument.
I read it back in 2015. Plenty of articles were written on it at the time. It’s probably been updated since then.
It's possible to do anything you want.
Also because I think it's wrong. But let's replace looting Target with looting X, or committing crime Y against target X. So if the social contract is voided, why not just do whatever?
OK, what does it say then? What's the argument? At least provide some of the evidence herein. I'm not here to argue with the authors of the paper.
Or argue for it.
Speaking of speculating...
What will happen is that the American capitalist machinery will continue operating as before other than the now vacant, burned, and uninsurable buildings in the already struggling part of town.
Those like our good mayor will move forward making sure such murders happen with lesser frequency in the future, and the rioters efforts will have added nothing positive to the mix.
Enough. "By any means necessary." It's up to you, the status quo.
Then why criticize those who criticize the riots as not being critics of the murder?
So you're willing to have people die and starve. Does it mater who they are?
Why not indeed? Defending an unjust, broken social contract on the basis of it supposedly being better than there being a void one is stupid.
Maybe there's a better way.
I think when people are faced with injustice, winning the moral argument is the least of their concern. What they want is to not be killed by the police.
Come back to me when they do the latter. So far neither Bitwhatsheface nor Marches seem to give shit other than to suck the balls of Target. Would hate for you to join in.
The one that wants to burn society to the ground versus the one that doesn't.
Maybe. We've suggested the status quo concedes the moral-juridical argument and yields to social justice demands for political-economic change now. Otherwise: Do tell ... :chin:
Maybe, but you haven't given us much reason to believe this. For example, charges were only made after the rioting began and, in general, it seems without pressure of whatever sort, cops are rarely prosecuted. To change that, systemic adjustments will have to be made. Your mayor on her own isn't going to be able to implement that outside Atlanta. What would the impetus be for such major change if there were no trouble?
And that's how all kinds of bad shit gets justified during a revolution.
Quoting Michael
How does arguing on here for a socialist revolution do that?
You mean you're itching for the greedy, evil capitalistic system to burn. The thing that's the cause of all evil in the world.
Kemp beat Abrams (a black female) by a very small amount. He's far from safe and this is far from Trump country.
Anyway, I take Bottoms at her word that she meant what she said. She's in zero danger of losing in Atlanta due to Kemp or Trump influence.. Her threat would come from someone left of her. Atlanta is far more diverse and Democrat than the state as a whole.
Sounds like a logical fallacy.
I don't know comrade. Tell me.
In a nutshell: When the RICH steal everything, all that's left for THE REST OF US to eat is the RICH.
or more prosaically (re: 'violent' protests):
[quote=Yoruba proverb]The child who does not feel the warmth of the village will burn down the village to feel the warmth of the fire.[/quote]
I wasn't talking about people arguing on here for a socialist revolution, I was talking about people who are actively protesting. They're not doing it to win the moral argument, they're doing it to stop the police killing them. It's not just about some abstract principle of justice, it's about the reality of applied injustice.
Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game. There is no fixed amount of wealth in the world. Wealth is created and constantly expands.
I agree with that. It's the looting and burning and things spiraling out of control with people getting hurt. That's on the police as well as the rioters.
My comment was directed at those in this thread, not protesters.
:up:
i don't think socialists understand that.
It’s a common bias, not limited to socialists per say.
This is true, with the caveat that the game is rigged so that all the expanding wealth gets sucked upwards while those without are made to be entrenched in that position. As they say: money makes money, and being poor is extremely expensive.
Quoting Marchesk
They do. Their problem is that it's expanding upwards, not downwards. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
That is a problem, but the standard of living also goes up across the board over time. Capitalism's excesses need to be corrected for.
Extreme poverty has been declining exponentially over the last two centuries.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
They will do better as they have more access to jobs and global markets. The trend in global poverty is going down. There's also a lot of factors at play across the globe. Sometimes those have been failed communist states or bloody civil wars where the winner installs their own greedy regime.
@StreetlightX Yes, society can get much more extreme.
The pandemic is the fault of the greedy rich? What was the unemployment rate before Covid in the US?
We can start with that sure. But you're going to have to reverse a 50 year trend. And besides, I made a whole thread on this with some very educational videos. If you were genuinely interested and not just throwing out bad faith objections, maybe you could educate yourself even minimally.
That's why I'm more partial to something like Rawls' maximin. If the worst off are better off in a society with wealth inequality than that's better than wealth equality.
You can't help yourself, can you? Disagreement doesn't mean bad faith. Unless you're an extremist.
But thanks for the videos, I haven't watched them yet.
By "the law" do you mean the institution of law enforcement or the written law? Regardless, I don't see how local businesses - even powerful ones like Wal-Mart - have anything to do with what Chauvin did to Floyd.
Ok, so how many Targets and sporting good stores and bars do we need to destroy before we've attained systemic change? Maybe I should be doing some looting! Apparently I would just be assisting racial equality and combating systemic injustice.
Is this change going to go in your direction or will it cause a conservative backlash? All I know is that the rioters have turned a substantial portion of the country less sympathetic to the movement and more concerned with personal safety from rioters.
It does with you. You never follow up your objections. You simply throw out new ones if the last one didn't work. It's rubbish.
That's bullshit. You just don't like people who disagree with you.
Maybe it's because of people like you, who, instead of highlighting police violence against protests, the arresting of journalists, the inflammatory language used by a certain fuckwit President and so on, the first thing you post about is fucking Target. You're part of the very problem you've identified.
If the forum was 100% pro-cop I'd be challenging them. I'm challenging you - and people like you who support the rioting - because you're insane. I ended our conversation because I can't really reason with someone who supports complete anarchy and burning everything down and doesn't care about the people harmed. It's about making a statement, I get it.
And you can't tolerate dissent.
But okay, if that is a poor arguing technique on my own, I should work on it. However, fuck you for accusing me of bad faith. I argue what I think, right or wrong.
You're an extremist.
Well that's fine because I guess I can't really reason with someone who walks into a thread on systemic racism and then defends Target as an opening post and top priority - in the name of bloody neutrality. That's insanity.
Read my first post in the thread. I said that there's blame on both sides. The reason I focused on the looting is, well, because much of the commentary here is actually pro-looting. I've already been over this with you, Streetlight.
That’s the irony of it. If we are to blame institutions, it was the State that murdered Floyd, not the private citizen. Yet here we have people destroying the property and livelihoods of fellow Americans.
NOS, by burning down a TGI Fridays you're fighting capitalism which in turn helps dismantle systemic racism. It's a nuanced argument - you need a college degree to understand.
It is. And apparently if you don't understand that nuance, then you're supporting police violence.
Very nuanced indeed. Also extremist rhetoric.
It’s simple perversion. You can justify violence, destruction of property, and making a mockery of a valid protest by invoking some abstract idea from the recesses of your skull.
No one's there for your aesthetic pleasure.
More than that, in this thread anyway. People dying and starving to overturn the system. And doing whatever you want since the social contract is voided.
Hopefully, this is a very minority opinion. I don't believe most protesters support it. They just want to see police held accountable, so they stop murdering people.
But the only thing worse is liberal shittards who coopt that violence in turn to shift all discussion away from the injustice and violence which birthed it. Protest which doesn't pass their ivory tower purity test.
Parasite gatekeepers of 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' protest. It's PC, whitewashed protest they want.
The updated version of drapetomania. Some people regard accusations of insanity with suspicion, when it meshes with politics. It's an extreme ingratitude for the countless benefits of Western Civilisation. Like the Boston tea party - pointless destruction by opponents of the rule of law.
Arguably, it was. And for all the great principles the US espoused as part of that revolution, America's history is more violent than Canada's. Violence begets more violence, and even when you win, it sets more precedence for violent solutions in the future.
I’ve never believed in the social contract theory. I don’t think the State came about as larger groups of people naturally agreed to subordinate their private interests for the common good. I believe states were born of conquest and coercion of one group over another. In that sense, I can sympathize with the anger, but violence will will lead to the same outcome: conquest and coercion of one group over another.
:100:
That's often what happens. And you run the risk of some general taking over and becoming dictator.
In this case, an actual revolution has the cops start using real ammunition with the military enforcing martial law. I don't care how many guns Americans own, it won't be enough against the military. Plus the fact that the group with the most guns isn't on the left.
That and most of us don't want a bloody revolution. We don't want to see cities bombed, people shot, and food supplies being disrupted. Nor do we want a communist system replacing the current one. That's a fantasy.
I think protesters should assert their rights, and not deny them of fellows. Americans have the unique right to march down the street fully armed as a display of power and force, and they can keep the state in check without destroying their own property and livelihoods.
If I'm reading you right you're comparing the riots today to the Boston tea party? This is a bad comparison for many reasons but before I go into them I just want to make sure that I'm understanding you right.
It doesn't make sense to me how people can support destroying businesses which had nothing to do with Floyd's death or mistreatment towards blacks by police in general.
It’s simple perversion. You can justify violence, destruction of property, and making a mockery of a valid protest by invoking some abstract idea from the recesses of your skull.
I'm sympathetic to calls for more transparency among police or addressing racial issues and how police interact with a certain community. I'm fine with abstract ideas; abstract ideas can be discussed and they can be fun to discuss.
Hell no.
I think it's pretty disingenous to suggest that is the sentiment. The sentiment, well ingrained into our culture, is that protest ought to be peaceful, and peaceful protest, if done right, can bring about systemic change.
You might disagree and argue that under certain conditions, violence is necessary, but arguing against straw men doesn't help your case.
Obviously the violence is very helpful for political actors to use to shift blame and attention away from the actual systemic injustice. That's a pretty significant argument against any violence, regardless of it's other benefits.
It's absurd that the socialists in this thread thinks there's a chance in hell of that.
Capitaliism?
In your frame in which the rule of law and private property rights are inviolable or where the system responds effectively to appeals to its collective conscience, of course, your interlocutors seem insane. But your interlocutors reject that frame, they say there is no absolute legitimacy to the rule of law when the law itself is used as the cudgel of a dominant group against a dominated group. To them, it then becomes more a question of what tactics advance each group's interests than what are "acceptable"/lawful. From there, violence is an obvious option (which is not to say it's always justified, just that it's not by definition ruled out/insane). So, your cartoonish rendering of your opponent's position is imo a function of your inability to see their perspective not any inherent absurdity of the perspective itself. I mean, I can see things from the perspective of the status quo, so I can see how you would take the position you do. But what any reasonable person in search of real answers needs to do to contribute here is to take a more meta-view and ask themselves who, in this society, is doing more harm to who? Who is benefitting and who is being harmed on the macro-scale? And then, what's justified in redressing that harm becomes broader in scope. Fine, if you don't want to go there, but those of us who don't see a level playing field to begin with are not insane in not seeing what you're seeing as a means to reset it. I don't think you're insane either btw, just looking out for your own interests by getting behind an ideological position you see as protective of them. That's OK, but don't pretend to be the sole voice of reason here. We have thought this through.
The largest minority and most vulnerable people in the US aren't black, theyre Latino. What we do to protect black people protects them as well.
This crowd (on this forum) will move on to the next echo chamber pretty quickly. People who actually care will be out making sure people know how to vote and know what the candidates stand for.
The irony is they can only rail against the system while living in free and open societies, upon gadgets that no other system has given them.
They don't have mobile phones in China? Woah...
I’m going to refrain from grouping people according to some abstract demarcation such as race, but tyranny is tyranny and injustice is injustice. The greatest minority is the individual, and if we stand for one we stand for them all.
And if the protests had been peaceful to begin with, that entire argument wouldn't have happened.
Perhaps the reason we're arguing about the violence is because "is the violence justified or useful" is the much more difficult question which requires a lot more debate. We could of course instead all circlejerk about how bad the systemic violence in the US is, but who would that help? I'd rather torch a Walmart.
I was talking about the "free and open" bit. China operates a hybrid system which I'm rather familiar with, having lived there for several years.
Because of one phony American shill prick who knew exactly what he was doing and what it would cause long beforehand? Bet he had a terminal condition or some kind of debt that's suddenly paid off. Or family or associates that are no longer in the country. Story is beyond rotten. Cops make little money. Dude has three houses that we even know about. Married a supermodel. Worked together with the victim at the same club, which doesnt actually prove anything. Mugshot looks completely different from video stills. Everything about this is unusual and makes no sense
I agree there is something rotten in the Alamo here. All that's been proven is to not only anguish minorities but effectively puppeteer them into an army that steals, kills, and destroys their own community, causing immense damage to infrastructure, businesses, property values, and investor presence let alone confidence that will go unrepaired for generations to come ... is turn a low paid cop, often one with a debt or chronic condition, into a patsy. A 7 minute incident has turned into a 700 million dollar international crisis. Between damage, insurance, death, armed force deployments, lawsuits. Probably even more than that. Because of ONE man who KNEW very well what he was doing and what it would cause. White supremacists are probably laughing their ass off and high fiving eachother right now while minorities continue to march around and get arrested instead of furthering their education and becoming that cop.. that politician.. that professor.. that prosecutor.. whatever position it is that inequality resides in.
The protests were never going to be peaceful, and it is naivety and bad strategy to use that as some kind of standard for discussion. As I said, there have been two movements of co-opting here: one by violent protestors, and one of violent protestors. The latter - happening in this thread and elsewhere in the media - is infinitely, incalculably worse than the former.
Infinitely worse than destroying things that have nothing to do with the police? What kind of moral argument is that? Do you not see just how extreme your position is?
Insofar as it aims to delegitimize protest and deflect from the systemic injustices and in fact restore and prop them up - feeding into the very cycles the brought it all about - yes, infinitely worse. Orders of magnitude worse.
Sounds good in principle. In practice, it would help if people would wake up to truths that hurt.
I think in the coming centuries most Americans will look like Latinos, they'll be dealing with the effects of global warming and the era of globalization will come to an end (for a millennia, maybe).
That's how the problem will be solved. In the meantime, let's talk about victims and how to increase votership in the age if Corona.
Are you suggesting Derek Chauvin was maybe part of a plot to start off a race war? I have heard that some of the rioters are also alt-right, looking to delegitimize the protests.
Sounds like a plot from the Watchmen tv show that came out in the fall.
The cop was just a stupid bully. He didnt mean to kill Floyd.
Maybe he was maybe he wasn't. That doesnt matter now because look what's happening. Domestic unrest. National guard/military police being deployed into states.
You want to destabilize a nation you exploit a vulnerable social tension. It just so happened to be race. Maybe not. I've discussed this with friends often. Maybe it was just a snapshot of current affairs and their problems and it all happened "organically" so to speak. I don't know. I do know it could have been and there are many people who stand to benefit from such a move.
I don't believe the rule of law is absolute and inviolable. After all, the holocaust was legal.
This to me just sounds Machiavellian and kind of evil to me to be honest. I'm fine with someone being self-interested in their personal or economic reality but for the political process... or when it comes to violence this is obviously horrible. I know you understand this so I don't know why you're presenting a view that you've probably rejected.
Honestly, if a black man or a white man came up to me and told me "ya know, I'm really only interested in my own racial/ethnic community and I couldn't give a **** what happens to anyone else" I absolutely wouldn't engage in dialogue with this person. Even if a poor person came up to me and claimed he only cared about poor people.... that's not how society works.
Please enlighten me as to how destroying a TGI Fridays helps dismantle systemic racism. It's completely nonsensical as far as I'm concerned and I haven't heard of any remotely reasonable connection between destroying local businesses and establishing racial justice/racial equality.
For one, I don't see a level playing field. I think it's a straw man often attributed to conservatives that they see a "level playing field" for everyone out there. Absolutely not the case. I'd be happy to address these issues but through a different format than destroying local communities and wreaking havoc on already oppressed class (i.e. the entry level or low wage worker.)
And being a cop is attractive to bullies. They need to be screened out of the hiring process. So does anyone with ties to racist groups.
Police shootings disproportionately affect people of a certain skin tone.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
I’m not sure about non-shootings such as choking, but it’s clear they do happen.
Now I don’t know which of those killings were or were not justified, but I think a citizen force or militia like the Black Panther Party might be a good idea to keep a watchful eye on the interactions between the state and their community.
Yes, I can see that. If it was about one man being killed, I would agree with you. But it isn't. One man is killed by another while other police look on impassively and the whole thing is on video, and no one is arrested. If this passes, then anything passes. So I am going to throw all my toys out of the pram, and all your toys out of your pram, and every other bugger's toys out of their prams, until everyone altogether decides that this will not pass. This is war. Don't act surprised when Poland gets invaded.
No, you have to keep your toys in the pram, so I can steal them and call it 'the American Dream'. Rock-a-bye baby...
Now you're talking. :up:
Everyone might end up on deciding they don't want you throwing their toys out the pram. It's a good way to create a backlash.
Yep. How much of it comes from the tone set by their leaders? They're chosen by local governments. It comes back to local elections.
Agreed with this, but sanctioned by the local government.
Quoting Marchesk
Never said or implied that. Strawman.
Non sequitur. 40m+ jobs lost in 88 days - what's the unemployment rate NOW, friend? And more significantly, WHICH income quintiles make up the overwhelming majority of pandemic-driven business closures & layoffs?
Honestly, drive by shootings are more common. Let the Black Panthers deal with that.
You mean like the being tough on crime or the war on drugs? Yeah, that's an issue. Problem is then with he voters liking that sort of thing. At least the drug war is losing some steam.
Yeah, maybe let black people police their communities so at least you remove the racial factor. It needs to be coordinated and supported by the city. Give them the resources they need.
Where being "tough in crime" is a dog whistle for racism, yes.
Chauvin was arrested. He will likely go to jail. I know the other officers were fired and there may be other charges; we'll see. Honestly, if Chauvin gets off then I'd join in some of the riots. Not against private businesses though.
We can throw toys out of the pram, I don't care. What I do care about is people and children going hungry because their jobs were lost because their workplaces were destroyed.
Thing is that a jury gets to decide that unless they convince him to plead guilty for the good of the country. So you never know.
Should we riot over a jury decision? It's one thing not to prosecute cops, but it's another when they have their day in court. As long as the prosecution and judge do their jobs.
A jury decision is a citizenry thing. It's different if a judge gives the cop a BS light sentence.
The two groups I'm talking about are the elites, i.e. politicians, the donors who buy policy from them, and their apparatchiks in local administrations vs. the poor and minorities. Now we both already know, unless we live on different planets, that the more powered group are utterly self-interested both economically and politically and this leads to systemic discrimination and injustice, which is a form of violence against the less powered one. So, what's utterly horrible is to expect the poor to play Jesus while the rich and powerful are the only ones allowed to be Machiavellian. I mean, just to give one recent example, it was the poor who lost their houses and the rich whose investments were bailed out after the '08 crisis. The state (controlled by group 1) could have bailed out homeowners but it didn't and preferred to inflict the violence of depriving them of a place to live rather than risk hurting group 1's interests (even though group 1 would have hurt a lot less). That's vicious self-interested violence at work (your house is taken from you, your business is burned down, what's the difference?). And the fact that its obfuscated by layers of ideological bullshit only makes it more, not less, pernicious. So, again, the moral foundation your argument rests on is nothing but politically-loaded quicksand and there is no reason for anyone not sharing your skewed perspective to accept it. If you don't make an effort to see past it, we'll go nowhere. And that doesn't yet mean that burning down Target stores is justified or effective, it only means we've got to the point where it's not necessarily unjustified or at least not any worse than what's been done to the people who are doing it. From there, we move on to tactics. Could it work?
Do you? Really? What do you do about it?
Black people need to arm themselves with the most powerful weapons legally available and when they see a cop trying to murder one of their community, make a citizen's [s]execution[/s] arrest.
When? About five minutes ago. After big trouble not before it.
Places were police join the peaceful protesters, listen to what they have to say, instead of spoiling for a fight.
Yep. Good for him. It's a pity he's in a minority.
Fair enough, but the Tulsa riot started over what the white people saw as a black uprising because of a shootout when armed black folk came to protect a black man arrested from a lynching. Which was good, until shots were fired.
Just saying it's dicey. Maybe it would work today. It's better if the city arms them.
This is 100% spot on. In reality I couldn't actually riot regardless since... I'm a state employee but I was just conveying my dismay. But yeah - it is a jury decision and while unfortunate.... I wouldn't actually riot.
And any violence was always going to be used to deligitimize the protests. Where does that leave us, strategy wise? Is there any strategy?
Are you telling me the riots are the start of the glorious revolution?
Quoting unenlightened
A bunch of random property damage scares no-one except some small business owners. If you want to keep Poland from being invaded, you don't send a bunch of volunteers with sticks, you send the army.
Quoting Baden
That's a great way to get a whole bunch of people killed. Not sure why the Koch brothers would care though.
Well, I don't destroy their places of work for one. I feel like this is becoming more about me than anything ideas-based so I don't see how it's too relevant. Nonetheless, I'm a pretty generous tipper and I'm happy to give personal financial advise/help people figure out a budget.
So why's the army there then?
No, it's a great way to stop their people getting killed. You have a right to protect yourselves from murderers, yes?
I didn't make it about you, you did. See I don't claim to care too much about strangers' economic situations, so I don't have to defend it. Stick to abstracts like 'justice' is my advice. You know - ideas.
To protect the locals. That's their job, after all.
Quoting Baden
More shooting means more people getting killed. Do you want to bet more people die on the "right" side?
Maybe we should ask the people who lead the civil rights movement (those who are still alive) how they did it? Or were they less oppressed?
Are you really saying this in regard to my opinion that one shouldn't go around setting fire to businesses and now possibly homes? Is that what you're saying?
Even on this front it fails. Does burning down target lead to ending systemic justice? No. When I asked you for an explanation you conveniently didn't address this.
So burn down their businesses. Stick it to the man, you think the CEO of Wal-Mart or Target will be visiting the local homeless shelter or food bank? No, who gets hurt is disporportionately those on the lower end of the totem pole of the company that they're working for; in other words, those more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck. Even socialist states or communists states have their own elite; and in the off chance you were able to somehow re-set society and turn everything back to 0 you'd just get another class of elites developing, so...
I want murderers to be stopped with deadly force if necessary. When they get the message that instead of a promotion, their reward is a bullet in the head, they might think twice. As for sides, yours is clear and that explains your predictable position.
Are you even reading my posts? You keep responding to some caricature of everything I say as if you don't have the intelligence to understand what I actually wrote. Do you really not understand it? If so, I'll just stop now because I don't know how I could have put things more clearly.
...You asked me what I personally do about hunger, so I took that as a personal question.
Yeah, it helps when you don't care about strangers' economic situations when you're advocating or condoning burning down their businesses and destroying their jobs. Nice little mental buffer you've got there - leave the problem of how to get food on their table or their bills paid without their source of income to them. Sure, we're philosophers why bother with economics?
Sorry to disappoint you, but the state won't collapse.
It seems to me you've been trying to draw (or at least entertain) some sort of connection between destroying businesses/rioting to ending systemic racism and I'm just not seeing it.
We both agree that no one should looting private businesses so... It's possible I misunderstood you I've got a lot of responses to get to here.
You aren't this stupid, what the hell is wrong with you? Have we not had threads on gun control on this forum? Doesn't everyone with 2 braincells agree that introducing yet more guns into a volatile situation is fucking stupid? Were you of the opinion that we should arm teachers after Sandy Hook? You talk like the NRA fuckwits who claim that we need more "good guys with a gun".
Quoting Baden
Go on then, spit it out. What's your ad-hominem attack on my character?
Yea I understood you. And we dont need your bullshit.
:up:
https://www.facebook.com/IlhanMN/videos/254086762346145/
Anyone who is favor of destroying their businesses, right or left, fuck you.
There's a lot of that in this thread for a philosophy forum.
Yes, I'd love if dumb racist white guys weren't allowed to have guns to hunt down black joggers and that cops weren't torturing black suspects to death in broad daylight. But until I have my wish and nobody is allowed a gun then I advocate that black people arm themselves and defend themselves and others in their communities being victimized. It's utterly bizarre that you would try to deny them that right. And it has nothing to do with being against guns. I want the guns taken off everyone not just black people. Why on earth should they unilaterally disarm??
On fuckin' :point: Re-posting this everywhere I can!
Quoting Marchesk
Sounds like what the patrician class was telling each other about "barbarians at the gate" the day before the Visigoths sacked Rome. :roll: Just sayin' (though you're probably right).
No, you didn't, frank. That would require more effort. Seriously, try taking it line by line. Tell me what you disagree with. Show me you understand what I actually said. Quote me. It's that easy. It's called dialogue. If you're not interested in that, just put a sock in it.
Who am I denying any right? Am I saying they shouldn't be allowed to arm themselves? No? Then don't insinuate that I do. You can hold your own in a rational argument, no need to twist my words.
My argument is simple: If black people arm themselves and start responding to suspected murders with deadly force, then yet more of these suspected murderers will shoot first and ask questions later. The ordinary citizens will always loose that fight.
Quoting Baden
Because the guns don't help. They may save you that one time someone is killed, in broad daylight, while a camera is running. They won't help you the 99 other times where there isn't anyone around to help, where you don't have warning and where you don't have time.
Guns aren't an effective defense for citizens. They aren't for school teachers, and they aren't for oppressed minorities.
There. Fixed it for you.
Twisting your words? I'm just going to leave this here. Your words.
Can't argue with that.
Maybe we should run an experiment and see.
If that's all you have to say in response, so be it.
I just wonder what it is about this topic that has everyone collectively loosing their minds? We usually agree, and even if we don't we usually disagree amicably.
Haven't the US been running that experiment for decades now? In all other contexts, people agree that less guns usually leads to a better society. But now suddenly that's supposed to be false?
I don't think I'm losing my mind at all. Read through my posts. The only "controversial" thing I've said is that the black community should have a right to defend itself with every legal means possible where and while it's under threat. But the responses to that and other very qualified suggestions regarding the possibility of violence as a tactic to achieve social justice have been received rather hysterically.
Less guns for everyone would. If they took the guns off the police and the liberty freaks / racists then they could take them off everyone and it would be a better society. While the police are armed and dangerous to minority communities and the racists are literally hunting down black joggers then that does not apply.
I think conceiving of politics as a war of one group against another or how to elevate my group above others is essentially toxic. I'd say this even in the case of a poor person who supports his class: His view doesn't take into account race, disability, appearance, health, body type, etc. - you can't account for everything which might victimize a person. We should work to empower people and protect their basic rights, not view politics as a war of my group against yours.
And for the record I disagree with the 2008 bailouts.
Don’t they have the right to do this now?
Well, if conceiving reality is toxic then so be it because this is the way the powerful act as though they conceive. I think you are not so naive as to not know that.
Apparently, it's a crazy idea the way I phrased it.
And the only "controversial" thing I have said is that I don't think stocking up on weapons to defend against corrupt policemen is going to work. What's hysterical about that?
Quoting Baden
Where I live, the police have guns and most of the rest of us doesn't, and that usually works out fine. I think it's a better society than the US at least. Of course it's also more homogeneous, so I may be biased.
Quoting Baden
I am sceptical of the added protection of a gun. As I said before, unless you want to pull your gun on anyone who might possibly threaten you, you'll always be disadvantaged anyways. Being the second person to draw their gun seems like a good way to get shot.
The consequences just seem somewhat obvious to me: everyone trusts each other less, is quicker to draw their gun, and quicker to get shot. Isnt a big part of the reason the police get away with killing people because they can always leverage the "he may have had a gun" defense?
Now, the same people are boggling at suggestions for minority communities to arm themselves in the face of the criminal justice system failing them, again. They can't whisper into the ears of those with legislative influence, they're never in the same rooms, they don't have enough money. Their society has failed them over and over again. They face a very real threat. Cops are firing on journalists. Cops are assaulting protesters. The president wants protesters shot.
Think about it. That threat to journalists covering a protest. The ability for cops to assault protesters; unprovoked. The media being blase about a country's leader wanting protesters to be shot. Everyone thinks it's just a minority issue, but they still live in a state where police can fire on journalists covering a protest and hospitalise protesters when not even plausibly acting in self defense. Every person in America has skin in the game when the basic functioning of its democracy is threatened, and it is threatened.
The police are assaulting journalists. The police are assaulting peaceful protesters. This is the pipe dream the 2nd amendment gun nuts have stockpiled for, it's come true.
But they're not in the streets, I wonder why?
Yep.
Quoting Echarmion
Your tone was hysterical not your content. I get the opposing argument. But I know if I were living in 1960s-70s Ireland where systemic discrimination was similarly rife, I would have wanted to arm myself as some did. The British and their bigoted police never respected anything but force.
Yes, I remember asking what would happen if a black group did that and the response I got was "just the same thing". Sick joke then and even sicker now.
I was but a youth back then; how much has changed.
Good question but best if they stay home.
What do you think the answer is?
So you’re idea is to maintain the status quo? You think that minorities having the right to arm themselves has worked to help prevent police brutality, discrimination, etc.?
Not a shootout and not one group of protesters fighting another angry group.
The police departments need to be reformed. People need to vote for candidates who make that a priority.
Why don't you just read what I wrote. Then quote and comment. It's quicker.
Would the police have acted the way they did with Floyd if the members of that community were walking around armed with guns? I’m not sure they would have.
Thank you.
It's good that there is so much shock and awe that minority communities might organize and defend themselves against being treated like punching bags by racists in the security forces and elsewhere. It shows the tactic might actually work.
I meant specifically; why do you think that 2nd amendment gun nuts aren't out protesting with their guns already, when they've seen journalists being fired on, peaceful protesters being assaulted, people being fired on while standing in the doorway to their own private property?
If the right to form an armed blockade of a public building is there, why can't the communities do so in in public? Why is the knee jerk response to suggestions of these communities bearing arms dismissal and panic whereas for a bunch of white nutjobs blockading a political building the POTUS could not have been more enamored?
Yes, and not every one of them needs to be armed. But having organized armed groups to protect them in the face of other organized armed groups (like the police) wanting to harm them has obvious deterrent potential.
There have been a couple heavily armed rednecks defending both protesters and property, but certainly not enough.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/maxnesterak/status/1265834786037223424?s=20[/tweet]
The Panthers doing armed policing of police is part of what got the state to panic so much they made COINTELPRO, it's a good start.
So where does the middle class fall in this divide? How about the upper middle class? How about the wealthy disabled kid? Does he still qualify as one of the elite? Where do wealthy minorities fall? Do blacks who own their own successful businesses qualify as elites?
I understand there are elites out there... I just think there are a lot of shades of grey and when it comes to social class in America some people define elite as $1M net worth, others as $10M, or $100M... it's not always clear. Then you take into account that someone may be disabled or very awkward or unattractive. I do stand against laws that favor the elite, by the way, like accredited investor rules.
I think its toxic though to have an entire mindset or mentality just based on "punching up" or fighting those with privilege. Pretty much everyone is both privileged or unprivileged in certain ways.
It's not their fight, and they tend to be more pro-police and military. It's the elected officials they have a beef with. In particular, Democrats.
Also some of them are full of shit.
The entire tone in this thread is histerical IMO, some of your comments included.
Quoting Baden
And how did that work out for the people that armed themselves? Not a rhetorical question, I'd like to know if you think the counter-violence was worth it.
Quoting fdrake
What's the alternative?
Quoting fdrake
Aren't those communities already armed? Has there been some kind of systemic disparity in the availablity of guns?
I entirely agree with that quote, but I think it also intentionally refrains from calling out rioting as a viable strategy to actually change anything. Do you think I am wrong about that assessment?
Quoting NOS4A2
I am not sure either, but I think it's likely that for everyone of these highly publicised cases, there are 10 that get swept under the rug. And in those 10, more guns means even more reasons to kill a bunch of "suspects".
Quoting Baden
Seems like the status quo to me. Unless you don’t think black people arm themselves. Have you not seen videos of black people pointing guns at cops? Usually doesn’t end well.
Also obvious civil war potential.
You keep saying that but you have demonstrated no ability to quote me and argue against the points I've made, whereas others have and though I don't necessarily agree with them I can respect that. Anyway, I think I've made plenty of sense and I've already challenged you to show me where I'm wrong re this post you called "bullshit".
"The two groups I'm talking about are the elites, i.e. politicians, the donors who buy policy from them, and their apparatchiks in local administrations vs. the poor and minorities. Now we both already know, unless we live on different planets, that the more powered group are utterly self-interested both economically and politically and this leads to systemic discrimination and injustice, which is a form of violence against the less powered one. So, what's utterly horrible is to expect the poor to play Jesus while the rich and powerful are the only ones allowed to be Machiavellian. I mean, just to give one recent example, it was the poor who lost their houses and the rich whose investments were bailed out after the '08 crisis. The state (controlled by group 1) could have bailed out homeowners but it didn't and preferred to inflict the violence of depriving them of a place to live rather than risk hurting group 1's interests (even though group 1 would have hurt a lot less). That's vicious self-interested violence at work (your house is taken from you, your business is burned down, what's the difference?). And the fact that its obfuscated by layers of ideological bullshit only makes it more, not less, pernicious. So, again, the moral foundation your argument rests on is nothing but politically-loaded quicksand and there is no reason for anyone not sharing your skewed perspective to accept it. If you don't make an effort to see past it, we'll go nowhere. And that doesn't yet mean that burning down Target stores is justified or effective, it only means we've got to the point where it's not necessarily unjustified or at least not any worse than what's been done to the people who are doing it. From there, we move on to tactics. Could it work?"
You ran away then so here's my challenge again. Tell me why that's bullshit and I'm not trying to make sense or just admit that your comment was just more empty rhetoric.
:lol:
https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-law
It is a big deal. See the penalties.
You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? Go look through my recent posts to see what more specifically I'm suggesting.
Yeah:
Problem is you need the Justice System to enforce it. I'll agree with Street about one thing in this thread. The officer should be charged with 2nd degree murder. And the other three are accessories.
No, I'm trying to stick to what facts I believe.
(1) There's a long history of cops killing black people under ultra suspicious and avoidable circumstances; so much so it happens uproariously every year. At some point it becomes a pattern - it's been a pattern for a long time.
(2) Put that in a political and economic context; the groups that are disproportionately effected by such brutality are also severely economically disadvantaged; their schools are worse, their neighbourhoods have less money, they have much less social capital to leverage into organisational influence, nevermind political influence.
(3) Put that in a political context where minority communities are gerrymandered so their votes matter less, in a context where no politician they could vote for actually would implement or even study targeted measures that would mitigate the disadvantages they have.
All of those things together put minority communities in the US into a massive pressure cooker; they don't get political representation, they have no easy means of getting political interventions useful for them, at least one of the parties they could vote for benefits from them having less representation, they are deprived of economic advantages; they work worse jobs, their lives are harder, and all the socially acceptable channels they can use to make themselves heard fall on deaf ears.
In their history, it takes them fighting for their own rights to get heard. Be it Garvey, MLK, Malcolm X or the Panthers; they're all addressing the same issue in different ways; the hitherto unsolved problem of systemic injustice against minority communities in the US, and their alienation from any socially acceptable means of addressing it. This is an alienation from justice.
MLK wanted the same opportunities and representation for everyone; minority votes get gerrymandered into irrelevance, the current POTUS is aware that mail voting empowers communities that struggle to join polling lines for various reasons and Tweets about it; getting massive approval. Imagine you live in a context where your fellow citizens are happy that your community's democratic powers are weakened. There is formal equality under the law, but no functional equality under its enforcement. There is formal equality in political representation; but political parties gain from doing what they can to undermine minority votes.
(If you've ever read self reports from POCs in heavily policed communities in the US you'll probably get more idea of the sheer terror and necessay adaptations, I remember reading somewhere that kids get lessons from their parents in how to avoid getting the shit beaten out of them or worse by cops)
Garvey, Malcolm X and the Panthers were more radical; they believed that since their communities were in no position to gain political leverage which could then be turned into functional equality, their communities should self organise and seize it for themselves. It is no coincidence that doing that gets you watched and disrupted by the FBI.
Imagine that every time you bring up that the law and its enforcement function differently for your community, someone will always bring up that you're formally equal under the law so what's the big deal? And time passes, a few months go by and another unarmed community member dies to a cop. and the cop walks off with a light sentence or no charge at all. I bet you'd be angry.
I'm for protesters arming themselves for the same reason I'm for them using video cameras; it forces a lethally armed police force with a history of brutality against minorities in situations like these to be able to be held accountable. Cops are not minority communities' friends, they show up in force whenever those communities start looking like they're trying to gain more political autonomy.
And I get super duper frustrated with the eternal impetus of centrist commentators to wait and work through official channels; there's just no forum in which even the problems of minority communities will even be recognized as problems, because addressing them requires systemic changes.
It's fair to point out that the "elite" or "powerful" are not such an easily definable group, but, no, I don't mean the middle class. The middle class eventually needs to be won over not attacked. Might say more on this later.
And, by the way, you can attack elites through general strikes, boycotts, rent strikes etc. as well as some forms of violence against their material interests. All I'm saying is there is no moral obligation for an oppressed and cheated group to play by rules set by (and to the advantage of) those oppressing and cheating them. Again, seems obvious to me.
Honestly, if you look at my posts as a whole, I've made only a couple of rhetorically loaded points and have stuck mostly to a fairly sober line. It actually took considerable effort. :razz:
Quoting Echarmion
Re the most recent armed struggle, that's too long a question to answer here and I think we'll never know for sure. It's complicated too by the fact that several unjustifiable atrocities were carried out by the Republican side as well as the British. During the previous struggle for independence from 1919-1921 though (which independence was won only for the South), what did demonstrably and unequivocally work was organized targeted violence against elite figures in the British army (with operations led primarily by the revolutionary leader, Michael Collins). When the big boys couldn't sleep soundly in their beds, they came to the table. Cut the snake off at the head and it shall slither to you.
Quoting Echarmion
Let's not revert to hysterics, eh? :wink:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/500022-tennessee-police-chief-tells-officers-who-dont-have-an-issue-with-george?fbclid=IwAR3KVB5jdTzgVPWcKehFYNVcDIIHHSIsOegVB5de10NKQ8cS-xfATQFCj4o
As always, a very well thought out post, but you've given me an opportunity to gripe. Yes, there's a loud uproar every time a cop kills a black person, even when the cop was a black man (as happened last summer). For some strange reason we don't hear any uproar about something that is much more common: drive-by shooting victims. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they're always black. There was just a really poignant one in Indiana where a 12 year old boy held his twin brother in his arms as his father raced to the hospital. The boy died. The shooter was never identified, but we all know who it was: gangs do it as initiation. Where's the outcry? Why doesn't Michelle Obama talk about how badly this hurts? Why doesn't somebody try to tear down a Target store over it?
Because nobody cares. That's why.
George Lloyd's story strikes a chord that gets attention. Same for Aumaud Arbery and all the others who've died because somebody thought they could get away with it. The protests say: "You didn't get away with it." The looting says: "We have no self respect, so go ahead and discard us."
Quoting fdrake
In some places there are large neighborhoods where most people are black, not all, but most. In other places the races aren't separated like that. Where there is separation, there's definitely an economic reason for it. Places like that are like pits that people have to claw their way out of, and obviously a lot of people never make it out. That's not where I come from, so I see it as an outsider.
My understanding is that after Clinton was president, there were economists who wanted to do something about it. They claimed that sooner or later the US would suffer if it just let people languish in desperation. Unfortunately the next wave was conservative and they were forgotten. Even stuff that the government had been doing to extend ladders down into the pits were abandoned.
Was it racism? I don't know. I do know that racism is generated by it though.
Quoting fdrake
Sure. I live in a community that was gerrymandered all to hell. They put a line straight through the middle of a predominately black college so students didn't know where they were supposed to vote.
In October 2019 the district maps were struck down by a state court and the state legislature was told to redraw them fairly. They didn't do it fairly, but it's more fair than it was. Democrats will pick up two congressional seats. It needs to be ruled on again, and it will be. They won't change it this year, though.
The notion that no progress can be made within the US system is wrong and it's a damaging idea.
Quoting fdrake
The situation is more complex than you're giving it credit for.
Black Americans are Americans, through and through. Totally. Even if they say they hate America and they don't belong to it, they're being quintessentially American about it. If some nation threatens the US, they're threatening a large population of Black Americans.
Where there are cops who are racist, they need to be weeded out. The notion that they're all racist is ridiculous.
Quoting fdrake
You waive the world "centrist" around like it's meaningful here. It's not. It's black activists and community leaders who are appealing to people to see that they can make change through the system. Yes, I get that the system is fucked up. I understand that you think you understand that better than me, I can't do anything about that.
Nice talking to you. Really. :smile:
Next time you don't read something, don't call it bullshit, makes you look like an idiot.
Lol.
If you haven't seen this classic of what the difference is with a white man carrying openly an AR-15 and a black man doing the same and how different is the reaction of the police, you should watch it. Tells far more than a thousand words.
Thought operates through a process of division.
It appears that all the old white people such as myself are in the process of dying off.
And the young white people aren't having as many babies as they used to, so....
Yes, it does and it's also trolling. So, let me make it very clear. If you want to respond to anyone's posts here, you're going to need to read them first. Otherwise, stay out of the conversation. Trolling posts will be deleted.
So you encourage looting liquor and TVs from stores? But for the distance, you'd be in the streets burning cars? Why do you sit idly behind your computer when your morals demand throwing rocks at police and stealing from stores?
https://www.leftvoice.org/police-brutality-in-a-blue-state
"Both Frey and other Democratic representatives have called for pacifying the protests, equating the violence of the demonstrations with the racist violence perpetrated by the state, of which they are a part. The political class in Minneapolis, in particular, and Minnesota is trying to prevent an escalation of this crisis in order to, among other reasons, protect capitalist interests. Target, which is owned by the Dayton family, emerged as a site of protest and looting. One of the family, former Minnesota Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, served until 2019 and was later succeeded by Walz. Target has benefited from the pandemic with a 141% increase in its digital purchases, according to Axios. The interests of the capitalist parties are increasingly exposed as the pandemic and the economic and social violence against workers and the oppressed advance. Target workers, by contrast, spoke out in solidarity with the protesters."
(The stuff about Klobuchar in the article is wrong - like factually wrong - but everything else is on point).
[quote=https://www.npr.org/2020/03/10/813922126/why-joe-biden-is-the-pragmatic-choice-for-black-voters]Biden presents as the person that can do that not just because of his ability to win the African American vote. But there is a sense that he can win over some of those white, working-class voters given his Delaware-Pennsylvania roots. So Biden sort of meets the two prongs of pragmatism. One is, can we trust him to keep our civil rights protections in place? And is he electable. And on both scores, he did better than any of the other candidates that entered the Democratic primary this cycle.[/quote]
But you know better than black voters what their interest are and how they should approach the current situation. It's quite telling how a protest over racism and police brutality is turned into ranting on the evils of capitalism.
I quoted an NPR article, dumbass. But you can go look up the percentage of black folks who vote democratic. 91% voted for Hillary. Bernie lost the primary in part because he wasn't appealing to older black voters. They do like Biden though.
Easy stuff to look up. But you know better.
Hardly, but the WhAt AbOuT TaRgEt???? corporatist brigade can all STFU or jump off a bridge - that'd be a start.
And can we not forget that giant retailers like Target almost always destroy local independent shops by way of displacing them? They're a market ecosystem killer, like a pesticide. Targets monopolize and offer poverty wages in retrun - they ruin, not nourish, local economies.
You quoted a shill piece for a corporatist racist.
Was any of it untrue, asshole?
Yes, all of it. Biden - a senile corporatist rapist - is neither 'electable' nor can he be trusted with civil rights protection, given his shitty track record.
In any case, my point was not about Biden but about electoral politics more generally. That Biden happens to be the current cadidate is immaterial.
https://streamable.com/u2jzoo
cop appearing to be enjoying himself today:
https://v.redd.it/jjclrdzp8x151
cop shooting something at guy for saying "fuck you":
https://v.redd.it/zepg0b43ly151
cops breaking supplies for peaceful protestors:
https://v.redd.it/v8x8isj0xz151
nypd driving into protestors:
https://v.redd.it/mztm15kh00251 https://gfycat.com/misguidedrecklesscod
cops shoving an old dude to the ground:
https://v.redd.it/bluggpblrz151
police actively seeking out fights compilation:
https://v.redd.it/m82yxl4qh0251
cop driving at people aggressively on a campus:
https://v.redd.it/ngxvkoro60251
cop shooting something at people watching from apartment:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Sarah_Mojarad/status/1266633046591078400?s=09
police shooting the press with something:
https://v.redd.it/o3v8ps7rat151
police arresting a CNN reporter:
https://v.redd.it/yce9bpk8mo151
police doing a drive-by pepper spraying
https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1266193926316228609
photographer being pepper sprayed:
https://i.redd.it/4ix8f3j6dy151.jpg
guy with hands in the air gets his mask ripped off and pepper sprayed:
https://v.redd.it/wlx0gyoe21251
lady who was coming home with groceries who got a rubber bullet to the head:
https://i.redd.it/ns0uj557x0251.jpg
https://mobile.twitter.com/KevinRKrause/status/1266898396339675137
reporter blinded by rubber bullets:
https://mobile.twitter.com/KillerMartinis/status/1266618525600399361?s=19
reporter describes getting tear gassed:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mollyhf/status/1266911382613692422
couple getting yanked out of their car and tased for violating curfew:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GAFollowers/status/1266919104574865410?s=19
young woman gets shoved to the ground by officer:
https://mobile.twitter.com/whitney_hu/status/1266540710188195843?s=20
reporter sheltering in gas station is pepper sprayed: https://twitter.com/MichaelAdams317
reporter trying to get home gets window shot out: https://twitter.com/JaredGoyette/status/1266961243476299778
cops come at a guy for filming a police car burning:
https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1266953514242228229
photographer arrested:
https://youtu.be/9wgkGLmphLE
Columbus police assaulting protestors:
https://twitter.com/KRobPhoto/status/1266796191469252610
congresswoman sprayed with pepper spray during protest:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/politics/joyce-beatty-ohio-pepper-sprayed-columbus-protest/index.html
7 protesters fired on by something:
https://v.redd.it/tal1ncha4o151
cops pepper spraying a group of protestors without provocation https://v.redd.it/0dxnkso0a1251
young child allegedly pepper sprayed:
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/video-shows-milk-poured-over-face-of-child-pepper-sprayed-in-seattle-protest
horse tramples young woman, police investigating: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/05/30/watch-video-captures-moment-police-horse-tramples-woman-during-houston-rally/
cop pushes protestor with his bike
https://twitter.com/ava/status/1266797973834395648?s=20
Reuters reporters detail being shot at with rubber bullets:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protest-update/reuters-cameraman-hit-by-rubber-bullets-as-police-disperse-protesters-idUSKBN237050
man pepper sprayed as he watches from his second floor apartment balcony (at 13s)
https://v.redd.it/l0yq3023p2251
swat holds alleged looter with the same hold that killed George Flynn:
https://v.redd.it/i5pj07xrw2251
CNN reporter pepper sprayed after identifying themselves as press:
https://mobile.twitter.com/darryl_forges/status/1266911141088972803?s=21
nurse gives her first hand account:
https://v.redd.it/n6x9ms0h86251
casually pepper spraying while walking by:
https://v.redd.it/1okeo9obn5251
girl getting booted while already on the ground:
https://v.redd.it/1maj0iv475251
more cop car ramming:
https://imgur.com/QTZCPKg
video compilation of most of these links:
https://youtu.be/OIgw1VJJLIM
BuT wHaT AbOuT ViOlEnT PrOtEsToRs??
Stfu.
A lot of us watching the protests and riots in the US will feel that we’ve seen this before. But there’s an interesting element added to the mix these days.
“Coincidently this week, the Wall Street Journal’s peek at Facebook’s decision making over the past several years spotlighted a 2018 internal report acknowledging that “[o]ur algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. … If left unchecked [it will show users] more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/31/a_week_when_social_media_showed_its_true_face_143332.html
USA all over the news right now. Bizarrely to me, it seems like the states is becoming more united.
This fall there will be a national referendum on the incumbent; the Devil himself, if he were to take the Democratic nomination from Biden's cold dead hands, will be elected - certainly in a popular vote landslide and probably (at this point) in an Electoral College rout too. You're just chasing cars & barking at shadows ranting against Biden. If Georgia is "in play" by the fall, which I guess it's almost even money now that it will, then I'll have to switch from "safe state" third party to "swing state" lesser rapist - Biden (or whomever the DNC-Obama-Pelosi-Schumer-Slick & Shillary replace him with). Btw, don't count Bernie out yet! (I hope for his sake he doesn't take it because if things get bad enough the old man & fellow progressives, I fear, may be set-up to take the fall).
SCROTUS' only play is some form of martial law (à la the Enabling Act - fuckin' Steve Bannon's wet dream) that most of 'the establishment' will consent to (I can't imagine why they would though) in order to cancel/suspend the election. By historical standards, things just ain't bad enough yet for a banana republican coup ...
Lol, as if anyone needed this peek so see the obvious.
What’s the obvious you’re referring to?
Facebook makes good decisions?
I have no idea what you really mean.
I do agree with this. This election is Trump's to lose, not Biden's to win. I still think the latter is fair game, perhaps especially becasue of the situation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/guaghc/protesters_hand_rioter_over_to_police/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Fuck you assholes who justify this shit.
Ignore them. They're a tiny minority.
There was no looting during the riots in HK.
I admire how organized and disciplined the HK protestors are.
Yeah, this blew up real fast.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/30/21275507/minneapolis-george-floyd-protests-police-violence
None of these last-minute parachuters here to virtue signal their "care" and "concern" give a shit insofar as this is the only thing they can't shut up about.
[Quote]"I won't flame anyone.
I think this is the end of america.
i think america will be balkanized. i understand sometimes people have very strong emotions and feel the need to get revenge. Personally in my case i dont think it would serve a purpose. i hope you all have a great life. i wish you all the best and i believe i'll see some if not all of you all on the other side.
sorry for all my dickishness."[/quote]
Direct replies to this post to @Christian2017.
Or rather the end of an unjust America.
Well, separate the artist from the art and say what you need to say.
Huh. Bet I can top ya. I think an all-seeing and all-knowing super being is watching you and me right now and one day will come to destroy the whole planet after his winged children do some crazy things first. Oh, you too? :)
Anything can happen dude. The world could end before you finish reading this sentence.
[hide]but it didn't.[/hide]
It is severely unlikely that would happen. Total chaos? Martial law? Media/phone/internet blackout? Mass killing? All possible. You know for an alleged man of faith you're awfully concerned with the world and its ways. Eh. So am I.
No. It's going to be ok. What do you want to see happen as a result of all this?
What do you think would replace it?
assuming there is a heaven i want to be killed. but i'm not committing suicide. Leviathan and sharks exist so that no one has to commit suicide.
something akin to the Balkan peninsula. but i could be wrong.
You mean different regions becoming their own countries? The protests aren't aimed at succession, and they have a common goal which is to force police reform. Things could devolve into more chaos, but it's not putting pressure on states breaking up. This isn't a regional fight between different states.
You haven't bothered to read and understand @Baden or @StreetlightX.
If you just want to shout and insult, you can do that in youtube comments.
The relevant issue of political philosophy, as has been said here and elsewhere, is the legitimacy of the state.
For most people (in particular in the West), state legitimacy is founded on a fair application of justice. The "rule of law" is a term in political philosophy coined to distinguish with the previous theory of the divine right of monarchs to decide what they want.
For instance, you seem to think the looting and burning things down is a crime and perpetrators should be arrested for that. Ok, now if I ask you how you know it's a crime? You'll certainly shout: Because it's on video!!! But does that establish it's a crime? Maybe all the looters are co-owners of the places they're looting and have had a share-holders meeting and decided to liquidate their stock in a disorganized manner?
The cover-up of the murder of George Floyd is at the same intellectual absurd level as someone now trying to argue epistemological edge cases that have not been ruled out "100%".
There is simply no way to even plausibly argue what we see is not a murder, at least in the second degree, in broad daylight by 1 police officer and 3 accomplices protecting the first.
You may say, "sure, fine, it's a murder and a cover up by the police, the prosecutor, the coroner, the local, state level, and federal level law enforcement, but that doesn't justify looting! Oh the humanity!", along the same lines as privileged news broadcasters and privileged commentators on the internet are trying to make.
But they cannot be dissociated; the murder and the coverup of the murder is simply proof positive there is no equal application of the law. Heart disease has never protected strangulation before. If you were bullying a kid, got them in a choke hold, and continued a choke hold for 9 minutes while the person you're choking said they were unable to breath, while onlookers told you you're choking and killing them but they couldn't intervene due to your 3 friends shielding you, "underlying conditions" is totally irrelevant. Heart disease would only be a defense if the death was genuinely by surprise in an otherwise normal wrestling match. The murderer in this case also knows the victim and may know of the prior condition, in which case the prior condition may actually increase the evidence of premeditated murder (moving it from 2nd to 1st as the choice of tactic to "restrain a cuffed man on the ground" is evidence of a thought out plan to murder, targeting a weak spot), not decrease it. Indeed, it is evidence (though evidence is not proof) that these police officers were enlisted to carry out a murder in broad daylight as part of a political plan to create race riots and a new national narrative more favourable to those in power than a great depression. Whatever the truth is, it is simply conclusive from the video itself that a murder had taken place, and any other person would be immediately arrested with their accomplices and charged with murder.
The idea that arrests only happen after a total and thorough investigation to know "all the facts" that the prosecutor offered as plausible deniability for his actions, and the actions of every level of law enforcement above and below him, to coverup of a murder, is laughably absurd.
Similarly, if you chased down a white jogger in the middle of the day and shot them, you'd be immediately arrested; if you argued that "they might be a robber" and "anyways, it was self defense as they went for my friends shut gun" it would be simply dismissed as lunacy by police, prosecutors, judges and your own defense council, because obviously the person being chased by people with guns is in the position of self defense. Such a defense would be even more absurd, so absurd no one would every even dream it up, if the scenario was black men chasing down a white jogger (obviously the white jogger would be completely justified in immediately assuming it's a gang robbery or abduction).
So, if the law is not equally applied, then the law has no basis of legitimacy in Western political theory.
What is who's property is a legal definition, if there is no justifiable legal reference frame, then there is no basis upon which to condemn looting and arson.
As Baden points out, it becomes group against group, each with their own idea of legitimacy and their actions can only be evaluated in terms of effectiveness in pursuing their own idea of legitimate political power.
The same American's condemning the looting as "unjustifiable in principle" are the same American's that completely disregard the relevance of laws of other countries when American soldiers bomb, raid and kill. If you think through the political theory that justifies disregarding the Taliban's law, or Sadam's law, and categorizing it as illegitimate, you will see that the exact same chain of reasoning can be used to conclude America's laws are no longer legitimate; if so, all agents of the state become criminals from this perspective, and all acts of violence against them are in principle justifiable; only what tactics are effective is the analytically relevant question from arriving at such a conclusion (just as American generals wonder whether bombing a school or a wedding is effective even if they are sure in their heart of hearts it's in principle justified).
Now, true, the looters, for the most part, do not carry out such politically philosophic reflections, they have mostly not the time nor the education. However, this philosophical rendering of things is also an intuitive visceral experience. One does not need to be a philosopher to feel the pain and humiliation of double standards; it is simply an obvious lived experience. Likewise, one does not need to be a philosopher to conclude society is not providing a dignified future for oneself and one's community, one need simply observe no such options available. When one sees a murder on video in broad daylight carried out over 9 calmly excruciating minutes, and then see the double standard of justice spring to the defense of the murderers, one does not need to be a philosopher to simply lose all respect for the state, agents of the state and the property the agents of the state are enlisted to protect. Once that respect is gone completely, one simply follows one's own idea of what is justified: to take from the shops what one cannot buy.
The peaceful protesters are laudible only insofar as their belief in peaceful protesting ability to influence a fair (enough) political process is actually true. If the mechanisms by which peaceful protesting was effective in the past, which is debatable as otherwise why would society come to such a point, then peaceful protesters are less laudible than the looters and indeed the police; for at least the looters and police have some sort of realistic political understanding. American's today do not condemn the Boston riots and looting that birthed America, but the privileged classes that owned the tea did so at the time; so, from a moral perspective, this maybe all that we are seeing, and nothing else.
The US is a leviathan. Arent you one of its scales? :)
true.
probably.
What i meant when i used the term was that skydiving, fighting a shark with a pair of garden shears and fighting sharks is the reason why noone should ever commit suicide. I would imagine alot of ancient hunter gatherers felt the same way.
The crocodile tears of those whining about protester violence can go shine some cop boots so they can be better licked.
That and coronary artery disease. No, no one has to commit suicide. :)
How does that work in practical terms? Do the affected communities hold their own trials by force?
Quoting Baden
That was a literal war for independence though. Are PoC going to secede from the US? Regardless, if you had advocated shooting the Koch Brothers, Jeff Bezos etc. my reaction would have been more amicable. But in our hypothetical armed struggle, the people that die will not be the people who control the system. It's going to be the poor, again.
Or I don't agree with what Street and a couple other socialists have said. Baden was making a more reasonable argument.
Quoting boethius
Nah, I'll do it here.
Quoting boethius
They have been successful before. That doesn't mean everything can be fixed at once. So more are needed.
Quoting boethius
Except for the local people who have their livelihoods destroyed and people hurt during the protests. There's been a few deaths now.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.html
I don't care about Target loosing money. I doubt they do, though, they probably have insurance. I don't se any evidence that what's happening is hurting the capitalists in any way. From where I sit, they stand to gain from more violence and more division.
Quoting StreetlightX
And do you really care about the outcome, or are you just here to signal your revolutionary credentials?
So what is the outcome of all this? It might force political reform. But it could have the opposite effect of crackdowns and more support for Trump's reelection as a backlash. Just about everyone in America had the protest's back at first. But a lot of people don't like seeing cities burnt.
And someone could send the situation into a deadly spiral, with a bunch of people dying.
Is the violence organize in a way to achieve some end? Will it force police unions and mayors to the table to accept some terms? Just burning and looting does what in the end other than get on the news?
Ok, so you agree with this analysis:
Quoting Baden
I'm not quite sure where I differ in my analysis, but please point it out.
Quoting Marchesk
This is debatable interpretation of history.
The justification of MLK's non-violent resistance (which is not peaceful protesting) was a strategic observation that violent resistance, alone (though justifiable), is not effective. MLK's logic was that civil disobedience (which is not peaceful protesting) forces the state to do it's violence in broad daylight for all to see. The goal was to get most white people to snap out of the denialism of state violence against black people. Whereas attacking the police, though justified, would strengthen white resolve to "win".
So, it was not peaceful protesting to begin with, and the reasoning is not applicable today because we can just see video of the police violence MLK was trying to bring to light, and most white people in America today really do condemn the police violence, but they are as unable to do anything about it as the black people due to political processes that are fairly easy to conclude are no longer legitimate (the democratic process is not working).
The idea that MLK was about "peaceful protesting" is simply delusions of the privileged class. For, obviously, if systemic injustice and corruption really is the case, and recourse through the justice and political system is not actually an effective option, then "peaceful protesting" is not a political threat; let them walk around with signs, who cares. Therefore, the idea that peaceful protesting is the "moral high ground" is simply propaganda meant to uphold the power of the privileged class; it is not good faith advice as to how politics works.
So, which peaceful protests have actually succeeded in the past in an American context? In particular, about issues of justice and state powers. Just weeks ago, many on the right were praising the heros violently threatening their politicians and fellow citizens with a show of arms inside government buildings; the same people arguing that "only peaceful protests" isn't sufficient are now arguing "woe, woe, peaceful protest, peaceful protest". What's changed, the understanding of politics or simply who's side is using violence to pursue their idea of justice and legitimate state power?
I'm here to try and make sure the discourse around legitimate protests doesn't get co-opted by pearl clutching liberals who couldn't give a rats ass about systemic injustice while pretending they give a shit about violence against property (always last minute, parachuting in with only one thing to say).
Stupid. Quote me where I said I "encourage" looting liquor and TVs from stores or where my morals "demand" stealing from stores. Tired of people who can't read responding to my posts with caricatures and missing the substance. If you can't read, go away. If you can, try again.
I don't fully agree with Baden (or yourself), but he wasn't turning this into a revolution against capitalism. Nor did he make an argument that anything goes. Or that people dying and starving would be justifiable.
Quoting boethius
Right, but civili disobedience is different than destroying people's property and work places. And it was well organized. People can use civil disobedience against the police. The issue is with the police, not some random business.
Quoting boethius
I don't see what burning or looting accomplishes other than to upset a lot of people.
And that is a useful way to spend your time?
Quoting boethius
Which violent protests have? Just saying what doesn't work isn't enough.
idk maybe you can call the cops on me or something for not being productive enough for you.
LOL!
Will any of you charming chaps be getting arrested lol?
Is this true @Baden?
But, regardless of @Baden's view of capitalism's roll in this, I did not mention the word capitalism in my analysis.
The question, in the context of riots, is about state legitimacy.
You can have a legitimate state that we could agree is an example of "capitalism". Ok, maybe I don't like it and you do; but insofar as the state is legitimate in terms of genuine democratic standard of fair laws and effective political process, there's no need to riot. If people were looting where I live, I would indeed view it as a crime; the difference is that where I live in Northern Europe I simply can't arrive, from any direction I take it, at the conclusion that the state has lost legitimacy and that people have good reason to pursue their own idea of justice rather than participate in the common idea of justice that is (well enough) expressed through the state intellectual structure and it's agents. I live here precisely because nothing the state does inspires within me any desire for my own re-appropriation of violence I, at the moment, entrust to state agents; and as a conscript I am also an agent of the state.
I am not a "statist" but I am willing to live in a state based society insofar as it genuinely reflects what its people think a state should be; ok, people here don't agree with my stateless dream right now, my task is to talk about it because if I can convince them then I'm confident the laws would change according to this new, and in my view better, understanding.
We're not having this discussion on Twitter, maybe pause for thought a moment and wonder why is that?
BuT DeStRoYiNg TaRgEt WiLl HuRt ThE LoCaL CoMmUnItY!
WhAt DoEs CaPiTaLiSm HaVe tO dO wItH iT?
That's a separate argument with other posters in this thread who want an actual revolution because they view capitalism as the root of all the injustice in the world, or much of it anyway.
Quoting boethius
But again, what is the ultimate goal of the looting and burning? How is it going to reform the police?
The protests are directed at police injustice. The violence though is more random, and at least some of the time, it appears there are people started it with their own agenda.
I don't entertain the notion that anything written in this thread materially affects the outcomes for oppressed communities in the US.
I am just commenting on what, to me, looks like bad reasoning. Perhaps you find opposition useful to develop your ideas. Perhaps you don't. Accusing me (or anyone else who disagrees with you) of fifth columnism seems pretty absurd given the circumstances.
aRe yOu FoUrTeEn?
Streetlight getting arrested?
I wrote the example of the violent riots, looting and then revolution against the British, seemed to be enough.
Indeed, most political changes against a government no longer viewed as legitimate are violent. I owe the freedoms I enjoy right now to lot's and lot's of violence in the past.
The point of democracy is to avoid the need of such violence. My point here is that this is what's under consideration; you can argue the state is legitimate, democratic processes are working as intended, any grievances should be pursued primarily through existing state processes. However, if you concede the point that the state no longer functions correctly, then the idea that "regardless of the issue, property riots and looting must be condemned" is no longer based on anything. Agents of the state and their real masters loot the treasury, people on the street loot Nike and Starbucks; there's no longer democracy, only who's side are you on will determine "who is in the wrong" as in any battle history has observed.
If there still is legitimate democracy in the US, I'm all ears to hear the case be made.
Has anyone disagreed with that specific point? I know all I have been doing is questioning the strategic value of what is happening. So have others in this thread. Since I joined, I haven't seen a single poster say that property damage is impermissible no matter what.
I was watching a live stream in Minny where protesters they escorted another Antifa looking dude out. They didn't want to have anything to do with him.
Also, Minny citizens are reporting people plotting violence to the authorities.
I hope we all agree on that re this situation. I doubt it though.
Literally no one but you has even mentioned the word 'revolution' you insufferable two-bit dolt.
Possibly. Likely several different groups trying to infiltrate.
Yes, yes, just like how the majority of the media is 'just commenting' on all the awful 'violence' of these very unaesthetic black people being inappropriately angry just because a cop killed one of them in public again. Uncouth.
As if using a specific word is the only way to to discuss an idea, you dumb shit. And it's not even literally true. I went back and checked.
A large country, like the US, diverse and interconnected landmass breaking up into completely sovereign states would lead to all kinds of horrible situations arising (perhaps even a civil war).
You can’t start over if you burn along with everything else. Stand alone remarks like that are, in my mind, exactly the opposite of what sensible wish to hear - frankly I think it’s a disgustingly irresponsible thing to say in a time like this.
There are people out there willing to take advantage of the situation and rile people up because they want a ‘revolution’. Streetlight said he wants everything to burn ... do you approve of those sentiments at this current junction of social upheaval?
I am listening to what is being said. I am also aware of the rather naive political leanings of some folks on this site (including the mods). Rioting shouldn’t be encouraged. Trashing amazon and such places doesn’t bother me though, but at the end of the day the innocent suffer and lose their businesses when things get out of hand.
From what I’ve seen in the media the protesters are NOT rioting or destroying property. There are vicious elements that are taking advantage of the situation. As an example a major reported that ALL of the arrests made in his home state were from out of state - meaning, those causing destruction and trouble in his home town had no interest in ‘protecting the community’ because it wasn’t their community.
I’ve seen the vast majority of protesters behaving well. I’ve also seen police acting, for the most part, in a civil manner under huge pressure.
Hopefully after this has calmed down a bit we’ll see some actual sensible political candidates come to the fore so after Trump’s/Biden’s next term in office they’ll be a REAL choice for people. If not, this will continue and then I’ll have to side with what christian said (we’re witnessing the initial cracks show in the splitting up of the the US - maybe in a decade or so).
We’re both lucky and cursed with communication. I do have faith in people though so at the end of the day the word is the most powerful tool we can wield to help move forwards instead of backwards.
Note: I’m not from the US so my perspective on the matter is carefully measured in a broader global context.
It's the violent white protesters destroying and instigating shit that really make me angry. Right, left or just spoiling for a fight, doesn't matter.
If that is a step in the right direction, there's a long long long way to go. And how many steps have been taken in fifty years since MLK and Malcolm X? Approximately none. Still trying to get that boot off the neck. Is anyone supposed to think it is progress when under these extremes a police chief says something placatory?
A step in the right direction would be to stop the extra-judicial killings; suggesting it would be a good idea is just more bull. This story is too old now to believe crisis speeches.
I agree with that. Doesn't require looting and burning.
There's nothing sensible about 3 centuries - and more - of injustice.
What does it require? the campaign has been going a long time, now. What would work? No one here was thinking about the issues much a few days ago.
Actually, looking back I did.
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
But the main point is the problem with legitimacy, which hasn't been taken up much because the focus is just on saying this or that action is wrong, period. That's an impoverished level of analysis is what I'm saying.
I'd think you'd make a really good fascist, given a chance.
The ongoing peaceful protest, which had everyone's backing, with a few exceptions like understandably torching the police precinct after the cops vacated.
It's no my revolution.
However, my argument above was not that the looting is effective, only justifiable (if you conclude the state is no longer legitimate).
If we agree the rioting and looting and arson and violence is justifiable in principle, then the next point to debate is if it's effective.
This is actually two questions in one.
First, indeed, is the question of "will the violence be effective in producing a legitimate (enough) state?"
However, there is a second question of whether "any pathways are available at all?".
If the argument against the practical effect of the riots is "they won't work because nothing will work", then maybe you may as well riot anyways while the military state organizes to crush all resistance; going down fighting is perhaps more dignified.
However, if the argument is that other pathways are available, then that argument must be made in a plausible way.
The purpose of more riots to achieve a practical political goal, is the "bet" that agents of the state will, at some point, stage a coup; a "coup of the colonels". Though rioters generally don't have such a plan, they have simply "had enough" with the current state and will simply riot until real appeasement (for instance, mass arrest and trials of associates of Epstein would probably do the trick), the consequence of continued and overwhelming riots is, historically, a military takeover (one way or another).
For, even in a illegitimate state, there is a tension between corruption and noble competence. Even corrupt leaders require, somewhere down the line, state agents that genuinely agree with the ideal of the state; the whole state cannot be corrupt all at once, corrupt elements rely on non-corrupt elements to keep enough order for the fruits of corruption to be enjoyed.
By rioting enough, the non-corrupt elements of the state are forced to recognize there is only one way to re-establish state legitimacy, which is to stage a coup and basically restart the state apparatus in a plausibly way.
However, this is not inevitable, corrupt state agents may create a new ideal for the state, purging legitimate representatives of the previous concept of justice and enlisting supporters to form a new state structure dedicated to a new concept of justice: i.e. a descent into tyranny.
Likewise, a military takeover may simply reestablish the same or a new kind of corrupt state, leading to another revolution of the historical wheel.
Of course, if the democratic process is "working enough" then the riots are just counter productive, too small to get meaningful traction anyway, and just senseless violence leading to the arrest of the rioters (and removal from the political scene and so ability to contribute to their cause).
Being actively against fascism is terrorism now, apparently. So being for fascism is what?
'Parently so. Joining antifa now. As I don't live in a ridiculous country where fighting fascism is terrorism. The negative consequences to that will equal zero.
(OK, not really joining antifa. The point remains though.)
That is a pious fantasy. An unarmed black guy is murdered in public view on camera while his fellows look on and do nothing, and no one is arrested.
Until there's a riot.
The peaceful protest that has everyone's backing has made no progress in 50 years. That is a fact.
When has there been such a thing on this scale since the 60s? You could rightfully argue there should have been one before this.
But we'll see what the rioting accomplishes.
Yes, you can argue that systemic "racism" isn't really a thing, but I believe the OP states that's not the subject here.
Well let me see, is my knee on your neck? I think it would be an over-reaction to my failure to die of covid. I have had a brick through the window, and I wasn't happy about it, but what is your point? We are not talking about disagreement, we are talking about extra-judicial killing and widespread oppression of a community.
But for what end? Who wins?
There were the LA riots in 1992 after the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King.
For people to figure out how to divide up power.
.
The context was large scale peaceful protests being unsuccessful the past 50 years.
In style more than in substance. Street would make a better Leninist, I think. Hang the bloodsucking kulaks, that kind of thing.
I don't know. I'm just shocked and disgusted that they're okay with people being harmed as long as it wrecks the system, for those who seem to want that.
This is really important - I think part of the problem here is that certain people cannot even begin to fathom any notion of conflict which is not modeled on 'disagreement'. Like the cop's boot had a 'disagreement' with George Floyd's neck. And the protestors have a 'disagreement' with the public execution of yet another black man. These pearl clutchers cannot even imagine conflict beyond disagreement - which is why anything beyond that is deemed 'violent' and beyond the pale. Despite the fact that what is being responded to is anything but disagreement, but systemic violence in its own right.
There have been peaceful protests all that time that you know about and have been supporting because everyone has. There hasn't been violence on this scale in that time, and evidently, no progress has been made because we are still suggesting that police officers who support extra-judicial racist killings ought not to be police officers, but clearly they are, and they are not all going to retire because one chief says so.
Now we are talking. Now there is some consideration being given. But people have been shouting loudly and peacefully that black lives matter for a while now, and nothing changed. Nothing has changed in 50 years of peace. "All we are saying, is give riot a chance." It might wake people up. It might get complacent white people to think for a moment about what supports their peaceful lives. It seems to have woken you up.
I'll take it! Kinda. Probably more Maoist. States are a bit meh.
Fighting a literal war of secession is a patently absurd suggestion.
Quoting boethius
I am not saying they must be condemned because they are violent. I am saying they are likely to be ineffective. Waxing poetically about their "right to be angry" doesn't change the facts on the ground.
Quoting boethius
You can loot Nike and Starbucks all you want, the "real masters" will just laugh at you.
Quoting StreetlightX
What is it you're accusing me of, exactly? Being an agent of Bloomberg or Murdoch?
I don't believe I've accused you of anything. It's a disagreement over values and framing.
I knew you'd say that.
China sure turned out to be a shining socialist example. Both authoritarian and capitalist!
Fair enough. I get your point, even. I am just not sure how to balance supporting their grievances and criticising their tactics.
Everyone who isn't a warlord, ultimately.
I can just see you now swinging your beer belly at them like an obese Bruce Lee with tats.
Is it even the tactics of BLM or most other black groups to be violent? We've said a lot about the violence, but a majority of the protestors are peaceful and wish to keep that way. But it's a volatile situation that sometimes gets out of hand.
The anarchists and white supremacists trying to turn this into something else aren't supporting their cause.
If it was true for everyone, if everyone knew it, there would be order. But there is not order. Extra-judicial killings are disorder. Slavery is disorder. Oppression is disorder. Look at the source of the disorder, not the manifestation. It is the knee on the neck that lights the fire.
Exactly. What it's not is "stealing TVs is good!" vs. "stealing TVs is not good!". If we can't get past that I'm going to punch me a @#$*ing wall somewhere.
The question was "when has rioting ever been effective?" Plenty examples throughout history of rioting achieving a political goal. Of course, the goal can change; that rioting was effective part of fighting a literal war of secession against the British today does not mean that fighting a war of secession against the British is the only available purpose of rioting.
Quoting Echarmion
I'm not arguing against this point; you maybe right that rioting is not effective. Perhaps nothing can be effective, or perhaps there's more effective options available. I am open to hear answers to "well, what would change things?" as many are open, including national news broadcasters.
But, insofar as there's riots now, we will see how the "facts on the ground" develop.
The argument that rioting will provoke a military coup of one form or another (as generally happens in third world countries in this sort of situation), is that this time there is a pandemic and a great depression and, as I argue in the other thread, serious risk of hyper inflation. There's also a federal government unable to fix any problem at all, but makes all problems worse; so, all these things will get more unstable, not less unstable.
People will not only riot because they are fedup with double standards of justice, but because they are hungry, because they are homeless, because they are bankrupt, because they have no visible future ("that the child who is not warmed by the village will burn it down to feel the warmth of the fire"); and centrists clutching their pearls today, aghast and disoriented by the scenes they are watching on the television, will be clutching for looting as soon as those pearls are taken away (i.e. as more and more people drop out of the middle class, the ranks of the rioting class are replenished, and the strategy of mass arrests does not work in with the expected attrition).
The argument that it's preferable to provoke a military coup in the first place (if someone was motivated by political strategy, not just immediate anger, or hunger, or basic economic survival in a depression), and to risk a totalitarian military takeover instead of a benevolent one, is that, after centuries of oppression, you may as well flip that coin.
No, because a lot of people will die, regardless of the outcome.
:lol: I worked in a supermarket once. The manager got pissed off at me because I called in sick and went to the pub. Typical frigging capitalist.
My mistake.
Well, there were the Hong Kong protests that started peacefully but were ignored, hence the escalation.
So despotism, feudalism, oligarchies and communism, are all fine and dandy because they provide order?
No, but they're generally better than no order. Unfortunately, none of the systems are fine. Some are less worse.
I'm not convinced we are in any position to critique tactics. As I mentioned way back in the fog of this thread, it's presumptuous to tell people who have tried every other avenue of protest that what they are doing does not meet some ideological purity test and 'doesn't seem to be very effective' - per the conversion that is happening right now around this post. On this score I think you're right - what is said here won't particularly have any material effect on the ground, so the rarefied tut-tuting only serves to shore up those for whom the only takeway is 'angry rioters bad, black people not being very dignified/helpful' and nothing else.
So you approve of the peaceful protests. Cool.
Those guys said the "cops can't reach where they are"; they're not going to stop any police violence that way.
Quoting frank
I think you are thinking of racism as an individual attitude. Like it's held by a few bad eggs. A bunch of cops being violent racists ultimately isn't the problem in my book; though it certainly doesn't help. The problem (well, part of it) is that being a violent racist as a cop is not heavily disincentivised by the justice system. Formally? Yes it is disincentivised. Functionally? What legal disincentives there are are undermined.
If as a society you're in a place where people are formally equal under the law, but those formalities are mere formalities in function, that indicates that something big has to change.
Quoting frank
I believe progress can be made on some things through socially acceptable channels. I think it's incredibly unlikely that without agitation like this (and subsequent organising) you'll ever see new laws implemented, organisational structures regarding justice administration changed. How long do you expect these people to endure?
Your state of powerlessness is actually pretty analogous to theirs, right? You have no idea how you can go about changing things. If you needed to try and change something, you're about as alienated from social capital as they are; you have the same choices they have. Do fuck all, or do something that at least increases visibility and registers intent. You're advocating waiting and keeping the faith in the socially acceptable means of expression; you're in the same position as them, but not the same community.
You can endure for longer because you're not in the community. You aren't on the receiving end of how things are; but you're still living in a country where cops are assaulting journalists and peaceful protesters and in all likelihood they will not be punished. The cops aren't there to protect the protesters, they're there to quell what's seen as a threat to private property and national security. That their fellow cops turn a blind eye to a few bad eggs assaulting journalists is indicative of their interests; it benefits their disciplinary function if no one can provide evidence to hold them to account.
If the American state saw the immediate need expressed by the protesters as valid; there would already be talk of reforms, there would have been actual reforms years ago. What actually happens is that cops show up to impede a vital function of democracy, a media narrative calling these protesters looters, savages, selfish shows up, and this creates a public consensus of issue framing that displaces attention from the substantive injustices the protests are trying to address. The same thing happened in Ferguson, which I'm sure was an isolated incident and a few bad eggs, who should've been doing the moral thing and enduring their pain forever in silence.
The consensus legitimises; by sweeping under the rug, as you're seeing live happening in your own thoughts; the institutionally sanctioned violence against these protesters (and now journalists!) by comparing it to their own community crime problems. The president's expressed wish for all of them to be shot isn't weighing heavily on people's minds, but a Target store being attacked is. It's been "a few bad eggs" forever, it's been "condemn violent protesters" forever; and the police keep killing and the things that keep the protesters' problems going are never addressed.
It's a double standard. All the things which vindicate the protesters' concerns are managed out of the media attention economy quickly, all the things which condemn the protesters but "formally support their right to protest peacefully" are emphasised. This is part of how the double standard functions. It will never be stated, as part of the justification narrative against the legitimate concerns and democratic expression of the protesters it functions in the background. This is what a disciplinary mechanism on the level of ideology looks like; it manages attention away from the concerns of protesters. Part of its function is that it can be immediately disavowed if pointed out; it is not designed to hold together rationally; it's been generated as a counterpoint, someone who raises it can disavow using it because their discussion partner failed to understand, it's working as intended.
How long would you wait and pray in these conditions? It's only been about 400 years.
French revolution was misplaced because it destroyed order? US independence the same?
Order is preferable above anarchy only If that order is conducive to justice and fairness. If it's not, it needs to be changed. Possibly through violent anarchy is other tactics don't work.
Love me a good bit of order.
Look at them clean lines.
Not an anarchist in sight, just people living in the moment.
Hope no one murders every single last one of them. That would be upsetting and disorderly. Very unhelpful.
:clap:
Is there a chance of a discussion about where this may lead the state of US politics in the near/far future?
It looks like the general public are doing as much as they can about this at the moment. What is the end goal? How do we get there? What steps/measures need to be put into place?
In an age of surveillance, both public and private, it has got harder and harder for crimes to go unnoticed. In there some manner in which this can be further implemented to protect the innocent? Clearly without such technology it’s likely no one would’ve believed/cared. Seeing is believing so this is probably the most striking weapon in combating injustices.
What dangers await and what cautionary measures need to be considered?
Because people die, and not just those in power. And the result is often times worse. The US revolution was a better result, but not the French. The Asian communist revolutions were terrible. Many African revolutions result in a corrupt authoritarian regime.
Speaking of Street's pic he posted while I'm typing, the German revolution was terrible as well.
Canada and Australia didn't need to revolt, and they seemed to have done okay.
Notably, Germany did not undergo a revolution. It was taken over by means of a constitutionally sanctioned exception clause. Entirely legal.
Ohhh no. Oh no no no no.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/aboriginal-deaths-in-custody/
"[There have been] more than 400 Indigenous Australians who’ve died in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. In that time, close to 30 years, there have been zero convictions as a result of these deaths."
Fuck this place too.
--
I'm unfamiliar with the Canadian situation, but by all hearsay accounts, their first-nations people are treated like shit too.
Highlighting for visibility.
This is very salient. In what ethical universe is a call for shooting people for looting—which they began as a result of a situation where a member of their community was tortured to death and the perp not charged—not only less objectionable than the theft involved but actually a laudable response to it?
The ideological fog obscures the fact that an official call for killing members of a community who are protesting being murdered is considered by many to be acceptable discourse, but any talk about violence against property isn't. Everyone should let that sink in. It highlights how the whole debate is so perversely framed. Take away the fact that the ones who are calling for the shooting are the powerful and the ones doing the looting are the powerless and you've got a disgusting upending of priorities where property is more important than life. Because it's their property and your life.
And this is not just about Trump's stupid tweets, that's just a particularly egregious example, the whole of the official discourse devalues the interests and concerns of those who lack the social and material capital to make them visible and elevates the concerns and interests of those who control the channels of visibility. Any analysis of important social events must recognize and deal with that reality to be worth anything at all.
Just rehashing what you said really. But it's so important to recognize. Those surfing on the moral waves of the dominant discourse need constantly to be knocked into the cold water until they learn to swim for themselves to the shore.
The same can be said for most creation events of legitimate government.
A lot of people died so that I enjoy freedoms in my country today; a lot of people died defending the freedoms you enjoy today. It is simply hypocritical to tell non-free people "the historical time of winning freedom has past, if you didn't win it then don't try it now, it is now the time of politeness and freedom is taking no further orders".
Either explain to them they are free or explain how more effective ways exist to gain their freedom. To point out people die in the game of politics so you shouldn't play is simply patronizing.
Do you hold the same opinion about the US military? Any war to accomplish a political objective will result in a process where "a lot of people will die, regardless of the outcome" therefore there shouldn't be a US military, and all US soldiers are criminal thugs?
The privileged saying "say no violence" at only the moment they need to actually contemplate that privilege being taken away, is not simply an empty platitude but completely absurd line of reasoning if one benefits from, much less promotes, the right of state violence. At least say "I like the current violence situation the way it is"; there's no use pretending there's some pacifist belief about all violence; it's just silly if you have no track record of radical pacifism.
As we have seen from US history, these killings create demonstrations and riots... and then things go back to normal with only perhaps the worst hit cities ending up in a downward economic spiral. Otherwise life goes back to normal. Nothing changes.
The only "improvement" is that usually less people are killed in the riots by the police and the national guard as before. So...that's a start???
I think it's because the ideological discourse is so skewed. Cops protect scared rich white people from their worst nightmares. In return, scared rich white people make them virtually untouchable.
Yes, except for homeland defense.
Quoting boethius
Yeah, did they have to? Should they have? It sets the precedent for future violence.
Quoting boethius
I don't know that radical pacifism is realistic, but it's a goal the world should work toward. It disturbs me that you think it's justified people, perhaps a whole lot will, die. And that could mean anyone, potentially.
It's also disturbing that you're willing to justify this on a coin-flip's chance that it might end up with a better result.
I find your reasoning horrific. Most protesters do not want that.
The sociological answer is this: the role of the police in American capitalism is specifically engineered to be an alternative to social provision. In other words: no need to provide for society when you can lock them up and cower them into terror. Via the sociologist Loïc Wacquant:
Police terror is an economic-political strategy, not an accidental feature of current social reality. None of what has been happening can be understood in isolation of these factors. The last of the factors mentioned here - the need to separate the 'deserving' from the 'undeserving poor' is yet another reason to resist the bourgeois attempt to parse out 'rioters' from 'protesters'. Grievance comes as a package, and it affects not only 'deserving' grievers, but those - especially those - who have been so destitute that looting becomes a viable strategy of response.
Race, class, and institutional terror are inseparably bound. Those who want to package it up into little digestible pieces do nothing but help enforce injustice.
:up:
I don’t buy into the idea that these are isolated instances. If we see one horrendous act in full public view it is silly to assume the same or worse never happens out of public view.
The ability for the public to document what happens live is a great boon. Camera footage is mandatory for police in the US, right? If not maybe installing such technology would mitigate some of the potential threats from within the institution that is meant to uphold the law rather than act as if they are above it.
One thing is pretty clear. Justice for one man’s murder is NOT justice for previous victims of police corruption. A clear plan set out by protesters would be a great thing! Asking for justice for this one incident clearly needs to take its momentum into some kind of protest backed movement that DEMANDS changes to how law enforcement functions.
I do think psychological screening is a VERY tricky matter too. We’re talking about a very high stressed job where violence and poor human behavior is seen in a daily basis. My friend was a policeman for a few years and he saw some quite crazy things - I imagine in the US (in certain areas) the dangers police face are enough to push anyone over the edge of reason.
Perhaps the peaceful protesters could be actively encouraged to join the police? That would seem to be a VERY good idea don’t you think? Often enough the people nest equipped for a job can be the very people who are loath to do it (from my friend’s perspective I know for a fact he joined the police because of an incident he was involved in personally - he was angry and scared, and honed that into responsible action by joining up).
Really though, this goes deeper than a law enforcement issue ... economic investments into schooling for poorer communities would be a good longterm plan, but the immediate problems are much tougher to handle on top of the current climate.
Hello. I think some people are glad to have got your attention. By 'you' I mean anyone who has not been paying very much attention to the BLM campaign. This is the first step, to notice the problem.
Now I suggest you take the next step of realising that this problem is not new. Here is some evidence that I repeat for emphasis.
[quote=Martin Luther King] Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. ... But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.[/quote]
A man of peace, famously, so pay attention when he points to "large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity." We have seen some of that here.
And this is from a long time ago, but it could have been written today about the present. So we know that the problem is intractable. I myself have seen and heard it all before, and so I am somewhat skeptical that it will lead anywhere this time. The goal is justice. Peace only counts as peace if there is justice. If rebellion is suppressed by fear, that is not peace, that is violent oppression. What has been manifested in a few days is a violence that has been there all along, the violence of oppression.
Books have been written on the measures needed to dismantle and combat systemic racism. do you want a book-list?
Edit: It's got to start with education. Here's an ignorant white Brit's introductory reading suggestions.
Franz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth.
Paulo Friere: The pedagogy of the Oppressed.
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time.
Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider.
Richard Wright: Black Boy.
Malorie Blackman Noughts and Crosses.
Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
I could go on.
I think it's very difficult to assess the value of the rioting if what followed was organised armed violence, i.e. war. Unless we're in a position where we intend to follow the rioting up with outright war, if necessary, the example has a flaw.
Peaceful civic disobedience has a good track record in the 20th century. The civil rights movement, several Eastern block countries like east Germany.
To clarify, I understand rioting, property damage and looting as an immediate reaction to injustice. That's not something I criticize, it wouldn't make sense anyways. At some point, the immediate reaction must turn into something more goal oriented though.
Quoting boethius
My take on history is that revolutions always eat their children. The only reason the American experience was different is because the loosers of the struggle were conveniently located behind an ocean.
Quoting StreetlightX
I get where you are coming from with this, but I can't quite agree. Isn't that gatekeeping discussion? Kinda feels like "you're either with us or against us" thinking.
I'm not so sure it's just the rich, that seems a bit of an exacerbation. I think even poor people do want police to perform well.
Yet were you hit the nail here in linking this to an ideological discourse. It's a perverse ideological discourse that engulfs the whole society into inaction and it keeps nothing happening. It is actually the discourse. The discourse keeps Americans from doing something about it.
The simple fact is that when looting starts (and of course, for Americans property is far more important than lives) there simply comes this point where conservatives rally with the police, want to take a hard line against looting, theft and rioting. The leftists still remember the issue what caused the riots and hence don't take the similar stance to conservative America. In fact, both sides, the leftists and the conservatives simply dig further to their trenches and those actions, either [i]reforms to policing[/I] or taking a tougher stance on rioting start to seem as a let down of either sides objectives.
So yes, the real reason is the discourse itself. It is poisoned far before the topic of actual police conduct and training is discussed. Far before that the opposing sides have retreated to their ideological castles and see each other in a worse light than before. And then ANY kind of understanding of the other sides view becomes a "surrender" of the values your side has taken itself to defend.
That's why nothing happens.
Point taken though that's not exactly what I meant. @StreetlightX gave a far better answer than that anyway.
For the rest, pretty much, you've seen that in this thread. I would argue conservatives are wrong here in the framing but we'll never get to that if the debate doesn't switch focus.
There is always the question of who has power to shape discourse and who doesn't. This follows degrees; if I started ranting my posts in the streets, everyone would see me as a crazy street ranter. Eventually the police would show up because I don't have a performance permit.
If you're a media institution, you have much more influence over the shape of discourse. You can select stories to publish, you receive donations from interested parties, you've got a major incentive not to bite the hand that feeds. As a media institution, you have major influence over the framing issues you're criticising. As a media institution funder, you have major influence over their decisions.
The playing field isn't equal. There are media components that work against the interest of protesters, and it is always leftists who work against them.
Thanks for a long interesting answer.
Yet I feel that now you put the US to be quite different from other countries. Wouldn't there be some general factors in the civil/police relations that are factors here?
Or do you think that the police in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands or Finland abide this kind of similar agenda and structure in the society? Or is your answer that the American situation is totally different?
Your position is that the violence serves a useful purpose. I'm describing what that violence actually is. If you envision a better form of violence to bring about positive change, describe it.
I've presented no caricature, but stated reality. If you can't defend your position, change it, but this complaining you're misunderstood and saying objections to your nonsense is stupid, is itself a waste of space.
There are riots whose behavior is far removed from any civil rights meaning. You refuse to condemn them but instead try to argue they have some positive value and then tell others to get lost when they disagree.
Nah, you haven't bothered to read my posts and are completely lost.
Not only that, but your politicians are basically prisoners of this stated discourse. It truly strangles genuine discussion.
Watched a short clip of Ted Cruz being interviewed by Fox News on the riots. The fact was the senator's comments were totally reasonable and he condemned the actions well, but the Fox News commentator started with this bizarre point of "do we know actually what was the cause of death?" Cruz could sideline this stupid question, but it tells how the separated media works.
Worst of all is Trump, that only makes the public discourse become worse.
I think in terms of media influence Trump's a much smaller issue than Murdoch and the Koch Brothers. Trump's pretty much a pustule, he's not the infection. He itches and bursts and it's satisfying to squeeze him.
Quoting ssu
Not actually living in America, I grew up in the UK and moved to Norway a few years ago. The UK's much closer to America than here, and has much the same issues, but the police are less militarised in the UK so there are less hospitalisations and deaths despite performing the same societal function. They still do shit like kettling and illegally detaining peaceful protesters (like with London's extinction rebellion), and illegally detaining activists under anti-terror laws... But at least Brits can expect police not to shoot them if they shout too loud, most of the time.
They also do predictive policing bollocks (that just concentrates police effort disproportionately in the poorest areas over time), the British state is even more of an overt surveillance state than America (the police film the public in London and put them through machine learning algorithms for facial recognition, there was a case where a guy stole a crate of beer and was watched continuously by surveillance for a 200 mile journey..)
And that doesn't yet mean that burning down Target stores is justified or effective, it only means we've got to the point where it's not necessarily unjustified or at least not any worse than what's been done to the people who are doing it.
Well, peacefully appealing to the moral sentiments of the ruling aristocracy who have made America a systematically racist shithole clearly isn't going to work. How to effectively apply other forms of pressure is an extremely difficult question.
Yes, some of the localised violence is uncalled for and counterproductive and even carried out for completely the wrong reasons.
I don't personally feel that random destruction of property is justified and I sympathize with any innocent small business owner who got caught up in this.
But the main point is the problem with legitimacy, which hasn't been taken up much because the focus is just on saying this or that action is wrong, period. That's an impoverished level of analysis is what I'm saying.
You responded with this:
Quoting Hanover
How is what you said a reasonable interpretation of what I said? How is it anything but a random expression of your emotional state?
I also said this:
Quoting Baden
Again, just quote my words, tell me what you think they mean and we'll go from there. Otherwise, we'll be talking past each other.
Quoting Hanover
Here's an opportunity. Which specific claim, quote it, is nonsense and why?
I completely agree it is very difficult to assess.
Definitely most riots throughout most of history were mostly irrelevant in terms of political change.
But most means not all, so the question is if this is in the "few exceptions category". Certainly the case can plausibly be made.
However, viewed as a political tool (which most rioters won't likely have any clear idea of, other than the intuitive expression of rejection of state legitimacy and "things be like this now"), the purpose of rioting is for the legitimate components of the state to overthrow the illegitimate components and leadership. The situation in the US is not a colonial occupation that would, as you suggest, require the organized armed violence followup. The "riot bet" is that agents of the state will be unwilling to fire on their own people at a scale large enough to restore order (the only surefire way to regain control once riots are at this scale); which is of course not an issue in
a foreign occupation context. If there's no political solution in sight, then the "good cops / soldiers" turn on their superiors rather than follow orders to shoot their fellow citizens (if things go well of course, and the revolution succeeds). This is the template of an effective riot based political change and there are lot's of historical examples of exactly this playing out.
Of course, that's not the only potential outcome.
A political solution is possible, or then the military and police could effectively end the riots through sustained mass arrests in a way that "good cops and soldiers" can live with (the status quo is maintained; not "enough" shots needed to be fired), or then a tyrannical government emerges with agents willing to "do what it takes" to maintain control.
These "good cops and soldiers" are, in an illegitimate state, carefully selected to be noble and competent enough to find murderers of the privileged class, protect property with their lives and track down thieves, and to carry out wars with discipline and courage ... but not have so much nobleness and competence as to be a "trouble maker" willing to make a principled stand (why oligarchs would say "well, I don't like Trump, but he has no principles! He's not so bad, we can deal with him" whereas Bernie was truly "unacceptable"). History shows that sometimes these "goodish" agents of the state act to reestablish plausible state legitimacy when it is clear their entire identity is not plausible without it, and the state is not plausibly legitimate. Sometimes they don't and after they are sufficiently purged and/or managed just go "oh, phooey, now things are even worse; I liked the old democracy days". In terms of political strategy of rioting, the hope is that riots get large enough to force political leaders to order the shooting of citizens, and in that moment "good state agents" stage an effective coup.
Definitely not a guaranteed outcome, but that's the idea.
I dwell on this option to make clear what the political idea behind rioting would be from a historical perspective, as a counterpoint to the idea rioting "cannot be effective".
The other options, political solutions, tyranny, botched coups, status quo maintained despite sustained civil unrest over a long duration (the riots don't get "big enough" but never really go away, transitioning to de facto gang rule in many areas, as we see in Mexican), can all be analysed as well.
Only "political solution" lacks an obvious meaning of what that would look like.
The current situation is bad, in particular, because the only leader with widespread legitimacy to (at least not be corrupt) is Bernie Sanders, but the Democratic party not only defeated him but made him bend then knee in a humiliating way that essentially disposed of his legitimacy (why no one cares what Bernie is saying about the situation today). However, "unhumiliating" Bernie (which would require making him the Democratic leader) would be the first easiest step to some sort of effective dialogue to reach a political solution. The police state and white supremacists have maintained a policy (whether centrally planned or just intuitively executed) of simply killing black, union and socialist leaders; the problem with this policy is that when people are pushed to the brink there's no leadership (people adapt by creating leaderless movements) with widespread legitimacy that can negotiate a settlement with the state. We can verify this to be the case in that there simply is no person we can name who could go to the white house and talk on behalf of the black and poor communities that anyone would give a damn about (Oprah? Will Smith? Obamas? Snoop Dog?). There is no MLK today that can intermediate between the oppressor and the oppressed. Bernie is, in my view, the closest to a legitimate representative that has widespread legitimacy (a big maybe though), and complete enough understanding of politics, although pathetically naive in implementation, to "achieve" something politically (if the state was willing to negotiate ... which is equally unlikely). So, it's very unclear what politically could happen that's relevant, partly because the Democrats already threw Bernie under the bus not realizing he is the useful idiot smart enough to be useful in the situation; that as problems get worse one needs smarter useful idiots to deal with them (i.e. Bernie is the idiot America needs, rather than the idiot America deserves, which is Trump), and it's equally unclear that even if Bernie or someone "crafted demands to end systemic racism " that Trump would agree to them; so, no one's even talking about some sort of political process at the moment other than "vote for Biden in November".
Murdoch, Koch Brothers or George Soros, there will be allways these rich men who get a micro-orgasm when the US president calls to them (or they can call him whenever they like).
Yet these fat cats would be happy with politicians that are normal and don't make a mess of everything.
Quoting fdrake
Norway!? Well, then you know first hand what Nordic socialism is like.
Quoting fdrake
Yet it's telling that the country you live in and which was described by Michael Moore to be an utopia experienced one of the worst right wing terrorist attacks anywhere in the World with quite a deliberate agenda (attacking social democrat party youths). And Norway did (in my view) the correct thing: it prevented any messages or proclamations spreading in media from the lone terrorist (which prevented copy cats). The terrorist Breivik was given a special form of a prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely, so he is not walking out with the typical maximum sentence under Norwegian law.
Even if the above isn't related to the subject, I just try to show that other countries do have similar problems and do sometimes take drastic measures, yet the way the police is perceived there surely isn't as in the US. But the generally they (the police) are doing the same thing. Above all, the police are part of the society in every country and there are minorities in every country.
So what is so different in
Norway:
the Netherlands:
Finland:
And the people in this thread need to respect that as well.
The current violence erupting now isn't the result of the police killing one Afro-American person, that was just the spark that blew the keg of gunpowder that has been filling up by peaceful protests over many years. We've seen all the kneeling, the hashtags, the peaceful requests to open a dialogue. We have seen all the movements trying to enlight how fascism is growing, how the alt-right and racist movements have risen. But no got damn person is actually doing any actions to battle it. Normal, regular people go back to their lives, they don't care, they don't do anything and then they are surprised when all of this blows up.
I'm not going to condemn the violence of the protestors. The apathy and indifferent attitude among the people make room for fascism to grow and the violence and destruction seen now is as much a blow towards that as towards the state violence. If years of peaceful protests and requests don't lead to anything, while fascist movements and white supremacists grow loud, then it's no damn surprise that these kinds of destruction and violent protests occur. I cannot condemn the current protests because society had it fucking coming.
The difference is that political protest as a means to effect political process is viable. Laws can be changed through political action, which may or may not include protest.
You have pictures of police dealing with protesters.
You don't have pictures and video of Nordic police murdering people in the streets, drive by pepper spraying protesters, running them over with police vans, shooting people on their porch, arresting and shooting at journalists.
People protesting in Nordic countries know they won't be killed and they're message will be seriously considered by politicians and the public in general, the state can be negotiated with effectively (union strikes), and elections can be affected by the protests.
Sure, Nordic countries aren't perfect and you can find flaws, crimes, racists and police managing protests as best they can, but the idea that Nordic states aren't viewed as a result of legitimate political process by the large majority of people that live in them is silly.
True, lot's of reasons to protest about, but the difference with the situation in the US is that there's genuine elections to look forward to; protest and civil disobedience are an effective tool of communication in a legitimate state and genuine democratic process. Protest and civil disobedience are not effective tools of political power. If the dialogue breaks down, only power remains.
Not even the ones trying to turn this into their own revolution? Fuck them. I hope they all get arrested. I hope the legitimate protesters continue kicking them out and turning them in.
I don't really want to pursue that line of questioning in thread, seeing as we both see it as a tangent. The only remarks I'll offer are there are differences in degree of police militarisation and the intensity of reliance upon police disciplinary function as part of societal structure. White supremacist terrorism is not analogous to anti-racist protests motivated to obtain policing and judicial reform, and the police response to each should clearly differ.
Wacquant refers to the US as a 'laboratory' in which certain factors were in place that enabled and encouraged this kind of use of police terror as pivotal and widespread social policy. It was among the first to preach deregulation and privatization, and thus the cutting back of the welfare state and social provisioning. This also happened in conjunction with the emphasis on 'individual responsibility' over social responsibility, and thus with the atomization of society in line with the neoliberal view of individual as selfish market actors. It also allowed the state - while deregulating the economy - to find purchase elsewhere, by massively regulating, instead, the lives of the poor. All these factors and more combined to make the States an ideal place for all police violence to become a pillar of social policy in a way it has not really been anywhere else.
But as Wacquant says elsewhere, the US has been also been really successful in exporting this model. Neoliberalism goes hand in hand with the expansion of what is now often called the 'carceral state' and the decline of state provisioning - the two being two sides of the same coin. There is an astounding inverse relationship - an exact trade off - between state provision and the explosion of police and prison industries. One example:
The same inverse correlation holds other social welfare provisions like public infrastructure, healthcare, and welfare payments. All beginning around the 70s - the start of the Neoliberal era. The more the State recedes in it's responsibility to take of its citizens, the more it imprisons and polices them. And the US figures are fucking insane compared to the rest of the world:
(source)
And that's just the rate of incarceration. The absolute figures are mind-blowing. I can't find a nice chart, but put it this way - it has a prision population of 2.3m, and the next biggest is China - that authoritarian monster state - with 1.6m. (source). Or as the article puts is: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners." Police terror in the US is quite literally off the charts. In that, it is absolutely unique, and absolutely terrifying. And this is not even to begin to bring in the figures of how many of these prisoners are PoC.
Edit: I forgot the moral of the story - there is systemic incentive to fuck the poor and the black by way of police: it is a social policy, unprecedented in scale. That's why it's so hard to 'reform the police'. This is not a story about police and 'bad apples'. It is a social-political-economic story, driven by neoliberal design.
[quote=Jacobin - "Don’t Fall for the Myth of the “Outside Agitator” in Racial Justice Protests"]The “outside agitator” trope is today often accompanied by a tirade against “white anarchists” or “Antifa” carrying out the rebellion — while people of color don’t. This is an attempt to isolate and weaken protesters from each other, to make the “good” protesters distrustful and paranoid about “infiltration” by white radicals. (Radicals of color, meanwhile, are nowhere to be found.) Fostering distrust among developing coalitions is a quick and easy way to ensure their swift demise.
...In 2020, the phrase, and these tactics, have once again reared their ugly head. The myth of “outside agitators” is being simultaneously weaponized by conservatives and liberals to demean and intimidate protesters. We shouldn’t let them — it’s an accusation designed to downplay the widespread anger so many are feeling and acting on in this country. King warned us, “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” Don’t fall for defenders of the status quo continuing to blame “outside agitators” for the rebellions sweeping the country right now — they want us to perish together as fools.[/quote]
The ones hijacking the protests, or the white people who use the protests as excuses to ventilate their destructive tendencies in no relation to the reasons for the protests, or the ones destroying stuff and doing violence in an attempt to further their alt-right white supremacist agenda with labeling destruction on the protests by doing it themselves, yes, fuck them. Because they are part of the problem the protests are against. The violence I don't condemn is, for example, the ones beating the guy who took out a bow and arrow to shoot people around him. That is a fascist poster boy if there ever was one and he had it coming, he had it coming for years.
It's hard for them to weaponize it if there are numerous observations of white supremacists instigating violence. It's in the best interest of fascists to instigate violence during protests.
Well yeah, it was also really stupid. What did he think would happen?
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article243136806.html
https://www.policeempathy.com/?fbclid=IwAR2xXlsoOstXTuxkJspy7mddc0AQQq-Xv_jL6v__-d4oYR6nkVurxG-joec
If one only recognises that the problem is not people rioting...
The problem is still that the peaceful approach has had no significant impact on society, the fascist state machine still grows. This is why violence and destruction from protestors cannot be condemned by anyone having insight into what is actually going on. If people peacefully protest for years and still get brutally killed by police violence, then they will move on to violent and destructive ways, because the former peaceful methods don't work.
If society ignores or is indifferent to suffering and problems in a part of their community, then they have no right to condemn the violence and destruction erupting.
There is no logic to ignoring people's peaceful protests and requests for help in changing things and then condemn violence and destruction that happens because nothing changes. It's the same as asking them to just accept that they might get murdered by the police one day and there's nothing they can do or change. Nope, people will stand their ground against such indifference, ignorance and downright fascism and anyone condemning that need to examine things much closer.
What the state and police is doing is a form of long term entrapment of an entire community, they push and push and when the keg blows up it's the "thugs" of the community that are the criminals. Nope, entrapment is a crime committed by the police and murdering people in those communities and hiding behind the state violence monopoly of the police will push the entire community to commit crimes when things have gone too far. The protestors committing violent acts cannot be blamed if viewed through the idea of entrapment, which the entire society is guilty of.
The only thing that can be done on individual police levels is to educate them in psychology and philosophy. A police officer who understands segregation, socio-economics, class struggles and the psychology of the persons they encounter will be able to do their job in a way that respects the community they invade.
However, it's hard for them to do so if the state orderers more militant actions. You, as an officer, only have a choice of putting down your weapon or complying with the state fascism.
You are also a part of the anti-fascist movement if you do things like informing a company that they are in business with white supremacies, if you work against an alt-right politician who's close to being elected into power etc. All active forms of anti-fascism will put you into that movement.
So it's just another tool for the racist fascist fucks to control the narrative. Get regular people to think it's an act of terrorism to stand up against fascism and you've laid out the carpet for that fascism.
We need to push forth the "appeaser" phrase, make it a hashtag or whatever. An appeaser is a word for anyone who just let fascism happen, who doesn't do anything and never acts to block it's growth. Society is filled with appeasers and they are far worse than the fascists because, without them, fascism will never grow or happen.
Anti-appeaser movement = AntiApp movement unite.
Somewhere else, someone mentioned that if we can't be antifascists, then we can be Fascisn'ts instead. I quite like that.
Yes. It's almost like major political support among national guard for a president who wanted the national guard to shoot protesters has predictable effects.
Yes. Hence, Malcolm X "by any means necessary". And it is not an accident that things are coming to a head as the last of the WW2 generation is passing away. Personally, I would prefer a few riots to a 6 year global conflagration, but I've always been a bit of a softie.
How fucking unexpected!
Someone remind me again how incremental change works again?
The base isn't your "average republican", the base is the kind of national guard that would shoot into a crowd. Or a journalist. Or sweep through neighbourhoods with no protests in them and shoot people standing in their door.
That is who he is appealing to. It isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Edit: also, it's not about Trump. This is a side issue, he's just a concentrated form of political legitimisation for the kind of fuckwit that would fire on a crowd of anti-racist protesters. Will the guard be punished? Will there be reforms of the national guard? Or is it more likely that the national guard being called in and shooting dissidents is business as usual? History sides with the latter.
Does this mean it's nearly the end of the war already? What is it with fascists and bunkers?
In this case they were returning fire.
Fascist mancaves?
:up:
I'm surprised a surprise shot didn't kill an officer.
Also they haven't clarified if the person shot dead was the person shooting at them.
The article you linked suggested as such, no? It's ambiguous whether the officers heard gunfire and shot someone unrelated to it, or whether they actually shot the person who shot at them. From the statement and subsequent investigation into "parties of interest", it seems like the officers did not know who shot at them and shot into a crowd of otherwise fleeing protesters.
Yes, the "returning fire" excuse doesn't hold much water if they decided to shoot randomly at protesters, which is what I suspect happened as they would have likely said otherwise if not. Of course, the double-speak and excuse-making will start now in that case. There's video going to come out anyhow so a clearer picture of what actually happened will emerge soon, I guess. E.g. if protesters or provocateurs did fire on police for no other reason than them clearing the crowds, they're going to be primarily responsible for whoever died.
That's so awesome!
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-dennis-rodman-george-floyd-20200601-strsfxqpkzgbvmcfww5bjponjm-story.html
A lot of the people who are engaged in the riots are black people, so clearly Dennis Rodman doesn't speak for what all black people want.
Snap.
Sure, nobody does. Question is do a majority of black people protesting, or black leadership involved in protests want a peaceful approach?
Better than just posting some socialist/anarchist justification. You'e not even American.
Thank the Lord.
Yes, I think they do, but they don't speak for the minority of people who don't think that a peaceful approach will work.
Why would you think that anyone thinks that black people favour violence?
Where does the violence come from? where did it begin? (hint: knee on neck until dead.)
Indeed, so don't argue for it on their behalf.
Why’s that?
Thanks for introducing him to me. :up:
Having said that, there is still some pretty good analysis to be found here considering what an emotive topic this is. What's your contribution been, @Brett? If you think you have something philosophical to say, please say it. Complaining about people falling into holes is no better than the lowest quality stuff on here.
That’s cheap baiting Baden.
It's not baiting. There is some good stuff on here and your post was a low-quality complaint about low quality (a sweeping generalization). I don't doubt you can contribute, so go ahead.
Your too smart for me.
* You're
Hm.
There you go.
Well Perhaps don't insinuate that I do. I have enough humility to argue on my own behalf, and not other people's. And at no point have I argued for violence; I identify as pacifist. However, I do suggest that violence works. This is because my experience is that it does. It pretty much runs the world. That does not mean I am in favour.
I am not sure that fascism can be defeated without violence, and I do not condemn it in the victims of fascism. And America is a fascist state.
Fair enough.
What you'll find in the political discussions is many emotive posts interspersed with some decent ones. That's just the nature of politics. Emotionally, people tend to react more strongly to things like police brutality than most philosophical topics. If we modded political topics like philosophical ones, we'd have to rip so much out of the discussions that they'd become incoherent. Anyway, the door's always open if you want to make the discussion better.
"Tell me if you've heard this: "well these businesses, they're not going back to "those" neighbourhoods, because they know its going to happen again". Which part? Which part are we talking about here? ... What you're saying is, that it's such a certainty, that they're making economic decisions based on it. OK. But what about the stuff that comes before??? In order for the fires to happen again, all that other stuff has to happen again. So when you make this argument, be very aware that what you're really saying, deep down is: a pile of unarmed people? - That's just the cost of doing business, in "those" neighbourhoods. ... That is a horrible argument. You are saying, with certainty, that it's going to happen again. So much so, that you don't blame businesses for making financial decisions based on that idea. And that the concern is the money. Not the people. But the money.
...Maybe that's something that we should, be like, demanding change. We don't have to accept this. It doesn't have to be this way."
I think it reasonably fair to say progress has been made, albeit with backwards steps along the way. The encouraging signs are that these public protests look string enough not to dissipate - this looks like an opportunity for rational discussion and a rethink about troubled areas in US culture.
How would that work? What's demeaning or intimidating about outside agitators? Also is Jacobin telling us that asking the question "are there outside agitators" is off-limits?
Quoting Christoffer
I agree with the sentiment. Though I wonder what exactly the relation between systemic injustice and individual morality is. It strikes me that while your argument sounds true, there seems to be an element of collective punishment. It doesn't matter who, specifically, the violence hits so long as they share collective guild as part of some group. Do you think that's a problem?
Building something important takes time and coordination. Destruction is something any chump can put their hands to with success.
Note: There is no excusing such actions. They don’t need to be excused only noted. Human nature is what it is. When upheavals happen we’ll always see the demons of our natures come out to play.
I'm just going to quote myself from earlier:
Quoting StreetlightX
Or to put it differently: the production of "bad actors" is a production and reflection of the social reality that birthed them. The attempt to separate those actors into little packets of 'good and bad' is an attempt to deny the reality that produced them. Or as a comrade elsewhere put it - there's protests in 150 cities in damn near every state in the country. These aren't outsiders, they're your fed up neighbours. Protests are not for your feel-good edification.
Right and the real problem is the systematic looters and burners going building to building causing all kinds of damage. I don't think they have much to do with protesting police brutality. They're either there to steal shit, or they're there to cause chaos.
Most of the protesters are peaceful.
This will be a long and rambling post, but since the rest of this thread is long and rambling, I figure it fits here.
(N.B: I am not an American, and far less a victim of the type of systemic racism being discussed. I don't think this discounts my opinion, nor do I think it makes it valuable. I simply offer this information for those who may be trying to understand where I am coming from.)
I spent September and October reading Taylor Branch's 3 volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. It was an intense couple of months, and at certain points had me feeling like I was living through the most tumultuous parts of the 60s. There are many, many things I took away from this bio. The most important is:
The intense tragedy of America. I almost said 'of the MLK story', I could have said 'of the black story' - but this is untrue. What I feel the most is a sense of tragedy for all of the USA, and maybe the rest of us too. Here was the best we had - a man out of his mind, life on the line, beset on all sides by violence, disillusionment, political grievances both major and minor... wound up dead on a motel balcony in his 30s. That's what you get, in America. America loves to have its heroes but what it loves even more than idolising them is killing them. And part of the tragedy is that King so clearly foresaw this. He hated the violence of American culture, he knew he was one of its victims. He also knew that peaceful protest of the sort he engaged in relies on violence in order to be effective. His Christianity however prevented him from being the perpetrator of that violence. It is a portrait of a man being swallowed up by the earth and donating his final sounded spit to the watering of a seed. And the worst part is, by 1968 King was a broken man. He knew, he just knew, that America was fucked. Even he could not overcome nihilism, the man who spent his life tirelessly fighting nihilism.
Why is this important now? Because we are all living in Dr. King's nightmare. The civil rights movement won victories, important victories, hard-won victories. But the goals of the late 60s King are further away now than they were in his lifetime. The end of poverty, of war, of inequality, of discrimination... And so we will go on quoting MLK because the terrifying conditions he spoke out against will continue to assault us. History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
I have no doubt in my mind that the people protesting our 2020 version of a lynching are trying to wake us up from that dream. But I do not see America escaping its cycle of violence any time soon. 2020 will be more bloody than 1968. There are no illusions left, there is nothing to hold onto anymore. A black man has made it to the Presidency now, the glass ceiling has been reached. There is now more space for people to bash their heads into, over and over again...
I would like to say something of hope. I would like to be like King was. But we can't be like that anymore, because King is dead and getting deader. I'm sorry America, you entered the wrong timeline... I can offer solidarity with the protesters, but I don't even know what such a solidarity would mean. All that is left is inchoate anger, as evidenced by this thread including this post. Those of you who are saner than me, I respect but I cannot trust fully. You will, quite rightfully, debate the finer points of strategy and moral philosophy, you will work out a way to get your shining moment in the sun. I wish you all luck. If you can improve another person's life for even a moment you are doing the right thing. All I can say for myself is that I feel utterly powerless, and I am not half as powerless as those on the streets right now. Perhaps I'm getting old... or soft. Perhaps it is a dreadful admission of privilege. All I know is, America is a tragedy and we must keep watching up to the final curtain. Please prove me wrong.
Try again and find the right way to finish that sentence.
People have been opened to such debates for years now, especially since Trump took office. And Afro-Americans have been very forward with their observations and thoughts on police violence and segregation. The problem isn't what has happened now, because that is the result of inaction for fixing the problems. If people would actually listen to the one's discussing the issues, the socio-economics and segregation problems as well as the observations of the rise of fascism over the last couple of years, that would have been the start of the solution. But people are mentally lazy, they are surface-level thinking and media plays along. The actual problems are complex and deep and need a deep dive in order to find a solution. The biggest problem has been that the alt-right narratives of "leftist agendas" and other nonsense about "leftist propaganda" has become mainstream and people cannot discuss the actual problems without being branded Marxists in a negative fashion.
Here's the solution: silence all the alt-right propaganda, silence all the surface level anti-intellectuals and have a proper discussion about the problems in society. People need to stop pitting leftists against alt-right and think that is where the issues are. People need to stop branding any discussion about class and segregation as "leftist". I'm sick and tired of pseudo-intellectuals who does this and gets a voice in both media and social media.
The ones actually looking into the problems knows where the problems are, it's the indifference, inaction and apathy from the ones putting people in power and those in power that rolls out the carpet for fascism to have control over groups of people that now had enough.
No one who's intellectually seen behind the curtain of society is in any way surprised by the current protests.
It's a problem, as if only one problem can be real at a tiime.
Also, I did make several posts offering ideas for police reforms, along with linking to some ideas.
Anyone who lives there.
Why should we care about anyone? I don't agree with this collective notion of guilt that demands violence. Also, it's not just privileged neighborhoods getting ransacked, in case you didn't notice.
To compare, we can compare to feminist theories about the collective guilt of white males. That is a much harder collective guilt since I have not chosen to be born into the privileges that I'm in and therefore cannot really be blamed on past actions by others because of it. However, the guilt of the people in society within the context of the protests, are directly linked to the situation at hand. The inaction and indifference to the problems within their own borders of society is the exact reason to why Afro-Americans have been subjected to systemic racism by the police.
If people in this community had any interest in changing things for the better they would have elected politicians that would work for solutions to the segregation problems. They would have acted together for the inclusion and empathy towards people of color, for building bridges where bridges are needed. They would have listened to Afro-Americans instead of just ignoring them. But they didn't. Throughout the years, there have been so many invitations from Afro-American communities to act against the problems. To discuss, inform and educate people on the complexities and there have been so many peaceful protests that have just been ignored or downright mocked.
People blame the police, but the police and their level of violence is a power that is positioned there by the people. So the people outside of these communities are as much to blame for what is happening as the police conducting violence. It's not that if you give a police officer a gun he will murder someone, it's not that if you give the police an automatic rifle he will murder ten people; the level of violence in power is given to the police from the people, directly or indirectly.
If people wanted a better space for everyone, they would have acted for it, but they didn't and what is happening now isn't punishment, it's the desperation against that inaction, indifference and apathy that people shows the world. If people don't listen now, then the people are the appeasers of fascism and appeasers of fascism was the ones who paved the way for Nazi Germany. What did the world think about appeasers after the war? The apathetic narcissistic people who paves the way for fascism, deserves the fate that fascism deserves. Act and do something or consequences will unfold, not as punishment, but as a deterministic force to balance out the inbalance.
https://www.kbtx.com/content/news/George-Floyds-son-a-Bryan-resident-speaks-with-KBTX-at-Black-Lives-Matter-rally-570911061.html
I hope you are right, there are not the lynchings and the overt apartheid there used to be. But things that have gone can return, and since the organisations responsible are still active, and black people are still dying for nothing, progress is not huge. I have proposed education, I have proposed specific empathic training for law enforcement, I could suggest that the KKK be termed a terrorist organisation, rather than ... a non organisation that combats fascism. I can offer loads of suggestions that you may think are rational to even practical. I really hope this time around it doesn't take a world war to defeat fascism.
But first identify the problem. We cannot even get that far on this thread of supposedly reasonable people. It's not a problem of black people being violent, but of them being denied justice, and denied a place in society, and the violence that supports this state of affairs is deeply entrenched and clear to see, but people are still looking the other way. How can we have a rational discussion in these conditions?
:fear: :sad:
^Prothero said it exactly right.
The anger and frustration are the result of decades of inequality and injustice. Riots will recur until such inequities are addressed.
"Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention" MLK Jr.
The way you put it, it makes a lot more sense. I do agree with that analysis. When I read the phrase "outside agitators" I did not take it to mean opportunistic looting, but rather people intentionally instigating violence in order to use that violence to justify repressing the protests.
As for the opportunistic looting, I agree it's part of the same, or at least similar, socio-economic pressures. But I don't think it follows that a movement, whatever it ends up being, needs to accept every behaviour. Treating people as merely driven by outside circumstance is taking away their agency.
Quoting Christoffer
Good post. I agree with your analysis for the most part. I do see a problem though: If we're going to treat violent protests as a "deterministic force", isn't the same true of the appeasement? In this mode of analysis, aren't appeasement and inaction just as predetermined. In fact, aren't even the oppressors merely a deterministic force?
Socio-economic analysis doesn't directly translate into moral judgements. It cannot, because the analysis presupposes determinism, where morality presupposes freedom. There is a difference, therefore, between understanding something as a phenomenon and justifying it. Now, most of your reasoning works for the latter, and I do agree that inaction is morally wrong. But of course, there are plenty complications. Most poor people (in the US and elsewhere) barely have any practical representation. You're probably aware of the studies regarding how much policy preferences of different groups actually determine outcomes. And the people worst hit are probably the ones who are already on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
That doesn't mean violence cannot be justified. It does mean it's a pretty damn difficult topic though.
Good. No one cares about harmless protests.
No one's asking anyone to accept anything. Only that protestors don't have to keep qualifying their protests at every juncture to make people like you feel good. These protests are not about what you fucking deign to 'accept' or not. It's a fucking energy sink, and its fucking tiring to have to append a 'protests in the mirror may be more violent than you're willing to allow' to every fucking statement. Don't accept it. Accept it. Who the fuck are you.
Here's an example of a homeless man's property being tossed into a fire.
But hey, it's just property, right?
True. I agree with that. I was thinking the piece you linked was more aimed at the people doing the protesting, not some guy on an internet forum.
The question is then how to use this opportunity to better the US for the people living in the US. Small steps can build momentum. I think a lot of the peaceful protesters should give serious consideration, and active encouragement from the community, to join the police force themselves.
In terms of surveillance there is something there too. I think without video footage the situation in the US would be much worse. It’s horrific to see and hear about the string if cases like this one, but equally such horror is better seen in the cold light of day than hidden. People can cover up their views well enough most of the time, but under surveillance it’s almost impossible. For that reason open public access to police operations - to some larger degree - would be an area worthy of consideration (as is already happening and as has been happening as practically everyone has a live streaming handheld device now).
At least people like NOS are shameless about being shit human beings. Liberals just want to feel good and have their egos stroked by being offered assurance that the Cause is good enough for them. Worse than useless.
Man, those local business owners must have really, really had it coming. I never realized you hated small business owners so much.
While there may be some sort of rational discussion to be found here in this thread, I don't think it can be had with those who for no serious reason support destroying local businesses and in turn the communities that house these businesses. It's just destruction for the sake of destruction. Simply having righteous anger doesn't entitle one to a blank cheque when it comes to violence and no one can seriously entertain this viewpoint intellectually speaking.
I've long had a suspicion that a pattern like this is behind a lot of arguments over outrageous topics (in the literal sense, of topics that provoke outrage):
Say someone stomps a kitten's skull on video, and that provokes a bunch of (righteous) outrage, and lots of people are shouting "kitten stomping is wrong!" That's a pretty obvious truth that I think almost everybody is going to agree with, and when everyone else is already shouting it, a lot of people won't feel any need to say anything more about it themselves.
But then someone outraged about the kitten stomping does something a little over the line to express that outrage. Someone who had nothing useful to add about kitten stomping being wrong (because it obviously is, what more is there to say) might speak up about that reaction being over the line, not to defend kitten-stompers, but just as a matter of principle.
While that outrage is completely justified, and some people overreacting is understandable, it's also good that some people with more emotional distance from the situation keep level heads and watch that things don't get too out of hand. But then some people spin that level-headedness as not being outraged enough about the kitten-stomping, and consequently as defending the kitten stompers.
That in turn provokes other people to defend the level-headed people and their right to not be outraged, and so the conversation ends up circling around that topic, instead of the original kitten-stomping.
All because there isn't really anything to add to "kitten stomping is bad", not because anybody disagrees with that. If people did disagree, then there would be more discussion about that, and not about overreactions to it. The only reason the conversation keeps circling around the reactions to the original offense is because everybody agrees that the original offense was wrong, but some people contend that the reactions are all perfectly justified, and conversation centers around wherever there is disagreement.
TL;DR: You defending the overreactions to the original crime is why everyone is arguing with you about that, and not talking about the original crime. Everyone agrees the original crime was wrong, so there's nothing more to say about that.
Precisely. Once the discussion got more level headed, agreement re-emerged.
It's important to keep in mind that you can accept the protests, with the rioting, as legitimate, while also saying that rioting shouldn't be encouraged, for whatever reason.
WOW Well done you did it! You said the Important Definitely-Not-Trivial Thing To Say. I wish all the protestors had your courage!
Good post.
Unfortunately, this is not true. It may be true for anyone who reads this topic but it's definitely not true everywhere. Also, claiming an "overreaction" means that you evaluate the riots to be worse than the original crime and everything it stands for. Many would see that as outrageous.
I don't think I know how to respond to that. When I say looking the other way, I mean this:-
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Here, quite explicitly, it is the destruction of property - and worse of the sacred 'business' that is the problem. Not the destruction of a black man.
What's the problem? Either it's the destruction by the mob, or it's the destruction by the cops. Each is the problem to the other and you have to look one way or the other, and not both. Trying to look both ways just gets you reviled and killed.
Obviously, State troopers and more deaths of black men is the solution to the riots. Press down hard on the feelings of outrage, and try and turn them inwards. And obviously it is not the solution to the other problem, of extra-judicial racist murders by cops. So what you gonna rationalise?
As trivial as it is, probably half this thread is people mistaking one thing for the other.
Yes there is definitely Nothing more to say about the structural violence that led to yet another black man being murdered in broad daylight and the links between capital, policing, poverty, crime, and a hundred other social factors and the REAL takeaway is 'don't be bad, be good'. Very good. Nice analysis. Excellent takeaway. Glad it only took 22 pages to get there. So Powerful. So Wise.
It's because they do not live there. They need not worry about their jobs, their grocery stores, their homes, nor think about anyone these riots might affect. What's left but to bleat from the ivory tower?
Why, you already have all the wisdom, don't you? You're the ultra woke communist revolutionary, the one who will single handedly stick it to the man. You don't need us, or the protest, your sheer ideological rigor shall bring down capitalism and injustice.
I don't think that's true at all. That kind of thinking implies "an eye for eye" sense of justice: that any reaction is justified up to the level of harm of the original offense, and only when you do something worse in response is it an overreaction. Justice isn't arithmetic like that. The right response to a crime should not be something exactly equally wrong as the crime but "in the opposite direction" or something; it should be constructive, something to remedy the harm done and prevent future harm, not just return harm upon its original perpetrator.
I can only speak for myself, but I personally don't have anything more to say about that than has already been said well by lots of other people here, like you. You and others have already said all I would have to say, so what more can I say about it?
Quoting Echarmion
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm gonna hang these on the wall of a kindergarden somewhere. The kids will appreciate these pearls of generic, completely unspecific, utterly dime-a-dozen words of wisdom that Definitely have Everything to do with Systematic Racism in the US and Totally Contribute to the Discussion in a Non-Trivial way. Just gonna have to read them back in the voice of Mr. Rogers or something. It's gonna be a treat. I hope everyone is Very Proud of the Hard Work they've put in today, and hopefully the Angry Black Protesters can all learn something Very Important.
I believe that people riot to demand justice, not to dispense it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You're the one claiming an "overreaction." This means that you believe the rioting is unjustified or is worse than the original crime and the systematic racism that it stands for. You can see how others might disagree, yes?
The point of the post you're responding to is to argue that "unjustified" doesn't equal "worse that the original crime". (To be clear, I don't think the rioting is worse than the original crime. But I think some specific acts of the rioters are unjustified).
You can respond to harm with lesser harm and still be unjustified. It's not the amount of harm dispensed by whom that constitutes justice.
I find it odd that as I grow older, I become less and less conservative. Politically, in any case.
For good or ill, I've spent most of my life in the practice of law in these United States of America. I'm an old, tired and jaded practitioner. Not as old as some, perhaps; though some of them should be put out to pasture, or put in the cornfield as a charming Twilight Zone put it. But more tired and jaded than most I suspect. I have no illusions regarding the law, I think, but have for the most part always thought that the rule of law is something to be honored and sustained.
There's problem with this conceit. The rule of law in its most significant respects is often ignored or perverted in our Glorious Union, and in lesser respects has become little more than a complex and sometimes mystifying mechanism by which the interests of a small group of people are maintained and furthered. I've quoted Bastiat in another thread and for another purpose, but the quote is one which comes to my mind more and more these days as characteristic of America and some other nations as well:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Certain kinds of looting, sanctioned by the law and our morality, are not just tolerated but encouraged in our Glorious Republic. The immensely wealthy are admired in our society and have been for many years, instead of being seen as the equivalents of gluttons and hoarders they are.
The ingenious, and shrewd, great landowners, merchants and lawyers who created the U.S. took pains to protect certain civil liberties and restrict the power of government. I thought this generally wise and valuable. But I doubt even those worldly men could have imagined the extent to which wealth and the wealthy would come to control everything and everyone here. Our politicians are bought and sold many times over. It's the nature of our politics that large sums of money are required by any successful politician, and so those who govern us are mere shills for those who support them as candidates or incumbents. The idea of plunder has become such a part of our legal system that our Supreme Court has decided that money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
This will only continue in the absence of dramatic change. As they see reason, the wealthy, individuals and corporations, have no reason whatsoever to change the system by which they've profited. They're unwittingly supported by many of the less well-off who continue to believe in the American Dream of which they've been deprived who so fear socialism--or whatever it is they consider that to be-- that they're quite willing for the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer, even if it means they grow poorer and less powerful themselves.
Sometimes my fondest hope is merely to be left alone in the mess that is now and will be. Perhaps that's the new American Dream. I hope I can do better.
There are reactions and there is justice. Yes, they should not get confused. Maybe it would simplify things if you explain what you mean by the riots being an overreaction. It seems to be an evaluation of some kind.
But why won't the protestors just be Nice? That's clearly the Most Important Thing that must Take up 23 Pages of Discussion.
--
But seriously, yes, the fact that people are so single-mindedly obsessed over low level looting and are apparently stuck dumb when it comes to the issues that you refer to - which perpetuate and sustain the current state of affairs - is a total indictment on most of the discussion in this thread. It is embarrassing and shameful, but not for reasons mentioned elsewhere. Instead we are treated with discussions of kittens and fortune cookie moralisms that are supposed to constitute substantial discussion. A few more posts like yours and this thread may actually turn out half decent.
The bear gets my vote.
Not to worry, it will trickle down to the lower classes like rain from heaven.
Justice is a topic that applies to the reactions as much as anything else. Reactions can be just or unjust. You mentioned justification. Justice and justification are closely related. Doing something unjustified is unjust, even if it's in reaction to something also (or even much more) unjust.
I don't think the riots as a whole are an overreaction. Angry people taking to the streets loudly and visibly complaining about the murder of George Floyd and the systemic problems that underlie it is a perfectly justified reaction. Some property violence, like overturning and burning police cars, I could also see as a justified reaction. Destruction of unrelated storefronts, including ones owned by people who are struggling to make ends meet themselves, or especially (in that video posted earlier) some homeless guy's mattress, is not justified. None of that is as bad as the brutal murder of a human being, but "not as bad" isn't the same thing as "perfectly okay" either.
And I wouldn't even be talking about this if it weren't for people saying or implying that it is perfectly okay, because it's not as bad as what it's in response to.
You evaluate that this is worse (an unjustified reaction) than the years of systematic racism and the incalculable suffering that it has caused now symbolized by the George Floyd murder?
You keep repeating this "unjustified = worse" things despite repeated, IMO very clear, disambiguation of them. In fact the very next sentence after the bit you quoted began:
"None of that is as bad as the brutal murder of a human being,"
...but, as that sentenced ended, "not as bad" isn't the same thing as "perfectly okay" either. And "justified", or "just", implies it's okay, or even good.
Poor wording on my part. Please allow me to rephrase.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You appear to evaluate this to be an overreaction to the incalculable suffering caused by systematic racism that is now symbolized by the George Floyd murder.
So the narrative is that arguing against the destructive part of the protest is to not care about addressing systematic racism. It's to be a worthless liberal, god forbid.
So what do our burn-the-shit down socialists have to say when black people are condemning the violence and advocating for peaceful protest?
So what is it? Is it just some worthless liberals in this thread focusing on the wrong thing?
[quote=George Floyd]We're not going to take it. We're not going to be repetitious. In every case of police brutality, the same thing has been happing. Y'all protest, y'alll destory stuff and they don't move. You know why they don't move? Because it's our stuff not their stuff. So they want us to destroy our stuff. They'e not going to move. So let's do this another way.[/quote]
Then he goes on to talk about voting for change, like Obama did, who also said:
So there you go. An argument for peaceful protest from the people being oppressed.
That stuff you quoted is not perfectly okay. It's far less bad than, as you say, the incalculable suffering caused by systematic racism that is now symbolized by the George Floyd murder. But just being less bad than that doesn't make it perfectly okay. There's a lot of stuff less bad than that that's also not okay.
Let's look at it this way: the Holocaust was maybe the worst thing that's ever happened. Would a hypothetical systemic discrimination against German people up to and including state actors murdering innocent Germans in cold blood (basically the situation we're talking about here, but directed at Germans instead of African Americans) have been "not an overreaction", or "justified", or "okay", because it's not as bad as the Holocaust that it's in response to? (Or conversely, if African Americans had done a genocide, would that make what's happening to them now okay, because it's not as bad?)
[quote=Lori Lightfoo]I'm hear to call you out for your recklessness and for your obscene disrespect to a righteous cause that you are trying to hijack. When you or anyone behaves in this way, we all lose. By giving the vary same forces of oppression we fight against the false validation that they crave.[/quote]
He discussion upcoming police reforms. This can happen within the system. And then he concludes with:
[quote=Stephen K. Benjamin]For those of you not from our city, I want you take your asses home right now![/quote]
I guess the mayor has some reason for believing in those mythical outside agitators.
Anyway, fuck you for wanting to see my country burn because of your ideology. Support the majority peaceful protest.
I don't see how it can be said to be an overreaction then. Particularly since the situation doesn't seem to be improving. In fact, we seem to be sliding backward of late.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What is this either/or? has anyone actually said it was okay?
Anyway, Godwin's law says it's time for me to bail.
Anyone kneeling someone's neck has to go. Are you kidding me? Pushing a reporter into a fire, macing a kid? That shit has to stop.
Also any cop targeting a reporter. And the Louisville shooting, which is real suspect. No body cams were on, some black guy gets shot.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 is being seriously discussed ... Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. :yikes: :point: :fire:
We'll see how that goes down.
One lat video form a black man disgusted at looters in long beach who he says had nothing to do with the protest at 0:49.
The police have utterly failed. The murderers within their ranks have been exposed, and now the cowards. They have refused to protect and serve, sheepishly standing around as communities are razed to the ground.
From previous experience we know what happen when the police run away during a riot: Roof Koreans. People will plea, flee, or finally stand up to protect their communities and neighborhoods. There are clearly instances of that already.
They have to follow orders from higher up, but yeah it seems they weren't doing much to stop the actual looters and fire starters. Just standing around provoking the protesters. I've seen it suggested that if they joined the peaceful protesters and stopped the looting, they would have been helped by the protesters to identify bad actors. The peaceful protestors don't want everything destroyed.
What?! Come on man. I'm sorry. Surely you meant they don't want anything destroyed. Right?
Sorta, kinda, maybe? It's difficult to tell what people actually think. Several people have been accused of openly calling for riots and destruction. Several others of devaluing the protest by focusing on some inconsequential property damage. No-one came out and drew any lines as to where justified protest ends, in this case or generally.
A little bit of hyperbole. And probably it would mean a few broken windows and a dumpster fire here or there, and the occasional scuffle with police. People getting a little bit worked up at night is different than the systematic looting. But mostly not anything destroyed. The Minny police precinct and some squad cars was understandable at the time, long as nobody was inside.
Trying to be a reasonable about people being understandably pissed off. And sure a Target might get looted in a couple places. But keep the local stuff safe. Beyond that, yeah peaceful, no destruction. It seems like there are elements looking for an excuse to break shit on a much bigger level. That's where it crosses a line.
What's worse:
Someone who breaks into your house with the motivation of stealing your television?
OR
Someone who breaks into your house with the intention of killing your dog?
---
Protesting: good
Looting: bad
Behavior and culture of American police: worse
I think there are pretty clear lines where lawful police force ends and brutality begins. There are also legal lines that appear to be designed to sustain an underclass in our society. Is anyone saying that's okay?
It's not the police. It's the culture of disregard combined with a bloody history. I think the fix will come in the form of an economic depression. The economy is still reeling from the virus, and now retail outlets are closing down all over the place because they're getting bomb threats and now daytime vandalism and looting.
By the way, the American revolution started with something kind of like this in Boston. It became a thing: somebody would start a fire and that was a sign for everyone to get drunk and go burn down the Governor's mansion. The Boston Tea Party was part of that. Nobody calculated the morality of it.
But the revolution would have been a failure if the French Navy hadn't decided to help. There's no French Navy coming to help this time. It will burn out. Most people will forget about it. As the recession deepens, who suffers the most? The people at the bottom, as always.
Take a broad view and it doesn't look like anything is different for the last 5000 years. Less CO2 output during the recession, though. Yay!
It's not about what they're doing. It's about you. Who you are. Right?
Because "overreaction" doesn't mean "worse than what it's a reaction to".
Quoting praxis
Maybe it's been a miscommunication (like this "overreaction" confusion you and I are having), but it's sure sounded like some people mean that, including you when talking to me just now. "This is not an overreaction" sounds to me like "this is the appropriate, just, and fully warranted response", in other words "it's perfectly okay". I gather now, if you're agreeing that it's not perfectly okay, that you take "this is not an overreaction" to mean "this isn't worse than what it's a reaction to". And I agree with that, if that's what you mean -- it's not worse -- but that's not what those words would sound like to me without all this extensive clarification. They sound like "this is perfectly okay".
It's the nature of the human animal. The human condition. Everyone. everyone. is biologically predisposed to favor similarity and familiarity over anything else. Google "babies are racist". Something is familiar or comfortable it's likely to be safer. Otherwise, it may not be. Example, living in a grassy plain for hundreds of generations. You know it's safe, you travel far enough to see the terrain change, some will instinctively stick to what they know, some will venture outward. Perhaps beyond that plain lies danger and those inclined to venture never make it back. So, those who instinctively stick to what they know, live, survive, and reproduce. Just biology.
When you have an open society with no religious mandate in education or morality, as such defines "freedom" apparently.. you're subject to society and biology. Which if you Google'd what I mentioned, would not be unexpected. Aside from that the media, not news media but movies, TV, and music. People don't like watching happy and fulfilling things when theres more emotionally thrilling options. They find it boring and dull. When I was growing up kids didn't want to play crash bandicoot they wanted to play grand theft auto. If you didn't play it and couldn't relate to what they were talking about you were an outsider to the group. A lame-o. Many don't outgrow this mindset even in old age.
That's the why. As for the solution. Well. State churches were abolished. One pivotal one has just been burned. Otherwise. Good luck.
If you're truly concerned about the why and the solution. You have to look in other countries were whites are the minority and non-whites are the majority. Are things any different? They might be. If they're a statistical minority yet remain an influential functional majority. If so obviously the concept is not effectively present.
If we must consult the dictionary, it means a more emotional or forcible response than is justified. Justified means having, done for, or marked by a good or legitimate reason.
What you're calling an overreaction is "far less bad" than what it's a reaction to but is nevertheless an overreaction because it's unjustified. Unjustified means not shown to be right or reasonable. Reasonable means having sound judgment; fair and sensible.
I think we can all agree that violent rioting is not fair or sensible, but then we can also agree that murder by police is not fair or sensible and that systematic racism is not fair or sensible. So maybe we can stop talking about fairness and sensibility and start talking about the emotional response.
You think that the emotional response is an overreaction. Okay, but you must be able to see how others may not see it that way.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I have no words...
We are not safe.
You have (almost) everything to lose.
We have (next to) nothing to lose.
So, in fact, You are not safe; and you will not ever be safe until you share power in an effective way that makes both of us safe.
Since 1619 ... 1776 ...1877 ... 1921 ... 1954 ... 1963 ... 1968 ... 1980 ... 1992 ... We still can't fuckin' breathe, America. :fire:
THE WORLD IS WATCHING YOU.
HISTORY IS WRITING YOUR EPITAPH.
@Pfhorrest -
"Overraction" to regimes of Reaction is like going insane in a "catch-22", meat-grinding, warzone (e.g. Korea '50s, Vietnam '60s-'70s, Afghanistan '00s-'10s): existentially appropriate.
I agree with all of that. That's basically what I've been trying to say to you all day.
Quoting praxis
Yes, all of that is not fair or sensible, I'm glad you agree. But none of what I've said is meant to judge the emotional response as not fair or sensible. I think I've been careful to distinguish between the emotions and the actions. The kind of anger that the actions express is absolutely justified. But it sounds like at least you and I now agree that that justified anger doesn't in turn justify any and all actions. I wouldn't be talking about any of this if people light StreetlightX hadn't seemed to be trying to defend the actions, not the emotions.
If the conversation had just been like this...
"Murder is bad."
"Yeah, it really is. Looting and vandalism isn't okay either though."
"No, of course not. Not as bad as murder though."
"Oh definitely not."
"And people are justifiably angry."
"Yeah, but that doesn't excuse any and all behavior."
"No, but it's understandable why people feel like acting out."
"Of course. I understand, even if I don't approve."
"Reasonably. Anyway, about those awful murders..."
...then we could have avoided this whole long tangent.
Quoting praxis
Your own dictionary quotes above are all the words you need, as this is saying the same thing as that.
Whomever has power and (almost) everything to lose - and, by implication, their Stockholm Syndrome-d functionaries & apologists. Are you one of them? :roll:
I think Mcconnell would rather see the country go down in flames than endorse that, therefore conservatives of his stripe have nothing to lose. They won't abandon their principles no matter what. Their lives would become meaningless.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Maybe had you had half the fucking brains to realize that I have not been defending looters but trying to actually pull this thread away from the energy sink of 'lets seperate good protestors from bad protestors' you might have had more to say than the fortune cookie bullshit that you and every other media duped liberal have been spouting. Anyone who has spent more than 100 words sweating over looting and not - I dunno - the fact that someone got murdered in broad daylight, can all go to hell. I don't give a shit about justifying or not justifting looting. The very fact that anyone is having that conversation at all - ad fucking nauseam - is the problem. You all may as well be Fox news anchors for all the airtime you give it.
And even that isn't an excuse to actively contribute to a god damn energy sink that perpetuates the kind of discussion that ensures no one talks about the things that matter. If you have nothing to say other than 'but looting!' then maybe just link to a Murdoch or Koch financed newspaper and be done with it - they're having that discussion much more vigourously and with very little opposition. You can join your circle-jerk of patting yourselves on the back and agreeing that looting is bad with your neo-fascist brothers-in-unarms there.
A lot of law enforcement across the country is (and this is rather unique) publicly and overtly stating that they believe that Chauvin murdered Floyd.
I think most of us in this nation can agree that when law enforcement doesn't obey the rule of law, and engages in extrajudicial killing, there ceases to be any meaningful rule of law, and we are then prone to descend into this sort of chaos.
In order to restore the rule of law, fair restitution needs to be made. This, I think, would suffice:
Members of law enforcement should take Chauvin, and the other 3 cops complicit in the murder of Floyd, into their custody. They should then go on social media and national TV and state that they recognize that in order to restore the rule of law restitution must be made, and then they should publicly lynch those 4 police officers. They should then state that the law enforcement community, nationally, promises to carry out the same punishment on any officers who in the future commit acts of extrajudicial killing.
I believe this would end 97% of the rioting.
true.
But then they'd be no cops left. Which is a most agreeable situation.
"5 demands, not one less.
1. ?Establish an independent inspector body that investigates misconduct or criminal allegations and controls evidence like body camera video. This body will be at the state level, have the ability to investigate and arrest other law enforcement officers (LEOs), and investigate law enforcement agencies.
2. Create a requirement for states to establish board certification with minimum education and training requirements to provide licensing for police. In order to be a LEO, you must possess that license. The inspector body in #1 can revoke the license.
3. Refocus police resources on training & de-escalation instead of purchasing military equipment and require LEOs to be from the community they police.
4. ?Adopt the “absolute necessity” doctrine for lethal force as implemented in other states.
5. Codify into law the requirement for police to have positive control over the evidence chain of custody. If the chain of custody is lost for evidence, the investigative body in #1 can hold the LEO/LE liable".
Would probably add something about gutting funding to police unions too.
Of course he can't do that sort of thing.
Another really dumb thing Trump is doing is making enemies out of governors and mayors.
I remember learning that around three million children die of malnutrition each year and thinking, ‘how did I not know that? how does everyone not know that?’ No good answers but apparently we can all live with it.
"Louisville, Kentucky, Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad has been relieved of duty after it was revealed that the officers involved in a shooting that killed a local business owner early Monday did not activate their body cameras.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced the decision to relieve Conrad on Monday afternoon during a news conference, where the deceased was identified as David McAtee. Conrad had been set to retire later this month."
The dumb thing that Trump is doing is breathing.
That's good news. Needs to be an independent investigation into what happened. And yeah, I noticed it was a black business owner.
"Confederate statues in Birmingham and Richmond. A former slave market in North Carolina. The national headquarters for a Civil War revisionist group. These were just some of the monuments and buildings symbolizing centuries of systemic racism in America that were hit during the weekend’s protests, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. "
Fuck yeah property destruction.
Yes, absolutely, those need to go. :clap:
Anyone moaning about violent protest not solving problems can go fuck off a bridge and never come back.
And people like this guy. :roll:
It's helpful to remember that the crates of tea thrown into Boston Harbor were a large, valuable shipment -- about a year's worth of tea drinking for Boston and surrounding area -- and worth million$ (a rough calculation into today's money).
Another thing:
I would discourage anyone from thinking that the riots will lead to a new day of good feeling. Probably not. It's also unlikely that the least well-heeled of riot victims (the small shop and restaurant owners) will just pick up where they were on May 24th. Many commercial strips damaged in past riots required a decade to be restored, and in some cases (like Lawndale in Chicago damaged in 1968 riots) have never recovered.
There's no guarantee that branches of large companies (Target, food chains, Walgreens...) will be promptly reopened. Most probably will be, if they have a good probability of being profitable.
So what does that mean. When a black man is killed by police the entire planet reacts and is thrown into chaos. Literal worldwide riots and chaos.
Meanwhile a white woman is sodomized by police on the side of the road, few people freak out online for a few days, and it's forgotten about.
Both on video.
I guess what I'm asking is if you were president, with unilateral authority, what would you do and why?
Is this what you're referring to?
Twitter suspends fake antifa account tied to white nationalists
Yeah, I'm cool with that.
Didn't know that. Awesome.
Fortunately Trump doesn't have all the unilateral authority he thinks he has. He has too much as it is. Donald: Please S T F U !!!!!
Quoting Chester
What kind of government would ban anti-fascists? Maybe, I dunno, the kind that starts with an F...
Are you in Minneapolis?
This guy nails it on several fronts:
Right. The riots could push us closer toward a deeper recession?
Mark my words, you have failed yet again.
If you're referring to having failed to achieve certain outcomes, sure. The more conservative politicians are the ones in power right now.
But not withstanding who's winning, I'd still argue that liberal principles and policies are better than conservative ones.
You may as well talk about "that notorious hacker Anonymous".
I see the Democratic party as social democrats.
Why spend your time calling out potential allies on their supposed lack of ideological purity, rather than, say, use the common ground to build an effective coalition? Making this about "people who criticize the riots Vs people who don't" is a great way to hobble your own movement.
Quoting Maw
On some level, I kinda wish Trump would actually call in the military, because that will really rally support behind the current protests, and the state will actually show it's most ugly face for people to protest against.
Of course the more armed people there are, the more people are at risk of dieing.
Y'know what is a far more effective way to hobble a movement? To suck all discourse around it into a black hole over 'rioting and looting' when saying nothing about anything else. Fox News already does that job - and they sure as fuck aren't 'allies'. Don't talk to me about 'ideological purity' when you pearl clutch over broken Targets and stay utterly mute about police violence or solutions. With 'allies' like that who need enemies?
And that's the problem with left wing movements. The right wing may be morally bankrupt and their policies reprehensible, but they do know how do build coalitions and push their agenda down everyone else's throats.
Chester is a working class Tory, an oxymoron, but real, there are lots of them in the UK, they helped to get the Brexit vote through. I tried to explain to him that he is allying himself with the self serving wealthy privelidged classes, but he couldn't see it, he obviously hasn't met any of them. The contortions these people get themselves into are remarkable.
I think the inability for America to solve this becomes crystal clear in the response of President Donald Trump. Apart from his usual failings to give any coherent answer (what does he mean by holding up a bible in front of a closed church?) to actual real world events. His abilities lies in inventing nicknames to his political rivals and beind outrageous when things are great. Trump is an epitome of the inability of to understand that his response is exactly the problem. Oh sure, he remembers to remark that the killing of Mr. Floyd was a bad thing, but then he goes to be the "Law and Order" President against the rioters using, again due to his utter ignorance, similar language that was used in the 60's.
And nothing, nothing is said about police tactics, training, the whole way the system works, what would be those things really doing something about the institutional racism. That wouldn't cure everything, of course, but it would be a start. The discussion never comes even to that.
C'mon man, I just wrote you a whole thing about the specific function and employment of the police as a matter of social policy in the US and all you can muster up is 'there are police in every country?'. You can do better than that.
These issues have taken root long, long, long before Trump came into picture. He is at best an accelerant, but certainly not a root cause.
First of all, the manual of the Minneapolis Police Department states that neck restraints and chokeholds are basically reserved for when an officer feels caught in a life-or-death situation. But Floyd was handcuffed and obviously unarmed by the time Derek put him in this hold. So he should be familiar with the manual but nevertheless chose a method to subdue Floyd (how much subduing does a handcuffed man need?) that wasn't meant for this situation. There was no imminent threat possibly excusing him to forget or to act in the spur of the moment and even if there was, once Floyd was subdued the life-or-death situation passed and he should've changed what he was doing. He didn't, while having ample time to do so.
Second, he was being held like that next to a police vehicle. Why wasn't he transferred into the back of the police car during those first 6 minutes (before he became unresponsive). There was a clear alternative available.
Third, there were three squad cars, so presumably 6 officers at the scene. If he felt threatened or if he was panicking, why didn't he ask for assistance? He didn't ask for help, of course, because he had it under control. Refuting any chance for him to claim some level of panic or fear.
Fourth, the ambulance was called specifically to help Floyd. While it was underway it went from code 2 to code 3. Derek, being the person physically closest to Floyd, was absolutely aware of his deteriorating condition and did fuck all to help him.
Fifth, bystanders warned Derek multiple times Floyd was unresponsive. He still didn't let up and still didn't help Floyd.
With so many instances of being able to (re)consider his actions during those 8 minutes and 46 seconds and the possibility of asking for help from fellow officers or moving Floyd to the car, the continued stranglehold using his knees became premeditated during the course of those 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
"Right but not all jobs are under attack right now".
She's so close yet so far.
So I have been thinking about this bit. Is there any reasonable expectation that this time around, there will be Bipartisan support for change? That the republican establishment didn't even seem to blink at Trump's suggestion to send in the army isn't encouraging.
And there is the question of how much good reform does in the short term. Police departments cannot retrain, much less replace, their entire staff overnight. And arguably the police violence is another symptom of the huge economic disparities.
So if the political will isn't there for not just police reform, but a change of economic policy, then what is the next step? The elections aren't until November, and whoever does get elected will not necessarily change much. If the political will doesn't materialize, and I don't think it will, what level of disobedience to the system is justified & effective? Will property damage cause enough disruption to force the holders of economic power to the table? Will just being out in the street, refusing to comply with curfews etc. continue to build pressure?
Thinking about it, it's hard to maintain any hope that anything can cause the necessary change. Just like with gun control, climate change etc.
I think you're correct in your assessment that these changes will not be overnight or that it's not just about police reform. But you mustn't confuse what effective means here. You're looking at the endgame and seeing it's so far removed from where it is now, that you don't see the road to it. It's taken step-by-step. There's nothing wrong with incremental change.
So I think all civil disobedience is justified until such time as there are concrete proposals on the table for police reform with reasonable assurances that the plans will be implemented. That seems to be the immediate, and justified, demand of the protesters at this time.
It's not enough for a fair and just society but it's a good start.
Quoting Benkei
This looks like the discussion that needs to be had. It is obvious, to some of us at least, that the institutions of government have lost the moral authority, and public protest and mass disobedience is justified. "Riot" can be seen to be a political term used in attempting to delegitimise the protest, and legitimise the suppression of protest.
Clearly, the destruction of property to save life and prevent injustice is legitimate and justified.
Clearly, there has not been much concession made to the protest, but rather an intensifying suppression.
What level can such escalation lead to? It can lead to a race war and to genocide. But if that is where the government takes its stand, then it will make clear what some of us already suspect, that a race war and genocide is government policy.
I am a man of peace; just because I happen to have invaded Austria and Poland, doesn't mean I want war...
Society acts upon a level of uncertainty about how to fight fascism and the intolerable which are pushing states into racist acts against their people. This confusion among the public creates an apathy that let racist ideologies to spread and destroy society, especially when they enter the stage of state police violence.
Silence fascism, alt-right and white supremacy. Push social medias and youtube to take down popular channels who can be proven to spread that propaganda. The only problem I see is the inaction of people confused as to how to think and act while still agreeing that white supremacy propaganda is bad.
A bad target. I hope he gets justice. Substantive issues surrounding the protest remain unchanged.
I am suspicious, however, since the footage comes from Infowars. The homeless guy was apparently really homeless, though.
I'm sorry for the homeless guy but it's totally irrelevant.
Indeed. There is a massive double standard.
More on topic: here a few suggestions for people to chew on that would make the police less lethal to minorities and more accountable.
(1) Mandatory body worn cameras including audio.
(2) Better police training in threat assessment.
(3) Better police training in arrest making holds; emphasis on safety to person who is arrested.
(4) Misconduct laws regarding failing threat assessment, camera guidelines and arrest technique leading to blacklisting an officer for failing them.
(5) Police have to write their reports independently.
(6) Prosecution and charging of police officers by independent prosecutors. Review of current independent prosecution.
(7) Incidents like this leading to police being fired and blacklisted from law enforcement and private security.
(8) Independent examination of evidence in cases where someone was seriously wounded or died.
(9) Better police training in threat deescalation.
Even if all these were addressed, it wouldn't address the overall societal conditions that lead to economic disadvantage and crime.
Power is set there by the people, the people are informed by other people with power and influence outside the government. If you can't change how the government works, who's in office etc. you can change which movements that put certain people in government power positions.
So, who are the ones that drive public opinion and push certain ideologies into government power? Social media platforms only act when their PR is damaged. Exposing white supremacists, alt-right, racists and fascist groups, channels and posts together with linking them to the platform they are on will push bad PR for these companies. Twitter finally fact-checked Trump after years of people giving them the bad PR of being a channel for his opinions. If the largest social media platforms are forced into taking actions against racist movements and propaganda, it would choke a large part of that spread and force these people into creating their own places for expressing opinions. This, in turn, puts them into an echo chamber where their opinions doesn't spread as well as it has.
Since capitalists and neoliberals behind these platforms usually want the most users and don't ideologically care to silence racists, they will need to be pointed out in supporting racism, which would force them in another direction. If these people were indeed not of these ideologies, they would either already have put into action anti-racist decisions or are forced to do so in order to protect capitalist interests.
One way would be to actually use the Karl Popper frame of reference in the critique against the platforms. To ask them how they view his tolerence paradox and why they cannot enforce restrictions of their platforms around that philosophy. If they don't have an opinion on it, a question can be asked whether they actively support racists or just have apathy against such issues.
Someone who's philosophically educated could through the support of the people mount an offense against the social media platforms to silence out all of these racist movements that create public opinion voting politicians like Trump into office.
Cleaning up the social media platforms from the unrestricted (and uneducated) idea about freedom of speech and through that all the racist, white supremacist, alt-right, fascist propaganda... is a first step at least.
(9) Mandatory education in psychology and conflict de-escalation tactics.
(10) Mandatory meetups with community members of the districts they patrol within.
These points would A) have the police using de-escalating tactics rather than force in situations where unnecessary violence usually occurs while being able to assess a person's state of mind rather than just viewing them as hostile and B) Create a dialogue between the police officers and the members of the community they patrol in, in order to let them hear the voice of the people and humanize the ones they have a duty to protect.
The human factor to de-escalate conflict and binary divisions between police and the people would dramatically reduce the conflicts and violence. So far, all decisions made today are to enforce more conflict, not less. While psychologists know the mechanics of how to build bridges between people in conflict, there are no practical applications applied to actually do this.
In any case, the proposals by @fdrake seem reasonable and I've been supporting body cameras and increased transparency by the police forces for a while now.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224[/tweet]
Some highlights - Body cams don't work; Training programs don't work; Demilitarization works; Development of alternatives to policing works; Less shady police union contacts work. There's more in there.
The whole Twitter thread is short and an interesting read. Click to read the rest.
--
On a related note, and something I'd meant to mention previously - I think the current events make clear just how little body cams do work in the current regime of accountability. The stratospheric rates of police violence across the US right now are being recorded from multiple angles. George Floyd's death was recorded from multiple angles. The police are well aware of this. They simply do not care, because they know the footage won't amount to anything. For body cams to work, it seems like they can only do so in the context of institutional reform where there are real threats of sanction that follow. Until that is in place, body cams are placebos.
He won’t. Neither will other innocent victims: the Oakland security officer gunned down in the street, the people murdered in Iowa last night, and the countless people who have been assaulted or had their property destroyed. Whatever “movement” was here has lost my support a long time ago.
There are no easy answers but a couple of points are well worth making. First, that 'political will' is not something that pre-exists, but is forged - sometimes in fire, necessarily. Given the fact that the US has dragged their feet on this for, well, decades, the lack of will is simply a fact of nature that any good political strategy must take into account. It is less an obstacle than exactly the problem to address.
Second, the actual elements of reform exist. As I linked to in my previous post, there is empirically baked research on what does and does not work. It's not a matter of starting from scratch, and more noise needs to be made about the concrete design elements of reform. That the US State is entirely mum about his ought to be a spur for further protest, quite frankly.
Third, there are no guarantees about how any of this is supposed to proceed. In fact, given historical precedent, what's happening right now is more likely to fail to secure change. But this is nothing new for progressive causes. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better"; that's been the percept for the longest time now. Defeatism will simply lay you back in the same quagmire, only perhaps even more widespread and more violent next time.
Fourth, as I tried to lay out way back - at the big picture level, the problem goes beyond borders. The US is unique in the way it has taken seriously the imperative to gut social provisions and replace them with class terror, and it's ultimately only by redressing that system-wide neo-liberal policy strategy that the problem will be tacked in earnest. It goes beyond Trump, beyond elections, and beyond institutional reform limited to police.
Quoting StreetlightX
You have to understand that the police does the same thing in other countries as in the US. You don't have an Apartheid system or Jim Crow in place, what you have is a police culture and a society where this kind of behavior happens and is tolerated, not an open institutionalized harassment by the police what you have in totalitarian countries or earlier in South Africa. It really goes down to the culture of specific police departments as the police isn't an uniform single institution like the FBI.
So far the status quo looks far better than anything you guys have offered. What a lost opportunity.
No it does not. I wrote a couple of paragraphs on it. Perhaps you can address what I said.
A dead black man is not an opportunity.
It won't change everything, but these kind of reforms would contribute to changing the culture. Perhaps in a decade the police and police - civil relations would be different.
You mean drinking tea at The Empress with all your well heeled, clueless mates?
So you think that the US so special, so different from anybody else, that any kind of comparison is useless? You don't think that other countries have minorities or poor people? That a large portion of the "customers" of the police are poor people?
Of course, perhaps it would indeed be better to compare the US to Mexico or Brazil, but I guess your legal system performs better than those and is less corrupt.
People organizing to protect a Target store. Well, it at least proves that people have the ability to cooperate and get what they deserve.
They’re stacking up.
Chris Beaty, murdered in the streets.
https://sports.yahoo.com/former-indiana-football-player-chris-beaty-shot-and-killed-in-indianapolis-violence-135059190.html
Dave Underwood, murdered in the streets.
https://richmondstandard.com/community/2020/05/31/community-mourns-death-of-federal-officer-dave-patrick-underwood/
I’m sure the “movement” will remember them.
Yeah me too. Updated list:
[s](1) Mandatory body worn cameras including audio.[/s]
[s](2) Better police training in threat assessment.[/s]
[s](3) Better police training in arrest making holds; emphasis on safety to person who is arrested.[/s]
(4) Misconduct laws regarding failing threat assessment, camera guidelines and arrest technique leading to blacklisting an officer for failing them.
[s](5) Police have to write their reports independently.[/s]
(6) Prosecution and charging of police officers by independent prosecutors. Review of current independent prosecution.
(7) Incidents like this leading to police being fired and blacklisted from law enforcement and private security.
(8) Independent examination of evidence in cases where someone was seriously wounded or died.
[s](9) Better police training in threat deescalation.[/s]
(10) Police demilitarisation.
(11) New laws to restrict police use of force.
(12) Federal investigation of police departments.
Intervention in the communities to make 'em better and not just cop at them are good too,
(13) Investment in community organisations (this worked a lot with Glasgow and knife crime); educating/feeding people.
See here for where the strikethroughs come from. Thanks @StreetlightX for the resource.
If having police brutality on camera doesn't end up making police accountable, the whole thing is rotten.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/
It's these that really drove home for me how footage is, as it stands, totally ineffective.
No it isn't. Been there, lived there few years in childhood, your not so different from everybody else. Really.
Just look south at your border. Travel guides don't advise tourists when coming to the US the following way: "If you are robbed or something happens to you, DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. Seek help from your Embassy. Avoid especially Interior Ministry Special Forces."
That is how an ordinary travel book explains police in Mexico. In many countries EVERYBODY distrusts the police and thinks that they are just thieves in uniform.
You have A LONG WAY to go just how bad the police can be.
Many times the real solution is just to form a new police department. Let everybody go, start from scratch.
Well, It's not hard to show that Mexico and Latin America do have bigger problems with police than the US, so it's not just anecdotal. This thread is going forward quickly, so could you link just what stats you were thinking?
We should also remember that cops are also murdered. Here is a memorial page for those who were shot and killed this year. Perhaps the problem isn’t as simple as “cops are racist and bad”.
That is true. They do sometimes have to deal with dangerous situations.
Quoting StreetlightX
Some of them, not all.
That's a ridiculous statement.
Facts also don't care about your extremist, all or nothing way of thinking.
Police in the US are a public health hazard. In fact, US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. This is of course ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state.
If you want some big-picture reading, Verso are even offering a free ebook on the topic right now, which you might use to educate yourself with.
Sorry for that, but this thread goes too fast for me. I was referring to your later answer, but now it makes more sense. I'll try to answer, even if you might not have the patience anymore.
I think this isn't because neoliberalism, because the reasons are engrained far earlier than contemporary neoliberalism. Basically the welfare state in the US has had large gaps all the time, there has always been a huge wealth gap and this has created povetry unlike seen in other OECD countries. Absolute povetry hasn't been eradicated as in other OECD countries. And the wealth gap is indeed also racial in the US, even if it now evident that a portion of white America is falling into similar misery. For Latin American countries, you can see a similar phenomenon with the gap between the native Indian community and European descendants.
Yet I still will argue that you can be compared to other countries.
The main purpose of the police is the same. What differs is that the US legal system is far more about retribution and punishment than a long term effort to prevent crime. This in my view is one of the cultural facts where in order to change the culture should be changed. And can the culture change? Yes, but likely it won't as the discussion never will go so far to make it clear for the population where the problem lies.
PTSD among police is something that should be considered.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4089972/
Especially since it negatively effects “response inhibition”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167876013000597?via%3Dihub
Hence it's far more safer to be a policeman now than earlier. Also, killings by police have gone down. And of course, it's not only African Americans that are shot or killed. But that really doesn't matter.
The comparison between the US and other countries still tells a lot:
[tweet]https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/1266929833449160706[/tweet]
Not all countries. Brazil is #1 followed by Venezuela. In terms of rate per 10 million, there are 32 countries higher than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country
Of course it's still absurdly high, but not the most murderous police force.
(Of course, the statistic of Syria is a bit absurd when it's estimated that about half a million have died in the civil war.)
Cute that "liberatrain" in this thread is of course crying over cops. Because as we all know libertarians stand for nothing and are literal public bathroom scum.
Then what might account for the appearance that police/citizen interactions are getting worse?
And just like with the Pandemic, I think we truly should set higher standards for this millennium as earlier times. The fatalities caused by the police ought to go down. The US society could still be less violent, you know.
Like the country YOU live in, NOS4A2.
"It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues: "The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defence against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth."
Bayley goes on to point out that there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates... The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviours of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. Bayley argues that policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal and informal processes. This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18th century: slavery, colonialism and the control of a new industrial working class."
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/7kpvnb/end-of-policing-book-extract
It’s true. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that.
"American liberalism has a distinctly contradictory relationship with black protest. On the one hand, liberals imagine themselves the best friends (in contemporary parlance, “allies”) of the cause of black equality. On the other, since at least the 1930s, liberals have recoiled from black militancy, convinced it served little purpose but to strengthen the hand of reactionaries... Though liberals like to talk a lot about the value of listening in moments like these, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they’d prefer not to."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/rioting-george-floyd-liberals-black-lives-matter
Here's a picture of Kroll, speaking at a Trump rally in Minneapolis, 2019.
When police unions are being run by trash like him, is it any wonder that American police are murderous thugs who beat their wives?
There are cops all over the country standing in solidarity with the protestors... check your sources my friend. I'm impressed by the overall population this time around. Hopefully something more is done to correct the issue...
Hashtag not all cops?
https://fox59.com/news/officer-shot-in-the-head-in-las-vegas-on-life-support/
They are. Only to teargas protestors as soon as the news vans turn off. This is Philly one moment:
[tweet]https://twitter.com/sbcmw/status/1267538370646937618[/tweet]
And about 5 minutes later:
[tweet]https://twitter.com/bbcease/status/1267582823428501508[/tweet]
Don't fall for the PR. It's the same shit abusive boyfriends do, buying flowers after punching their partners. Or in this case before.
Here is the woman Obama referenced in his article. Sad.
I was called a "one note liberal" earlier which is kind of funny because I don't remember the last time I was ever called a liberal. I'm center-right/libertarian.
The Punk-Ass President Had Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed So He Wouldn’t Look Like a Bunker Bitch
In historical and non-American contemporary usage “liberal” means basically the same thing as the contemporary American usage of “libertarian”, and even in America nowadays people further left than the Democratic party are picking up that usage to refer to anyone non-socialist but not socially conservative, i.e. the center-right
"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined. In other major metro areas, the trend continues: Oakland PD receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending( $264 million out of $592 million), dwarfing every other expenditure, including human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion.
In Minneapolis, the city council and Democratic mayor Jacob Frey passed a $1.6 billion budget for 2020, bumping up the Minneapolis Police Department's funding by $10 million (to $193 million) in order to add an extra class of recruits. But according to the local ABC affiliate, programs and agencies that could actually prevent crime get a relative pittance: $31 million for affordable housing, $250,000 for community organizations working with at-risk youth, and just over $400,000 for the Office of Crime Prevention."
Cops kill by virtue of their sheer existence as black holes of state funding.
Correct - it depends on which way that he meant it. If he meant it by the definition that you described then I guess the insult loses its humor a little.
"Prosecutors in three of California’s most heavily-populated counties, as well as a candidate for district attorney in Los Angeles, are lobbying the State Bar to prohibit District Attorneys from accepting donations from police unions, citing the possible conflict of interest this poses.
The letter, signed by District Attorneys Chesa Boudin, of San Francisco, Diana Becton, of Contra Costa, Tori Verber Salazar, of San Joaquin, and George Gascon, the former San Francisco DA running to be Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor, says that their proposition comes “in the wake of mass protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.”
The letter reinvigorates an issue that has surfaced in recent district attorney elections in the Bay Area. In 2018, District Attorney Nancy O’Malley was criticized for accepting union contributions from departments her office was investigating in police killings. Gascon, too, has accepted police union money while his office investigated police shootings, something he pledged to stop doing at a news conference Monday."
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/01/in-wake-of-george-floyd-killing-ca-prosecutors-lobby-to-stop-das-from-accepting-police-union-money/
Protest 4ever.
Inspired by Philip Kerr's thriller A Philosophical Investigation (about a serial killer who preys only (or mostly?) upon other serial killers ... yeah for "meta" self-referential reasons (i.e. is 'philosophizing' a mode of psychopathy or psychosis?)), a story about 'a cop who kills ("retires") killer-cops because s/he's certain they will get away with murder again' is haunting me now. 'Certainty' being the (psychotic / PTSD) trigger. Not sure who this (self-righteous) covert cop-killing cop is yet; but part of the fun will be compromising the reader with an 'eye-for-an-eye cum ends-justify-the-means' moral conundrum. Anyway, a summer project in the making ... To Serve & Protect, of course, as a 'working' title; alternative suggestions, however, are welcome. And someone please let me know whether 'this novel' has already been written (and if so, is it any good or needs a better rewrite).
update re title:
Vigil (alluding to Dante's "Virgil" ... and "Virgil Tibbs" the detective from the movie In the Heat of the Night)
A rebellion is not surgical. Good people do, indeed, suffer. As good people have suffered before rebellion, it should be added. I just want people sympathetic to understand that this is a line being fed, orchestrated, to prey on your otherwise good moral sensibilities. No, good people shouldn't suffer. But the suffering began before even George Floyd was casually murdered while his friends watched. And all the marching, voting, hugging, and talking has already been done -- more times over than the usual highlight of events counts, too. The reason rebellion spread so quickly at George Floyd was because of the number of similar stories that locals are so very familiar with. These talking points about anarchists and outside agitators and what-not -- they are just talking points. If anarchists had the power to instigate this kind of rebellion they would have already done so long ago. You can find black faces that counter this because, as with any human group, not everyone agrees on the right way of things -- but life is more chaotic than that. Some, even if it counters a news narrative, choose to rebel by means outside of the usual peaceful protest, voting, marching, etc.
What does it matter that you have the people on your side when, after all that having been done before, the police continue to grow in funding, numbers, and continue to kill without repercussion?
I'm tempted to be more base, but instead will just say that defunding the police is the only way to have fewer killings -- because at least then there will be fewer cops doing the killing.
And since no one is voting for that -- after all, it is a minority position, yes? -- how exactly was voting, marching, and so forth supposed to effect that change anyways?
But surely we can agree that the police murdering people is wrong, and should be changed. So what then?
Without addressing the issues that allow police officers to get away with this, and make them really lethal, I doubt that would do much. Cops don't get fired and blacklisted if they've got previous instances of brutality and murder, cops write statements to cover up their crimes, prosecutors go very light on them, police unions resist changes to protect suspects, the new cops would have military grade arms...
From the conference call with the governors (and from tweets, naturally) one can notice just how much he wants to send the military in.
Dominator in Chief.
But you sleep with the lights on
And wake up with a scream[/i]
--The Late, Great Warren Zevon, Fistful of Rain
'Nuff said. For me, at least.
:up:
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
:cool:
When one says that the culture has to change, it actually is about an immense field of work, multitude of things that would have to change. Not only the police, the whole US legal system is basically now there to jail people. This gives credence to the Bayley's view that StreetlightX mentioned.
The question of the police and the security system is just like the question of the armed forces. Is it there to defend from an exterior threat or is it there basically to keep the present leaders in power? Or is the armed forces itself in power? This isn't just a question of "training" and "culture", although those are absolutely essential on how armed forces perform. The changes have to happen in how the whole society itself works. It is same for the police in any country. The Norwegian police and the Nigerian police are totally different as are the Norwegian Army and the Nigerian Army, but so are the societies themselves. Problems in Nigeria wouldn't go away with replacing Nigerian police with Norwegian police. Or one cannot think that one can transform one without there happening changes in the society itself.
There have been good remarks just why is this so difficult, starting for example with the police unions. I think that also electing key figures in the legal system, which sounds great, is also a part of this "systematic racism" problem in the US. Unlike in my country, in the US the sheriffs and prosecutors are elected, which makes the an issue far beyond just the realm of the police force. Americans love retribution and punishment, something in the culture of the frontier or so (likely people know this better than I). "Tough on crime" is something that sells and will get you elected.
What is actually quite normal is that the people who basically live normal lives and have no touch to the justice system at all usually demand harsher sentencing than those who actually know the reality. Vast majority of Finns want harsher sentences and think that the whole system is too lax, but the whole legal system is quite separate from any populist politician to change it.
The whole "electing your prosecutors and judges" thing has always struck me as insane.
Quoting Moliere
I don't think it's the only way. After all, plenty of police forces around the globe perform much better. Unless by "defund" you mean essentially "demilitarise", i.e. stop throwing more guns at the problem.
Quoting StreetlightX
Wait, what? That's insane. Prosecutors shouldn't be allowed to take donations from anyone.
Quoting StreetlightX
All those assault rifles are expensive. It's great really, the weapons industry can sell their old stuff, the politician can be "tough on crime", and the police get new toys. Everyone wins...
[tweet]https://twitter.com/lil_yenta/status/1267613755694694400[/tweet]
That's fuckisgusting if true, pardon my French.
EDIT: Hadn't read this yet:
Philly mayor, police commissioner condemn armed vigilante group in Fishtown (Michael Tanenbaum; PhillyVoice; Jun 02, 2020)
The mayor seems to be catching on?
"In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on right-wing extremism and its relationship to “violent radicalization” in the United States. The report’s principle researcher on the subject, Daryl Johnson, later told The Intercept:
“Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
This may not be a coincidence.
An investigation published in 2019 by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers are members of Confederate-sympathizing, anti-Islam, or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. Within these private groups, members often are openly racist".
https://www.justsecurity.org/70507/white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-forces-fact-checking-national-security-advisor-obrien/
That you see the sort of stuff you mentioned becomes pretty understandable once you take this into account.
The violations under investigation, including 20 arrests, were collated from social media accounts, news reports, and direct contact with some of the journalists affected."
https://cpj.org/2020/06/at-least-125-press-freedom-violations-reported-over-3-days-of-us-protests/
Nope, I mean "spend less money so there are substantially fewer persons playing the role of police officer" - get rid of beat cops. Make it a service you request rather than one that shows up to keep "order".
"In 2018 the city issued a report outlining all the procedural justice reforms it has embraced, like mindfulness training, crisis intervention team training, implicit bias training, body cameras, early warning systems to identify problematic officers, and so on. They have made no difference. In fact, local activist groups like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD 150 have rejected more training and oversight as a solution and are now calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to cut the police budget by $45 million and shift those resources into community-led health and safety strategies.
...It is time for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage problems of poverty and racial discrimination by wasting millions of dollars on pointless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely provide cover for the expanded use of policing. It’s time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move, instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system."
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/defund-police-protest/
Not all cops.
Some easy arithmetic that's been doing the rounds: if you have 10 bad cops, and 1000 cops who don't speak out, you have 1010 bad cops.
Given the scale of police violence and brutality we have seen - in response to protests against police violence and brutality - all cops are bad cops. Which is a children's-book way of saying state-sponsored terrorists, at this point.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/small-town-police-chief-killed-officers-cities-wounded/story?id=71017820
What changes do you think the police and surrounding legal system need?
It’s a tough question. The dynamic between officers and various neighborhoods and communities are too complicated to assess from any one standpoint. It’s simply not as simple as everyone is making it out to be. There are too many individuals and interactions involved that we never see or hear about, and I think making hasty generalizations about this or that group of people only exacerbates the problem.
I don’t think defunding the police goes far enough. They are agents of the state and I think we need to start at the top instead of the bottom.
I wonder if that whole "good cop / bad cop" dichotomy ought be rejected as bad framing, just like the good protester / bad looter dichotomy. It's about systemic violence, not individual merits. Anyone bringing up how "some cops are genuine good people" is missing the point. I hope we all agree people are people regardless of their job. Asking individual cops to be "better people" and speak up isn't going to work. The system must be such that ordinary people will speak up.
Quoting Moliere
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had on what social functions the current police fulfills, what functions it should fulfill, and which ones should be transferred to other kinds of institutions.
I don't know enough about American beat cops, in my experience with the police, they're mostly on beat so they can respond to calls from the area quickly. Not sure what else their job is besides "making people feel safe", which obviously doesn't apply to many black communities in the US.
Quoting ModusOperandi
Are you all right? That post is almost indecipherable.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/san-francisco-da-to-prohibit-officers-with-history-of-misconduct-from-being-hired/
"[San Francisco]: A resolution to prevent law enforcement from hiring officers with a history of misconduct was announced by District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Supervisor Shamann Walton on Tuesday. They are urging the Civil Service Commission to forbid the police department and sheriff’s department from making such hires."
Still barely anything. But this stuff is working.
I have also been reflecting on what we are actually seeing.
Though your reasoning I think is completely adequate to establish first degree murder, it is an unsatisfactory explanation on the whole.
What I mean by that is that if we conclude we are seeing a premeditated murder, it seems completely implausible for such a desire to be formulated spontaneously. Though such a hypothesis maybe true, it is the least psychologically plausible.
If we entertain the hypothesis that the murder was planned before arrival on the scene, both the will to murder and the complicity of the other police, the events make much more sense. The accomplices are there to ensure the murder takes place without interference from bystanders nor other officers, not part of the conspiracy, that may arrive by accident (off-duty, other law enforcement agencies, other responders etc.).
The evidence for this is exactly consistent with what you describe in that there is otherwise no explanations for the actions we are seeing. It explains why there is no other plan pursued other than to wait for an ambulance, and explains why the suffocation was carried out for minutes after the victim is unresponsive (which is obvious to witnesses and can only be more obvious to someone in intimate contact with the victim).
We know that the victim and the murderer knew each other over an extended period of time.
However, in formulating this more plausible theory of why cold and deliberate actions would be carried out to murder George Floyd, there are further questions.
Although we have evidence that point towards a conspiracy by police officers involved, we do not have good evidence that the conspiracy was somehow contained to these officers to resolve a private dispute or retribution with George Floyd. The fact that the murder is carried out in daylight in front of witnesses and video and the fact that the "covering for" the murderers is institutionally pervasive (from the prosecutor, the judges, the coroner, without any meaningful intervention by higher levels of the judiciary or law enforcement), leads to the only intellectually satisfactory conclusion: that if we are witnessing a plan and not some bizarre series of coincidences, that the conspiracy involves the key elements of the justice system to ensure the murders are treated as lightly as possible, and therefore key elements of the justice system are also involved in the crime.
Since George Floyd has no institutional relevance (and again, if he did have some specific institutional relevance there are better ways to murder a specific person), the only motivation available of a larger conspiracy is to carry out a murder for the purposes of starting a race war.
If we entertain this possibility we notice an immediate congruency with several facts of the case that otherwise seem benign. First, the crime George Floyd is accused of is of using counterfeit currency: A crime easy to setup (just give him a counterfeit bill, or then give the shop owner the counterfeit, or just never have any counterfeit and just tell the shop owner to make such a call) and so it is entirely compatible with plan to setup the situation in which the murder can take place (if we had actual proof of George Floyd engaging in a crime or altercation under his own direction, it is of course then much more implausible that anyone could engineer that to happen or then design a plan predicated on the mere possibility that George Floyd "might" get himself involved with police; rather, if there is a setup it must therefore be for a crime that cannot, at the end of the day, be proved to have actually happened), but, furthermore, the nature of the crime renders it the jurisdiction of the secret service (who could take steps to guarantee the circumstances of the originating event would not be investigated), whom, within the span of three years, we may reasonably assume the President has selected, at least for his immediate entourage, the most fanatical, loyal and devoted members willing to carry out illegal actions if they are either ordered to or then come to the spontaneous conclusion themselves of what sorts of national events may play favorably to the reelection, or continued power by other means, of their employer. If such an enterprise was embarked upon, whether spontaneously or by some direction (or then the perception of an order that could also be categorized as incomprehensible speech although communicates a fundamental feeling and desire), we can reasonably assume that secret service members would have connections within the law enforcement community in which to identify the people and the department that could be entrusted with the task, the kinds of people required and the institutional setting within which they could know the legal consequences to themselves would be as minimal as possible (and, in any case, would be worthwhile for the good of the white race).
For, otherwise, it is simply bizarre that a 20 dollar note would motivate a murderer and several accomplices to murder in broad daylight (why would they decide to spontaneously kill, or then stand idly by, this particular black man for this particular crime), but for purposes of jurisdiction management within a wider law enforcement conspiracy it is entirely reasonable and fully consistent with such actions.
The presence of the counterfeit bill in the events places what we are seeing in 2 degree separation to the President and other white house officials.
Such a theory, though more evidence would be needed to prove it, satisfactorily establishes the motivation and the institutional means to explain the crime and transparently obvious cover up as it appears to us. George Floyd may have therefore been selected because of his heart condition as I posit in a previous post, and the exact plan of the murder designed to ensure that there is a strategy to minimize or avoid the consequences while also ensuring it is an obvious murder carried out in broad daylight with multiple camera angles that would be more than sufficient to insight violent and sustained protest.
If there were other motivations, private to the murders, to kill George Floyd, it seems unreasonable that they would decide to carry out the murder in broad daylight without even attempting to provoke some chaotic series of events difficult to or impossible to interpret clearly.
We know the President has the desire and the motivation to implement martial law, and we can reasonably surmise the secret police have both the intellectual and covert means to organize a crime convenient for the purposes.
Furthermore, as the protests unfolded (which is completely reasonable to assume in the formulation of such a plot) we have evidence (though again not proof) of police or otherwise intelligence or professional agent provocateurs that started the initial violence as well as completely unreasonable delay in any political actions that might calm the protesters (therefore, we have evidence that response to the crisis was already organized in such a way as to ensure a descent into the violence necessary for a race war for the purposes of rallying the white supremacy base as well as put soldiers in the streets as a necessary step towards suspending civilian rule).
I am of course open to analyse other theories, including that the will to murder was entirely spontaneous, however, given the wider context of: failed policies with regard to the pandemic and economic survival of ordinary people, the rise of organized white supremacist groups infiltrating law enforcement (which @StreetlightX points out is admitted to by the FBI and US Marshals), the prospect of electoral loss, it is not outside the bounds of reasonable historical analysis to consider the possibility of a Reichstag type event (knowing full well the truth of such events may never fully come to light). The purposes of considering such a possibility being that there maybe non-corrupt elements of law enforcement that may have the means to prove or disprove it and to do something meaningful with the information if it is the case, before it is too late to do so.
Quoting StreetlightX
That would have a big impact very quickly. But why would Trump ever do that?
Aie, there's the rub.
If you play with the thought that black people are over represented in crime, it makes sense for humans/cops to identify that section as a more probable cause to the structural problems of crime that they're trying to solve, and therefor have a more destructible/aggressive approach towards it. However, police brutality is not something that black people face alone so this statement is not entirely true and lacking other variables.
How systematic racism came to be probably derives from the history of US slavery and the abolishment of it. After the end of slavery in America, black people probably didn't have the academic possibilities of gaining a medium or high class position in society so they took place in low class society as it were their only choice.
Life in a low class society creates prerequisites for a human to be more inclined to shift into a criminal life style and it's also hard to get out of which creates a slow momentum in their evolution.
I don't think it's easy even for the government to make a change for black people since it's all based on class indifference from a capitalism ideology. What are they going to do, cash out more paychecks, change to socialism welfare culture?
Black people in low class society should rise up against themselves and really show the world that they're ready to make a change and be left out of the typical "afro american" stereotype that you see in movies, that would be beautiful and remarkable human feat to see.
Should white people in the US rise up against themselves and really show the world they are ready to make a change and be left out of typical "white privilege" stereotype that you see on real footage of the real world? Would that be a remarkable human feat to see? If so, what would it look like to you?
I don't live in america so i can't look from a white persons perspective there. I don't think that white people necessarily see themselves as privileged, they just exist in whatever comforts that were given to them, and the majority of white people are not racist today. White people are making a change and have been trying to make a change if you look at people like Abraham Lincoln and his decisions. There are even successful black people today and there has even been a black president. If Martin Luther king lived today he would be joyful over how far black people have progressed and how much freedom they have been given in society.
The issue today is probably less about the color of your skin, and more about the structure of capitalism society which thrives on indifferences and it's all just a chain reaction since the time of slavery.
Theoretically, if every black person in low class society set their goals on making a better life for themselves in an honest way they would probably succeed. Unfortunately that's not in every black persons mindset.
It's great that white people are showing solidarity to black people with #BLM hashtags but it also overshadows white people that has suffered the same fate of police brutality, which probably make these protest more about showing solidarity to black people and their suffering in low class society than actual police brutality.
So why can you look from a black person's perspective there?
How do cops solve a structural problem, especially with aggression and violence?
Quoting EpicTyrant
Didn't you just write that this is an impossible demand due to the structural discrimination they face?
I can try to understand it but i can't feel it. I can only make sense of how to live in this world based on the values and way of thinking that is passed on to me by my parents while raising me and the freedom of choice.
If i can imagine being a black person in low class society it would all largely depend on the values that were given to me by my parents. If my parents were absent and i were given too much freedom to absorb into it's chaotic society i would be tempted to turn into a criminal lifestyle.
If my parents had listened to Martin Luther king and teached me good values and given me a goal to strive for, it would increase my chances of becoming an unprejudiced black man accepted by society.
This is a nice sentiment but it partakes of the trope of the 'model minority' which is, at it's core, a racist one (to be as clear as possible, I'm not calling you racist, but the trope employed in what you said, probably unconsciously). You can read about issues with it here and here. The problem with it is that it ties race to action in a way not expected of others: white people are allowed to be trash human beings without it being tied to their race - why not black people? Perhaps the most freeing element for any race is to be able to be perfectly average or utterly flawed and not have those flaws and failings reflective of their 'race'. To not have to bear responsibility for an entire race just because one is black or any other skin color.
One measure of freedom from racism is: the ability to be an utterly awful failure of a human being and not have people pin that on to your race. Most white people don't have this happen to them. They can be garbage without it being said of them: 'ah, they're not very good representatives of white people, they're really letting down the white team'. It should not happen to black people either.
The cops only wants to do their job, and they're given many means to do them. Some cops choose a more destructive approach because it either feels safer for them or if they're lesser good by nature, and that aggression could be related to them being unprofessionally trained to deal with stressful situations so they use the destructive tools that was given to them. Cops should be more professionally trained.
I don't think that they suffer structural discrimination, more like structural deficiencies. They have the same rights as white people but harder prerequisites to abide by the core values of the white man.
Quoting StreetlightX
But this is a problem but it’s one that can be applied to whites as well. Whites are accused by blacks and whites of being “privileged” and being “privileged white males”. This is obviously not true of all white people or all white males but it’s a feeling applied by many to whites. So there appears to be a problem here that’s a human failing.
How do you know it's individual cops "choosing" to be destructive rather than a system that encourages them to be destructive?
Quoting EpicTyrant
What's the difference?
Quoting EpicTyrant
On paper, yes. But they don't appear to have the same rights in practice.
Quoting EpicTyrant
What are the core values of the white man? What does it mean to have "harder prerequisites"?
I think you misunderstand what the theory behind white privilege claims: namely that all white people (in a given society) have white privilege, regardless of the other factors that influence their station.
I think it’s possible that the police force is not racist but that there are cops who dislike their job and the people they deal with until they reach the point where they have a hatred towards these people. It’s possible the job has damaged these people. Somewhere along the line they must have exposed what was happening but nothing was done about it. Those cops don’t have any others skills so they’re not likely to resign and look for another job, policing is the only thing they know. It seems to me there have been many examples of cops crossing the divide in a positive way. Obviously bad cops are more newsworthy and get more coverage. But what I’ve seen over the last week or so makes wonder about the idea that the cops are “racist”.
Sure i can agree to that, but you forget about the heavy responsibilities of a white man. It is expected of a white man to be an achiever and to strive to reach higher goals.
We all choose to aim our empathy towards people we can connect with that share our same values, regardless of color.
I would probably put a low class society criminal black person in the same category as a "white trash" person.
The core values of the white man expressed in systematic racism, for instance?
I don't think this is true at all.
Quoting EpicTyrant
'White trash', is, curiously, more about class than race, although it's obviously a racial concept. It's far more specific than your equation suggests.
I think racism, at its core, is the belief that human beings can be subdivided into races. Once those sorts of abstract aggregates disappear from thought it becomes impossible to treat them as members of it. I don’t think it’s a human failing so much as it is a rational one.
Yes I’m aware of that video. I don’t think that’s a convincing argument. Nor do I understand how a black could become a President in a racist society or Colin Powell serve in the government or Condoleezza Rice serve as Secretary of State. There’s obviously a clash of cultures between blacks and whites but I don’t think “systemic racism” is a good enough term to address the problem.
Thank you.
Why don't you think it's true? You can see it reflective in the societies that white man has created. It's all about advancements and making a life for yourself and to behave in a certain way which is expected of you. Your parents tell you to go to school and study, to obey the law and find love. There are many black people that follow these values themselves because they're at the foundation of a good life in this society and they suceed.
However, since many black people are born into poverty and gets more exposed to shitty parentship they are not given these values to be a an achiever and to strive after further goals, which further cements your descent into criminality.
That's why this is more a problem about class level society than race and color.
Because I don't believe the drive to high achievement is specific to white people at all (which would mean what? Other people don't have that drive?). In fact, it simply isn't a generalizable trait for white people - or really any 'kind of people'.
Quoting StreetlightX
I’d agree with that. There is actually a very powerful black upper class who have success and influence. So that drive for success is not specifically white. Though it does appear to be that way and it makes one wonder why and how.
Sure they do, but black/white people born into poverty may not strive after the achievements in the same way as is expected of middle/high class people do, which is where the majority resides.
I'm really tired of this fantasy of Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King did not believe in peaceful protest, and viewed peaceful protest as a degenerate political philosophy meant to appease those too cowardly to challenge the status quo yet who feel too guilty as to do nothing.
Civil Disobedience is not peaceful protest, but requires a physical confrontation with the police and will always be blamed as "the real violence" by racists and misguided centrists: because disobedience baits the police, disobedience disrupts "essential" economic activity, and disobedience is simply a violent insult to the traditions and institutions of racism; and indeed, it is lived as a fully violence act to the white supremacist and it is that violence which provokes the violence of police that makes civil disobedience effective (in that time), that most whites would be forced to action (in the street and at the ballot box) by their conscience and join blacks in a much more forceful movement than blacks alone.
The purpose of civil disobedience is based on his belief that most white people were not racist but had a fundamental desire to uphold christian values, that by forcing agents of the state to show their hatred for the black man, woman and child, and willingness (that they cannot help due to their hatred) to beat, kill and slaughter black men, women, and children clearly unprovoked in broad daylight and before the nation (unlike in the shadow of the alley or corner of the prison that can always be claimed to be provoked or otherwise deserved by the victim).
Furthermore, Martin Luther King is quite clear civil disobedience is only a tactical consideration and that he is, fundamentally, unified with and supports violent tactics also.
[quote=Martin Luther King -- Why We Can't Wait]
In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious. The majority of Negro leadership is innately opposed to compromise. Even were this not true, no Negro leader today could divert the direction of the movement or its compelling and inspired forward motion.
Many of our white brothers misunderstand this fact because many of them fail to interpret correctly the nature of the Negro Revolution. Some believe that it is the work of skilled agitators who have the power to raise or lower the floodgates at will. Such a movement, maneuvered by a talented few, would not be a genuine revolution. This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals--the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. In this time and circumstance, no leader or set of leaders could have acted as ringmasters, whipping a whole race out of purring contentment into leonine courage and action. If such credit is to be given to any single group, it might well go to the segregationists, who, with their callous and cynical code, helped to arouse and ignite the righteous wrath of the Negro.
[...]
It was the people who moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people. Of course, there were generals, as there must be in every army. But the command post was in the bursting hearts of millions of Negroes. When such a people begin to move, they create their own theories, shape their own destinies, and choose the leaders who share their own philosophy. A leader who understands this kind of mandate knows that he must be sensitive to the anger, the impatience, the frustration, the resolution that have been loosed in his people. Any leader who tries to bottle up these emotions is sure to be blown asunder in the ensuing explosion.
[...]
The hard truth is that the unity of the movement is a remarkable feature of major importance. The fact that different organizations place varying degrees of emphasis on certain tactical approaches is not indicative of disunity.
[...]
only one answer can come from the depths of the Negro's being. That answer can be summarized in the hallowed American words: "If this be treason, make the most of it."
[/quote]
King was dangerous. And he's all the more a hero for it. The whitewashed fantasy of a kum-bay-yah peace loving King is just that - a whitewashed fantasy. King was a frikkin Marxist - albeit one critical of Marx, and who understood and spoke about the intimate link between class struggle and racial freedom.
Quoting EpicTyrant
Achievement, or success, is a powerful American ideal. I think it’s more idealised in the US than any other nation. It’s a problem that it’s expected of everyone and it’s how many are judged. That in itself being a majority opinion is not the most healthy of situations for people who don’t take part in it.
Yes that's what i was pointing out in my first reply about it's origins in slavery and how they were automatically placed in this position after the abolishment of it and that their evolution as been slow because of this. Within given time, as it has been proven since before, things will get better. This is just people venting out frustration and nothing will probably come of these protests.
Good point about King. However I think non-violent resistance was not limited to civil disobedience, and included peaceful protests. And his dedication to nonviolence is quite explicit.
“ Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence”
- Where do we Go From Here.
It's kind of linear though, since it began with slavery>low class society>mixed society. It can get worse but according to the narrative and how much less racism there is compared to before, the evolution of a more tolerant society is on a positive scale and has been since the dawn of time. Things have always gotten better for humanity and we've found ways to improve ourselves by meddling and learning from chaotic times and our past mistakes.
Our basic will to strive for greatness will guide us through our journey as a life form in this time and space. Black people were taken into slavery and branded, white man has guilt and wows to seek redemption and learn how to integrate, with patience on both sides we will learn how to control the chaos of inequality.
I agree things have, in broad outline, 'gotten better' for some people. But they have done so because of the kind of active, political intervention of the kind that you're seeing play out on American streets right now. People had to fight and bleed and die for this progress. It did not spring up out of some natural progression of history.
Yes, he is dedicated to non-violence, but only for tactical reasons. He is quite clear he views violent resistance against oppression justifiable; the question being can it work.
[quote=Martin Luther King -- Why We Can't Wait]
For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in the airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected titles "Mrs."; when you are harried day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"-- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged intro the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
You express great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."[/quote]
Yeah but this demonstration should be about police brutality and not black lives matter.
Lives for black people are already being improved for colored people around the world, which is made true by politics, you don't have to start a violent protest about it.
I can understand the reason for a violent protest about police brutality, since nothing is being done about it politically, but racial issues are another matter.
This is manifestly false.
How can you agree in the beforehand post that there has been improvements of certain colored people and now claim it's false? Everytime i look upon a picture of Americans in government or in a workplace i always see black people. Successful companies are filled with black people and they aren't even stereotyped as the first person to die in a horror movie anymore. Things are getting better.
It doesn't stop:
[quote=Martin Luther King--Why We Can't Wait]
I must make two confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may provoke violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
[/quote]
A common sense reply, that also tells Trump is going to have a new secretary of defence again, if he has the time to fire this one...
And so the blacks that rise with the tide gets immune to racism and accepted into society, while the bottom remains that the bottom because of the capitalism society structure of America. This just proves more that racism today is more about class level society and prejudices, whereas before it was about color. In a fictional society if there were a certain low life type of white people that commited crimes they would probably be branded as something sloggy as "The rats" and people would look down upon them in the same way as people look down on low society blacks that commit crime but respect black people that belong to their same societal sphere.
Except this is not what is happening. And again, if the 'bottom' remain - and are kept - disproportionately black - that's structural racism.
Sure it is structural racism as a side effect of the slavery, but there is already being done much politically to improve it, which can be proven by the history of time. I can understand that black people have an identity of being targeted and that gives them freedom to defend themselves, but they fail to realize all the efforts that are being thrown into improving their life, or they fail to realize that much of that responsibility also lies on them.
Well, then unless America becomes more socialist they are pre destined to remain on the bottom class level forever, unless they adopt a mindset to achieve something greater than the ghetto like Eminem for example.
You really need to watch your language.
But yes, unless America becomes more socialist indeed, it will remain a shitty, unjust nation.
The problem with using MLK's legacy to chastise the violence today, is the obvious fact that Martin Luther Kings tactic did not work, otherwise we would not today, 60 years later, be witnessing lynching in the streets.
The white moderate did not join the black non-violent direct action cause and fix the problem of institutionalized racism, otherwise Trump would not be president.
Rather, the white moderate has tolerated not only the creation of a new system of oppression for blacks, in some ways worse than before (for the system of prison slavery is arguably worse than the system of segregation), but has tolerated the creation of this system of oppression, due to the absence of segregation, to include their own sons and daughters.
The violence today that is now "a fact of history" that Martin Luther King warned the white moderates about (before he was killed), is now not only a racial struggle but a inter-generational struggle.
In tolerating a new and improved cage of poverty for the black man and woman, the boomers and co. were willing to throw their own children into it.
What we are seeing on the streets is a young generation rallying around the largest and most obvious symbol of generational oppression, systemic racism, in a struggle against an enemy embodied by a 73 year old bumbling, racist fool.
In killing Martin Luther King and other nonviolent direct action leaders (because they are extremists), there is no one to negotiate with and the whole point of nonviolent direct action is moot in any case.
The current situation is that the entire younger generation is in "the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations" and without legitimate leaders nor a competent enough elite to fix any problems anyways (even if they wanted to rather than just loot while the looting's good at a safe distance from the comfort of their New Zealand mansion, Mediterranean yacht, or Swiss chalet), the conditions will simply continue to get more intolerable and unendurable, and neither the fierce tactic of nonviolent direct action nor the docile irrelevance of peaceful protest is now helpful nor even doable (due to a lack of widely legitimate leadership): either Trump's state will win or then the people fighting it, and either way the methods of victory will not be signs, flowers and speeches.
There is no one in the white house willing to "sit down, make a deal" with the mob, there is no one in the mob with whom a deal can be made.
The fundamental error of the American elites (including the entire Democratic party, who also voted for the CARE Act) is that in a system maintained by bread and circuses, to believe that both the circus and the bread can be taken away simultaneously without the entire system crashing. It was a crazy dream, but history will be very clear: if the circus part is swept away by a pandemic, you betta double time yo ass to double down on the bread part. The CARE act is, in essence, the "let them eat brioche" moment of American political history. The lynching of George Floyd is simply "the spark that will light the fire that will burn the first order down."
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/06/03/derek-chauvins-murder-charge-will-now-be-2nd-degree-3-other-ex-mpd-officers-also-face-charges/
It's working. Keep it up!
Spot on. This is what's so historically new, the lack of basic common sense in the POTUS, and more importantly, the full backing of this insanity by the SCOTUS and Republican senate.
This ain't your 60s civil rights riots, that many are lulling themselves to believe, this is something entirely new (in American history; lot's of precedent in world history, none of which spontaneously "just went back to normal").
I think “linear” was meant not in opposition to “non-linear” but to “exponential”. Being born to a wealthy family not only gives you a head start, but being ahead for any reason gives you a speed boost; and vice versa being behind for any reason. So the poor (and disproportionately black) get held back from advancing out of the lower position they’re already in, while the rich get a hand up in advancing even higher than they already are.
The class-race connection StreetlightX highlights has the interesting implication that a lot of structural racism can be fixed without explicitly addressing race at all. If you help all poor people equally regardless of race, you disproportionately help black people automatically because the poor are disproportionately black.
These incidents of racially biased police violence don’t look “structural” in that way though, as it seems the police are not just targeting the poor equally regardless of race, but targeting blacks specifically for racially motivated reasons.
[quote=Martin Luther King, speech May 10, 1967]
I am convinced that segregation is as dead as a doornail in its legal sense, and the only thing uncertain about it now is how costly some of the segregationists who still linger around will make the funeral. And so there has been progress. But we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism.
[...]
It is now a struggle for genuine equality on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle. You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period. We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads.
[...]
The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will …
Now I want to deal with the third evil that constitutes the dilemma of our nation and the world. And that is the evil of war. Somehow these three evils are tied together. The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war … We have left ourselves as a nation morally and politically isolated in the world. We have greatly strengthened the forces of reaction in America, and excited violence and hatred among our own people. We have diverted attention from civil rights. During a period of war, when a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs inevitably suffer. People become insensitive to pain and agony in their own midst …
[/quote]
These cops arrest a guy because he "looks like" a suspect (i.e. he's black). Turns out the guy is FBI. :fire:
:clap: :100:
[quote=William Faulkner]The past is never dead. It's not even past.[/quote]
For what it's worth, consider this 'genealogy' of America's Oligarchic White Supremacy problem:
the United States - a LEGAL history since 1789:
(I) SLAVE State (slave patrols, US Senate + Electoral College, 2nd Amendment, etc) 1789-1865
(II) APARTHEID "JIM CROW" State (klu klux klan, poll taxes, US Senate filibuster rule, etc) 1877-1968
(III) MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL NATIONAL SECURITY State ("Cold War" to "War on Terror"-Patriot Acts) 1947-NOW
(IV) PRISON-INDUSTRIAL POLICE State (slave patrols redux? - Nixon's "War on Drugs" to Clinton-Biden "Crime Bill") 1971-NOW
The answer to what is to be done?, in broad strokes (devilish details notwithstanding), is to completely dismantle (IV) and, as much as practically possible, rollback (III); that is, demilitarize the State and Economy to 1940-levels in order to give up Empire abroad and class-race Oligarchy at home.
[quote=Toni Morrison]In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.[/quote]
:point: "Class" & "Race"
:clap:
But that would still be a systemic problem, and still a problem that would disproportionatiely affect black people, so it could reasonably be called institutional racism.
Quoting Brett
Yeah, I agree that asking cops to resign is neither realistic nor very helpful. They're caught in the same economic system, they just occupy a different spot in it.
Quoting Brett
There have been positive examples of individual cops. Saying the police is, as an institution, racist, doesn't mean that all individual cops have racist beliefs. That's what's so sinister about the problem, really. In a setting where certain behaviours and policies are encouraged while others are discouraged, you can end up disproportionally targeting black people with aggression without ever noticing the blip on your moral radar.
Quoting Sam26
It's been proven beyond a doubt there is.
Quoting Sam26
You can just leave for now, I suppose. We'll remove your personal details, delete your name and so on later.
Back to systemic racism.
Just make her black and poor and imagine the response. That's all it takes. (I mean at any point in the video does anyone think there's even a remote possibility they are going to lay one finger on this horrible self-entitled bitch?)
Rich, powerful and white: Police reaction: Subservience.
Middle-class white: Police reaction: Respect
Poor and black: Police reaction: Contempt
Obviously, this is a generalization but seems close enough to the unwritten rules of US policing in enough states to be accurate.
1:
Oh and they just skipped the part where they spray him to death, because youtube and not liveleak.
2:
I actually did see that first video before and it is fucking insane. The stuff of nightmares. In fact, worked it into a short story I wrote. (In the second video, the officers show an absolute callous disregard for the victim but aren't actively trying to kill or injure him). Anyway, yes, absolutely, police brutality does not break exactly along the lines of race but when you look at the numbers it's skewed towards the poor and minorities.
Yes, I pretty much agree that had universal health care been passed decades ago (or even just one decade ago), equal (at least more equal) education been implemented, and homelessness been solved, that the US would not be in this current situation.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, he was killed essentially the moment he started to address white poverty, which for him would be his new allies going forward, as they are the whites that have as much to gain from ending poverty, but, if successful, would "cost billions". He was fully cognizant that rich white people were only allies during the legal phase which doesn't cost anything and because having to see police brutality "shocks the educated conscience", whereas poor whites would view desegregation (at first) as somehow "taking from them something"; but that in the second phase the rich would abandon them and they would need to grow the movement to solve poverty regardless of race by organizing the poor.
I am fully convinced that had MLK and others, including white civil right leaders such as Bobby Kennedy, not been killed, the US today would be "a normal country" by the standards of the democratic world.
However, by killing all the leaders, such organization MLK had in mind was no longer possible.
What it's about is giving kids like this the society they deserve. That's all. How do we do it?
You are completely correct that it is better to first consider that there is much more pervasive and severe systemic police brutality against the poor (the untermensch) and that within this system of systemic police brutality there is an additional and even more brutal system for black people and in particular the black poor (the double untermensch). A rich black man in a suite is treated similarly to a poor "white punk", still harassed but not over a line that might bring in the rich black man's lawyers or then the white punk's parents lawyers to make trouble.
There is, beyond race, an even more deeply rooted unequal application of the law in terms of rich and poor. The rich are not prosecuted for their crimes no matter how heinous, as the Epstein network of elite child rapists demonstrates.
For poor people more generally, police brutality is only one component of a wider justice system brutality. Whereas the brutality against black people can be simply spontaneous, against poor people more generally the brutality is dished out after bankruptcy, after repossessions, after eviction, after losing it, after "justice"; after, albeit more lenient, still incredibly harsh drug or thievery sentencing in the same traumatic and inhumane prisons. The police officer is only one cog in a much larger brutal machine. And indeed, for black people it is the same, a justice brutality involving many more intellectual jobs and not merely a police brutality, there is simply an additional brutal component that is most visible in direct physical abuse and killings by the police and easier to understand (but as you point out, not uniquely reserved for this class of untermensch).
In my opinion, the riots are very much expressing outrage of all poor people, and their few middle-class allies, at the whole system on behalf of blacks and equally themselves. However, because blacks "have it worse", because the particular outrageous killing of George Floyd, and because exactly how the system is unjust to whites cannot be so easily interpreted by the average poor person, as the middle class whites continuously tell them it's their fault for being poor and police are just "doing their job", whereas, the blacks have literally centuries of analysis to understand racism, but the traditions that built up understanding of poverty more generally, anarchy and socialism, were wholly eradicated; black identity preserved this understanding, transposed into a black context, because, for black people, it is impossible to ignore and forget for even a single day. The white poor, by standing and fighting with their black brothers and sisters, are also standing and fighting for themselves. Because there are no real intellectual leaders of the poor nor the black community today, because such people have simply been murdered, what I describe is not an intellectual thing, but an intuitive one, a gut feeling of, in effect, "Fuck the Police" and an application of the simplest and most direct means available of expressing such a feeling. Within such a context, an intellectual approach to morality is no longer really applicable. The facts of history are unfolding and it serves no purpose to tell leaderless people they should have "a more morally perfect strategy of change".
The only morally certain thing we can say is "If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness."
"No Justice, No Peace" expresses the simple and unavoidable consequence of educated elites breaking the social contract in such obvious ways that even the uneducated poor can see through their crimes and their bullshit. It is not a peaceful slogan inline with the educated elites' conception of the law and of order.
[quote=180 Proof](IV) PRISON-INDUSTRIAL POLICE State (Nixon's "War on Drugs" to Clinton-Biden "Crime Bill") 1971-NOW
The answer to what is to be done?, in broad strokes (devilish details notwithstanding), is to completely dismantle (IV) ...[/quote]
The night a NYC grand jury failed to indict any of the 6 police officers who, in broad daylight with witnesses present and video recorded, summarily executed Eric Garner, I tried to think through (some reasonable) National Reforms to US Policing, and then wrote the following on another forum:
A. IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE POLICE-VS-COMMUNITY OPPOSITION - As a condition for (essential services) federal funds, each state legistlature is required to establish statutory (phased-in) residency requirements (MINIMUM 5 YEARS) for all Municiple & County civil servants including, and especially, Police and Prosecutors so that they are required to live in the communities (i.e. neighborhoods, towns, cities & counties) in which they have sworn "to serve and protect"; the 5 YEAR MINIMUM is intended to prevent former police officers FIRED FOR A CRIMINAL COMPLAINT to be rehired soon thereafter by any other Police Department;
B. IN ORDER TO REMOVE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST THAT INHIBIT LOCAL PROSECUTORS FROM POLICING LOCAL POLICE MISCONDUCT - Each state governor / legistlature must establish a dedicated, Special Prosecutor's office - or appoint the state Attorney-General - to investigate and convene state grand juries to consider all criminal complaints for Use of Excessive Force and Killing by Police Officers;
C. IN ORDER TO INCENTIVIZE POLICE DEPARTMENTS TO POLICE AND/OR PURGE THEIR OWN "ROGUE" OR "CRIMINAL" OFFICERS - Civil monetary settlements to victims of Police Misconduct must be paid from [s]the Police Pension trust-fund[/s] and not paid by State, County or Local taxpayers (i.e. the Public);
update (4.15.21) – Repealing qualified immunity would be the most direct and comprehensive way to go since 'police unions' are most often not disaggregated from (general) public service pension funds.
D. IN ORDER TO DEMILITARIZE POLICE - US Department of Defense, state National Guards & US Justice Department must be prohibited by Federal law from transfering surplus military-grade weapons, vehicles, equipment and other gear to State, County or Local Police Departments;
E. IN ORDER TO ESTABLISH OPERATIONAL TRANSPARENCY AND NATIONAL POLICING STANDARDS - By Federal statute and as a condition of receiving federal funds, each State County & Local Police Department (1) must biannually report statistics - by Color/Ethnicity of the victims - on all Police Killings and other Criminal Assaults by Police to the following:
• US Public Health Service (PHS)
• US Department of Justice (DoJ)
• US Congress (re: appropriate committees & subcommittees, etc)
and (2) disclose in sum each month the identities of both Police Officers and their victims to local print & electronic media outlets.
Much more, of course, will be needed to "completely dismantle" the Prison Industrial Complex, etc; but the immediate, proximate, ongoing injustice of extra-judicial police killings of Black, Brown & Poor people in this country cry out for the kind and scope of reforms contemplated here which, unfortunately, nothing like them can or will be implemented soon enough - especially given the racist, neo-fascist, crime family currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. :shade:
[quote=Toni Morrison]Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?[/quote]
Is there any legislation in the works along these lines that you know of? Anything that someone might contact their representatives to support?
Quoting 180 Proof
I see potential for community-sourced police to be corrupted by local community biases in a way that non-local police would not. Say for instance the local crime scene is dominated by a particular gang, (or divided among several, one of) who then infiltrate and capture the police force (the way white power gangs already capture police forces), and look the other way on crimes committed by “their people”, while aggressively going after “the competition”. In less specific terms, a majority is not always right — a bunch of local white cops accurately serving the community will of their racist mostly-white community is not good for the handful of black people who live there too.
For this reason, balanced against your concerns, I’ve long thought that police should operate in pairs, one of whom is a long-time local and one of whom is an outsider, to check and balance each other against these respects concerns.
On the broader note of police reform, I think the long term optimal goal, compatible with anarchism even, is for the law to spell out explicitly what kind of acts are permissible for ANYONE to take in response to what kind of criminal offenses (basically what violence is accepted in response to what other violence), and for the police to simply be ordinary citizens with no special powers or privileges above and beyond those, merely paid to go do the job that anyone is allowed to do, just to make sure somebody is doing it. Then whenever police have to use violence, a trial is held exactly as it would be if a civilian had done the same, to determine if it was indeed a just application of violence. This this discourages police from escalating situations unless it is clearly and unambiguously necessary to use force, because if they jump the gun with their guns they’re as likely to be convicted of murder as some vigilante would be.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1
I think this is well trod territory. It's not so much a discussion as much as dispelling actively believed myths about police.
And the locals have to have an outside partner to keep potential local biases in check too. Perhaps dispatched from some kind of inter-community “exchange officer” program: everyone has to be a long-time local of somewhere, and then each local department sends some officers to this program to serve as outside checks on locals elsewhere, accepting another from elsewhere in exchange.
Checks and balances.
Your right of course, if systemic racism is a fact. But I’m just referring to the research and the fact that you viewed it only in terms of statistical shootings. I’m not saying it proves anything, only that you had viewed it narrowly.
Edit: though I don’t see how a black cop shootings a black could be regarded as an act of racism.
I grew up in East Oakland, which is a dangerous part of the country people often refer to as “Baby Iraq.” I was raised in a Chinese household, and my white dad left when I was about 3. My childhood wasn’t great. I was abused badly by my step-father and I ran away from home multiple times. I was homeless on and off when I wasn’t able to find a couch to sleep on. But my childhood still wasn’t as bad as some of my friends.
The first time I was robbed at gunpoint was in middle school. When I was 16 one of my best friends died in my arms after he was shot during a drive-by shooting. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint at multiple times, and I have been the victim of other violent crimes even more times. When I look back at everything that happened to me, I realized that 9 out of 10 times, the person or people who victimized me was black. It might have been easy, at that point, for me to dislike black people, but thankfully I was educated better than that. I had a very liberal education and I knew that black people were responsible for more crime in my city not because they were innately bad, but mainly because of existing socioeconomic circumstances that trace back to the times of slavery and beyond. I knew my friend Dre was a D-boy that hit licks not because he was an evil person, but because he had no father and his mother was a prostitute who smoked crack. Whenever I visited with him, we ate mayonnaise sandwiches that his mom made. We got our condiments by taking handfuls of packets from fast food restaurants and squeezing them into a bottle. Later on in life I knew that I couldn’t reasonably expect Dre to be a perfect law-abiding citizen precisely because of the circumstances he grew up in.
In my early 20s I was somehow able to turn my life around. I began living with my grandparents and took classes at a local junior college until I was able to transfer to UC Berkeley and graduate. I joined the police department shortly thereafter and mostly worked in the internal affairs and personnel assessment section. Most of the people in the police department are good people. Most of the younger people are college-educated minorities, which I think is a good idea since the department should reflect the community it serves. Still, every person in the department is susceptible to developing subconscious prejudices and biases, so I’m a big advocate for doing as much training as possible.
Most of my friends in the department support the protests. It can be difficult though. If you’re standing on a skirmish line and people are yelling at you, cursing, throwing paint, animal blood, bags of urine, feces, and Molotov cocktails, it can break you down. “Fuck you, pig. Why you dressed like Darth Vader? We ain’t in Iraq you bitch ass nigga.” Sometimes you’d want to say something back. We are here because there are some small mom and pop businesses behind us that we are trying to protect. If we are not here, they will be looted. And I would prefer not to wear this bulky, sweaty gear either, but if I take it off, those rocks and other things that are being thrown at me will hurt even worse.
Most protestors are not like this, but there are many that are; and they ruin it for everyone (similar to how a bad cop can ruin it for everyone). But just as I could have easily disliked black people for being the repeated victim of black crime, I realize it is easy for individuals to dislike all police because some individual ones are bad. So if I am on a skirmish line with people calling me every name in the book, I won’t take it personal. I know it’s not me that they are targeting. It is the uniform. They don’t know me anyway. They don’t know who I am or what I stand for. They don’t know that I taught prisoners at San Quentin prison for years or volunteered at a homeless shelter every week for over a decade since I was 17. They don’t know that I am an activist myself and walked in the same protests as they do now. They don’t know that I love my community and want to make it better in every possible way. They only know that they are angry and I wear the uniform. Even with this being the case, I’d rather be a human pinata that understands than have someone else standing in my place who doesn’t. It’s hard though. Even good cops are still human. But most want to do the right thing.
My best friend is a Black Lives Matter activist. We talk about this stuff all the time. We disagree on a few things, but by approaching our debates in the most difference-minimizing spirit we can muster, we usually always reach agreement. The main thing we always come back to is that people need to be educated. It’s too easy to become susceptible to hasty generalizations and group-think. A lot of this stuff is a part of human nature, I think, but it’s not stuff we can’t be [mostly] trained out of.
In any case, I think there’s a number of things police can do better. I don’t like how some police officers are so prideful, and even arrogant. I think law enforcement agencies need to do better in encouraging an ethic of humility throughout their departments. My lieutenant always told me, “Just because you wear the uniform, doesn’t mean you are above the people you serve. You serve them.”
I also don’t like any idea or symbol that serves to separate police officers from the people they serve. I wouldn’t allow officers to wear those thin blue line patches as an accessory on their uniforms. I understand it is meant to support officers, but it isn’t necessary and many times serves to reinforce an imaginary bifurcation of citizens and officers -- the latter of which belongs to the former anyway.
I don’t like how many officers wear dark sunglasses when they are talking to people. It seems rude to talk to someone when you can’t see their eyes. It also can be intimidating.
I think command presence is very important. It keeps officers from getting killed. However, some officers need to realize that they can go overboard. Every citizen, whether they are from the “1%” or the very “bottom” of society, needs to be treated with some base level of respect. Even criminals deserve this. You will be surprised by how much you can get accomplished, and how many dangerous situations you can avoid, by being calm, mild-mannered, reasonable, and respectful. Thankfully most police departments in the country are adopting better training regimens that put heavier emphasis on de-escalation techniques. Of course more can always be done.
Officers need to undergo more training in regards to cultivating more racial sensitivity. They need to learn more about Black, Latino, Asian, etc., history and culture, and in particular they need to learn more about why people, like my friend Dre, do the things they do. Of course even with all of this additional training and understanding, you still need to arrest people who are doing actual crimes, whether or not they had a rough childhood, and whether or not you feel where they are coming from. This is where the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation comes in -- or rather should come in -- but that system has problems of its own as well.
This is wonderful news. But also look!:
Great post. Thanks.
Great post. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
I used to live in a 'mixed' neighborhood, which is a misnomer, because every single house on one side of mine was filled with unemployed black families on state support. I was there for 10 years, during which their children grew up and wanted a place to live, and I was in the way. So they burgled my house four times, shot my cat, stole my identity wrote $7,000 of checks on me, stole my Obamacare, and then started shooting at my windows during drivebys. It turned out, they had shot already murdered another white person around the corner, and the police did not want to start a block war, so I had to call the FBI in the end.
Every single of those blacks knew who was in the gang, where they lived, and what they were doing. Not one black person helped me. they all pretended like nothing was happening, and the police had just strung up tape around the white person's house who'd already been murdered for fun or something. The first time they actually shot at my windows, I packed an overnight bag and left. 18 months later, after the gang moved into my abandoned house, took drugs, and set my furniture on fire, two of them were finally sent to prison for life and I could go back to where I used to live, pick up some of my undamaged property, and sell my prior home.
Not only did I never get one ounce of sympathy for what I went through from any black person, many of whom I wrongly used to think of as friends. they all just completely pretended like nothing was happening. I was victimized like hell by them. So this last week, on Sunday I saw another one of the gang caught on videotape stealing from a downtown store, and on Monday, the street tried to organize a flash mob to raid the local Walmart, for which reason the entire neighborhood was cordoned off by the National Guard.
When I share this on Facebook, I am told I am a 'privileged white sh*t who is exactly causing the problem.' No one at all on Facebook groups even voices any concern that the same happens to other people as happened to me. And I guess you are going to say much the same thing now.
Actually no. I'm writing a reply to you, in your thread.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The totality of the reforms suggested provide the "checks and balances" currently lacking and needed. You're missing the forest for trees, P.
You sound more like a victim than a survivor, friend. Sorry, as a survivor I just don't have enough sympathy left in me for both survivors and victims. 'Occupational hazard' re: my triage-mindset. Stay safe. :mask:
:up:
I appreciate it. I'm glad for you too. Whether it's New York, Oakland, Philly, or Mumbai, the locale matters not. All around the world it's the same song. Makes you wonder "if heaven got a ghetto."
:halo:
I just want to add that this is a basic Marxist point, and a reason why, among socialists, you will always hear the refrain that race issues and gender issues cannot be addressed without at the same time addressing class issues. The primacy of class analysis is not to the exclusion of race, but to its augmentation. The same can be said of gender issues too. If affordable and easy to access childcare, for instance, is largely inaccessible, the burdens of this largely falls upon women, who tend do the labour of child-rearing in disproportionate rates.
Or to take an issue that links all three - consider domestic abuse. Rates of domestic abuse are always higher among the poor (a lack of financial options means abused women lack the independence to escape abusive partners, for instance), and if the poor are disproportionately black - well, lo-and-behold, black (and hispanic women, in America) experience double the rate of battering compared to their white counterparts. Things like this is why it’s not a matter of tackling individual ‘bad apples’ and so forth. Structural issues are complex because things are always so interconnected and harder to see because of it. Without an eye for it, one can simply draw the conclusion: black people beat their wives more, therefore.... (and yes, the correlation drops off as soon as you compare well-off blacks with well-off whites).
Alternatively, the MLK speeches that @boethius has been posting say all this far more eloquently than me.
Yes. Racist & Sexist discriminations are modes of systemic policing that help enforce and maintain Class exploitation. Don't you think 'white grievance' populism is a (not so) new form of - hyper-mediated - false consciousness?
White grievance populism is identity politics at its worst. It abstracts whiteness as a cultural identity in a vaccum, disconnected from economic and institutional bases and then constructs, as its Other, black, brown and other 'identities' which function as threats. Tethered to no real life conditions - only the exponential power of concocted imagary and narrative to 'identify' with - it has the capacity for unlimited violence. The right perfected identity politics - in practice - long before the left even gave it a name.
I guess it could be called false conciousness, although I have theoretical gripes with that notion.
Quoting Wolfman
Just like with the military, when those who serve start to feel there "outside" from the society, that the civilian society is something different that doesn't care about them, then you start getting problems. If the criticism turns into hatred and abhorrence of the police, things just turn worse and the "police community" that feels separated just hunkers down. Luckily that can be avoided, but it takes an effort.
Quoting Wolfman
That humility should be part of professionalism. There's a way to get people who serve in uniform to do better when you get them to understand that the best police force is the "smart" and professional one which can tackle underlying problems by good policing cooperation with other authorities and the community and doesn't use the brute force in every issue. Unfortunately Hollywood promotes the idea that the best cop is the door crashing, hard hitting F-the-regulations renegade, as if that's the guy who will save the day. It has a really bad effect, actually. Because that is what many assume police to be as, let's face it, typically we aren't customers of the police daily.
But in any case this isn't just the police. It's the society itself and the people and there you go to far larger problems in the American system. But just like the Armed Forces did a lot by integrating blacks and not keeping them in separate black units. Wasn't easy, but did succeed. That police work improves could be part of the bigger solution.
The US could do lot to improve it's police and it has the possibility to do it.
How bad things just could be, just look south of your border. Mexicans truly don't respect the police. When there is deep distrust and disrespect for the police, the force basically stops functioning. As in many Third World countries, the usual way people think of the police is that they are thieves in uniform. You get this total collapse of the legal system. And that disrespect and distrust from the community is just overwhelming. It is shared by everybody: the rich and the poor.
You can literally see it from the way the Mexican police officer slouches in his car, how many of them are overweight and basically the appearance is of someone who doesn't take pride in himself. Or then there are the few in full tactical gear, heavily armed with automatic weapons wearing balaclavas and speeding in their trucks with their tactical team to the next location to fight the war. My wife is Mexican and we have nearly every year stayed there. Just to give an anecdote, my mother-in-law was driving me and my wife and kids in an upscale part of downtown Mexico City. A policeman approached that car to stop because I think we had passed a red light. My feisty mother-in-law just yelled at him: "I have two small children in this car, I don't have any time for you now!" and just continued away. And the police, who were actually many present there just where left standing there. I told my mother-in-law never to do that in Finland. She just laughed, but agreed to behave differently here.
But back to the US, I fear that the most immediate obstacle is now Trump as he genuinely wants to pour gasoline to the fire now and show his credentials in being the "Law and Order" President. Perhaps his recklessness will get other leaders to behave better.
With due respect for your post, there are two things that worry me about what you've said. First, that prejudice is the main thing to address. It is something to address, but in isolation, I don't see how it can be effective. This is because prejudice is a result, and end-product, and not a starting point or origin. A few pages back I posted a link to some evidence that addressing racism on an individual level among police is largely ineffective. What does seem to work are concrete mechanisms of accountability that translate into structures of incentive and disincentive that shape the emergence - or non-emergence - of prejudice in the first place. And those structures by definition cannot be instituted at an individual level but only at an institutional one.
That means oversight boards with teeth, not governed by police, or not only police. It means changes to funding structures, tied directly to policing outcomes. It means making changes to use-of-force policies like these ones. And it also means addressing prejudice on an individual level, just as you said. The point you make about dark glasses, and learning history, and arrogance are great. But only as part of a suite of reforms that must necessarily be trans-individual and institutional. If incentive structures are not changed, if these reform is not tackled at a 'population level', it's hard to see why these changes will take root. I'll add too that taking pressure off individual cops by instituting institutional change can only ever be good for cops themselves, who can rely and lean on those larger structures for support.
Quoting Wolfman
Second worry: is this really the case? This strikes me as an underestimation of their epistemic position. Literally 'what they know'. I - and others - have been watching in horror as police forces have quite literally unleashed terror upon peaceful demonstrators in the last few days. I'm not saying this to be hyperbolic, I really mean it when I say that there have been acts of domestic terror worthy of that title. And I simply don't believe this can be put down to 'bad apples'. The scale of brutality - across multiple cities, coast to coast - points again to structural issues. I don't think it's fair to say that police are just protecting small mom and pop businesses, even if they may also be doing that. They are also charging at protestors, shooting non-protestors outside their own homes, destroying city-approved medical aid stations - a literal war crime in any other circumstance -, and radio calls to run protestors over. And these are tiny samplings. These things too, are what protestors know, above and beyond a uniform.
I don't think this can be put down to 'godd cops' and 'bad cops'. Something else is at work here. And this is not directed at you personally, but where is the widespread condemnation of widespread police violence by police? Why, given what we've seen, have there not been outrage on behalf of the police themselves? Why is there not universal denunciation, from police departments all across the US, and promises to do better? Why are police seemingly not holding themselves to high standards? If these are bad cops - where are the good cops? Why are they not speaking? This absence is also, I think, something people know. I hope this doesn't come off as attacking you. I don't mean to do anything of the kind. I do want to push back a little, and wonder what you might say to address concerns like these.
Maybe place specific? Some of it is I think. Some of it is scapegoating applied to genuine economic issues (see Chester's talking points for an example).
I grew up in a rare conservative bastion in Scotland; mostly an agricultural community; I didn't even see any POC in person until I was 15. The town's had less and less jobs over the course of my lifetime - more boarded up shops, major industry leaving, no institutions of higher learning, less and less funding for the failing state schools and no private schools in sight. The ruling classes won't touch it with a barge pole; except on their holidays. So there's lots of gentrifying investment; the place has loads of coffee shops and pubs and hairdressers and hotels, each business doesn't last long unless they're franchised. It's a holiday and retirement area for people who made a better living elsewhere.
The racist sentiment there is actually directed towards the worsening economic conditions; it was a poor community before the industries left and before the massive erosion of the welfare state. It's the immigrants' fault that our town is like this; they're coming here taking our jobs (mechanisation killed most of them, industrial flight killed the rest). they're putting a squeeze on farmers' livelihoods (focusing on the price competition from EU food imports rather than the subsidies). It's a scapegoat.
So when some fucker complains about the local travelling folk being unable to get a job, living off government welfare, while the fucker has to work long hours in precarious jobs and put in loads of illegal unpayed work, they're actually interpreting the structural violence of class which they're subject to in terms of an imaginary opposition of class interest along race lines.
In terms of media narrative (or ideological state apparatus), it pays to foster a blame narrative on immigrants and POCs for the same reason it pays to foster distrust along radical/centrist lines in the anti-racist protests; the interests of capital are in you fighting with your allies and not knowing who they are, even when a white working class Brit has way more interest in common with a third gen Indian working class family.
I think whites coming from the lower rungs of the class ladder feel alienated from the centrist/liberal structural racism narrative, because they're actually subject to comparable (though certainly better) conditions.
Maybe it's worthwhile remembering the origin of the term "redneck"; it's a derogatory class signifier against those whites that had to work in the fields. It looks to me in the same ballpark as the "divide and rule" and hate mongering/scientific racism/white supremacy facilitating competition between the indentured servants of the Irish and black chattel slaves, ultimately "justifying" their subordination and subjugation while giving structural incentives/validation to fight between themselves.
Whiteness has always been a justification narrative of the ruling classes, if my fellow pasty skinned celts @Baden weren't necessarily considered white...
We are not responsible, for the mental illness that has been afflicted upon our people by the American government, institutions, and those people in positions of power.
I don't give a damn if they burn down Target, because Target should be on the streets with us, calling for the Justice that our people deserve.
Where was Autozone at the time when Fernando Castillo was shot in a car, which is what they actually represent. Where were they?
So if you are not coming to the people's defense, then don't challenge us when young people and other people who are frustrated are instigated by the people you pay. You are paying instigators to be amoung our people out there, throwing rocks, breaking windows and burning down buildings. So young people are responding to that, they are in rage. And there is an easy way to stop it.
Arrest the cops.
Charge the cops.
Charge all the cops.
Not just some of them, not just here in Minneapolis, charge them in every city across America where our people are being murdered. Charge them everywhere.
That's the bottom line.
Charge the cops. Do your jobs. Do what you say this country is supposed to be about, the land of the free for all. It has not been free for black people, and we are tired.
Don't talk to us about looting. Y'all are the looters. America has been looting black people. America looted the native americans when they first came here, so looting is what you do. We learned it from you. We learned violence from you.
We learned violence from you.
The violence is what we learned from you.
So if you want us to do better, then damn it, you do better.
[/quote]
David Smail has some interesting stuff on this. Notably the notion of a personal event horizon. So for reasons of international (American) economics and politics, Northern UK industrial towns go into decline, aided by a government based in the South with other priorities. But what the inhabitant sees is the collapse of industry, unemployment and poverty, leading to cheap housing, sweatshops, and so immigrants settling. But making the connections requires a global understanding that is rare. What one experiences are local events I'm doing badly, the town's doing badly, and the place is full of foreigners. The real sources of the decline are over the horizon, so one settles on whoever is newly around, whether that is the Pakis or the middle-class tourists. In either case, they are actually slowing the economic decline not causing it, but it's hard to see that from ground level.
Other people think their troubles are their own fault rather than due to distant economic forces, and get depressed etc. Not something discouraged by the authorities.
This is not going to stop.
Why is the title referring to systemic racism in particular and not just racism in general? The Floyd murder (which I assume is the background for this topic) was probably not just an instant of systemic racism but also plain old fashioned individual racism.
If there is racism in the American police force (and I think it’s quite obvious that there is) that doesn’t automatically qualify as systemic racism. If a black person in police custody is more likely to be beaten than a white person, that would only reflect the attitude of individual officers and not be systemic. If blacks are more likely to be suspected by the police because of their skin color, that would also be plain racism. But if blacks are more likely to get into situations where they could be potential suspects, that would have a more systemic character.
When something is systemic it reflects a deeper set of causes. Blacks are disadvantaged all the way through the system. They are on average poorer and receive less education and that again makes it more likely that they turn up as criminals. If you called the Floyd murder an instance of systemic racism only, that would make the four officers less individually guilty and that’s hardly the case.
Mostly for conciseness's sake. I thought about writing racism and systemic racism in the OP title but it sounded awkward so I just specified that you can talk about both afterwards:
Quoting Baden
This is interesting because I am in agreement with you. Sinyangwe’s twitter post uses Oakland Police Department as an example of a more “reformed” law enforcement agency that experienced a reduction in police shootings, and unjustified use of force incidents (among other things) after entering federal receivership, and officers who were involved in unjustified use of force incidents were terminated. Well, this is my police department that he is referring to, and my internal affairs section that worked to weed out and prosecute these officers.
There are some officers who are not pleased with the idea of federal receivership, but I don’t mind. Most of the problems that arise from being under a receivership are those that you would ordinarily find in any bureaucracy (they come with the territory, so to speak). But I don’t have many gripes with it at a theoretical level.
[quote=StreetlightX]If these are bad cops - where are the good cops? Why are they not speaking?[/quote]
Speaking for myself, I have been speaking, and more importantly, acting. If the media wants to come talk to me, they are welcome to do so. The media is, however, notoriously selective in the material they cover. The majority of cops I know have been supportive of the protest. Some of them have kneeled with protestors, exchanged hugs, and made Instagram posts, among doing other acts of solidarity. I can’t speak for other officers or other departments because every department has its own culture (a more general police culture, but also a more specific localized one).
If someone puts an example of alleged police misconduct in front of me, I will analyze it and render a judgment based on my own training, experience, care, and prudence. If departmental policy is violated, I will recommend that administrative action be taken against that officer. If the officer is involved in criminal activity, I will recommend pursuing criminal charges.
It is very easy to get fired under federal receivership. In the past two years I’ve seen more good officers get fired for political reasons than bad ones not getting fired. If there is any perceived cloud of doubt surrounding an officer, they are usually fired and replaced to err on the side of caution. There’s actually only one recent case where I wanted an officer fired from the department, but he wasn’t because he had a very good lawyer.
In any case, I usually don’t mind the idea of more oversight. It never affected me [much]. A lot of the points brought up in the twitter post have already been addressed by the department in a robust way. Not only can we not shoot at people driving away in vehicles, but we can rarely even pursue them anymore (and if permission is given, the chase is usually terminated rather quickly or else California Highway Patrol will take over), due to the possibility of hitting innocent drivers and pedestrians. It’s kind of funny because now criminals know about that policy, so if they want to get away, they can just speed away, and no one can do a thing about it. Sometimes we can track them down, but other times it is more difficult, like if they’re driving a stolen (10851) vehicle.
I don’t mind police demilitarization to a degree. I must admit some of this might be due to jealousy. LAPD has 19 helicopters and we have only one. How is that fair? But no, all levity aside, I don’t think outfitting police departments with grenade launchers or anything like that is the way to go. But I will say that places like Oakland are extremely dangerous. Not long ago we were ranked as the most dangerous city in California, and in the top five most dangerous cities in America (this has been slowly changing, in part due to receivership, a change in departmental policies, more training, more scrutinized hiring practices, and the like). People on the streets here are known to carry automatic assault rifles. Many D boys (drug dealers) and other criminals also wear body armor. It is not a rare occurrence to find these guys wearing up to level 3 bullet-resistant body armor that is capable of stopping most kinds of small arms fire. If I have a job as a police officer to catch bad guys, I’m not going after these people outgunned. I have a family of my own, and I rather like living. I can’t tell you how many bodies I have seen in the morgue riddled with rounds from an AK-47. For those unfamiliar with that weapon, it shoots 7.62 caliber rounds, which is capable of defeating the level 3/3A armor that police officers ordinarily wear.
Actually, in 2009 four Oakland police officers were killed on the same day. Two of those officers were killed by an SKS rifle, which shoots the same aforesaid 7.62 caliber rifle rounds. The officers were amazing people. Ofc. Romans was a happy-go-lucky kind of person who always had a smile on his face. He was the epitome of community policing. Even when he went into “ghetto” areas like the Acorn Projects, the little kids would run up to him for hugs. He would buy them ice cream and carry them around on his shoulders. Ofc. Sakai was a very humble, intelligent police officer. He was a UC Berkeley graduate and an avid volunteer in the Oakland community. A lot of the selfless things he did were never known until after he died because of his humility and soft-spoken nature. These guys were some of the best that society had to offer, and they were taken away by Lovelle Mixon, a pedophile, rapist, and murderer. After these guys died they had a freeway named after them (small consolation). Something else happened too. A large number of people gathered in Oakland with customized t-shirts that read, “Justice for Lovelle Mixon.” Some carried signs with the deceased officers’ faces on them with devil horns or funny moustaches drawn on them. They chanted, “No justice, no peace. Fuck the police.” I don't want to see anything like this happen ever again.
There are those too, you know.
And the list goes on, StreetlightX, that is just on glimpse of google search on the subject.
And the reason why there isn't an universal denunciation? Well, there isn't a universal organization of police departments in the US. Nobody can say "on behalf of all policemen..."
Quoting Congau
Baden's reply notwithstanding, I understand racism as shorthand for manifest systemic discrimination that, whether by explicit policy or 'unwritten norms', empowers governmental & non-governmental agents to exercise their personal prejudices to the detriment of individuals stereotyped "racially" (i.e. identified with color/ethnic out-groups), and so I consider "systemic racism" to be redundant. When someone uses a phrase like "racism in general" I translate that to mean more precisely personal, or customary, prejudice, which is experiential-based but not institutionally empowered. My preferred shorthand: personal prejudice + institutional (class-caste normative) power = racism.
Everyone, regardless of color/ethnicity (or gender), is susceptible to being prejudiced, but only those persons who control, manage, represent, support and/or (seek to) benefit from institutionally enforced prejudice are racist. Yes, in the American context for instance, it's possible to be a "Black racist" but that's as improbable in 2020 as it is for national & state governmental institutions, or large and medium-sized corporations to be run and controlled by Black chief executives and senior management who set agendas and standards - very roughly speaking, that's about 3% or 33 times less than Whites - so it's reasonable to guesstimate (conservatively) that for every "Black racist" there's (charitably) 20-odd to 30-odd "White racists"; thus, the prevailing socio-economic status quo (e.g. Police, Prosecutors, Bankers, Insurers, Educators, et al).
In sum: Blacks - bigots or not - do not significantly control the lives and livelihoods of White people in any sector of American society and, therefore, talk of "racism in general" or "Black racism" is simply a canard that rhetorically deflects from the social construction of Racism in trying to 'naturalize' it by suggestion or innuendo.
STOP MISSING THE RACISM FOREST FOR THE PREJUDICED TREES.
Yes, I agree. A lot of police stop hanging around their regular non-police friends after a while because they just have more in common with their co-workers. There's also a sort of bond that is forged when you share your blood, sweat, tears with someone. But I think you need to remain as grounded as possible and retain as many of your non-cop friends as possible. Working for a police department will change you. I thought as a far-left liberal I would be immune to this effect, but I was not.
[quote=ssu]That humility should be part of professionalism. There's a way to get people who serve in uniform to do better when you get them to understand that the best police force is the "smart" and professional one which can tackle underlying problems by good policing cooperation with other authorities and the community and doesn't use the brute force in every issue. Unfortunately Hollywood promotes the idea that the best cop is the door crashing, hard hitting F-the-regulations renegade, as if that's the guy who will save the day. It has a really bad effect, actually. Because that is what many assume police to be as, let's face it, typically we aren't customers of the police daily.[/quote]
Yeah, that's true, and a lot of people join the police department for all the wrong reasons. Some people slip through the cracks. Police departments are furthermore paramilitary organizations where sometimes there is a lot of testosterone in the air. Combine this with long work hours, stress, physical and mental fatigue (and even abuse), the threat of violence, etc., and people can be really on edge. Officers have to wear many hats during the course of their job. Some officers are more concerned with being "warriors" but I think they should primarily view themselves as counselors or mediators.
[quote=ssu]Just to give an anecdote, my mother-in-law was driving me and my wife and kids in an upscale part of downtown Mexico City. A policeman approached that car to stop because I think we had passed a red light. My feisty mother-in-law just yelled at him: "I have two small children in this car, I don't have any time for you now!" and just continued away. And the police, who were actually many present there just where left standing there. I told my mother-in-law never to do that in Finland. She just laughed, but agreed to behave differently here.[/quote]
Oh, that's funny. I've traveled to Mexico quite a few times and I've twice had to bribe the policia to get out of being arrested for crimes that I never committed in the first place. The corruption there is VERY obvious and isn't even disguised. It is simply a way of life.
Cool infographic going around.
Same story as healthcare, pump more money into a shitty system and you get a worse outcome. Terrible for everyone except special interests. I didn't realize it was that bad re policing though until now.
~Malcolm X (re: AmeriKKKa)
Taking a MF breath 8 minutes 46 seconds later ... on the occasion of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Memorial for George Floyd and all those who've been - will be - murdered with impunity by White Supremacy and its agents since 1619.
Do you love this troubled country enough to open your eyes and refuse to lie to yourself about her and all that we don't want to see? I wonder.
"Faced with staggering unemployment numbers that are likely to remain elevated through the election, Senate Republicans are reversing their positions on ending a federal increase of state unemployment benefits after July.
GOP senators fear that the wave of protests, riots and other forms of social unrest that has rocked major cities around the country is linked to the bleak economic picture and that their majority is on the line.
But many Republican senators, including members of the leadership, now say the federal government should continue to enhance state unemployment benefits or provide a back-to-work bonus of $450 per week for laid-off workers who return to their jobs."
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/501035-gop-shifting-on-unemployment-benefits-as-jobless-numbers-swell
A pretty extraordinary BTS look at Times staffers pushing back vigorously against management and the publishing of that piece.
This is great news, even if it's only slightly less shit.
One thing that frustrates me though is that the Republicans don't see the obvious solution to the problem of high unemployment pay discouraging return to work. Portman there is suggesting that "pay people to go back to work" idea, but if you're willing to do that and willing to give people unemployment money, why not just give people money unconditional of their work status? So that any money they make from work is on top of their "unemployment" money, and they have incentive to go back to work because it doesn't cost them to do so. I mean, if they want to call it a $450 unemployment boost plus a $450 back-to-work bonus, I don't care, it works out to the same thing, but it's dumb that they don't see it for what it is.
It's like some kind of income that's, at least at a basic level, universally available. Like a... a... universal... basic... income.
I believe upper management stated that they didn't review the piece before it was published, although I wouldn't be surprised if that was an effort to save face (the alternative, reviewing it and publishing it being even worse). Certainly, there have been repugnant pieces published in the op-ed section of the NYT in the last few years under Bennet, but this piece in particular has the potential to shake things up.
What is that?
The Netherlands spends 4.5 billion per year for 18 million people. Budget is set to decrease slightly.
I do feel the Dutch police is not well equipped to handle large organised crime but on the other hand organised crime tends to stay in the shadows mostly. And obviously, if you're poor or even unemployed in NL, you're not as fucked as in the USA.
Did you know there's actually a very good economic argument to pay unemployed people well? Unemployed people are necessary to grease the wheels of the labour market. If everyone was employed, how are you going to replace that non-performing employee? You couldn't. So the unemployed perform the all important function of creating flexibility for companies and companies should be taxed for that opportunity so we can pay the unemployed a fair amount for their critical role in the functioning of the labour market.
Then we get a feeding frenzy at the top where the tabloids (this includes the Telegraph) reinforce these lies and support the populists in return for more rightwing Britain first policies. All the billionaires and rip off merchants, investment bankers etc get into a feeding frenzy because they're going to make loads of money out of the economic and financial changes during the Brexit process and the workforce will become more pliant and desperate, so easier to control and exploit. Win win.
Then sell of to the US so they can pick the carcass clean, job done.
The country will be ok, they survived the war, they will survive this, it's the bulldog spirit.
Quoting Benkei
I'm familiar with these arguments! I'm curious as to how widely known they are. I've spoken to economists who have been against full employment on precisely these grounds: that unemployment has a structural function in maintaining a high quality labour force. The challenge is, as you've said, making sure they don't play this role without being, well, compensated for it.
A related interesting perspective I've heard is that - pre-COVID - the main social issue to tackle isn't unemployment, but good employment. Pre-COVID, unemployment - at least in developed nations - was trending to be at almost historically low levels. The gravity of the issue lay in precarious, unwaged, 'flexible' labour, with jobs but only barely - zero-hour contracts, lack of insurance, no holiday or sick leave, minimum wage jobs, etc. There's a whole thing to say here about the outsized role of finance economies (as opposed to industrial economies) in encouraging this sort of thing, but that's for another thread. In this connection, it means people are going to live shitty lives, and will more likely turn to - crime (with my Marxist hat on, this means that defunding police will work best with - a change in the mode of production).