I've banned @Chester for being a low quality poster after a particularly hostile post.

Goddamit who gives a shit about this.

Democrats are centre-right, and Hillary is a corporate rat whom every leftist despises with a passion.

:rofl:

Didn't know that. Awesome.

Why the fuck are you asking me and not your leaders?

So here's a fun fact I learnt. After MLK was assasinated, the US was hit by the biggest and most violent riots since the civil war. There were uprisings in nearly every major American city - at least 100 of them. Dozens of people were killed, property was destroyed en masse, and violence skyrocketed. Six days later the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, because LBJ and the rest of the government were shitting their pants.

Anyone moaning about violent protest not solving problems can go fuck off a bridge and never come back.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wbxk/confederate-statues-and-other-symbols-of-racism-all-over-the-country-were-destroyed-by-protesters-this-weekend

"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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52877411

Hong Kong police have banned a vigil marking the Tiananmen Square crackdown for the first time in 30 years. Authorities said the decision was due to health concerns over coronavirus. However, there are fears this may end the commemorations, as China seeks to impose a new law making undermining its authority a crime in the territory.

And this is how it begins.

Another really dumb thing Trump is doing is making enemies out of governors and mayors. — Marchesk

The dumb thing that Trump is doing is breathing.

We're all complict. The only question is how to be a little less complicit, in whatever small or big ways we can. Adorno's ethical question comes to mind: how can one live a good life in a bad life?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisville-police-chief-fired-after-officer-bodycams-found-be-during-n1221351?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma

"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."

Meanwhile, Joe Biden's policy suggestion is to shoot people in the leg instead.

Basically the state of American electoral politics right now: would you prefer to be short in the heart, or shot in the leg? Democrats will only maim and cripple you for life (without healthcare cover), instead of actually killing you. The lesser evil :party:

https://sports.yahoo.com/biden-suggests-police-could-shoot-assailants-in-the-leg-instead-of-the-heart-201750470.html

"Joe Biden said Monday that police under attack in the line of duty should shoot their assailants “in the leg instead of the heart” as a way to avert the killing of civilians."

Finally, some real leadership :heart:

It should be absolutely infuriating to people that actual talk of instituional reform of even the speculative kind involved in demands like the above is simply nowhere to be found among American leadership. Their priority is literally to send more cops out, engage in more cop - and now possibly military - violence, and - what? Begin the cycle anew?

Seen in the wild:

"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.

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. — Old Master

But then they'd be no cops left. Which is a most agreeable situation.

I say all this in the full realization that almost no one is equiped with the conceptual resources to carry out any other kind of conversation because people's political eductation has been absolutely stunted at every turn. I get it - it's the primal ape rection to spectacle - "wow fire! broken windows!". I just thought people here had evolved somewhat.

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.

If people in this thread spent even a quarter of their energy discussing the sources of why this all happened rather than pouring time into the question of 'looting' maybe it'd be a sign that things might actually get better in the future. As it stands, people like Marches are so fucking obsessed with treating this like an intellectual game that the entire question of the injustices that govern the protests have been wholly ignored.

StreetlightX hadn't seemed to be trying to defend the actions, not the emotions. — 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.

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. — Ciceronianus the White

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.

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. — Pfhorrest

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. — Echarmion

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. — 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.

Apparently the people who do live there don't live up to your rigorous standards either. Which leaves... ah. Got it.

Tell me More of your Wisdom.

Everyone agrees the original crime was wrong, so there's nothing more to say about that. — Pfhorrest

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 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. — Echarmion

WOW Well done you did it! You said the Important Definitely-Not-Trivial Thing To Say. I wish all the protestors had your courage!

Neither MLK nor Gandhi worked in a vacuum. Their principled non-violence was immersed in environments which were bloody, in which people died, were hurt, and where misery was (is?) the rule and not the exception. Non-violence has a part, and an important part to play. It should be encouraged where possible, and praised where successful. But it has always been one part of a tapestry of moving historical pieces of which people like MLK and Gandhi were fragments.

Look we get it, the protests are not up to your standard of purity, and the real issue is definitely not a trail of dead, state-murdered black men and everything that lead to that, but your discomfort. Tell us more about how these protests make you feel. How can they accomodate your all important, make-or-break judgement better? However can they make it up to you in order to gain your Very Important Support?

^ Look an on-script one note liberal, right on cue.

Y'know the more I think about it the more I reckon the overwhelming anxiety from well-meaning but utterly shit liberals over protestor violence is born from desperate need for self-assurance that they're only supporting 'good causes' and not 'bad causes'. As if they would taint themselves somehow if they were to just fully commit themselves to supporting the biggest social movement I don't know when. Like 'yes yes I know that there's structural violence and that a man was executed in broad daylight on video, but...". It's the same 'but' in 'I'm not racist but...'. It's the only way to explain the fact that all these people drop-in outta nowhere and uniformly - as if following a script - kick conversation off with some lip service to supporting the protests before vomiting out a paragraph or two about the violence despite having said jack shit about anything else.

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.

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. — Echarmion

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.

we don’t need to worry about an adult who got punched by a toddler, he can take it, but that doesn’t make punching in general harmless. — Pfhorrest

Good. No one cares about harmless protests.

There's nothing cynical about this suggestion at all. The fact is that certain social policies have, and remain, in place in order to keep blacks poor and destitute, and are very much contributory to the issues we're seeing now. I mentioned earlier the massive rise of carceral prevalence, which overwhelmingly and disproportionally affects blacks; the practise of redlining is yet another. Economics and race are inseparable.

^Prothero said it exactly right.

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? — Echarmion

I'm just going to quote myself from earlier:

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. — 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.

@Baden - Beau's righteous fury at the shitty WhAt AbOuT tHe JoBs AnD tHe BuSiNeSeS?! argument:



"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."

Ahhh Beau is Bae. He's like my zen space of the internet. I could listen to him talk for hours.

You'e not even American. — Marchesk

Thank the Lord.

Woah 10 different black people.

Ah yes, Dennis Rodman. The black person who can stand in for all black people. They're all the same after all. Just metonyms of each other. That's how it works, right?

Heh, it's like when the Brazilian favela drug gangs had to enforce social distancing because Bolsonaro was too inept and kept (and keeps) not giving a shit about the murder of his own population. Imagine if that was a developed country lik... oh.