Another "I can't breath" death: Police Reform & Protests in the USA

[Elegiac]

I don't think that I voiced my support for the employment of order through violence. I think it's a given that it unfortunately may or often turns violent. Isn't that what we're being outraged about? The excessive use of violence?

No. I am saying the system itself is a form of violence.

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” - Coretta Scott King

This is what I'm referring to. When people say "I agree with your message but I can never condone violence" in response to a civil protest against violence, you are ignoring the fact that the situation is already violent.

The distinction, for you, comes that when rioting and looting happens it is a) impossible to ignore, and b) poses a risk to you. Which is my entire point about how utterly dishonest the clownery of it all is.

[Elegiac]

Hey, you know how major stars like Justin Bieber, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Seth Rogen are Canadian? But also, living in the USA and taking over your entertainment?

The invasion is coming from inside your house.

Off topic but despite meeting no traditional standards of masculine beauty Seth Rogen is just....unf. Something about being a genuinely good guy.

Maybe it's Jack Black Syndrome.

[Pannonian]

Oh, I was wrong. ICE isn't the Gestapo, this is the actual Gestapo.

Gestapo was plain clothes secret police.

These guys are the personal goon squad of Barr/Trump here to threaten, intimidate and dominate. I'd go for SS.

[Benggaul]

Teeny tiny baby steps.

Overnight, Philadelphia officials removed the statue of Frank Rizzo, the ex police chief and mayor who once told people to “Vote White”

[Elegiac]

Gestapo was plain clothes secret police.

These guys are the personal goon squad of Barr/Trump here to threaten, intimidate and dominate. I'd go for SS.

I wouldn't, it's insulting to the hard work Hugo Boss put in to designing those uniforms.

These are rent-a-cops.

- - - Updated - - -

Teeny tiny baby steps.

Overnight, Philadelphia officials removed the statue of Frank Rizzo, the ex police chief and mayor who once told people to “Vote White”

It gets even better! The mayor of Birmingham managed to calm down a protest trying to dismantle the Confederate Soldiers & Sailor's monument by promising to professionally finish the job.

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, is vowing to remove a 115-year-old Confederate monument from a public park after protesters attempted to tear it down. Demonstrators at Linn Park took aim at the Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument, dedicated in 1905, on Sunday during a protest over systemic racism and police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd's death.

As some attempted to tear down the 52-foot-tall obelisk, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin arrived at the scene. He pleaded with demonstrators to disperse before police came to make arrests, saying that he understood their anger and would have the monument removed.

"Allow me to finish the job for you."

[Edge-]

HEY, REMEMBER THAT GOOD GUY POLICE CHIEF IN RICHMOND VIRGINIA THAT TEARED UP TALKING ABOUT HOW PROTESTERS INTENTIONALLY SET FIRE TO A BUILDING WITH PEOPLE, INCLUDING A CHILD, INSIDE IT AND THAT THEY THEN PROCEEDED TO BLOCK FIRE ACCESS?

Yeah that was a fuckin lie.

But, Lt. Chris Armstrong said, based on his investigation, the fire call initially came in as being on Broad St, but it actually involved a fire at 309 N. Monroe St.

He said there was a car fire on W. Monroe that spread to the exterior of a nearby building. He said the fire was external only and did not get inside.

Armstrong added that when the fire department arrived on the scene, a father and son were already outside "unharmed."

Armstrong did confirm that a fire truck was impeded in its effort to get to the Monroe scene quickly.

But the details of how that happened were a little different from Chief Smith's version.

Just a little bit different.

[Pannonian]

I wouldn't, it's insulting to the hard work Hugo Boss put in to designing those uniforms.

These are rent-a-cops.

Alright, then let's go SA. Uneducated goons in ill-fitting khaki uniforms - only strong as a group - a rabble, hoodlums... thugs - as some presidents would say. I'd originally intended to christen the red-hatted yokels that way, but they don't even reach that bar. The SA, cowards as they were, at least fought when at an advantage. These fucking rednecks only get their weapons when they're sure no one will try to stop then.

[Grimbold21]

Less honest? No. Less rooted in anything that might bring about change.

Hey if you enjoy pissing in the wind having pointless conversations, so you can keep playing devil's advocate go for it. But from where I'm sitting it really doesnt look like your ideology is practical for creating change.

What ideology? Who am I defending?

Oh but it is rooted in such things. I keep saying that I support civil protest as means of change. Whereas you appear to support primitive losses of control and succumbing to frivolous and momentary desires are legitimate ways of enacting change. Ironic when, I'd wager, the primary concern of those people is anything but the injustices the group they may (or not) belong to suffer.

You speak of change and yet you appear to want to perpetuate our immaturity when it comes to resorting to violence as means to carry out changes.

So, as an example, were I apart of a protest which either from get go wanted to turn to rioting/looting or ended up turning to those during it, I'd either try to convince them otherwise, or failing that, I'd walk away. In the latter scenario, I would rush to prevent said actions and would hope that those around me outnumbered those willing to commit those actions.

[Elegiac]

What ideology? Who am I defending?

The status quo.

You're still giving police the benefit of the doubt.

[Aurgjelme]

Reminds me of this clip from the 1992 LA riots, guy is not happy they burned down his shop and truck.

I shared in the other thread a video of a African american firefighter with four kids, who had invested everything into a sports bar in Minneapolis.
Of course looters ruined his bar and stole just about everything, and as he is interviewed, looters come back and try to make of with whatever is left.

Of course you had @Elegiac coming and accusing me of sharing far right propaganda, and that the movie was apparently from 1992. Which it of course isn't.

But there are no other sources to share this clip from on youtube, for some reason it's not popular to show how this looting affects innocent civilians.

[Edge-]

Hey @rrayy

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...-John-s-Church

The White House gave the order -

McEnany, who lies repeatedly during each event, noted that Attorney General William Barr "decided that morning" to expand the perimeter around the White House. (Note: The United States attorney general is not in charge of the security configuration of the White House.) But she also confirmed that Trump gave "an order" indicating he wished to "go to the church."

"When the president gives an order, people act. It's not as if he needs to walk through every detail of how a plan goes about. He says 'I want to go to the church,' he goes to the church and everyone executes the plan and the order that the president puts into place."

But was, pressed a reporter, "the plan still for the president to walk out there, even if the protesters were still there?"

"I'm not aware of the determinations that the Secret Service had as they arranged for the president to walk out there," said McEnany, but "I would just note again that the decision to expand the perimeter was a decision made in the morning by Attorney General Barr." (Note: The United States attorney general is not in charge of the Secret Service and cannot give those orders, and something has gone extremely wrong if he has seized command of those forces. McEnany is either lying to the nation or confirming that a slow-rolling coup is currently taking place.)

White House gave the order to clear protesters for Trump's photo op. They're at the top of the chain of command.

You've been wrong for pages, and you're still wrong.

[Egomaniac]

Tbf nobody is gonna believe racism is over in the US as long as the White House isnt on fire.

Well, Racism is a long way from being dead regardless of the fire status of the white house.

[Aurgjelme]

"Gentrification explains why there are so many white young adults, both ordinary protesters and anarchist vandals, compared to African Americans in the videos we see of protests and riots in big cities across the United States, compared to images of urban riots in generations past. Thanks to rising rents, young white leftists and liberals have been displacing the nonwhite working class and poor, many of them social conservatives, in places like Brooklyn and Oakland and Austin. While the initial occasion of a protest may be the death of a member of a minority group in police custody, affluent young white leftists are more interested in symbolic violence against capitalism or patriarchy or whatever.
These children of the economic elite end up harming those on whose behalf they pretend to be speaking. Like the upper-middle-class hippies of the 1960s who called police officers “pigs,” today’s affluent hipsters despise the police, many of whom are their age but are more likely than leftist radicals to be from working-class backgrounds and to be nonwhite. Slogans of elite radicals like “Abolish the Police and Prisons” and comparisons of the Border Patrol to the Gestapo are insults to the unionized, working-class Americans of all races employed by those institutions.
Dressing up as revolutionaries like children on Halloween, the sociopathic heirs of the overclass, already living in neighborhoods from which the working class was forced out by economic privation, take part in the vandalization, looting, and burning of local businesses, many of them owned by immigrants or members of minority groups. If they get arrested, the fortunate among them can count on being bailed out after phone calls to their indulgent liberal or moderate conservative parents, who live in expensive, nearly all-white urban and suburban neighborhoods and denounce racism and fascism on their Facebook pages.
It will take years for the American hub cities damaged by the riots, along with the pandemic and the lockdown, to recover, if they ever recover. The black poor and working class first had their urban industrial jobs taken away from them by corporate executives in the white overclass who offshored them to Mexico or China. Then they were replaced in their former urban neighborhoods by the hipster children of the white overclass. Now even their grievances like protests against horrific police brutality are stolen from them by their supposed allies in the white overclass and turned into an occasion for virtue-signaling or vandalism by the elite.
Many of today’s big city riot ninjas will look back in the future with pride on their nights of prancing around in black leotards and spraypainting “BLM” and “Fuck Trump” on downtown buildings. A decade from now, the most successful will have well-paying jobs, many of them in the politically progressive sectors like the universities and NGOs. The unlucky ones may still be working at Starbucks—perhaps at the very stores whose plate glass windows they once spray-painted or smashed."

[wunksta]

But there are no other sources to share this clip from on youtube, for some reason it's not popular to show how this looting affects innocent civilians.

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...y=Korboi+Balla

[Levelfive]

My support is there. And you just add to my point. You need to care and focus on this precisely for that reason. Not only because it allows the police to do so, but it triggers a gut reaction from the larger audience that leads them to misrepresent the protests, which risk being seen through the actions of the looters.



And you insist on conflating this focus with a lack of care. If anything it inflates my negative emotions, for the aforementioned reasons. The cause is undermined or hijacked by the actions of looters.

And you speak of caring. Do truly believe that looters care about the situations that have lead them to their action? Is the quick acquisition of material wealth how you show your care and support for the injustice that a community faces?

If the answer is yes, then I suppose, yes, we fundamentally disagree.

How exactly is the "cause undermined"? People would have supported not murdering black people, but due to protesters' behavior, they're ok with it after all?

[Egomaniac]

Hey @rrayy

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...-John-s-Church

The White House gave the order -



White House gave the order to clear protesters for Trump's photo op. They're at the top of the chain of command.

You've been wrong for pages, and you're still wrong.

He's been wrong for well over 100 pages and he'll continue to be wrong for well over 100 more.

[Pannonian]

How exactly is the "cause undermined"? People would have supported not murdering black people, but due to protesters' behavior, they're ok with it after all?

Maybe he means that people wanting to derail the discussion will only want to talk about looting


....


like he does

[Aurgjelme]

HEY, REMEMBER THAT GOOD GUY POLICE CHIEF IN RICHMOND VIRGINIA THAT TEARED UP TALKING ABOUT HOW PROTESTERS INTENTIONALLY SET FIRE TO A BUILDING WITH PEOPLE, INCLUDING A CHILD, INSIDE IT AND THAT THEY THEN PROCEEDED TO BLOCK FIRE ACCESS?

Yeah that was a fuckin lie.



Just a little bit different.

It's a good thing police in riot gear was there to disperse the crowd that was moving in on the fire truck then, according to the snippet you shared.

[Edge-]

https://truthout.org/articles/police...activists-say/

Cops kneeled in solidarity with protesters and then turned around and assaulted them.

- - - Updated - - -

It's a good thing police in riot gear was there to disperse the crowd that was moving in on the fire truck then, according to the snippet you shared.

Without additional information, we have no clue what they were moving closer to do.

But the chief lied about the circumstances. He should be fired for that.

[Levelfive]

Maybe he means that people wanting to derail the discussion will only want to talk about looting


....


like he does

For sure, though, as has been noted, anybody who was desperately looking for some excuse to weasel out of dealing with the actual problem was going to find one one way or another anyway.