I had business outside today. I needed to go in towards Philly, closer to the riots, to get a new PSU put into the Great Beast. I went armed; I’ve been carrying at all times awake since Philadelphia started to burn and there were occasional reports of looters heading into the suburbs in other cities.
I knew I might be heading into civil unrest today. It didn’t happen. But it still could.
Therefore I’m announcing my rules of engagement should any of the riots connected with the atrocious murder of George Floyd reach the vicinity of my person.
- I will shoot any person engaging in arson or other life-threatening behavior, issuing a warning to cease first if safety permits.
- Blacks and other minorities are otherwise safe from my gun; they have a legitimate grievance in the matter of this murder, and what they’re doing to their own neighborhoods and lives will be punishment enough for the utter folly of their means of expression once the dust settles.
- White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends; them I consider “enemies-general of all mankind, to be dealt with as wolves are” and will shoot immediately, without mercy or warning.
UPDATE: I didn’t mention white nationalists because I judge my chances of encountering any member of that tiny, ineffectual movement to be effectively zero, and I refuse to cooperate with the mass-media fiction that they are a significant factor in this crisis.
We don’t have a problem with white nationalists attempting to burn down our country using black people as tools and proxies. We have a problem with Communists doing that. I insist on naming – and if necessary, shooting – the real enemy.
I hope that was just a hot-take……those ‘rules’ are not sound doctrine, and I doubt any firearm academy would affirm them.
I appreciate your grit, but IMNSHO you should reflect & rethink….especially #3
Caveat – maybe PA law allows you to do these things….but I’d be eyebrows-on-the-ceiling surprised.
The second word of #3 is “rioters.” That implies violent mobs behaving destructively upon property and person. That equates to imminent threat, and as such probably falls solidly under self-defense.
No. Unless the ‘rioter’ is threatening your (or an other) life…running around smashing & burning stuff doesn’t cut it.
Maybe PA allows deadly force in such a situation? You can bet your freedom on it, but I won’t….I’ll just bug out ASAFP.
As for #2 – my bullets are color blind. If you lawfully deserve to get shot, you’re getting shot.
#3 in particular looks like a fast track to club fed.
> You can bet your freedom on it, but I won’t….I’ll just bug out ASAFP.
A fair position to hold in these modern days. A person might argue that you would then be derelict in your responsibility as a citizen and thus member of the militia. A luxury of the modern age is the privilege of allowing others to do the dirty work (that is, we now have career praetorians), absolving us of our responsibilities.
It’s like watching your neighbor’s house burn down, and rather than risk injury or lawsuit by trying to assist, you just walk away. Not your problem.
The problem is that in the current political climate if you defend yourself against Antifa you’re likely to get labeled a racist and slapped with a life sentence.
At this point, we almost have to let the rabid left and the police state tear each other down the rest of the way before we can respond.
Once there is no judicial system left to slap a life sentence on anyone that resists the bolshevik revolution, fighting back becomes a lot more plausible.
>The problem is that in the current political climate if you defend yourself against Antifa you’re likely to get labeled a racist and slapped with a life sentence
Nah. The general run of Antifa is as white as library paste. Those clowns look noticeably more ofay than me, and I would disappear in a crowd of Pennsylvania Dutch.
Maybe you’re thinking of Black Lives Matter?
Eric, you know better than to believe that accusations of “racism” have any connection to actual skin color. “Politically white” isn’t a term I made up, and Antifa claim to “speak on behalf” of those poor oppressed downtrodden false-consciousness minorities, therefore opposing them is white supremacy.
>Antifa claim to “speak on behalf” of those poor oppressed downtrodden false-consciousness minorities, therefore opposing them is white supremacy.
They would have you believe that, yes, but so far the prosecutors courts aren’t buying it.
So far I think I’ve seen reports of three arrests of drivers trying to get out of an encircling mob in the last week.
>So far I think I’ve seen reports of three arrests of drivers trying to get out of an encircling mob in the last week.
I’m not sure how this is relevant to your previous assertion. Are you claiming that the encircling mobs were Antifa-white and the drivers were nevertheless accused of anti-black racism?
Because otherwise there’s nothing much remarkable about this. The rioters are taking place largely in cities run by various hard-left political cliques that are quite willing to criminalize resistance to their pet mob. And the Antifa/BLM combination is definitely their pet mob.
Both Antifa and BLM are led and financed by Soros; they are not genuine grassroots movements. And it turns out the leader in Mpls was the same Sanders staffer who said the city would burn if his man lost. Any connection between the riots and George Floyd is phony; he is merely their “coup excuse” (if anyone else here plays the game Junta).
As far as blacks having good cause — that’s BS, too. Police using unnecessary force are a real problem, and Floyd appears to be a good example of it; but it happens to all races.
I wrote the President and said use all available force. New York and MN in particular are putting arrested rioters back on the streets without even asking for bail, so if the army doesn’t kill them there’s nobody to do it but us.
I’ve actually been expecting this civil war since 2008, but I was afraid the bad guys would start it during a Democratic administration, thus forcing patriots to fight as the rebels while the bad guys controlled the White House and army. Instead, they picked now. Thank God for President Trump. (Unless he lets Esper talk him into chickening out, in which case we’re all hosed.)
>Any connection between the riots and George Floyd is phony; he is merely their “coup excuse” (if anyone else here plays the game Junta).
I have. And I don’t think you’re quite right.
Floyd’s death is a coup excuse for Antifa, sure. But I don’t think it’s that simple for BLM and the blacks on the street. Their anger is genuine, and a reasonable person can sympathize with it without believing the riots are anything but a self-destructive tragedy for them.
It’s as genuine as Antifa’s. Both come from sincerely held false beliefs. Both were inflamed by the media and Soros’s orgs.
Notice how these kinds of things always happen right before presidential elections.
This is nonsensical and borderline paranoid.
I don’t believe Chauvin was intending to influence the election when he did what it did.
Chauvin’s action is exactly the kind of thing that BLM exists to protest about. Suggesting they’re only protesting because of the election cycle is truly weird.
I didn’t say that. Stop hallucinating. My point is that given the BLM are willing to go ape when a thug who once pulled a gun on pregnant woman’s belly while robbing her place dies of a drug overdose. An excuse to motivate them to riot at a convenient time can always be found.
The only hallucination here is suggesting that “right before a presidential election” has anything at all to do with a group whose initial point was to protest police killing blacks protesting about police killing blacks.
They have a legitimate cause for anger, but Floyd’s death *ISN’T* it.
Floyd was not stopped for “driving while black”, nor for any number of stupid tax (loosies) or quality of life laws. He was being arrested for *a felony*–passing counterfeit currency. The whitest most middle class male in this country would have been irons for that.
Floyd and the arresting officer knew one another from working security at a “club”.
Also let’s quote from NPR here:
Other sources indicate that Floyd had an underlying heart condition.
Two of the three other officers there assisted in this to one degree or the other, and the third *DIDN’T* stop it.
Chauvin went from cop to ex-cop to suspect to arrested and charged with murder in 3 days.
The black community has reason to be upset by the other bloke who got shot for walking in the wrong place a couple months ago.
We *all* have reason to be incandescently furious over the death of the young woman who was shot when the police did a no-knock in plain clothes.
But Floyd? Something happened there that was NOT your normal cop kills black guy thing.
The black community has the right to demand answers. I’ll go further and state that *someone* has an *OBLIGATION* to demand answers.
But at least in this case the “authorities” are doing the right thing.
As an older White guy I’m trying to imagine being arrested due to handing a clerk a counterfeit twenty, and I just can’t imagine it. I imagine the police looking at the other bills in my wallet, noting that those are not counterfeit, and asking me where I got the twenty. And it would end there, because I’m White and present myself well.
@Troutwaxer Probably because the police rad his license plate and got his past record.
Yeah, try that and let me know how it works.
If you’re wearing your Hugo Boss suit and tie and got your loafers on? Maybe.
If you’re wearing a well worn LED ZEPPLIN t-shirt, blue jeans and beat up workboots with a scruffy beard? Turn around and put your hands behind you please.
But guess what, if Floyd had been sober and wearing a suit and tie he wouldn’t be dead now either.
See, there’s a HUGE difference between j-walking, speeding and passing counterfeit currency.
Two of them are infractions, and one of them is a *major* felony.
You may tell the cop you have no idea where you got it, but that doesn’t mean the cop is going to believe you.
> Both Antifa and BLM are led and financed by Soros
Wrt. Antifa, the Soros connection I am aware of is that he donated money to the Tides Foundation, who are a “fund of progressive causes” charity; one of their many donations (according to Wikipedia they fund 130 organisations) was to the Alliance for Global Justice, who in turn once sponsored “Refuse Fascism”, which is an Antifa organisation.
If this is the basis for your claim, it is lazy conspiracy theory. Soros indeed is socially liberal and sympathetic to BLM, but he is pro-capitalist, which almost certainly means he is anti-Antifa.
Soros has said flat out that he wants to see western civilization destroyed. (Yes, it makes no sense, but I saw him say it on an interview.)
Antifa is in thick with the Muslim Brotherhood, but don’t know whether funding flows that way.
Well, they do say ‘you are what you eat’…
The ‘neighbors house’ comparison is not fair.
There are so many variables in the mix in any confrontation that to try to reductio the argument is simply meaningless.
I was simply responding to ESR’s generic ‘rule’ regarding arson in general.
If my neighbors are in their home, and some punk is trying to firebomb them….you’re goddamn right I’m filling them in (although I’d have to snipe them from hundreds of yards or sprint the same distance to get them).
I have no idea of what my ‘currency’ is amongst the regulars here….but I have my doubts that I would be described as ‘derelict’ or a ‘coward’ in such a situation. I have been consistently forthright in my 2A stance.
> The ‘neighbors house’ comparison is not fair.
Is it not? Here is what you wrote in more fullness, and what I was responding to:
> running around smashing & burning stuff doesn’t cut it.
> Maybe PA allows deadly force in such a situation? You can bet your freedom on it, but I won’t….I’ll just bug out ASAFP.
A riotous mob, “running around smashing and burning stuff” seems to be rather equivalent to a neighbor’s house being on fire. The reason for the fire is irrelevant; the fire and one’s response to it is the fact in question.
In the same way, the reason for a smash-and-burn riot mob is irrelevant to the reality of the rioters, and one’s civic responsibility (or lack thereof) to respond.
Unless you are willing to abdicate your responsibilities as a free citizen and de facto member of the militia to a third party, i.e. law enforcement, fire department, et cetera, failing to respond would make one derelict and morally if not legally culpable.
Note that I am not saying it is necessarily wrong to so abdicate this responsibility; the nature of our modern society strongly incentivizes doing so, and I fully understand why one would and make no claim that I wouldn’t as well.
Enough
But apparently not enough for you to resist saying so. +1
It’d have been fine if you’d ignored me; I’m just having a discussion, but your unnecessary and unwarranted catty response is like a damn laser pointer to me. Meow!
Anyway, I feel I’ve made my point adequately and don’t really see a need to continue pressing it, so aight.
Your belief that the use of deadly force to prevent arson is not justified is greatly dependent upon state law. Many states do permit the use of deadly force to prevent arson, specifically, or in more general circumstances that would include an arson.
Then you are free to make your play.
Good luck to you.
Thinking #3 will land you in the slammer for a while unless they are posing a direct threat to your life or the lives around you.
I would conjecture that throwing a Molotov cocktail constitutes a serious threat to life.
Only if directed at living beings.
Firebombing an empty parked car doesn’t justify deadly force, unless you live in a state that authorizes such force in defense of private property (I think Texas might have such a statue).
I live in New York and only completed NY pistol permit classes, so I can only speak to New York. In New York, if you see someone committing arson, deadly force is justified, period. Regardless of whether it is directed at “living beings.” The reason the instructor(who was a lawyer specializing in self-defense) gave was that any fire could kill someone. The firefighters who respond could die or be seriously hurt. There could be people in the building being burned that you don’t see. The fire could spread to where it could injure people. Therefore all arson justified deadly force.
As I stated, this is only in New York. However, New York is not known for being very pro-second amendment or pro-self-defense.
Yeah….I don’t live in NY nor do I ever intend on visiting (unless it decides to respect the RKBA of all US citizens….hahaha fat chance), but I really wouldn’t fancy your chances in court if you offered that defense.
There are also non-white Antifa persons, that might introduce a great level of risk to you if you let your guard down for those types.
Are you familiar with the statistic that more whites are killed than blacks by police per arrest? Which matches common sense giving police are automatically more law suit conscious interacting with black people, whereas no one cares if they rough up some random white meth head.
Do you see any evidence whatsoever that the PD’s conduct had anything to do with race vs. general good old fashioned color blind corruption.
Police brutality is a legitimate problem, one that isn’t going away as long as we have the war on drugs and the militarization of the police force. But the framing of this issue by the MSM is absurd, and it’s been weird to see intelligent people fall for it.
Glad you’re staying armed. Just don’t be naive about how much hatred a lot of black people involved in these protests have for you for being white.
>Do you see any evidence whatsoever that the PD’s conduct had anything to do with race vs. general good old fashioned color blind corruption.
My estimate on the odds that race was a factor in this killing went up when I learned that Floyd and Chauvin knew each other and had worked together. It’s not something I ordinarily assume – evidence has taught me to believe that plain police arrogance and poor training are usually the drivers in supposedly “racist” police killings – but it’s all too easy for me to imagine that Chauvin had some personal grudge and imagined he could get away with executing it because his victiom was black. Stupid assumption.
Maybe – having worked with him (security work) – the officer knew his history and thought he was a POS and simply didn’t care about him. That may have led him to not give a fuck as he knelt on his neck.
That would be pretty depraved indifference to another human life, and worthy of significant jail time.
>Maybe – having worked with him (security work) – the officer knew his history and thought he was a POS and simply didn’t care about him. That may have led him to not give a fuck as he knelt on his neck.
I agree this is plausible. I didn’t say that I was certain racial hatred mattered in in this one, just that the odds on that look higher to me than in the general run of police-bad-shoot scenarios – where it is often assumed as a motive but I think seldom actually present.
Floyd autopsy report:
https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf
I’d rule it an accidental death, at worst negligent, not intentional.
And you don’t have to be a racist to have a poor opinion of someone you know is a five-time violent felon and evidently doped up. Incidentally he was resisting (refused to get into the car).
As to who cops kill, ratio of deaths to incident is 4/100k whites, 3/100k blacks, even tho blacks commit 5-8x more crime per capita, and naturally have relatively more interaction with police. And black cops are more likely to shoot black suspects than are white cops. So who really has a grievance here, and against whom??
> I’d rule it an accidental death, at worst negligent, not intentional.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/george-floyd-what-happen-last-30-minutes-his-life/KV3JWRCB6FE2DNJJFBFWVYLL3U/
According to their own police report, after George Floyd lost consciousness, Keung checked for a pulse and “couldn’t find one”. Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck not just on being informed of the lack of pulse, but “for the next two minutes and 53 seconds” after that until paramedics arrived, rather than immediately attempting resuscitation themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-degree_murder#Minnesota
Third-degree murder doesn’t require intent. It just requires not giving a shit whether the person lives or dies downstream of your actions — such as keeping a knee on their neck three more minutes after they no longer have a detectable pulse.
> someone you know is a five-time violent felon
In Texas, not Minnesota, felonies for which time had been served in prison. The allegation was of “passing a counterfeit twenty”, which is not a violent crime, even if the allegation was true.
Where is this alleged “fake twenty”? After extensive googling I have been unable to find out anything about it past the store clerk’s claim of it looking “suspicious”. Some stories seem to hint Mr. Floyd refused to take it back when walking off, others that he did take it.
This would be an important element of the State’s case, possibly the only such element (without it, there would be no grounds for the attempted arrest in the first place, let alone the resulting murder). If the store clerk kept it, the police should have recovered it at the scene. If Mr. Floyd did take it, it should have been recovered along with any other possessions taken from his body into evidence. Yet it seems to have disappeared entirely, almost as if it never existed.
I was not aware Chauvin’s charge had been elevated to second degree murder (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868910542/chauvin-and-3-former-officers-face-new-charges-over-george-floyds-death).
I agree that showing “intent” is going to be a much higher bar to clear. (It probably wasn’t clear from the way I wrote it above, but I was primarily arguing against the “accidental death” possibility.)
And given the bar for “intent” — will be tough to convince a jury, unless it’s handpicked for a positive conviction. My cynical little voice opines that they’re angling for another set of riots when it doesn’t fly and they’re acquitted, plus a larger wrongful death settlement for the Floyd family.
>As to who cops kill, ratio of deaths to incident is 4/100k whites, 3/100k blacks
Do you have a citation on that, kind Sir? Not that I don’t believe you, but I’d like to throw it around to people who wouldn’t.
FBI stats. Um, where the heck did I see a compiled set of stats for cop vs perp? Most recent I can recall, the Red Elephants channel on YT laid it out; don’t recall if cites were visible, but he’s pretty careful about sources.
Meanwhile…
https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
Don’t recall what all stats are in these papers; they lay ’em out differently, but it’s enlightening.
I go the other way on it. It’s been my experience that most racists are “class not instance” racists. They hate the blacks they see on TV, but the ones they know are Ok.
I *suspect* that Chauvin knew Floyd as a pretty tough guy, and not a small one, and they’d been in few scraps togther–on the same side–so when he Floyd got froggy Chauvin used what he thought was an appropriate level of restraint.
Keep in mind that Keith Ellison is the AG here. That needs to figure in. If Chauvin is convicted of murder he wins. If Chauvin is found not guilty the black community AND Antifa get another looting session, and Ellison wins.
This, exactly. Don’t forget that Ellison is a Muslim Brotherhood operative, and MB is hand in glove with Antifa.
Also worth mentioning, a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer.
I call complete bullshit. You got any cites on that?
You can pull it out of FBI data, but here’s someone else arguing about it and dragging forth a bunch of stats:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39880/is-a-police-officer-18x-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-black-male-than-an-unarmed
This is the article they’re dissecting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/19/academic-research-on-police-shootings-and-race/
I see at least two problems here. For starters let me fix your original claim by italicizing one word in the top post:
“…a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a Black man than an unarmed Black man is to be killed by a police officer.”
So the first problem here is that you’re comparing apples and oranges (and I didn’t notice that on my first reading.) If you compare all Black people instead of unarmed Black people you discover that a police officer is 2.5 times as likely to be killed by a Black Person as vice-versa, not 18 times as likely. (It’s in the link you provided!)
If you count unarmed Black people killed vs. unarmed police officers killed, then the police really, really look very bad indeed! Just to show you how ridiculous comparisons like this can be, if zero unarmed Black people are killed by police, and one police officer is killed by a Black person, a police officer is infintely more likely to be killed by a black person – even though that situation would be substantially improved over what exists today, regardless of whether you’re the Black person or the police officer!
And all this completely obscures the fact that the number of unarmed Black people who should in fact be zero.
But if you bring up questions of parity, the police are also about 2.5 times as likely to kill a Black person as to kill a White person. (And about twice as likely to kill a Hispanic person.)
The statistic in the top post is utterly meaningless. Can I stop now?
> And all this completely obscures the fact that the number of unarmed Black people who should in fact be zero.
Because nobody has ever killed someone with their fists, right? Nobody has ever been so hopped up on weird stimulants that he becomes an uncontrollable, wild, deadly animal. No one has ever died or suffered grievous injury from being simply pushed down, yeah?
Are you actually this stupid? Jesus H.
Sigh. The idea that there should be no unarmed Black people killed by police is an ideal. It’s what everyone who’s sane on the subject is aiming for. But it would be enough if the percentage of unarmed Black people killed by police was the similar to the percentage of unarmed White people killed by police.
And why are you referring to unarmed Black people as “uncontrollable, deadly animals?” That’s real jerk behavior in the current climate!
Wow, you actually just made me angry, Trout. Not annoyed, not frustrated. Cold Anger. Do you know how hard that is? I’m talking once-a-decade, here. You are in a very rare stratum.
> Sigh. The idea that there should be no unarmed Black people killed by police is an ideal.
Fucking shit, dude. My god damn point is that an unarmed human is still deadly dangerous. You say “unarmed black people” as a dumbfuck synonym for “peaceful, non-violent black people” because you are a rank coward incapable of understanding the difference. Or you are a racist.
> It’s what everyone who’s sane on the subject is aiming for.
Bitch, No. You cannot change human nature. Humans are dangerous great apes. Accept that fact and its ramifications, or admit that you don’t think black people are human, you piece of shit.
> But it would be enough if the percentage of unarmed Black people killed by police was the similar to the percentage of unarmed White people killed by police.
Oh, so then you’d be fine if more whiteys were killed, since it would even out the racial numbers. That’d sure learn ’em! (Look, I can deliberately take you in the least charitable way possible, too! What the shit is wrong with you?)
> And why are you referring to unarmed Black people as “uncontrollable, deadly animals?” That’s real jerk behavior in the current climate!
I’m not, you slimy weasel. This is beyond the fucking pale of lively debate. Point to where I said that, you pig-shit assclown. Nothing in my comment specified race, because I am not a fucking racist. That’s All You, Bud.
Reread what I wrote. I didn’t write anywhere that you were a racist.
And I didn’t say you called me one, you illiterate twat.
You deliberately characterized what I wrote as if I were referring to people of a specific race as animals, which I specifically didn’t do, and fuck you right to hell for implying that’s what I meant. May a few extra demons also have their way with you for trying to pull this gaslighting “Nyah-nyah I never said thaaat tee-hee” bullshit.
I’m dropping this here, because you are exposed for people to make up their own minds and I have nothing more to hurl but flame.
I’d have to find it again, but a couple days ago someone (mighta been Tucker Carlson, so none of our lefty friends will believe it) did a detailed rundown of all the “unarmed blacks killed by cops” incidents from a couple years ago, in total, ten.
Eight had done something like charge the cop with a car, or claimed to have a gun, or did something else egregiously threatening or suicidally stupid.
Two probably actually had a gun (unclear).
In no case was it just gratuitous violence by the cops.
That 2.5 times stat is fucking useless, because it’s pure per capita and takes no account for crime rates, which is the single biggest predictor of being confronted by police.
When I ran the numbers using 2018 NCVS for crimes and Statista list of police shootings by race, it’s about 1.21 times as many shot per violent crime. For 2017 it’s roughly parity at .97. If I used homicides known to police in the UCR instead of all violent crimes it’s a blowout with blacks being less likely to be killed, but the UCR homicide rates do NOT track with NCVS violen crimes by race.
I can’t find solid numbers for non shooting deaths in a single year, but I did see 26.4% of all deaths for a range of years, which is a bit higher than their portion of the violent crime rate in 2017.
Please note that unarmed is NOT the same thing as innocent. I would very much like stats on innocent people killed by police, and that number really should be zero.
“presumed to be Antifa Communists”
You’re hilarious. Of course they’re much more likely to be white nationalists attempting to heighten the contradictions than bored gutter punks fighting tha man, but I’m not going to lose any sleep if you make a mistake.
> Of course they’re much more likely to be white nationalists
Oh, oh, I can play this game too!
I say they’re more likely to be… um… Satanic child-murdering dog-men from Planet X! Yes! I do not need to provide evidence for my assertion! Evidence is a tool of the evil White-God Patriarchy! Rrrrah! Behold my virtue!
They are klansmen in blackface
Twice as evil
They are the diet coke of evil….
…just one calorie…not evil enough
>Of course they’re much more likely to be white nationalists attempting to heighten the contradictions
No they’re not, because if you gathered every actual “white nationalist” in the U.S. you might not even be able to fill a small school bus.
The odds of any of them being within pistol range of me in a riot is too small to be worth considering.
Eric, as much as I’ve appreciated your technical contributions, you’re batty and getting worse, and your somewhat deserved arrogance doesn’t let you see it. Perils of age, I guess; I’m not far behind you and getting a bit less flexible myself.
I wish you could see it.
> I wish you could see it.
“I know you are good in your heart, but, Oh!, if only you believed in Jesus and that Satan’s hand truly does exist in our world! I do so wish you would come to the light; I myself know how hard it is to admit one’s own sin!”
I find this mindset so damned fascinating.
Some never outgrow middle school, producing ‘arguments’ that consist entirely of baldly asserted personal aspersions. Just call them a poopyhead and move on with your day.
Lighten up, Francis.
You just have the feel of a troll here fishing for a ban…..
>You just have the feel of a troll here fishing for a ban….
If I banned everybody who shows up here to tell me I’m batty and mentally rigid, I…might just be proving their point for them. Silly gits.
Watch the video footage and play “count the honkey”
Utter nonsense. Repeating the debunked lies of Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey only results in ridicule.
You’re delusional. White nationalists don’t exist. (Though the vicious level of anti-white racism that animates the useful idiots of Antifa and BLM certainly tempts one to raise the flag of racism, until you’ve heard Larry Elder or Candace Owens speak.)
They do exist, in small numbers. (I’m not sure about Eric’s assertion they wouldn’t fill a small school bus, but I don’t think they’d fill a high school auditorium.) The MSM and Antifa, which defines everyone who dares say something they disagree with as a Nazi, are grossly inflating the numbers.
I recall reading somewhere that current estimates of the number of serious, credibly racist white-supremacist types as being towards the thick end of 10,000.
I own more rounds of ammo than that. They’re not a concern. They’re a punchline to a crap joke.
>I recall reading somewhere that current estimates of the number of serious, credibly racist white-supremacist types as being towards the thick end of 10,000.
That estimate is far too high. it would have consequences we’re not seeing, because with those numbers they could at least occasionally organize for direct action.
These riots are revealing their inability to do that.
I think the number was around 8,000 or so…..which in a nation of 360+ million, means they’re a handful of frogspawn in an ocean.
And they’re stupid enough to be easily identified and observed.
I used to live right down the road from one of these vaunted “white supremacist” compounds out in the middle of nowhere (15 miles from the nearest town).
It was vacant, because the owner was in jail on unrelated charges (some sort of fraud on the order of bad checks, I didn’t care enough to pay attention).
I expect this is typical.
>I expect this is typical.
Entirely, even down to the check-kiting. I had actually noticed before your story that this particular crime is very common from white-trash terrorists. I have no idea why.
Cuz the attitude they have in common is “I ain’t payin’ and you can’t make me! And if you try, I’ll hurt you.”
It’s not about being a white supremacist; that’s just the trappings, using the most defiant self-label they can think of. It’s about pissing at authority, including anyone making ’em actually pay for stuff.
One might regard it as an ugly intersection of the libertarian ideal and the criminal mind. :(
I can’t help but notice how easy it is to commit check fraud, have it recorded, and cover the damages. Check’s gone, account’s closed, bank fee paid, merchant compensated, fraudster is pulled out of society’s view.
Which makes me wonder how many of these crimes are completely fabricated, in order to permit the safe exit of an undercover FBI agent from whatever white supremacist cell he’d infiltrated, rose to the top of, and effectively dismantled by pretending to be incompetent.
Well there *is* the old joke about any meeting of a ‘white supremacist’ organization is 3/4 people paid by the Feds to be there.
they’re much more likely to be white nationalists
Bullshit. The KKK types haven’t been a significant force in decades. It’s all they can do to even muster a hundred of them for a rally. They don’t have the money to pull off the kind of capers that Soros’ minions do.
I think of Antifa as the new KKK.
Historically, KKK was a “militant arm” of the Democratic party, and was all about using and threatening violence to deter blacks/Republicans from registering to vote, voting, or speaking in “their” towns.
Change “black” to “white” (but keep the parties the same) and that’s Antifa.
The *national* AG says it’s Antifa.
The local police (around the country) say it’s Antifa.
ANTIFA says it’s Antifa
You say it’s white nationalists.
After Rodney King cities got torched without the White Nationalists. After Ferguson Antifa did pretty good job of it. Every time the Left is out in force they light the town up.
The only reason to bring them up now is to try to gaslight the rest of us.
It makes me sad to do so, but this blog is off of my RSS reader now. Goodbye.
Your world will be poorer. Goodbye.
Well, then. Bye.
and we are supposed to care that you are leaving because?
floyd was not murdered. he died of a heart attack.
Stomping on a neck is a deadly move. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that his heart failure – regardless of prior medical condition – was induced by the stress he endured.
I don’t believe the officer ‘murdered’ him….as far as I know from available details…..but the officer was responsible for his death. That is an unjustifiable homicide.
The officer – and the uncaring LEO derelicts that surrounded him – deserve to face a jury of their peers for a range of manslaughter charges.
They fucked up severe.
Had they been civilians, those four cops would have all been charged with murder one under the felony murder rule. That they’re facing lesser charges is still blue privilege at work (although, honestly, right now I’ll take it, since the usual punishment for this sort of misbehavior by a cop is a desk job).
>Had they been civilians, those four cops would have all been charged with murder one under the felony murder rule.
I agree that the behavior deserves murder one, but don’t think the felony rule applies here.
You’d have to identify a felony in progress different from the violence done to Floyd for that to apply; the “felony murder rule” is not a self-licking ice-cream cone.
Well, not as I’ve ever seen it applied, anyway. Caveat that I’m not au courant with the murder taxonomy in all 50 states.
> I agree that the behavior deserves murder one, but don’t think the felony rule applies here.
You realize that in posting your three rules you established grounds for being charged with first degree murder should you actually need to shoot someone?
First degree murder requires *premeditation*, an *intent* to kill. I have not followed this closely but I have seen nothing public to indicate an *intent* to kill, much less a “premeditated” one.
There many comments about the two of them working together, but (thus far) NO ONE has come forward with any quarrel between them. In this media age *someone* would if the could get away with it.
No. Your assertion that they would “all be charged with murder one” is not legally defensible.
You are jumping on the latest fashionable bandwagon.
point 1) Felony murder is Murder 2 in Minnesota
point 2) Chauvin is now being charged with felony murder
point 3) As ESR says, you need a predicate felony for felony murder. I’m not entirely sure how that squares with point 2 since i haven’t seen any evidence of a predicate felony but obviously the AG knows something that i don’t (which is completely unsurprising). I hope they’re not over charging to force a not guilty verdict.
I think people calling for Chauvin to be charged under Murder 1 are misguided. Just because the family feels bad doesn’t make it Murder 1, It’s Murder 1 when you can prove both Intent and Premediatation and I don’t think either is a slam dunk. Given currently public evidence i believe he acted with reckless disregard, not intent.
Given that AG Ellison is a major fan of Antifa, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were trying to force a not-guilty verdict, just to provide more fuel for the fire–and more cover for his Antifa buddies.
That is totally believable. I”ve had similar thoughts lately. Ellison is total slime, a muslim and a racist to boot.
Huh so apparently in Minnesota, Assault can be the predicate felony to a felony murder. Seems a little odd to me but hey if that’s how they want things to play out…
Aggravated assault is a felony in Pennsylvania, and likely would be in Minnesota as well. Pennsylvania defines it, in relevant part, as an attempt “to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes such injury intentionally, knowingly or recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” 27 Pa. C.S. sec. 2702 (a) (1).
Oh it’s not the assault being a felony part, that makes total sense to me. It’s that the merger doctrine doesn’t get applied. As Eric says, “self-licking ice cream cone”. The assault that lead to the death is in and of itself the felony that makes it felony murder.
If an armed robber intends to use a gun to intimidate his victims, but there’s a shoot-out and his accomplice dies, he’s up for felony murder and that’s not a self-licking ice cream cone.
If a couple of thugs decide to beat up a guy for giggles, and one of them catches an unlucky blow to the throat and dies, then the surviving thug is still up for felony murder.
If a couple of thugs decide to beat up a guy for giggles, and the victim catches an unlucky blow to throat and dies, now the thugs shouldn’t be up for felony murder because they didn’t intend to kill him when they went to beat the hell out of him? If the other two incidents are felony murder, actually killing the victim needs to be felony murder, too.
The point Jon is amused by, if I understand correctly, is: given an appropriately loose definition of felony murder, it would be very difficult to have a murder that isn’t inherently also a felony murder, since murder kind-of implies some form of assault.
Without digging into the nitty-gritty definitions, it seems silly on its face.
Considering the family hired Baden for a ‘second opinion autopsy’ (he’s shown he can be bought) …I expect they’re angling for a settlement.
Agreed on it being reckless disregard, not intent.
Also more’n likely had it been so argued up front, rather than all the OMG-Murder!! accusations, we wouldn’t be enjoying a long hot Riot Season.
>Also more’n likely had it been so argued up front, rather than all the OMG-Murder!! accusations, we wouldn’t be enjoying a long hot Riot Season.
I wish I were that optimistic.
Floyd’s murder was a real atrocity. But I think if it hadn’t happened, there would be riots over a manufactured one. And I’m not faulting black people for this, either. The fault lies on the manufacturers.
As somebody else pointed out, it’s a wearyingly familiar pattern just before presidential elections when a Republican is in office.
Crank up racial tension to keep the black vote corralled, yippee, we’ve seen this movie before. The major variable from cycle to cycle is how many square miles of black neighborhoods get burned down by black people in the process.
This time it may not be working.
Some blacks are still buying it. But it looks like the riots are “corraling” much more of the white vote for Trump. When cities are burning, the people are going to demand the man who will stop it, even if he actually were Hitler.
> Floyd’s murder was a real atrocity.
No, it isn’t. Some dude, high on fentanyl and maybe meth tried to pass a fake 20 (whether he knew it or not), was busted and at some point decided to *resist arrest*.
His death was unfortunate, it remains to be seen whether it was actually murder.
Where are you getting the high part? Only thing I’ve heard that even suggested drugs in his system was some rather obvious wishcasting by the autopsy report.
https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf
As far as I can tell, this is the actual autopsy report. I’ve seen it posted in many places, and so far, no one has claimed that hennepin.us isn’t the real website of Hennepin County.
I draw your attention to page 2, section VI.
19ng/ml is a very low dose of meth. It almost certainly reflects either a usage one or more days in the past, or relatively slight inclusion (or heavy contamination) in with something else.
4-ANPP can mean either sloppy manufacture of the fentanyl, or it can be just a metabolite.
I have no idea what the THC numbers mean. I don’t think they are relevant.
But what the hell does 11 nanograms of fentanyl per mililiter of blood mean?
Here is some context: https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/02/fentanyl-overdose-dont-count-naloxone-save-you-10822
A dozen people taken to the ER from a single incident – people who thought they were taking cocaine, but were actually getting fentanyl. The people with 11 and 13 ng/ml were dead within hours. The patient with 9.5 ng/ml died a few days later. The survivors had no more than 4.6 ng/ml in their blood.
So Xanatos Gambit time – was George Floyd a dead man walking before he even set foot in the store because of his fentanyl overdose? Or was he a habitual opiod abuser who had developed enough of a tolerance to survive a dose that would have killed any of us? Or did he commit suicide by swallowing his stash when the police arrived?
I foresee some squirming and evasive answers when the defense lawyers start asking those questions in court.
It was reported that the autopsy asserted fentanyl intoxication.
> Had they been civilians,
Probably not. Picture someone getting froggy on an airplane, 4 “civilians” restrain him and he suffers heart failure. That’s the closest I can come to what happened.
I don’t see any other situation where one guy lets 4 other people put cuffs on him and *THEN* he decides to fight back.
> That they’re facing lesser charges is still blue privilege at work
No, that they’re facing lesser charges is that we don’t know the *facts* that the DA knows.
Keith Ellison (https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-05-at-3.35.08-PM.png) is the AG of Minnesota, and the one that raised the charges from 3rd to 2nd degree murder.
If there’s one left wing cop hating piece of offal AG out there, he’s it. If he could get away with charging all of them murder 1, he’d do it.
>Stomping on a neck is a deadly move.
When properly done, it’s pretty much standard police procedure. Here you see stomping on neck in my country (BTW,no one was shot, even when police guy was attacked by bystander – the blessings of not having militarised police):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJnRrHI5Ofw&feature=emb_logo
To quote the movie “Collateral”
“….I didn’t kill him…the bullets and the fall killed him”
(Great movie BTW…worth watching for TC’s failure drill alone)
Yo homey, that my briefcase?
That was a fucking sweet scene
Taking your comment as written… that probably doesn’t matter, legally speaking.
There’s a standard doctrine (well supported with SCOTUS) called the “Eggshell Skull” doctrine. Basically, even if the person dies for a different reason, if you’re part of the chain of events then you’re culpable. In this particular case, the ME report puts Chauvin at no more than 3 steps removed which is very unlikely to remove culpability.
Yeah. Basically, you take your victim as you find him, and his physical problems do not excuse you from their results if you take action to precipitate his death.
David Friedman cites this in one of his books as Vosberg v. Putney.
Technically the eggshell skull rule is for torts, civil cases. You still get the same bill even if your victim was exceptionally fragile.
But the real principle here is less of a rule, and more “lack of an exception”. And that holds true for criminal cases as well — if it satisfies the elements of the crime, you can be convicted, even if the victim was more fragile than average.
Eric, perhaps it’d be helpful if you could define what you mean by “rioter” and how it differs from “protester”.
Also, I suspect you will have a precise idea on what a “white nationalist” is & is not. Keep in mind that many others may have a different understanding of the term and will use it accordingly.
> Eric, perhaps it’d be helpful if you could define what you mean by “rioter” and how it differs from “protester”.
Are you serious?
> Keep in mind that many others may have a different understanding of the term and will use it accordingly.
Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!
Post-modern philosophy is a fucking disease.
>Eric, perhaps it’d be helpful if you could define what you mean by “rioter” and how it differs from “protester”.
A protester holds up a sign and yells a slogan. A rioter intends to commit crime against persons or property, and expresses that intent in behavior; e.g. persons equipped with incendiaries or street weapons are rioters, not protesters.
>Also, I suspect you will have a precise idea on what a “white nationalist” is & is not. Keep in mind that many others may have a different understanding of the term and will use it accordingly.
There are lots of different flavors of white nationalist doctrine, a surprisingly large number for a movement that has been numerically tiny ever since the disintegration of the Second Klan just before WWII. If you squint hard enough you can even jam neo-Nazis in that box, though you should not because they’re actually transnationalist.
I’d say the defining characteristic of “white nationalism” is its program of creating white ethnostates that either outright exclude or legally subjugate nonwhites.
It is also worth noting, because of the common equation of white nationalism with Naziism, that Jews are not necessarily considered nonwhite; in fact, I have read what I think was white nationalist internal argument that condemns Naziism as regressive and a drag on the movement.
Any way you slice it, white nationalism is a tiny, frustrated gang that would love to be thought far more numerous and influential than it is. It gets enormous assistance from the Left and the major media (but I repeat myself) which have lots of reasons to inflate “white nationalism” into a giant bogeyman so they can feel virtuous and be righteously violent in opposing it.
So it seems that, on Monday, Emperor Trump had his Praetorians assault protesters in order to gain access to a filming location and insult Christianity and a church; for the making of an political advertisement.
The rioters apparently returned to the streets later that night to continue the previous night’s misbehaviour.
And what are the odds that the group of people who mistakenly think of themselves as a white nationalist (but fail the definition) outnumber the actual group of white nationalists?
> So it seems that, on Monday, Emperor Trump had his Praetorians assault protesters in order to gain access to a filming location and insult Christianity and a church; for the making of an political advertisement.
This is not true. Blatantly not true. To my understanding, the protesters there were imminent violation of a curfew that had been enacted due to the previous violence. I acknowledge I may be mistaken in this; please give me a good pointer if this is so and I will amend.
Regardless, unless you can show me hard evidence that your Great Satan gave an actual order to do this I’m going to assume you’re just either making shit up or repeating the catechisms given you by your Holy Journalist Priesthood.
>And what are the odds that the group of people who mistakenly think of themselves as a white nationalist (but fail the definition) outnumber the actual group of white nationalists?
How would that work, exactly? Can you outline an ideology that would make people think they they’re “white nationalist” but not fit the broad-church definition I gave?
Remember, the movement itself is fissiparous – not united, for example, on whether neo-Naziism belongs inside it. But there really isn’t any way to draw an ideological boundary that makes it more than tiny; even the Church of Satan probably has more members than the entire body of self-described white nationalists.
Because if you gathered every actual “white nationalist” in the U.S. you might not even be able to fill a small school bus, and so a similarly numerically tiny group of people who miscategorize themselves can outnumber it.
Not understanding the sets of ideologies won’t prevent someone from applying the wrong label all over the place, including onto themselves.
I could imagine it occurring. I see that type of thing when people self-diagnose medical conditions.
In Germany, my impression is that quite a high proportion of self-described white supremacists are what I might call “mystical white supremacists”, who don’t have much in the way of political discipline or agreement about what kind of world-order would be good, but do have strong beliefs in the spiritual superiority of the “white race”.
It’s interesting that you mention Satanism, because these folk consume a lot of online Satanist material. This group in particular have been influential in Europe because of the amount of material they put together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
>“mystical white supremacists”
Analogues exist in the U.S., but they’re neither numerically nor ideologically dominant within white nationalism here. One reason is that there some very crazed forms of millenarian Christianity taking up the space that groups like the Order of Nine Angles occupy in Europe; this tendency is sometimes known as the “Christian Identity” movement.
> How would that work, exactly?
Because most of the people in this world are *much* less facile with language than you are.
If someone is white, has some sense that blacks *generally* less intelligent (based on, say, standardized intelligence tests), then looks around at cities run by black mayors or predominately black city councils, he could, with a bit of a stretch come to the conclusion that Whites tend to run things better, and the the US–his nation–would be better off if fewer blacks were in positions of power.
Being in the zeroth standard deviation for intelligence, and a consumer of mainstream media, he then concludes he’s a “white nationalist”.
Also, one could be like me–white and a fan of what this nation once was on the path to being and still could achieve if we could manage to engineer a virus that only attacked communists and consider oneself a white nationalist without realizing the implicit “whites are better” argument.
I don’t generally think that those descended from Europeans are “better” in any real sense than those descended from Asians, Africans, Australian Aboriginals or American First (second, third, fourth, fifth) peoples. I do believe that the culture we were building here was better.
Sigh. The more prejudice you show the fewer people want to join your culture. Why isn’t this obvious?
Please point out the prejudice being shown here, trout. Point it out and explain it.
I’m sure you won’t, but I’d sure like to see you try.
My point, which to judge by your reply, you’ve missed very badly is this: We do have a pretty good culture, all things considered. However, some of us argue very loudly that it’s necessary to exclude certain groups from that culture. Some actually take active measures to exclude certain groups from our shared culture.
So why are you so surprised when someone says, “Fuck you, American culture. I’m going over her to do my own thing!”
And when someone writes, like William did above: “If someone is white, has some sense that blacks *generally* less intelligent (based on, say, standardized intelligence tests), then looks around at cities run by black mayors or predominately black city councils, he could, with a bit of a stretch come to the conclusion that Whites tend to run things better, and the the US–his nation–would be better off if fewer blacks were in positions of power.” and you wonder why nobody with brown skin wants to join your culture?
Please don’t waste my time with complaints when I notice the obvious and call it out!
Except, America as a culture has been bending over backwards to accommodate blacks for the past 50 years. The result is that blacks are still less intelligent and Black run cities are worse then White run cities.
Eric! I had a comment here that appears to have vanished minutes after posting. I imagine it will return to life soon, but just in case I’m leaving this note here.
(It was Comment # 2427333)
Doing an alternate version of my comment that got lost.
> My point, which to judge by your reply, you’ve missed very badly
I certainly didn’t. You confirm later in your post that you straight-up failed reading comprehension, implicitly accusing William of prejudice for what he typed, which is a hypothetical explanation for how a low-intelligence person could end up with views resembling what one might call racist white nationalism. You instead decided to attribute this hypothetical to him directly, like a snake. You also, in a previous post, tried to attribute a disgusting racist thought to me that I never said. Like a snake. Sst.
> We do have a pretty good culture, all things considered.
Cool. If we like it, do we get to keep it?
> However, some of us argue very loudly that it’s necessary to exclude certain groups from that culture.
Who? Idiot white ethno-nationalists? Yeah, they’re powerless assholes. Can we move on?
> Some actually take active measures to exclude certain groups from our shared culture.
Who?? Who is doing this? What active measures? How successful are they? Support your assertions, ass.
> So why are you so surprised when someone says, “Fuck you, American culture. I’m going over her to do my own thing!”
First, why is this made-up person in your head (not you of course) lumping the minority of racist assholes with the entirety of “American culture?” That’s one pretty fuckin’ dishonest dude.
Anyway, that’s not what they’re doing, man. They’re not walking away, they’re trying to tear it down with the rest of us still in it!
> Please don’t waste my time with complaints when I notice the obvious and call it out!
Complaints? I asked you to back up your assertion. That’s not a complaint, it’s a request for you to support your bullshit.
Which, hey, you didn’t, because you fail reading comprehension utterly. What a shock!
Dude, you JUST DID IT. You are accusing me of being a racist for *COMMENTING ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD*.
When someone points out that psychometric data demonstrates that blacks score 1/2 a standard deviation lower on intelligence tests. They are IMMEDIATELY branded a racist.
As for perception that cities with black leaders being less well run, well, New Orleans, DC and Philadelphia aren’t exactly shining examples of how to do it.
Then again (to be honest) Seattle and New York have set a pretty low bar in recent years.
Hell, in Baltimore Catherine Pugh is going to jail a former mayor–who resigned over corruption charges (though misdemeanor) actually *almost* won the primary.
And then there’s Chicago.
Now to be honest the problem in those cities isn’t really the color of the politician’s skin, it’s the democrat party machines that are corrupt as fuck.
But the thing is when you look at the news for these big cities that are burning and falling apart you see about 2x as many light skinned African American faces, or in California Latino faces/names as you do whites.
This may or may not be a baseline reality, but given what most people are going to see on CNN or read in the newspapers it’s NOT a big leap.
I think it’s mostly that the Democrat party is corrupt as hell, and the whites in the party just aren’t as fucking blatant about it because they know they can’t claim people are being racists by calling them out.
BTW, I’m not the person who keeps voting for the policies that shit all over blacks and latinos.
I’m not the one arguing for disparate treatment under the law.
I’m not the one who is advocating burning down the inner cities and then getting all panicky when the rioters head my way.
On the day Eric went close to Philadelphia I took an order of groceries (and cosmetics) into downtown Denver *AFTER DARK*, to deliver it to someone with the ultra white name of “Santiago”. And yeah, I went armed, but the only time I don’t go armed is going to the gym, when it’s open.
But I have watched the comments here and other places where people who question these things get branded RACIST because frankly you fucks have no valid arguments.
You have a rich fantasy life, evidently. Did not happen.
I read his comment as not actually caring about *your* definition of white nationalist. Rather, he was implying that *others* may well have a definition of white nationalist that includes *you*.
IOW, it was a warning that the optics for you could well be bad if you had to enact your plan and the media got wind of it..
Not saying you will or should care about this angle, given what I know about you from your writings. Hell, if things got bad enough I’d probably stop caring about this angle myself, but from where I sit in TX we’re very far from that point.
>Rather, he was implying that *others* may well have a definition of white nationalist that includes *you*.
There comes a point in dealing with blithering stupidity of that kind at which one has to decide not to care.
Yes, there are probably people who think I’m a white nationalist. You can’t reach people like that; there’s no point in modifying one’s behavior to mollify them, they’re too deeply stuck inside an ideological hall of mirrors.
A definition of “Nazi” which was popular (at least by volume; what hostile work environment?) when I worked at Google was “didn’t vote for Hillary [for President]”.
I’ve pretty much concluded that no matter what my real views are, a bunch of people with the ability to “cancel” me will call me racist.
Yeah. Arguments from Hitler and arguments from Stalin are both crap. When someone starts talking about communism or fascism* my general response is that they’re trying me to stop thinking and react from my fears.
* I’m taking arguments from fascism a little more seriously now that I’m hearing the “Grandma should die for the economy” crap from certain Republicans.
You complain about people trying to jerk you around by your emotions, and then pull out the “You’re killing grandma for evil money!” line?
Are you trying for an award or something?
I’m referring to this. Is there anything about the Lt. Governor’s comment you like?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests
> * I’m taking arguments from fascism a little more seriously now that I’m hearing the “Grandma should die for the economy” crap from certain Republicans.
Texas’ lieutenant governor suggests grandparents are willing to die for US economy
Whoops, the headline isn’t “should”, it is “are willing to”. Here’s the text:
> “No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick said. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
> “And that doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that,” he continued. “I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me… that what we care about and what we love more than anything are those children.”
> Patrick claimed after speaking to over a hundred people over the phone that there’s a consensus that they don’t want to “lose our whole country” over the current public health crisis and face an economic collapse.
Most humans will recognize these as entirely normal sentiments. I’m curious – was this quote from 81 days ago the only thing you could find when you tried to justify your claim just now? Or did you consider it so vile back then that you bookmarked it?
He wasn’t the only one who said things like that, and of course was widely criticized. I found the sentiment appalling.
> I found the sentiment appalling.
You find the sentiment that grandparents are willing to risk their own lives for a better future for their grandchildren “appalling”? Huh. Says a hell of a lot about you, man. Do you always treat the elderly like invalids? Does that go over well? So fascinating.
Safetyism is a thing. An appalling thing.
As opposed to all the “FUCK CAPITALISM! BURN IT ALL DOWN! WOOOO!” from the other side? Why is one more egregious than the other?
We’re hearing numerous, credible reports from Portland of protesters being disappeared into unmarked vehicles by unknown federal agents. The left wasn’t fucking around when they were talking about fascism. The right laughed, and now fascism is here. The nightmare scenario libertarians and rightists were all scared of if the left really took power has arrived, and it was ordered by Republicans.
I hope y’all on the right are proud of what you have enabled.
This is the first I’ve heard of it. I wouldn’t put it past Antifa to fake these incidents, or exaggerate them (i.e. what actually happened was that a violent rioter was arrested by the FBI). Have you a source for this extraordinary claim?
It’s been literally all over the news the past couple of days.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/report-federal-officers-using-unmarked-cars-to-pull-protesters-off-streets-87888453990
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/report-federal-officers-using-unmarked-cars-to-pull-protesters-off-streets-87888453990
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/07/us-attorney-for-oregon-requests-investigation-into-arrests-of-portland-protesters.html
Confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security. Reliable enough source for you?
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland
Hmm, I see.
Counterpoint: https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/63543.html
And you’d better pray that mass arrests of Antifa and BLM are coming… because the alternative is more widespread Burning, Looting, and Murdering, followed by mass shootings of Antifa and BLM terrorists.
@A Random Xoogler
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Maybe you should read a real newspaper? Or watch some real news? I saw it in European newspapers quoting official US sources.
I you have not even heard of this story, what else have you missed?
You should now ask yourself how much of your opinions are based on inadequate information and missed news stories?
>The right laughed, and now fascism is here.
Randy Weaver and Elian Gonzalez’s aunt and uncle might like a word with you.
As usual, the left only gets around to objecting to “fascist” tactics when they’re used against Communists rather than for them.
Me? I’m angry enough to think it’s almost a shame that, this being the U.S., those “disappeared” Marxists almost certainly will not get the treatment they would give out if the roles were reversed – that is, quietly shot and dumped in a mass grave.
@esr
“I’m angry enough to think it’s almost a shame that, this being the U.S., those “disappeared” Marxists almost certainly will not get the treatment they would give out if the roles were reversed – that is, quietly shot and dumped in a mass grave.”
So you consider shooting people for being “Marxists” (which has always been an empty word in the USA).
That is where all those noble words about Libertarian and Freedom came to: Wanting to shoot people for their political opinions.
But that was indeed what Jeff Read was pointing at: Fascism is right there, in the hearth of the Republican Party and US Libertarianism.
Heck, they themselves would also probably get that treatment if they won. Communists are notorious for turning on their original revolutionaries.
The Judean People’s Front‽
Splitters
There’s an interesting boundary case. I would not mind at all seeing the discrimination laws go away, at least to the point that the owner of an apartment complex or work place could make it all one race, religion, ethnicity, or political leaning, just because people can trust each other more and work together better in such homogeneous environments. (I might point out that this is already being done, maybe illegally, by companies like Google.) Were this legal I might choose a home or job in an all Republican or Libertarian community. Does this make me a white nationalist?
>Does this make me a white nationalist?
No, though it resembles some of the least obnoxious varieties of white separatism. What it’s missing is the white-nationalist emotional fixation on subjugating nonwhites.
Odd framing, Eric, for someone who should be able to make at least a theoretical distinction between “white nationalism” and “white supremacy”. In particular, the rhetoric is current that mass immigration from Africa into Europe is a “consequence” (i.e., punishment and thus presumably negative) for colonialism—and this rationale is applied explicitly to nations such as Ireland. There is room for a position between “nonwhites should be subjugated” and “a white nation historically as oppressed as any of the African colonies that never had colonies of its own should have the option not to admit hordes of foreigners whose stated goal is its destruction”.
ISTR it also resembles some of the philosophy of W.E.B. DuBois, and of the Nation of Islam.
That is, insofar as it professes segregation. After that, the philosophies appear to part ways pretty fast.
One might consider white nationalism as freedom of association writ large.
One would be incorrect. White nationalism focuses on an ethnostate, emphasis on State, meaning a bunch of people deciding for others who they are or aren’t allowed to interact with and in what ways. Ethnostates just have the additional flavor of race-based customs, borders, and citizenship. It is a general characteristic of any state entity; the point is it’s foolish to hold up probably any kind of state as some sort of large-scale freedom of association.
Below is the relevant section of the Texas penal code. Clearly only guidelines for the Lonestar state. Note the stand your ground language at the end.
Sec. 9.31. SELF-DEFENSE. (a) Except as provided in Subsection (b), a person is justified in using force against another when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect the actor against the other’s use or attempted use of unlawful force. The actor’s belief that the force was immediately necessary as described by this subsection is presumed to be reasonable if the actor:
(1) knew or had reason to believe that the person against whom the force was used:
(A) unlawfully and with force entered, or was attempting to enter unlawfully and with force, the actor’s occupied habitation, vehicle, or place of business or employment;
(B) unlawfully and with force removed, or was attempting to remove unlawfully and with force, the actor from the actor’s habitation, vehicle, or place of business or employment; or
(C) was committing or attempting to commit aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated robbery;
(2) did not provoke the person against whom the force was used; and
(3) was not otherwise engaged in criminal activity, other than a Class C misdemeanor that is a violation of a law or ordinance regulating traffic at the time the force was used.
(b) The use of force against another is not justified:
(1) in response to verbal provocation alone;
(2) to resist an arrest or search that the actor knows is being made by a peace officer, or by a person acting in a peace officer’s presence and at his direction, even though the arrest or search is unlawful, unless the resistance is justified under Subsection (c);
(3) if the actor consented to the exact force used or attempted by the other;
(4) if the actor provoked the other’s use or attempted use of unlawful force, unless:
(A) the actor abandons the encounter, or clearly communicates to the other his intent to do so reasonably believing he cannot safely abandon the encounter; and
(B) the other nevertheless continues or attempts to use unlawful force against the actor; or
(5) if the actor sought an explanation from or discussion with the other person concerning the actor’s differences with the other person while the actor was:
(A) carrying a weapon in violation of Section 46.02; or
(B) possessing or transporting a weapon in violation of Section 46.05.
(c) The use of force to resist an arrest or search is justified:
(1) if, before the actor offers any resistance, the peace officer (or person acting at his direction) uses or attempts to use greater force than necessary to make the arrest or search; and
(2) when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the peace officer’s (or other person’s) use or attempted use of greater force than necessary.
(d) The use of deadly force is not justified under this subchapter except as provided in Sections 9.32, 9.33, and 9.34.
(e) A person who has a right to be present at the location where the force is used, who has not provoked the person against whom the force is used, and who is not engaged in criminal activity at the time the force is used is not required to retreat before using force as described by this section.
(f) For purposes of Subsection (a), in determining whether an actor described by Subsection (e) reasonably believed that the use of force was necessary, a finder of fact may not consider whether the actor failed to retreat.
Thanks for that….but it’s irrelevant in other states.
( but when I visit Texas, I’ll be forewarned ;) )
Again, only for Texas, but this code is a bit unusual. Deadly force IS allowed for defense of property. Not usually seen in state penal codes. Now, just because it is in the code doesn’t mean you won’t get prosecuted. Also civil suits are a whole different matter.
SUBCHAPTER D. PROTECTION OF PROPERTY
Sec. 9.41. PROTECTION OF ONE’S OWN PROPERTY. (a) A person in lawful possession of land or tangible, movable property is justified in using force against another when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to prevent or terminate the other’s trespass on the land or unlawful interference with the property.
(b) A person unlawfully dispossessed of land or tangible, movable property by another is justified in using force against the other when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to reenter the land or recover the property if the actor uses the force immediately or in fresh pursuit after the dispossession and:
(1) the actor reasonably believes the other had no claim of right when he dispossessed the actor; or
(2) the other accomplished the dispossession by using force, threat, or fraud against the actor.
Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, Sec. 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Amended by Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, Sec. 1.01, eff. Sept. 1, 1994.
Sec. 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
(1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
(2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
(A) to prevent the other’s imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
(B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property; and
(3) he reasonably believes that:
(A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or
(B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
Montana has a similar stand-your-ground law, allowing protection of both persons and property, even in public. No duty to retreat. Far as I know it has not yet been tested.
Reverse Racism?
Judge not on the actual conduct or “content of character” but color of skin?
Mel, Can’t stop the (virtue) signal.
You didn’t say what you would do if you saw a cop engaging in police brutality, perhaps lethal, but perhaps blue privilege suffices. Would you have stopped Officer Chauvin?
>Would you have stopped Officer Chauvin?
So how would that work, exactly? If I draw on Chauvin, the other cops on the scene gun me down and Floyd probably still dies. If I don’t draw, I’m just another bystander pleading for the brutality to stop.
I don’t see any winning outcome here, so I won’t play.
> I don’t see any winning outcome here.
I said something essentially the same about the actual bystanders over in the Final Warning thread. I’m glad to see my assumptions about how that would play out match yours.
You could “save” him if you sacrificed your life.
Can I ask what you’re basing that on? Bystander rushes group of four cops, one kneeling but with hands free, the others standing but with hands already on holstered weapons. At least one of the four cops shoots the bystander before they can do anything of importance, and Chauvin doesn’t even have to lift his knee.
What’s your scenario for the bystander “saving” Mr. Floyd, even at the expense of their life?
With a firearm, ideally a rifle, from sufficient range to go unnoticed by the police before opening fire. You could, in theory, yell at them to order them to surrender or be shot, but there’s no way they’d actually surrender… Which means gunning down all 4 before they can get to cover. The problem is, if you did that, and saved their victim, the media would paint you as the bad guy (and, to be fair, I’m assuming you magically *know* they will murder their victim if you don’t intervene). If you were very lucky, you might escape the scene, but not likely. You’d probably be “accidentally” killed while awaiting trial.
Well sure, we could save everybody from anything if we had magic snipers posted everywhere in advance.
This isn’t frigging Minority Report, the question is what someone actually on the ground at the time could do.
Winning move is to call 911 and get EMTs out there as soon as it appears he is being harmed. Let the EMTs deal with the cops and hope the individual gets medical treatment in time.
The EMTs were already en route by about the time the video recording had begun.
Your comment gave me pause, and I had to re-evaluate our generous host’s point to make sure I actually understood it. (PS: After writing this, then reviewing the OP, I realize that Eric covered all this very tightly, and I doubt I’m adding much of anything. I’m still going to post, though, in case someone finds any value in it.)
If I were to take the line Eric is taking here, I might explain my reasoning like so:
(To Be Clear: I am speaking hypothetically, and not endorsing Eric’s ROE per se.)
In the event I encounter rioting mobs in the act of engaging in destructive violence, I will preferentially seek to avoid lethal force in attempting to stop said mob if the members so encountered appear to be rioting for the publicly stated reason for the riot and stand down when confronted.
Due to the claimed, possibly accurately, racial nature of the initiating offense and the event’s consequently assumed connection with the Black Lives Matter movement, black rioters will be given the benefit of the doubt that they are angered to violence and rioting for this reason, which while still reprehensible is understandable if the reason presented is true.
(Compare this to, for instance, ghetto Jews rioting against their German oppressors.)
It will further be assumed that any non-black rioters acting under this flag have less or no claim on this grievance, and are therefore rioting for reasons other than the one publicly stated.
To the extent that AntiFa is present in the riots (being an explicitly anarcho-communist revolutionary paramilitary organization that regularly engages in mob violence to sow chaos and dissension in furtherance of their goals), to the extent that I believe communism is a scourge of mankind and those who would wield violence to achieve it are in fact enemies of mankind, like pirates or slavers, I will assume that any non-black rioters in the act of engaging in destructive violence are members of AntiFa there for their own calculated political ends, thus engaging in terrorism and do my human duty to remove this threat.
Again, I am not endorsing this line of reasoning, just working through it hypothetically to aid my own understanding of it.
ghetto Jews rioting against their German oppressors
They engaged the Nazis in combat. Nothing to do with rioting at all.
Thank you for the correction. My intent was to give a hypothetical case not a strictly historical one, but I acknowledge I did not make that clear.
Wouldn’t ‘reverse racism’ mean believing that your race is inferior to others?
A form of self loathing?
No, “reverse racism” used to be an occasional term for racist attitudes directed by minorities towards whites. Or institutional bias in favor of minorities.
Nowadays the politically correct line is to deny that this constitutes racism at all, because racism is necessarily driven by structural inequality.
I know how the term is used. I offered an alternative meaning because the contemporary one is gibberish – it implies that racism flows in one direction (from white to black) and that the direction can be ‘reversed’.
(Go to Malaysia for some ear-ringing racism)
Quite frankly, any time I hear “structural blahblah” I know I’m listening to an asshat ;)
It gets more complicated in the “Identify as” world. We have transgender. But we have transracial. How do you know they are black or white? You would have to ask them what race they identify as.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
At least you are gender neutral.
(I’ve considered taking enough colloidal silver until I’m literally blue in the face – Argeria – and being a superminority so I can waltz in anywhere or they would face a lawsuit).
Even more fun is if there are more antifa than you have bullets or there are actual police. Your white suprivilege makes you a target (another reason for going blue).
>Even more fun is if there are more antifa than you have bullets or there are actual police. Your white suprivilege makes you a target (another reason for going blue).
Don’t be silly. I do want to shoot the totalitarian scumbags that are trying to burn my country down, but that doesn’t mean I’d go all Yosemite Sam where cops are watching.
I can only maximize my expected number of Communist riot agitaters killed by not getting jailed or shot while I’m doing it. I’m committed to defending civilization, not to playing stupid.
If you look at the statistics for crime and police killings, you see that they really don’t.
So if it is an asian, do you crash and dump core?
Throw a kitten at them.
Little yellow devils, they love snacks.
You are *such* a cos-player, Eric.
How come you’re not leading an elite team to take out the clearly overreaching federal government? The streets of the capital are being “guarded” by paramilitary troops who refuse to identify themselves or their affiliations. This is exactly the kind of thing you insist the 2nd amendment is for so… why exactly are you not getting on with it?
Because Chaotic Good, not Chaotic Stupid?
>why exactly are you not getting on with it?
Well, for one thing, I’m not there. For another thing, those troops are not presently a threat to my liberty, and I’m not yet certain they’re a threat to anybody’s liberty. For yet another thing, I have lots of things to do with my life besides shooting people, and I’m a bit on the old and on the physically impaired side for “leading an elite team” of violence specialists.
Note that the OP was not about me looking for trouble. It was about my policy if trouble finds me.
Ah yes, we must be on the internet right now…..where soft-handed snideness reigns supreme.
Don’t waste too much time online, else your mommy will have to reheat your hot pockets.
Riots are one of the very few situations where military force is justified against civilians. Not coincidentally it is also one of the few situations where group guilt is applicable.
The military would be entirely justified plopping down sandbags and belt-feds, and clearing the streets with lead. That police and military have barely even opened fire (rubber bullets and tear gas don’t count) shows the degree to which the rioters are allowed to do as they please.
Also, the second amendment exists to defend against TYRANNY, not to defend against government. The two do not always, or even usually overlap. The KKK, the SS(originally), the Blackshirts are examples of this.
> TYRANNY, not to defend against government.
While I understand the distinction you are making, from my (libertarian) perspective it is without a difference.
A tyrant is someone assuming the arbitrary power to dictate to me what I am or am not to do, regardless if that person is chosen by a bunch of other people (President, Congresscritters), or chosen by a bunch of people chosen by a bunch of other people (administrative bureaucrats, law enforcement agents), or acting on their own initiative.
A government is necessarily a tyranny to the degree in which it upholds, or fails to uphold, the individual liberties of the citizens it claims to represent. Any government that expands beyond very narrow prescribed powers allowing it to safeguard those liberties immediately becomes a tyranny. One can argue about degrees of acceptable tyranny, but since that is a personal value determination it isn’t a very useful debate.
All they need is a whiff of grapeshot
You’re pretty stupid, ain’t ya? Here’s about as good an explanation as it gets:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/06/04/where-are-all-you-gun-owners-now/
Read it and weep, fool.
> How come you’re not leading an elite team to take out the clearly overreaching federal government?
Because it’s currently not the Feds that are overreaching.
If you had written it “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be White Nationalists attempting to manipulate this tragedy” nobody would have had a problem.
>If you had written it “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be White Nationalists attempting to manipulate this tragedy” nobody would have had a problem.
But that would have been a hollow gesture – what Andrew Molitor calls “cosplaying” – because my odds of ever encountering an actual white nationalist are epsilon.
We don’t have a problem with white nationalists attempting to burn down our country using black people as tools and proxies. We have a problem with Communists doing that.
I insist on naming – and, if it comes down to it, shooting – the real enemy, not cooperating in the mass-media fiction that “white nationalists” are of any significance in this crisis.
But you do raise an interesting point. Anybody who is upset by my intent to shoot Communists if the riots reach me should honestly answer the question “Why do you consider a plan to shoot Communists upsetting but a plan to shoot white nationalists not?”
Any such answer should be justified by squarely facing the comparative casualty figures of Communism and white nationalism over the last 120 years. I’ll be unreasonably generous and allow the Nazis onto the “white nationalist” side, even though they were actually transnationalist and in most ways ideologically closer to Communism than to their neo-Nazi successor groups.
(Yes, I meant that. Neo-Nazis have kept Nazi racialism but discarded Nazi political economics.)
“Why do you consider a plan to shoot Communists upsetting but a plan to shoot white nationalists not?”
For myself because I don’t think Communists have the slightest chance of making significant political inroads in the U.S. At this point worrying about Communists is about as useful as worrying that Kaiser Wilhelm’s army will show up. And oddly enough, I think you’re right about White Nationalists as you’ve defined them. What I do worry about are those racists who fall somewhere between “White Nationalist” and “neutral-about-race.” I think that particular subgroup is growing in number and is increasingly dangerous to our democracy.
Where I think you’re getting it wrong is this: you imagine a neat, simple politics with only two or three sides, when in fact there are lots of factions out in the field right now trying to exploit the protests, not counting the assholes who’ve come out just to make trouble. Any looter/rioter you shoot could be of any faction, anywhere from far-left to far-right. They might even be a member of the government acting as an agent provocateur. Getting caught up in these games would be really stupid and would not end well. You were correct above when you wrote “the only way to win is not to play.”
Here’s the winning strategy: If you see a rioter use the video camera built into your phone, then come home, blog about it and publicize their picture.
I don’t think Communists have the slightest chance of making significant political inroads in the U.S.
Academia and the media are maggoty with them. The Soviets set out to undermine American institutions, and they succeeded in several cases.
It might be more appropriate to say that the Soviets set out to exploit our already existing divisions, which makes the racist right into useful idiots.
> because I don’t think Communists have the slightest chance of making significant political inroads in the U.S.
You’re saying this when AntiFa, a communist organization has political backing from large city mayors and cover from interference if not actual support by law enforcement in those cities?
I guess you can quibble on the word “significant,” but I think we can shortcut the Scottish Veritables game if that’s all you’ve got.
> What I do worry about are those racists who fall somewhere between “White Nationalist” and “neutral-about-race.” I think that particular subgroup is growing in number and is increasingly dangerous to our democracy.
That… seems like a pretty broad brush for marking someone “dangerous to our democracy.” I think you’ll need to either get a lot clearer about exactly who you’re talking about and why them, or explain what you specifically mean by “dangerous to our democracy.”
Hell, I wouldn’t mind you explaining what you mean by “our democracy.”
>You’re saying this when AntiFa, a communist organization has political backing from large city mayors and cover from interference if not actual support by law enforcement in those cities?
You forgot most of the national media serving as its PR arm.
Yes, let us not forget Chris “Throw You Down The Stairs” Cuomo, sorry: “Fredo”, airing an entire segment in defense of AntiFa.
I would say rather that Democrat politicians are the enforcement arm of the media.
I’d say you’re both right.
“What I do worry about are those racists who fall somewhere between “White Nationalist” and “neutral-about-race.” I think that particular subgroup is growing in number and is increasingly dangerous to our democracy.”
Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, eh? Just how broad is that brush you’re using?
Not exactly. I was noticing that Eric had narrowed the field of “what is a racist” by only considering White Nationalists. I was more pushing back on that than trying to go Clinton’s route, (which I disagree with pretty strongly.*)
I think what we’re going to learn, maybe 3-5 years from now after people have carefully analyzed what’s happened over the past 10 days is that as many as half-a-dozen largish groups have been strategizing around what to on the streets when the next big wave of Black Protest hits, possible bad actors including the boogaloo racist fringe, Black Block kids, Antifa,** criminal looters (as opposed to spontaneous looting after order broke down) and maybe some Black revolutionary groups testing the waters.
* It was both an inappropriate statement and poor strategy.
** The original antifa was a group of Jewish gangsters in the lead-up to WWII. They had a lot more credibility than Antifa. You can read about them below.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/meyer-lansky-punch-a-nazi
>Not exactly. I was noticing that Eric had narrowed the field of “what is a racist” by only considering White Nationalists
That’s because garden-variety bigots don’t have the doctrine or organizational capacity to incite riots nationwide. Whoever is having pallets of bricks shipped to street corners in targeted zones, it could theoretically be organized white nationalists if the movement were orders of magnitude larger than it actually is, but it’s not random individual bigots.
Which, mind you, I don’t think are a common phenomenon these days in any case. They were in my childhood, but progress does get made.
“Whoever is having pallets of bricks shipped to street corners in targeted zones, it could theoretically be organized white nationalists if the movement were orders of magnitude larger than it actually is, but it’s not random individual bigots.”
That’s definitely one of the most interesting aspects of the whole thing… With the forklifts passing dozens of security cameras while en-route, not to mention the question of whether the forklifts used were rented, because rented lifting equipment tends to have big identification numbers all over it, as does municipally-owned equipment. That’s not even considering the question of whether someone might have been clueless enough to use their equipment without a mask… At some point an investigator will run this stuff down, and I’ll be very interested in what they find!
The other issue here is that you have to be pretty tied into the other side’s plans to know where to put the pallets of bricks. At the very least someone is monitoring the BLM Facebook posts (or similar) and at worst it’s another non-violent movement infiltrated by a TLA.
One crew who left a pallet of bricks along what turned out to be a planned route of protest was from Home Depot. They called law enforcement and the media and said that it was a load ordered over the phone and pair for with a prepaid credit card. The crew really, really didn’t want to be associated with Antifa thuggery.
Interesting!
Will one? Remember, we’re still waiting for the security footage from the Las Vegas shooter.
Or for that matter for someone to investigate WTF happened with that ISIS training camp whose leadership was mixed up with a lot of prominent democratic politicians, where the cite ended up being completely demolished by someone in the FBI before it could be properly investigated.
>At some point an investigator will run this stuff down, and I’ll be very interested in what they find!
Some of the results are already landing. I chased a link from a conservative blog to a Fox News story: Feds investigating whether ‘professional’ Antifa-linked agitators exerting ‘command and control’ over unrest
Notable quotes:
‘Another DOJ official said the feds have seen signs of “very organized” coordination from “professional” agitators, some linked to Antifa.’
“I’ve seen very little in the way of far-right groups, but we are looking and that may be out there.”
This is completely consistent with what we see in the riot videos: pretty pervasive Antifa presence, no sign of “white nationalists” at all.
Faux News? Please Eric, choose a source with some credibility. On the other hand, The Nation is reporting that the FBI didn’t find any evidence of antifa, but does expect violence by the far right.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust either source without cites; I don’t know where Faux is getting their information, but the Nation has pictures of someone’s screen; God only knows if they’re real – what The Nation is showing could be faked up by anyone who knows how to use a word-processor.
We’re in the hall of mirrors now, and I am not happy!
Says the person who cites CNN. The source which compares unfavorably to the scrawled ravings on the inside of the average insane asylum.
I cited CNN in agreeing that Eric was right about the Boogaloo!
Sorry Ian, I should expand on that. What starts my radar moving is when someone is following the party line a little-too thoroughly. Then I’ll inspect their cites and sources… I do this for both the left and right, which is why I’m also skeptical about The Nation’s coverage in this case.
What’s happening right now is that nothing is very clear about those who are rioting. The seem to be young and white, but beyond that not much is clear. So everyone is projecting. What makes me sad is that nobody is waiting to see what get’s uncovered – and minute-to-minute coverage is all over the map. My current theory is that lots of different groups are exploiting the current protests, which if you think about it is very, very scary.
Yes it is. It’s just inconvenient for your narrative.
Not exactly. I was noticing that Eric had narrowed the field of “what is a racist” by only considering White Nationalists.
This is indistinguishable from calling anyone who is not in lockstep with the orthodoxy of today a racist. You know, like Antifa and BLM do.
I was more pushing back on that than trying to go Clinton’s route, (which I disagree with pretty strongly.*)
* It was both an inappropriate statement and poor strategy.
Yeah. It showed what she really thinks about us rubes out here in flyover country.
boogaloo racist fringe
Well, there you go again. Free clue: not everyone who talks about boogaloo is a racist – unless you adopt the Antifa/BLM definition of “racist”.
This is indistinguishable from calling anyone who is not in lockstep with the orthodoxy of today a racist. You know, like Antifa and BLM do.
Jay, don’t be an ass.
>Jay, don’t be an ass.
Jay is not being an ass. A bit defensive and twitchy, yes, but I can’t blame him. Every conservative and libertarian has learned the hard way that people who talk like you do usually have the agenda of equating any dissent at all from the establishment line with racism.
And your side thought Obama was a Mooslim who’d been born in Kenya…
But I know better than to do the whole “you departed from the party line so you must be a racist” thing. It’s far too easy to get hoist by your own petard that way – which is why I told Jay not to be an ass!
This is also why I don’t believe you to be a racist; I think your heart is in the right place even though the sources of information you see as credible are about 90 percent crap. I like to think I see a little deeper than that.
Sorry, a little deeper into people, not into information sources.
What’s this “your side” shit, kemosabe? I thought no such thing.
Unfortunately I can no longer tell what’s crap and what isn’t.
Only semi-relatedly: regardless of your politics, you’d probably “enjoy” Matt Taibbi’s book _Hate Inc_, which blames both Crossfire and Roger Ailes for this sorry state of siloing. Not clear to me that the old way of manufactured consent was better, exactly, but at least both sides weren’t passive-aggressively trying to tear each other apart.
P.S. I’m trying not to take a particular view of all this (beyond the idea that Black people have some legitimate differences.) I just see it as really, really interesting!
Sorry. Not “differences” but “grievances.”
>Free clue: not everyone who talks about boogaloo is a racist – unless you adopt the Antifa/BLM definition of “racist”.
Some things to note about when I was involved in organizing the Lobby Day protest in Richmond back in January:
1. The word “boogaloo” got thrown around a lot. Usually humorously (“Today’s forecast: Sunny, cool, and breezy with a chance of boogaloo”), but with an underlying realization that this shit could get real.
2. Racists showing up and the resulting bad optics were a major topic of concern. We didn’t want them at our demonstration, but since we had made a point of saying “open to anyone” it was unclear what we could do if they did.
3. It was hilarious watching the presstitutes combing through the crowds for racists/fascists who weren’t there, getting more and more visibly depressed when they couldn’t find any. (And, of course, they erased the black gunfolks who were there. Not narrative-compliant, therefore nonexistent.)
4. A local group called Seven Hills Antifa had announced that it was going to show up at the demo in support of gun rights. This gob-smacked everybody, but I explained about the communist/anarchist mix in the organization, and that the anarchists occasionally win their internal arguments, and that pretty much had to be what had happened in this case.
5. As a result, the channel crew designated me their liaison to Antifa. Which was reasonable, as the rest of them together couldn’t muster as much knowledge about Marxist theory and left radicalism as I already had by 1979. But Antifa never showed up.
I just learned that from a CNN story. At the very least there’s a divide in that group over whether to hate cops more than Black people or vice-versa, and it seems to be happening (per the CNN story) along the lines of age. I suspect the younger people have a better grasp of the implications of everyone carrying a high-def camera, and thus accord things like the George Floyd video more credibility than their elders.
BTW, I’m betting on a massive use of cell-phone video in court over all this, with some very interesting results 2-3 years down the road.
> my odds of ever encountering an actual white nationalist are epsilon.
IDK you used to have one posting here. Maybe not a “nationalist”, but certain the white supremacist part.
And you can find a few of them on the street if you know where to look–jackanapes with swastika tattoos etc.
> Yes, I meant that. Neo-Nazis have kept Nazi racialism but discarded Nazi political economics.
A lot of the lower level shitheads may have, but like the socialists, the Nazis are in it for *control* and that ultimately means the state dictates the economy.
>IDK you used to have one posting here.
Encountering one in a riot, I mean.
Let me point out Larry Correia’s excellent “fuck you” to the leftards who are calling for the NRA to fight the cops:
https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/4131113506899547
“Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.
But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?
How fucking gullible do you think we are? :D Like holy shit. Damn dude!
Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.”
Somewhat related, but one of the chats I lurk in recently had screenshots of a conversation posted, wherein someone confessed to being scared, and asking to borrow a gun for protecting their home until the country calms down. The person asking got upset when the person asked pointed out that any such lending had been made illegal by the policies the asker had supported.
I am mildly curious how many will review and abandon their previous support for “gun control” during this time, as they begin to experience first hand the actual goals and consequences of such. I am not as hopeful about that as I would like to be.
I suspect they’ll start agitating for the return of “may issue” gun permits, so that they and their friends with pull can get guns when they need them, but it will still illegal for me to loan a gun to one of my friends unless I do it at a gun range.
I remember reading an interview with Charlton Heston some years back when he was talking about his leftard acquaintances calling him up to ask to borrow a gun during the LA riots. He told them to get fucked.
Yes. Specifically, the drivers are regularly accused of “white supremacy” and the entire scenarios framed as “hate crimes”. This is precisely what happened to James Fields in Charlottesville: Despite unambiguous video evidence that he both was actively being attacked and tried to stop and push (rather than ram) his way through the crowd, he got a sentence of over 400 years, mere weeks after the Berkeley mobs had been dragging drivers from their cars and beat one into a coma.
I’m surprised you’re not a fan of people who are fighting against the large government that’s murdering people. Seems like your interests are aligned? I’m generally in favor of anyone who protests against the government for more liberties (covid lockdown protests in wisconsin, the current protests, even the weird environment protests from nyc a few years ago), since they’re exercising the first amendment – “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
I figured you would be a pretty big fan of others fighting for your rights. Is the issue that you’re sick of the stupid trolling around it? or just how big of jackasses some of the BLM people are?
>I figured you would be a pretty big fan of others fighting for your rights.
Nobody in these riots is fighting for my rights. It seems to be Free Shit Army and Communists all the way down.
What esr said. Smashing a store window and walking off with a cheesecake is hardly “fighting against large government”.
> I’m surprised you’re not a fan of people who are fighting against the large government that’s murdering people.
Because there isn’t anyone doing that.
The last *Republican* mayor in Minneapolis left office in 1974. Two generations ago. Minnesota is so generally left that they have the “Democrat-farm-labor” party. The state AG is is a *hard* left democrat and fan of Antifa. The left has run the schools, the police and basically everything for well over 2 decades.
Are you going to suggest that every time someone being arrested starts to fight back the police should just let them go?
More like 1961. The guy in 1973 was only Mayor for 1 day (literally).
Wow. Missed that.
Fair enough.
The state AG is is a *hard* left democrat and fan of Antifa.
…with a penchant for beating women. Of course, the Democrats give him a pass for that because he’s black, and it would be totally racist to expect him to conform to basic human decency standards.
Not just black, but also Muslim.
Stay safe and stay out of the way. Crossing state lines and terrorism make this a federal case. https://threader.app/thread/1268573651672104967
Impressive. While that would seem to support the “3D chess” theory of Trump’s actions, it still bugs me that all those myriad federal departments have that many tactical teams to begin with.
Except for one thing; there are only a few, actual, Antifa organizations which are active, but they’re like Eric’s White Nationalists – altogether they probably couldn’t fill the “convention center” of the Fresno, CA Ramada Inn. But the philosophy of “antifa” – that is, “we’re against fascism” – is something 99 percent of the U.S. population agrees with. In fact, if you think in terms of WWII, where we sent an army of millions to Europe to – what did we do? Oh yeah, we fought fascism!
Just how well do you think this “brilliant plan” cooked up by Trump/Barr, who’ve been talking non-stop about Antifa being the terrorists who caused the riots, is going to go over? The counters are obvious and very simple; “Your honor, do you expect me to be pro-fascism?” And in the political arena, “Trump loves fascism.”
> But the philosophy of “antifa” – that is, “we’re against fascism”
That is not the philosophy of AntiFa, you fool. The philosophy of AntiFa is Capitalism is evil, Communism is good, Capitalism is Fascism, if you are not anti-Capitalist you are Fascist, prepare for violent revolution against you whom We have declared to be Fascist so that we may move on to our Communist utopia!
I guess you believe that the philosophy of “nazi” is “we want social services in our nation.”
I’m not mistaking anything; I understand the complexities. I’m just saying the approach Jeremy and Anonymous (writing above) are impressed by has a lot of inherent weaknesses. And what happens if you declare BLM to be a terrorist organization? Do the politics of that play very well?
> And what happens if you declare BLM to be a terrorist organization? Do the politics of that play very well?
I suppose the question would be: “How many people have to die at the hands of the organization/philosophy in question before society at large realizes they are dangerous?”
Except that Communism already has a death toll so high the Nazis only achieved a fraction of it. So why the ever-loving fuck is AntiFa not treated with the same if not greater automatic loathing?
You’ve dodged the question I asked (and you’re also confusing BLM and Antifa.) So try answering it this time: “…what happens if you declare BLM to be a terrorist organization? Do the politics of that play very well?”
I didn’t dodge, I was just oblique to a fault.
I’ll rephrase my answer: it depends on how many people have been killed or had their livelihoods destroyed by BLM before such a declaration is made.
Since the discussion was about AntiFa, I was addressing that. I wasn’t confused, I was bringing it back on topic.
BLM is and has been a criminal shakedown operation with racist roots. I first heard of it during the Furgeson melee, “hands up don’t shoot” bullshit. It’s got a great propaganda wing in the press, and is suckering a lot of weak people into this “protest”. I think it could at this time legitimately be called a terrorist organization.
No excuse for bad cops, but no excuse for racist and anti-American outfits like blm and antifa either.
It started during Ferguson, based on a lie created by an anti-police activist in St. Louis who got to the scene before the police had it under control, and coached a couple witnesses who lied to the police and the press, but recanted in sworn testimony.
I was wrong about this.
It was started after Trayvon Martin jumped and beat up wassisname and got shot for his stupidity.
Antifa claims to be “against fascism”.
The only problem is that their definition of “fascism” is “anything that does not bow down strictly to today’s hard-left orthodoxy”. Not just any, but today’s. If the orthodoxy changes and you don’t, poof! you’re a Nazi.
So their claims are ringing increasingly hollow to the average American as their cries of “but we’re against fascists! Really!” get more and more plaintive.
Antifa is just a bunch of hard-left thug shock troops. Fuck ’em and whatever it is they actually ride in on.
> Fuck ’em and whatever it is they actually ride in on.
I’d guess either their mom’s Lexus or their professor’s twenty-year old Civic.
There was video posted on Twitter of a Bentley.
Jay, how this is perceived will depend on what the Feds do. I suspect, Trump being in charge, that they will overreact and get damn-near everything wrong, including accusing the wrong people. At that point the nation’s sympathies will point the other direction, as they did when McCarthy overplayed his hand. We’ve seen this movie before.
The other thing you’re missing is that the left is at least as angry right now as the right, and probably more so. Things are not necessarily going to end well.
Lastly, I think maybe you don’t understand the political brilliance of the Republican Party in steering the country to the right over the last forty years. They’ve played a really careful, excellent game of pushing things to right just a little, waiting out the outrage, then pushing a little more, then waiting out the outrage, and it’s produced both a nation that’s far-further to the right than it was when I graduated high school, and which is also suffering from “outrage fatigue.”
Trump plays this game really poorly. His presidency has been a matter of “all outrage all the time,” and he has no clue about actually governing. Right now he has the country turned up to “simmer” and it will only take a couple more mistakes to turn the knob to “boil” and even though I think the left will win this round I really, really don’t want to see it play out!
> it’s produced both a nation that’s far-further to the right than it was when I graduated high school
Could you define what you mean by “the right” here? Because this sounds like delusional lunacy that I genuinely don’t understand.
Thinking about it, depending on his age maybe he’s referring to how belief in glorious socialist future of humanity greatly crashed following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although that was more the result of a sudden quasi-Black Swan event rather than a gradual process.
Sorry Eugene, I’ve never been a socialist, however much I like the idea of a well-regulated capitalism.
Except, capitalism can’t be well regulated. Look at the idea of “creative destruction”. Look hard.
What I suspect you and I (and maybe even OGH) can agree on is – crony capitalism (that is, favors being cut for those who have captured the regulatory or legislative machinery) needs not to be “regulated”, but abolished.
In the Real World, I suspect this will realistically happen only when the 103rd Porcine Interceptor Squadron is recognized as a legitimate fighting element of the USAF.
What I suspect you and I (and maybe even OGH) can agree on is – crony capitalism (that is, favors being cut for those who have captured the regulatory or legislative machinery) needs not to be “regulated”, but abolished.
That will certainly do for a start!
Fuck off, slaver.
Starting with the meta, it’s obvious that there’s social movement in all political directions all the time. For example, we’ve allowed Gay marriage, but many states have restricted abortion rights – both sides got something and both sides lost something.
The question then becomes, “Which side is losing more?”
I’d do the math like this: Both Democrats and Republican’s have an economic/defense policy and a social policy. They’re essentially united on the defense and economic policies. The defense policy is to build up the national security state, (neither Obama nor Bush nor Trump has a record of reducing government surveillance, for example.) And of course neither Obama/Clinton nor Bush/Trump ever met a rich person they wouldn’t give government money to. But Obama/Clinton tend to do it with more subtle policies, after all the i’s have been dotted and all the t’s have been crossed, while Bush/Trump are more comfortable with the “just write them a check” approach. But the ultimate result of either approach is that the bills get harder and harder to pay with each administration.
All of these are essentially rightwing policies. There’s no support for unions on either side. (The Democrats pay lip-service, but Obama failed to sign a pro-union bill when it was presented to him, which I found very telling.) Abandoning Glass-Steagal in 1995 was bipartisan policy if you can imagine that and it led to the 2008 recession.
But the end result of all this is that costs at a community college are now close to two orders of magnitude higher than they were forty years ago. The cost of homes has increased by something like 400 percent, (due to a change in the law to make money-laundering easier) and the cost of servicing that debt as a percentage of family income has increased dramatically.
So if you only think in terms of social policy, the Liberals are a little ahead, but if you start to think in terms of economics/defense/personal liberty the liberals are losing badly, because the Democrats gave up on supporting the middle class a long time ago. If you want to know more about why I feel this way, fill in the following blank:
“Obama repeatedly stated that __________ was his favorite president.”
Democrats are “good” for the middle class. Instead they’re “less bad.” I’m going to hold my nose and vote for Biden,* but I’m not happy about it!
* Biden is from Delaware. He made his bones by pretending to be a nice guy while never voting for anything a Delaware corporation objected to!
Sure, one would naively think it was the left-wing but sadly bipartisan policy of encouraging banks to lend to people who were realistically unlikely to be able to pay back because to do otherwise was racist, but yeah let’s blame Abandoning Glass-Steagal.
Because of the ballooning of the number of non-teching administrators. Originally to deal with all the regulation the Left imposed, eventually it became self-sustaining as bureaucracies tend do. Nowadays there main purpose seems to be to provide sinecures for leftist activists.
Are you sure this has nothing to do with all the zoning, environmental, and other NIMBY regulations that made building new houses much harder?
Here’s a hint: they gave up supporting the middle class long before you graduated high school. Heck, their pretense of supporting it was already wearing thin by WWII. Not surprising since the middle class was the Republican base.
They cared about the working class for significantly longer, but are currently in the process of throwing them under the bus. Largely because they can no longer deliver on their promises and the costs of their earlier short-sighted pro-worker policies are coming home to roost. For example, a lot of their pro-union and general workplace regulation benefited workers in the short term, but long term caused American factories to become uncompetitive. Or their various underfunded pension schemes, in the sort term they make workers without spending from the budget, but eventually the literal bill come due.
Hoo boy. Alright. I asked: “Could you define what you mean by ‘the right’ here?” So, I’m going to evaluate what you said based on that.
> Starting with the meta,
A bunch of blah-blah-blah….
> The question then becomes,
Changing the question…
> I’d do the math like this:
More blah-blah-blah…
> All of these are essentially rightwing policies.
Asserting your blah-blah-blah is “rightwing” without actually defining it…
> There’s no support for unions on either side.
And now we get to the only time you get close to defining what you mean by “the right,” which as far as I can see is just “Pro-Union = Left Wing, !Pro-Union = Right Wing”
That’s a pretty fucking narrow, arbitrary, and borderline useless definition, man. Can you do better than that, so we can actually have a god damn discussion with you?
The rest of your comment is just more blah-blah-blah that gives no further insight into what your working definition is, just a bunch of assertions.
Something I’ve always wondered about liberals. Do you guys feel guilty about lying this blatantly or do you get some kind of thrill from it?
Eugene, the scary part is that Troutwaxer is not lying. He really believes that lunacy about the nation having moved rightward.
I think this is because to him every leftward move – including stuff like drag queen story hour at the local library – instantly becomes the natural moral order with which no reasonable person could cavil, and therefore invisible in any calculation of left vs. right movement.
Yes, this is a stunning failure of self- and historical awareness, but it’s not lying.
Lying through willful self-deception is still lying.
There’s always a [good schools] moment. Conquest #1: everyone is conservative about what he knows best, such as where his house ought be located.
You also get some true believers. These are the people you hear about in the “woman gets murdered by the ‘peaceful refugees’ she took in” type stories.
I deny even this. Nobody takes tours of American ghettoes to prove that the slaves aren’t as violent as “racists” claim they are, as they would if they were true believers. They travel to the opposite side of the world because they have to travel that far before there’s enough ignorance to smother the cognitive dissonance. “I don’t know anything, therefore it’s good.”
The population of such lethally vociferous signallers is small enough that they may be genuine morons, which can be found in any group.
First, see my reply to ktk above.
Also, I don’t see “Drag Queen Story Hour” as the “natural moral order.” It happens that I’m glad we’ve stopped demonizing sexual minorities, but I’m a lot further from that very foofy side of Liberalism than you might think.
Politically there are three things about me that matter. The first is that I really dislike the idea that our society will hurt people or nature unnecessarily. The second is that I have a strong belief in individual liberty. The third is that I consider myself a realist.
So I caucus with the Liberals and vote Democratic because they are more likely to vote along with the scientific consensus and less likely to unnecessarily hurt people or nature.
But ultimately I’m neither a Liberal nor a Democrat. What I’d really like is a form of Libertarianism that espoused a much better means of dealing with bad actors, and a much, much smaller history of acting as useful idiots for spoiled people with too much money. And by the way, I despise both the communist economic philosophy and the idea of the spoiled rich that they can control reality/physics because they have money!
> First, see my reply to ktk above.
Which will avail him not, since you completely whiffed defining your terms. Do you do this just to make it more frustrating for people to debate you?
> The first is that I really dislike the idea that our society will hurt people or nature unnecessarily.
Based on your evaluation of what constitutes necessity.
> The second is that I have a strong belief in individual liberty. The third is that I consider myself a realist.
I roll to disbelieve.
> So I caucus with the Liberals and vote Democratic because they are more likely to vote along with the scientific consensus
Said as though “scientific consensus” is synonymous with “the truth.” Because science is all about consensus, right? You might as well call it “clerical consensus,” because it amounts to the same faith-based belief in self-appointed group authority.
> and less likely to unnecessarily hurt people or nature.
Citation needed. This is an assertion of faith. You are as religious in your political positions as the Christian right.
> What I’d really like is a form of Libertarianism that espoused a much better means of dealing with bad actors
You say this as if it’s even possible for there to be full agreement on what defines “bad actors.” That you are so vague in defining shit, I can’t help but read this as “What I’d really like is a way to cull the people I don’t like without feeling bad about it.”
Of course, he’s a leftist. That is their main debating tactic.
That is SO MUCH BULLSHIT.
570 buildings (at last count) were burned in Minneapolis over “Justice for Floyd”.
Floyd died on Monday (25th). Chauvin was fired on Wednesday and charged with murder on Friday. These are the people you caucus with–people who want it to be arrest, execution, trial?
Do you mean the people who SCREAMED about Trump being a racist for blocking flights from China because the WHO stated that the Wuhan Virus was not easily transmittable to humans. Which leads to:
The ones screaming that calling it the Wuhan Virus is RACIST, unlike Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Ebola, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus etc. etc.
Or the idiots who say the current insurrection is perfectly ok, but that protests *against* the state wide house arrests were not Ok, and that going to church is DANGEROUS?
You’d also be “caucusing” with people who believe that GMO foods are “bad” based on limited to bullshit evidence, that “organic” food is better for you based on nothing more than the emanations from their crystals, etc. etc. etc.
You do know that the *actual* temperature data is “underperforming” against 96% of the GCMs, right? The exception being one or two *Russian* (oh man how it hurts to say that) models which have carbon sensitivity at 1/2 rather than 2x (as I understand it).
The scientific “consensus” is whatever Ezra Klien’s New Model Journolist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList) has decided is the message of the day.
You’re basically siding with Big Brother because “that’s what everyone believes”.
Allow me to predict a response that will, predictably, not be forthcoming or if it does it will not actually address the subject.
(Trout-Mode Activate! Sha-sha-sha! Ka-Shing!) “Read what I wrote. I said ‘more likely’ and ‘less likely.’ This means that no matter how many arguments you throw at me, I will be proven right because I will endlessly hedge on what ‘more likely’ and ‘less likely’ means. Now watch me act smug and superior to you non-Prog troglodytes, who actually think that words mean anything more than what I decide they do at any given moment.”
And with all that, much of which is either true or at least a defensible argument, the left has less warts than the right!
> the left has less warts than the right!
Nice assertion. Care to justify it? No?
Still waiting on that definition, trout my boy. Still waiting…
Definition? Remind me please.
> Definition? Remind me please.
Cute.
I asked here for you to define what you mean by “the right.”
You failed to do so here.
I responded to and explained your failure here.
Oh yeah, not going to play silly guessing games like this. We all know who the right is and isn’t.
> Oh yeah, not going to play silly guessing games like this.
Bwa-ha-ha! Silly guessing games? What? I’m pretty sure my question was very clear, and you are now refusing to answer it. Why? Because it’s “silly!” That’s some rhetorical magic there, bub! I am slain! You have defeated meeee!
Wait, no, you’re just a slimy weasel. Never mind.
> We all know who the right is and isn’t.
No, we fucking don’t, Trout.
I don’t know what YOU mean by it, because the shit you say doesn’t at all match my understanding of it, which is why I was asking, so we can actually have a discussion.
It’s called setting terms, but I guess the ground-rules of reasoned debate are just too fucking “silly” for you.
I’m realizing now that you actually don’t think I’m communicating with you in good faith, and you don’t think I’m asking you to clarify with honest intentions. You seem to think my confusion with the shit you say is a put on.
I’m guessing this is because you, yourself, are a dishonest, pus-spewing boil of a man only capable of debating people you make up in your own head. Like every other Prog-Left asshole I have ever known.
On reflection, I believe the trick has to do with dissociating leftist stated intentions and leftist results. Same American habit that takes Lenin’s rhetoric seriously.
“Accordingly, in jokes Lenin is often depicted as sneaky and hypocritical.”
“One day Lenin is shaving outside his dacha with an old-fashioned razor when a small child approaches him. “Grandfather Lenin,” the child begins eagerly. “Buzz off!” replies the father of the Russian revolution. What a kind man: after all, he could have cut the kid’s throat.”
Similarly:
“General Turreau’s career demonstrates how easily a thirst for blood can be harnessed to the pursuit of noble ideals.” The Terror was driven by nobility? Yeah, nobly skinning people. Sure.
Naturally America has drifted further and further away from stated leftist intentions.
If your neighbour came to your house every day and smashed a plant pot with a hammer, saying, “But I was trying to squash a mosquito,” eventually you’d figure him out and have him arrested for vandalism.
Leftists, similarly, repeatedly do things which destroy American livelihoods, especially those of the poor and the nonwhite. They never retract. They never adjust. A normal person eventually decides either they’re too stupid to live or their true intentions must be evil. An American continues to buy their excuses.
A Troutwaxer believes their Fascist rhetoric (point 4): “It wasn’t our fault! It was the Plot of the State Enemy! Oh, woe!” The wreckers, the kulaks, the Jews, the Capitalists, etc etc. As leftist rhetoric and leftist results become ever more dissonant, obviously the White Nationalists must be winning. Even though it’s always leftist policy that’s written into law, and never wignat policy.
The simple fact: every time a leftist initiative is implemented, things become worse, in exactly the way rightists said it would. The more perfectly it is implemented, the more disastrous the damage. The leftists then defend the policy; again, the more perfectly implemented, the more fiercely defended. At what point do you admit the policy must be working as intended? What if (SJW rioters aside) they are not all eight-year-old children, but instead foresaw the exact thing the rightists foresaw, but went forward anyway?
The Progressive perfectly understands collective guilt when it comes to their political enemies. But with their ‘friends’ the slaves, they somehow fail to understand? Or, perhaps, the proggie is not in fact a drooling retard and still understands it perfectly. They know if they allow the slaves to riot and loot all the time, they will get a reputation for being barbarous thugs, no matter what excuses are mouthed for them. That reputational vandalism is part of the plan. Point deer, make horse. Can’t play [point rioter, make citizen] if you don’t have any rioters. If they won’t riot spontaneously then they will riot on command.
If you’re a leftist for whatever twisted reason, obviously you admit that leftists are liars at no point. E.g. all your friends are leftists, so you can’t admit it without becoming friendless. Cast out of your tribe. This norm of being a fuckin’ liar also makes the self-deception seem normal and prosocial.
Notably there are historical roots in the Sophists of Athens. Being liars is not some kind of coincidence or provincial pragmatism.
Well said!
Eric, why did you remove your reply to this comment? Yes, I made a minor criticism of it, but I mostly agreed with it.
I am not aware of having removed anything.
I’ve been blogging from my phone, though. Still trying to recover from the blown PSU on my main computer. it is possible that I inadvertently deleted something through the phone interface, though I can’t think how that would happen.
I can confirm it disappeared, and was curious why, as well. It is back now, though.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by shitty software.
I suspect that you wrote “I suspect” when you really meant “I hope” up at the top of your post.
Put another way – what historical basis is there for expecting an overreaction? Is it because of that time he nuked North Korea? Or that time he invaded Iran? That time he had those “journalists” arrested? Or maybe that time he pardoned his friends who had been persecuted by his enemies? Or that time he had Hillary jailed?
You can start with this, and move forward by considering the very apparent mood of the country!
https://www.newsweek.com/2018/07/27/government-prosecution-trump-inauguration-dc-police-j20-protesters-fake-news-1024282.html
That article is hilarious. Anyone who is familiar with the Flynn case, the Roger Stone case, or the “Mueller” investigation will be familiar with the cast of characters, and the tactics. Oh, or the Ted Stevens case, or the Enron case.
I literally howled with laughter when I got to the part where the author whined about all of the resources assigned to the case. One full time prosecutor and one full time investigator. Can you imagine? That must have cost the taxpayers something like 32 million dollars.
So yeah, totally an overreaction by Time Travelin’ Trump, that sneaky scoundrel went back and convinced Clinton, Bush and Obama to hire these goons, just so they could overreact in 2017 (literally the very day that he takes office) and 2020.
That’s not a critique, that’s a rant.
There certainly were some rant-like elements in it, but it still refuted both branches of your argument. Sorry if you missed the serious parts.
First, I mocked the idea that the inauguration prosecutions was an overreaction compared to “normal”, and second I mocked the idea that President Trump had hired the people involved in your one example of a purported overreaction.
I’ve had self-identified AnTifa folks call me a Nazi for having the temerity to ask them if they had and due process amongst themselves to avoid false positives when identifying Nazis.
It’s not a terrible question. I’ve had the experience of being called a commie in mainly-right environments and a CIA-plant in mainly left-wing environments. I just might be doing something right.
>are only a few, actual, Antifa organizations which are active, but they’re like Eric’s White Nationalists – altogether they probably couldn’t fill the “convention center” of the Fresno, CA Ramada Inn.
You might not be that far wrong, but the two-, maybe three-order of magnitude difference means one crucial thing: the white nationalists lack the numbers to engage in street-level direct action, but Antifa has those numbers.
The result is extremely visible in the recent riot footage. Antifa is everywhere, white nationalists nowhere to be found.
Eric, the problem here is that you’re skipping a step, which is finding out the actual motivation of the White rioter – and we don’t know that yet. The right-wing media is saying “Antifa,” but they’re presenting very little evidence. (At least in Portland Antifa’s MO is to go after neo-nazis using violent tactics.) Minor property damage is more a Black Block phenomena.
Also, you’re hedging on the racism issue. There may not be many White Nationalists, but there are plenty of ordinary racists out there, and of course the use of provocateurs is a very old tactic.
The motivation of the white rioter is to a) chimp out and b) become the next Billy Ayers. Kill some people, get a comfy job. That’s just how America works, and how it has always worked.
This is way more true than you might think. The initial violence part of the rioting (not the opportunistic stealing) is being done by the same sort of people who brought us OWS. And there was some analysis regarding those people at the time. Like:
http://volokh.com/2011/10/31/the-fragmenting-of-the-new-class-elites-or-downward-mobility/
It’s hard being a privileged grievance studies major who can’t find the cushy white collar high status no work position they were led to expect. (For instance, university diversity bureaucracies simply can no longer keep expanding to keep up with employing the supply of incoming drones.)
When you can explain to me what would motivate a while female “white supremacist” to dress up in a burka and steal a cheesecake in the middle of a riot, I may start to take the claims of it not being antifa seriously.
Not before.
So if you actually believed the White rioters were WN, shouldn’t you be upset at all the Democratic DAs mass releasing rioters and all the celebrities and Democratic politicians offering to pay their bail?
The reason you’re not is that you know perfectly well their “Quantum White Nationalists”, i.e., their only White Nationalists for the exact second their looting and arson is generating bad PR for your side. Afterwards they go back to being good leftists worthy of being bailed out and to be celebrated for “smashing the system” via the exact same actions that they temporarily transmute into “white nationalists” when they’re criticized.
Less flippantly, when I try to put myself in the world-view of a “white supremacist”, or racist in general, and try to predict what they would do in the present situation… I can’t come up with any _possible_ reason for them to join in on the mayhem and city-burning.
I can make sense of it from the _left_ worldview very easily: if you strongly favor authoritarian central government, if you are an inheritor of the cultural capital of the Soviet secret police and gulags, the Nazi brownshirts and concentration camps, then the LAST thing you want is a bunch of “pig ignorant” libertarian types saying that the incident that triggered all this is _exactly_ what you can expect from an authoritarian central government, and an Elite police force shielded by that government and given power and authority no “civilian” could ever hope for black _or_ white. On the contrary you NEED to keep all of the “optics” focused entirely on the issue of race. Private property gets destroyed and burned down, bystanders beaten and killed? Great, the terrified public will sheepfully go along with the calls for stronger government intervention and increased police powers. Any _white_ folks murmuring that maybe a tiny bit of the rioting and destruction might not be completely called for? You can quash that immediately as racist hate-mongering — thus silencing any possible political opposition to step one.
But some “white supremacist” “redneck” “racist”? The more stereotypical you make him, the _less_ I can see any way he would stand shoulder to shoulder with “them coloreds” out there burning down some blue city. (Mostly their own neighborhoods in those cities, as esr has already pointed out.) Why would they bother lifting a finger, when it’s already being burned down for them? If you had huge crowds outside the Minneapolis jailhouse, with signs and shouting declaring Chauvin a hero and demanding his release, I would agree that was pretty obviously racially motivated garbage. But if that’s happening I haven’t heard about it. (Union chief Kroll has of course stepped forward to defend Chauvin, but I claim that’s explained at _least_ as much by the Blue Line as by racism. That is, I would need a bit more from you or Jeff Read just saying “no you’re stupid, of course it’s just racism” to be convinced, like actual evidence or a model of some kind.)
The only thing that could possibly be claimed is that, well, the white supremacists are dressing up like antifa to make antifa look “bad”. Which… again, doesn’t really fit the stereotype of the “unsophisticated redneck” “white supremacist”. I talked about the “cultural capitlal” of the left… what’s the equivalent here, the KKK? Yes, the scary white hoods and robe… but they wore those because they were _afraid_ of getting caught, to hide their “private” identities (much like the burka-wearing bitch cheesecake thief, I’m not saying this particular tactic is limited to one side), not because they were trying to look like some “other” violent group, let alone a left-leaning one.
tldr: it’s not enough to say “gotta be dem racists.” There needs to be some kind of explanation for _why_ one of them would don a burka and paint “police=KKK” signs all over downtown stores.
And steal a goddamn cheesecake.
> I can’t come up with any _possible_ reason for [white nationalists] to join in on the mayhem and city-burning.
I can. Not the city-burning – no point in that. But if I were a white nationalist mastermind and had the troops to deploy on direct action, I would be fielding response brigades to stop arsonists. And I’d give them banners like the Battle of Thermopylae insignia used by European identitarians, or a hoplite helm – carefully avoiding all fascist and Nazi symbolism.
Think about it. What more perfect way to gain legitimacy? I’d even film some rescues of black-run small businesses from the rampaging ferals of their own skin color, and make that part of my propaganda. Getting to beat up Antifa and black criminals would be just a bonus. Hashtag:#WeStandForCivilization.
This won’t actually happen, because there aren’t enough white-nationalist troops to make it work. But it’s a possible reason, if there were.
Well, yeah But by “join in the mayhem” I meant more what Troutwaxer seems to be imagining: a bunch of “white supremacists” going in and helping to _cause_ some of the burning, not putting out fires.:D
You send agent provocateurs to make the other side look bad. If you’re the “White Supremacist Mastermind” you try to get some violence and property damage going. The advantage of this is that it’s very inexpensive.
This tactic used to work because the media would cover the burning and looting far more than they’d cover the issues of the protest. But the tactic doesn’t work anymore due to cellphones with video cameras, plus social-media/twitter.
I think we’ll find, 2-3 years from now when someone has done the research and gotten it published that we have a far-deeper look at how a protest evolves into a riot than we do now.
You mean like all the laughably obvious fake “hate crimes” your side keeps staging.
> The advantage of this is that it’s very inexpensive.
Hypothetically, perhaps. In the real world, expense is unimportant, because _it’s never going to fucking happen_.
You completely failed to do what I asked when I was still trying to be polite, which is not just slap your claim down as an axiom (“of course it would be to the white supremacists’ advantage to sneak around in disguises and pretend to actually be left-wingers”), but provide a model for _why_ and _how_ they would do that — especially the part where the “Mastermind” _gets their white supremacist underlings to actually go and do that_.
Less politely now, I am telling you that if you ask a “white supremacist female” to put on a burka, you will get a face full of buckshot. You won’t even get to the “steal a cheesecake” part of your “Mastermind’s” master plan.
Once again, while the KKK _were_ hiding under white hoods from the consequences of their actions, they certainly _weren’t_ trying to make it look like those actions were carried out by, I dunno, Frederick Douglas or something. When they did some horrible shit like burning a cross on somebody’s lawn they damn well wanted everyone to know that it was the KKK doing that dumb horrible shit, they _owned_ it.
Still too abstract for you? Looting stores and destroying private property (even down to the cheesecakes) requires no justification or incentive at all, if you _already hate capitalism_ axiomatically. This neatly explains why both “white” and “black” owned homes and businesses are getting trashed IF it’s antifa doing the burning and trashing. For a white supremacist, you can only explain the the black-owned businesses being destroyed, and you _can’t_ in any way explain how you would get a “redneck racist” to squeeze into a burka and spray paint “viva la revolucion” on a looted storefront instead of “n* go home” or what have you.
Yes, we must posit elaborate theoretical justification so we can imagine why theft might be tempting and breaking stuff might be fun.
I take it you never jumped on frozen puddles as a child? It is well-known (well, until recently I guess) that mobs are not civilized. You can make a mob out of any crowd, and once it’s a mob you’re lucky if the surroundings aren’t razed to the ground. Humans are poorly adapted to gatherings of more than 150 individuals.
@Alrenous:
> Yes, we must posit elaborate theoretical justification
Ok, I kinda get what you’re saying, and thanks for the extra snark, but… no offense but were you following the context? If the question is whether “redneck racists” or antifa are more likely to be the main component of the fray, then it seems a little justification ought to be required from both sides of that debate. (Not sure how “communists are self-proclaimed anti-capitalist, therefore less respective of private property” rises to the level of “elaborate” , but whatever.)
If you’re sincerely convinced that negligible numbers of _either_ fraction are present, you could have saved time and directed that comment at Troutwaxer’s initial claim of it being “white supremacists”. (Of course that claim was presented without any justification, let alone “elaborate”, but that was kinda the point of my replies to Troutwaxer in the first place.)
> I take it you never jumped on frozen puddles as a child?
Oh I jumped in plenty of puddles, frozen and unfrozen. But I managed to do it without causing tens of thousands of dollars of property damage or attempting to burn down a building with a child trapped inside while I prevented fire trucks from approaching the scene.
Or stealing a fucking cheesecake.
I think what everyone’s missing here is that I was responding to Eric’s post above that it couldn’t possibly be White Supremacists because they would use a particular set of tactics. I noted that the use of agent provocateurs was also a very standard tactic, and far more in line with what’s been done previously.
For myself I don’t think there’s much good evidence yet as to who’s doing what (and I think there are lots of factions in the field doing all kinds of things – which I’ve said in about six different posts so far on this thread!)
I haven’t changed my mind on that one, but was specifically objecting to Eric’s construction of possible White Supremacist tactics by pointing to the tactic which is much more common!
We’re missing the key question here — was it a proper cheesecake?
They stopped being proper cheesecake when people stopped putting lemon in the top layer of cheese! I haven’t had good cheesecake in a restaurant in years, Cheesecake factory included!
Remember the joke from about 15 years ago, what is the difference between a radical muslim and a moderate muslim?
The other thing that Antifa has that the White Nationalist/White Supremist types (lumping the two together) don’t is *massive* support and assistance from “moderate” leftists.
You have mayors and professors *supporting* Antifa, while the white nationalist/supremist types are considered odious by almost everyone.
Like the moderate muslim the moderate leftist doesn’t want to kill you. He wants the radical to kill you.
My insight into US Antifa is mostly gleaned from Twitter, so far from reliable, but my impression is that the political makeup of Antifa in the US is not hugely different to that here in Germany. In Germany, while communists are very active in Antifa, it is a dominantly anarchist movement, and while it revolves around the anti-capitalist equation of capitalism and fascism, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist arguments made for this thesis.
If you shot an anarchist, you might rationalise that your victim was a useful idiot of communists, but I guess you would be uncomfortable about that.
There are two types of anarchists:
1) anarcho-capitalists/anarcho-feudalists
2) someone’s useful idiots
Not true. The Makhnoists, for instance, agitated with some effect against the Bolsheviks, and Stalin saw the left-anarchists who took part in the Spanish Civil War as a serious threat to the Comintern’s goals. Communist thinkers today get attacked all the time by left anarchists.
I’d also point out that right-anarchists were a bigger ideological influence on fascism than the Marxists.
>I’d also point out that right-anarchists were a bigger ideological influence on fascism than the Marxists.
That is utterly false. The theoretical foundations of Fascism were laid down by Georges Sorel, who wanted to rescue Marxism from the decline he saw coming because Marx’s immiseration hypothesis had failed.
Mussolini’s “Everything for the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” is not where you land if you’ve been “influenced” by any kind of anarchism at all.
I follow Zeev Sternhell in making this claim, who is arguably the most well-regarded historian of the ideological roots of fascism – if he’s wrong, I’m wrong, and of course I could be wrong due to my own failure to master the literature.
But to summarise: there is a well-documented split between Proudhon, founder of the French school of anarchism, and Marx. While Sorel described himself during one period as a Marxist, he was never conformist and he was much more influenced by Proudhon. One of the short-term influences of Sorel’s work was to make the boundaries between socialist, ultra-nationalist and anarchist thought very permeable for many people: this was the environment in which Italian fascist thought developed. As with all new revolutionary movements, the ideas didn’t really crystalise until they seized power.
Sorel is still regarded as a “to-read” thinker by many anarchists, although with a warning labels.
>I follow Zeev Sternhell in making this claim, who is arguably the most well-regarded historian of the ideological roots of fascism
Dear Goddess. If he’s the “most well regarded”, I can only conclude this is an academic specialty especially well stuffed with high-grade idiocy.
The most charitable interpretation I can make of your report is that this Sternhell is particularly sloppy about confusing the early phase of Fascism, when Gabriele D’Annunzio was running things, with what it became after Mussolini took control of the movement.
If Sternhell said that right anarchism had influenced the Republic of Fiume I could take him seriously. I don’t know that it’s true, but it’s not crazy. All kinds of things influenced D’Annunzio’s live-action role-playing game, up to and including medieval necromancy.
But Mussolini changed everything. Once he successfully reinvented fascism on the premise of totalitarianism – “Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” – there was no way in which either right or left anarchism could in any way be said to still be an influence on Fascism, or in anything less than total opposition to it.
If Sternhell claims otherwise, he’s either delusional or grinding some kind of political axe, and I don’t really care which it is. It means I don’t need to waste any time on him.
Unipolar state centralism and anarchism – they’re like matter and antimatter. Which is why Stalin wiped out the Spanish anarchists.
I speak with particular authority on this, being what you would think of as a right anarchist myself. And I think this is one of a very few matters about which I would get instant agreement from a left anarchist.
I think that probably nails it.
The biggest problem with this area of study is that there is so little difference between how the Fascists implemented their plans and the Communists implemented theirs that the academics get all spun around trying NOT to be fascists and wind up incoherent.
Like the people who claim that leftists *can’t* be authoritarian.
Anitfa is about as far from anarchy as one could get.
>In Germany, while communists are very active in Antifa, it is a dominantly anarchist movement
That’s reversed in the U.S. Antifa here is Communist-dominant, though the minority anarchist faction occasionally wins some of their internal arguments.
>If you shot an anarchist, you might rationalise that your victim was a useful idiot of communists, but I guess you would be uncomfortable about that
The kind of anarchist that joins Antifa is Marxist/nihilist. I wouldn’t be rationalizing. About the only good deed Stalin ever did was exterminating the nihilist-anarchist faction in the Spanish Civil War.
Good opinion piece on liberal cities, gun control and second amendment supporters
https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/4131113506899547
I was thinking today that we could have so many ways of bringing back James Bond movies with believable villains, if Hollywood was not already owned and operated by enemies of America.
Unfortunately, these days its also not believable that MI6 would send its agents to fight such villains.
Testing to see if I can comment with this system.
Oh dear. Prog doctors and academics are blatantly trying to turn public health into a skinsuit. Their open letter is a load of drivel and hand-waving assertions about “white supremacy”, which is meant to excuse cheering the protestriots for being progressive while still suppressing other assemblies that are not progressive because they might spread the ‘rona. To boot, they’re demanding that everyone else must support the cause of the protestriots.
It feels kinda like reading blood libel from a mid-tier antisemite.
‘The
JewWhite lives longer than us. Biological disparities do not explain this, so he must be poisoning our wells. TheJewWhite is evil for not wanting to stay in his house when ordered to, but we are righteous for ignoring that same order to draw attention to how theJewWhite is oppressing our people. Our illness is the fault ofOrganized JewryWhite Supremacy.’Mildly paraphrased for brevity. Example of a literal quote:
What a bunch of cloacas.
Also, drastically short on self-awareness:
They’ve been doing this for decades. This is why the CDC was prohibited from using funding to advocate for gun restrictions. And look at the fruits of their labor: an organization which ostensibly has as its core mission the prevention and control of communicable diseases completely unable to do so. To the point that Covid-19 is running around the country with economically-disastrous results.
But, hey, at least they managed to get great press coverage about their concern over vaping.
As a point of tactics, I suggest that openly announcing point #3 beforehand is unwise, quite orthogonally to the wisdom of the policy. An unfriendly prosecutor would jump right on that and spin it into “he was deliberately hunting Antifa”. Apologies if someone else already made this point.
The slaves were never freed.
I have previously stated that the slaves had become tired of acting as shock troops for the Progressive hegemon. I guess I was fuckin’ wrong!
You can tell the slaves were never freed because nobody asked if they wanted to stay on the plantations. Yes, perhaps 99% of them would have wanted to leave, but: nobody asked. We have to guess, because they went from being forced to stay to being forced to go. Nobody cared what they wanted. It continues to be the case that nobody cares what they want.
Ferguson increased the rate slaves are murdered in Ferguson by 30%. This is considered a success. ¯\_(?)_/¯ You can tell for sure because they did it again and again. At some point you have to admit that is in fact one of the main motivations of these actions.
Reminder that you can donate to Planned Parenthood for specifically slave abortions.
When civil rights destroyed the slave family and slave business district, this was considered a success. Having these forms of independence affected the slaves’ willingness to perform their slave duties.
Fascism diagnostic point 3: the exploitation of social frustration, frequently that caused by the Fascism itself. In this case, the slave’s frustrations at being enslaved is exploited to direct them at the slavemasters’ enemies. (Sort of. There’s a shortage of riots in red cities, given the mayors won’t order the cops to stand down. See also: Canada.)
(As should be obvious but as I doubtless have to explain: a small number of slaves, then as now, have purchased their emancipation.)
Most of the rioters are on public assistance or have government jobs? (But I repeat myself?) Well, naturally. Since the 14th made direct slavery illegal, the slave must be retained using a bankshot manoeuvre. The slave knows today’s meal depends on their Progressive master, and thus dares not go against his wishes. Naturally if they ditched their masters they would find it much easier to get a dignity-granting job, but the master is deft at ensuring this two-step inference is one step beyond the slave’s grasp.
By happy coincidence, this also allows the master to disavow responsibility for the slave’s actions, even though they almost never oppose the master’s wishes. (Any that do immediately shouted down; that’s just [social consequences], see.)The master can always point to an emancipated slave or the odd defiant one. “See, I’m not coercing compliance!” However, he who pays the piper…
I begin to think Rhodesia and South Africa were destroyed due to jealousy.
Can we assume the hegemon has power in DC? If so, then it’s the model they wish to aim for. Ruled from Georgetown et al, supermajority European and all minorities Uncle Toms, but ruling over something 50% slave with homeopathic levels of European. Soft, deniable apartheid. A much less affluent America, but an incredibly obedient one, with a clear distinction between upper class and under class.
I still can’t quite decide if you’re being overly cynical, or not cynical enough.
Just remember two facts. Put them to the Science test: they’re predictive.
Nobody hates n****** more than Progressives do. Everything they do is calculated to produce maximum Bantu suffering.
Every American riot is a pro-Establishment riot. They are (indirectly, deniably) State-funded.
—
E.g. directly torturing Bantu wouldn’t be stable, so they strip them of jobs and families instead. Use honey instead of vinegar. Then they offer to ‘save’ them by stealing all their natural leaders for Georgetown. Trust me on this: goes back to Lincoln.
Progressives knew damn fine that ’50s conservatives were correct: their initiatives were likely to destroy families. The problem: that was their goal. They were hearing it was going to work, so they went through with it and then doubled down at every opportunity. Poor blasted Detroit is no more an accident or some kind of misfortune than Stalin’s gulags were an accident. “Jokes about Stalin usually refer to his paranoia and contempt for human life.” Under Fascism, only samizdat comedians can tell the truth.
—
E.g. New York missed the memo and de Blasio didn’t immediately order his cops to stand down. Result: the riots stalled and petered out for a night or two until someone frantically called de Blasio and brought him in line.
The Weathermen killed people and that got Billy Ayers a snug job, which he still holds today. Presumably there’s another round of sinecures up for grabs, so it’s time to rustle the slaves again.
The 60s and 70s were about the Old Left being overthrown by the New Left. Presumably there is also an element of SJWs attempting to overthrow the New Left this year. Problem: SJWs are genuinely as stupid as the New Left pretends to be. Also, New Left trying to overthrow that usurper, Trump. How dare he take POTUS’ power away from the regnant monarch? The nerve. Doesn’t he know his job is to do nothing and then take the blame? Trudeau understand this perfectly.
(The problem with responsibility laundering: finding someone who won’t interfere with your public messages when it comes time to make them public. If your patsy refuses to play along, you can’t stop them without pulling back the curtain.)
The drive to re-culture former slaves by putting their children in your schools has always been a New Englander puritanical religious left thing. The same folks who were radical abolitionist fringe Republicans, then Progressive fringe Republicans, then, finally, Democrats.
That the ‘school up the blacks and bring them to our idea of god’ thing only worked for a small subset of the people it was tried on, the most talented members of that community, its potential leaders was, I suspect, an unhappy failure until the re-alignment.
Note that Democrats have always been the horrific racists, but it only seems they thought to OWN their slaves again after the Progressives joined the party and brought some lovely ideas about indoctrination and the power of the state.
Anyone paying attention knows about LBJ and the horrifically cynical establishment of the Permanent Free Shit (Vote Farm) Army, paid for by his enemies.
Woodrow Wilson had no use for black people in any capacity. He hated them, segregated them and put them down but at least he didn’t *use* them.
Me, I wonder exactly when the attitude of owning and using started in Dem higher ups. For example, did FDR *intentionally* remake (read “ruin and destroy”) prosperous and orderly at least somewhat Republican industrial cities by encouraging the mass migration of rural blacks into them? Because that’s what wound up happening. (Note that that migration had already been happening on a smaller scale, but was greatly accelerated.)
FDR probably intended to change their voting demographics and political machines. I don’t think he intended to ruin and destroy them. He was quite willing to mess with industry and the free market and fervently believed in the power of central planning, but because of that idiotic belief, he didn’t believe that his various interventions had any relationship to the economic disruptions they were causing.
The rest of the world had a Depression.
It took an FDR for us to have a Great Depression.
You mean Blacks didn’t flee the Jim Crow south whenever they got the chance? Damn that Roosevelt!
Do you read what you write?
Jim Crow was a Democratic institution. Why would anyone want to flee the loving arms of Democrats?
What DID happen, however, was what often happens when you get very large scale immigration of groups with major cultural incompatibilities with the area they were migrating to.
That always leads to trouble.
One of the major troubles, is that the black immigrants committed a lot of crime. (They were not the first, or presumably last, immigrant group for which this is true. Cultures differ, and matter.) Back home it was just the way things were done, but it alienated pretty much everyone in the big cities.
Law and order was not sufficiently enforced for various reasons. Which made everything much, much worse as usual.
As immigrant groups with a sufficient critical mass do, instead of assimilating to local conditions the rural blacks forted up and formed their own islands of ‘our way’ in the new environment. And responded to the hostility of outsiders (to the violence and crime, much the same way everyone responded to new Irish immigrants back in the day) by turning for support to the one group that was sympathetic to their plight – would be Democrat machine politicians.
The rest is inevitable enough.
So with a little slight of hand FDR took Republican constituencies and used them to ruin each other, starting the process of turning one into a permanent Dem client dependency along the way.
Democrats used to be very enthusiastic about assimilation, quite violently so – what my father’s side of the family (and many other German immigrants) went through during the Woodrow Wilson era was pretty bad.
But after this enormous triumph, encouraging mass immigration while undercutting any attempt at assimilation became staples of Democratic strategy.
I’ll also add that shielding black populations from the effects of the anger of their crime victims is when ‘anti-racism’ really took off.
If you imagine that I approve or support of the Southern Democrats in the middle of the last century, all I can say is that you have a splendid imagination. Political parties do change over time, and if you can find a single Democrat under sixty who supports Jim Crow I’d be very surprised. Also note that Roosevelt wasn’t a Southern Democrat.
> if you can find a single Democrat under sixty who supports Jim Crow I’d be very surprised.
Man, this is way easier than you seem to think. They don’t call it Jim Crow any more, they call it Social Justice, and it’s aimed at whitey now, while still presuming “people of color” are incompetent, irresponsible children.
I’ll add, Trout seems to support various planks of the Jim Crow platform even now. And he’s far from alone.
Hint: A big one is gun control.
> You mean Blacks didn’t flee the Jim Crow south
> whenever they got the chance? Damn
> that Roosevelt!
Dude, how fucking ignorant of history *ARE* you?
No, blacks did not flee the Jim Crow laws in the post civil war era because they had no skills that were marketable in the north until there were labor shortages in factories during WWI.
The factory labor shortage in WW2 is what turned it into a flood of migration. FDR’s command war economy pushed hard to induce rural Southern blacks to relocate to industrial cities desperate for labor, any labor.
Mind, a lot of poor rural white folks followed the same path but their record for assimilation, while less than perfect, is somewhat better.
There’s a running joke in modern conservative circles that goes “The Democrats haven’t been this mad since Lincoln freed their slaves”.
I’ve made the point elsewhere that it’s telling that these riots always destroy minority-owned or minority-employing businesses. This was put into sharp focus in Detroit where Antifa encountered a black man renovating a house and responded by burning down the house, his work truck, and his tools. It’s clearly a tool for the establishment/deep state/whatever you want to call it to keep blacks in line.
The problem they’re having is that Trump isn’t playing along with their games. With criminal justice reform passed and signed and the pre-COVID economy he’s provably done more to help blacks escape the DNC’s plantation than any President since Lincoln. A new poll indicates that black likely voters support Trump at a 40% rate, which is a disaster of epic proportions for the DNC if it’s even half of that. The media keeps pushing polling showing Biden winning based on national popular vote, but that’s not how the game is scored and from their behavior we know their more honest internal polls must be really alarming.
Rush Limbaugh had a conversation with leftist black radio host Charlemagne Tha God last week that was aired on both shows. He audibly vapor locked Charlemagne by discussing in some detail how the Democrats (including Obama) have utterly failed to do anything for blacks and asking why they vote for them. The question was not answered, not surprisingly. A lot of conservatives jumped on Limbaugh for “wasting his time”, but I think strategically it’s brilliant to get Charlemagne’s audience to hear that.
People killed by right-wing white nationalist extremists in the US in the last 25 years: around 240 (168 in Oklahoma City bombing, 70 or so since then: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/white-extremist-murders-killed-at-least-70-in-u-s-since-1995.html )
People killed by left-wing extremists in the US: not very many. There was one attack on a congressman in 2017 that led to a fatality, maybe. a few more. Of course there were more in the 60s and 70s, though still nowhere near the scale. of the other side.
>People killed by right-wing white nationalist extremists in the US in the last 25 years: around 240 (168 in Oklahoma City bombing, 70 or so since then.
This claim exemplifies what’s wrong with media talk about white nationalists. Timothy McVeigh wasn’t one. Search as you will, there is zero sign of racist ideology in his back trail – significant, because actual white nationalists can’t shut up about that shit.
It shames me to say this, but we have McVeigh’s manifesto and he was actually a violent libertarian – much closer to my politics than to any white nationalist.
Poof, there went 70% of your “white nationalist” casualties.
If you dig further, you’ll find the connection of many of the remaining 70 killings to white nationalism is equally nonexistent.
All you have to do to get thrown in that bin, really, is be a white rural gun owner who has been seen in camo and commits suicide by cop. Bonus points if you once posted something on social media that some snowflake thought was racist.
If I had to make an educated guess at how many of those killings were done by an actual white nationalist based on their observed other activities? Um, three. Possibly as many as six. Equally possibly, zero.
McVeigh’s actions were inspired in part by The Turner Diaries, which “depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and, ultimately, a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites.” (wikipedia) That doesn’t exactly make him a white nationalist, but close enough for me.
You. say he’s really more of a “violent libertarian” but of course libertarians and white racism have been conjoined at the hip since approximately forever.
I’m guessing you don’t make such fine distinctions on the left, between eg Antify and Trotskyites and Maoists and christian socialists etc. You are perfectly happy to lump them into together into one movement. Why is that?
>You. say he’s really more of a “violent libertarian” but of course libertarians and white racism have been conjoined at the hip since approximately forever.
OK, now that you’ve established your malignant idiocy, you can go away.
No no he’s perfectly correct. In this instance ‘white racism’ refers to anything which suggests Bantu might be able to stand on their own two feet or in any way take care of themselves, instead of being maternally nurtured by blessed Baizuo with special handouts like affirmative action and disparate impact.
Libertarians are perfectly ‘racist’ in this sense.
You see, if Bantu can stand on their own…why aren’t they? Why do they keep grovelling at the feet of the DNC?
> That doesn’t exactly make him a white nationalist, but close enough for me.
The motto of the Democrat party.
If this is the SPLC data, they’ve even been caught trying to pass of Islamist and Hispanic gangsters as White Nationalists. Heck, they’ll probably classify all the people killed by Antifa in the current riots as white nationalist victims. As well as any rioters killed by people defending themselves and their property.
Slate is a bad source to begin with and Slate doesn’t even support the assertion you’re making. Slate says “white extremism” in its very broad count, not “right-wing white nationalist extremists”. Did you think people wouldn’t read your sources, or did you just come to troll?
Either way, fuck off, you stupid liar.
If you read McVeigh’s own words, such as here and here, you find he’s not going on about whites, blacks, or race. He’s going on about the murderousness of the US government.
>Slate says “white extremism” in its very broad count, not “right-wing white nationalist extremists”. Did you think people wouldn’t read your sources, or did you just come to troll?
Probably to him all these categories are indistinguishable and blur together into one big BOOGA BOOGA. It’s not dishonesty, exactly, just a dimwitted inability to make relevant distinctions. I have encountered this before.
You know, if we can trust Charlie Hebdo’s coverage of that big storm that flooded Houston, it is heavily implied that Fascist is a synonym for African-American. If Antifa means Fascist as a pejorative for African-American, then it would would be explicitly a white supremacist aligned organization. Of course, if you find that argument entirely persuasive, then you might believe an essay on Mexican Politics that cites only Punch, Mad Magazine, and Harvard Lampoon.
More seriously, Obama mainstreamed critical race theory (CRT), and pushed forward the program of protest and riot to address alleged incidents of police misconduct. Furthermore, CRT purists who think that Asian and Hispanic are too white were legitimized. CRT basically assumes that whites are evil.
African-Americans are around an eighth of the population. That is not enough for rule or bilateral power sharing when combined with an untrusting ideology of racial conflict. So insofar as African-American CRT advocates have political power, it is because they have white political allies. Some of those political allies have also internalized CRT.
How might a white who has internalized CRT behave? Might they act evil and racist, even while believing that they are less evil and less racist than other whites?
The arsons of black and minority property does not seem all that functionally different from arsons of black property in 1921. Will this break apart the political coalition that has made the recent arsons possible? What might such breakdown look like?
Hearsay of the riots leads me to suspect that a lot of these white ‘allies’, communist or otherwise, are going to find themselves converting to a white supremacist belief system.
If CRT does not have a way to forgive non-allied whites who do not think that they are racist, and do not think they have done anything wrong, how can it insist that CRT’s white allies be forgiven for burning down minority neighborhoods for kicks and giggles? When those white allies have their faces rubbed in the fact that their acts differ from the KKK only in having black cheerleaders, what will they do? Are they going to choose to live with that guilt, despite their current philosophy not equipping them to do so? Or are they going to convert to a philosophy that legitimizes it?
You underestimate their skill in sophistry. CRT believers will just declare that the people whose businesses were destroyed in the riots were not really black, whatever their apparent ethnicity, because by opening a business and running it at a profit they had joined the system that oppresses all minorities and thus incurred its guilt. That is, they will say that the violent thug is the true black American, the ideal to which all such ought to aspire, and any black American who tries to live within civilized norms is a traitor to his race.
In other contexts, they already do say that. Acquiring self-discipline, taking thought for the future, and being educated are already called “acting white”. If carrying out that concept allows CRT believers to escape the realization that they’ve personally ground the faces of the poor, they’ll do it and never look back.
It’s cover for perfectly normal ingroup vs. outgroup stuff.
The nonproductive Bantu is a slave. They are dependent on Progressive gimmiedats and thus feel strong pressure to do whatever a proggie feels politically benefits the DNC. If the RNC wins too many elections the Bantu might have to get a job.
The productive business-owning Bantu is an enemy. They have the freedom to vote Republicant. They must be reduced to poverty and dependence ASAP. Occasionally you get a Sowell who actively speaks out against Progressive tyranny. Preposterous! Definitely cannot be allowed.
If they were true believers in critical race theory, they would occasionally do things which are politically nonsensical. They don’t believe in CRT, they believe in “I get mine,” and their favourite theory is whichever can be most deftly twisted to justify that.
Like the Alt-Right. Exactly like, in fact.
Alt-Right are the ones who left the reservation early. Less strongly selected for willingness to sacrifice self in advancement of violence.
But if even a low percentage of the current white ‘allies’ involved in the riots convert later to white supremacist terrorists, we would see a several times increase in the number of white supremacist terrorists. And maybe also organization.
Eric, allow me to properly thank you for being willing to stand up to these thugs and communists.
Several comments:
First and foremost: If you shoot and kill a rioter in Philadelphia, you will be crucified. The actual circumstances won’t matter, unless you have absolutely unambiguous video of the rioter attacking you.
The district attorney in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, is a Soros product. He’s probably never heard of you – but after such an event, he’ll be flooded with calls from your SJW enemies in SF fandom and open source, labelling you a notorious alt-right agitator, open racist, and “gun nut”. Cherry-picked quotations from your writing here (and from commenters here (think James A. Donald) – no distinctions will be made) will be used as “proof”. The national media will happily pile on. So Krasner will railroad you with the greatest enthusiasm. You will be fortunate if you (and Catherine) are merely bankrupted by legal costs and forced to move to another area by continual just-short-of-violent harassment.
Those same enemies will use the event to justify your complete expulsion from all open-source related activities and venues. Anyone associated with you, such as Dave Taht, will be expelled as well, unless they “atone” by groveling apologies and joining in the lynch mob. Projects and tools with your name on them will be purged as well: GPSD, NTPsec, RepoSurgeon.
You will likewise be barred from all fannish activities. Any convention which allows you to attend will be labelled “alt-right”, “racist”, etc, and threatened with violent disruption; hotels will refuse hosting rather than risk attack. Penguicon will probably be closed down – unless the organizers submit completely to SJW demands.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if the SJWs are already planning some of this. Some of them have read this post. They probably imagine you are “going hunting”, and are salivating at the prospect of your scalp as a trophy.
Second point: there is some very good analysis of the situation at National Review Online.
Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes that MN AG Ellison has grossly overreached: the “felony murder” charges against the other three officers stand only if the act of subduing a recalcitrant arrestee is considered criminal assault.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/new-floyd-murder-charges-will-be-tough-to-prove-and-may-imperil-good-cops
Former LAPD officer “Jack Dunphy” notes that much of the body-cam video has been withheld, and that it has become commonplace for any criminal resisting arrest to shout “I can’t breathe” the moment police put their hands on him.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-george-floyd-killing-a-police-officers-view/
More will follow.
> Projects and tools with your name on them will be purged as well: GPSD
That would be one hell of a feat.
Nah, for tools like gpsd that they can’t do without, they’ll just write Eric out of the history of those projects so that they can declare victory. Have you seen the wiki article about him? Apparently he’s just the “administrator of the project page” for gpsd; and no mention at all of libpng, giflib, reposurgeon… they’d rather focus on CML2 so they can make him sound like a washed-up nobody.
I note without further comment the following:
https://2020.penguicon.org/2020/06/statement-on-george-floyd-and-black-lives-matter/
Fucking idiots think this will save them when the Grievance Mob comes for their asses. Hope they don’t enjoy running the con, because when the hard demands come for them to give it up, and they will, they’ll have already painted themselves into a corner without any chance for defense. PenguiCon is lost. Now soon-to-be “FuckWhiteyCon,” with special access areas for the Chosen People and arbitrary rules specifically for punishing the
Jewswhite folk.Argh, this is so infuriating. Does nobody have a god damn spine any more?
Chief Engineer: Captain! Shields are down to 10%, Klingon SJW’s are still demanding more!
Captain: Initiate self-destruct sequence…..
Holy shit.
I have been bashing repeatedly on the cheesecake-stealing bitch in Seattle, and had not bothered questioning my underlying assumption that this was not really a controversial stand to take. Because, really, who the fuck _does_ that when a man has been killed brutally and unjustly?
Uh, nope. Stupid me. The fucking internet LOVES her. She is a god-damned HERO as far as they are concerned.
https://junkee.com/cheesecake-looted-prostests-seattle/255750
Choice quotes (sorry I only have stomach for a few; if you want to subject yourself to more you’ll have to follow the link).
The first and foremost:
> @_cinnamonro11_
> For everyone who’s confused on the concept of looting and what it has to do with/does for the movement— we live in a society where goods and material items have more value than black lives. It’s a profound and legitimate form of protest
I had been holding on to a lot of respect for BLM in light of the horrible incident that sparked all this, and had been trying to maintain sympathy even when the riots turned ugly (private businesses instead of police + govt targets). For everyone who downvoted me in the FInal Warning thread when I said (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8685#comment-2424402) this was a symptom of Gramscian Damage, that the communist mentality had “seeped in deeply and congealed far beneath the surface”, there’s the horse’s mouth for you, not my fault I fucking called it.
> @yammuune
> YALL RLLY ??????? THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY GOD I LOVE THIS. LETS GOOOOOO FUCK ??????????
Hmm. Yeah. We got ourselves a real hotbed of “white supremacist alt right” agitation here, boy I tell you wut. Makes sense, you see a buncha hammers ‘n sickles course ya think of flyover country.
There follows a _huge_ outpouring of praise for the “fellow queen” female news reporter who, as the thief struts by, declares that it’s “unclear where she might have gotten that.” (Damn, if only Jeff Read had been there: “SHE GOT IT AT A KKK RALLY! GET HER!”) Yeah somebody “walk me through it, step by step” here: why would the media support a “white supremacist” in their midst? This isn’t Fox News, it’s Seattle’s local KIRO, they’re gonna _support_ this “white supremacist” thief in her thievery and praise her as a hero? Let me guess, they know it’s a redneck racist, but they’re gonna pretend it’s really antifa (they probably paid her to wear the burka?), but they’re gonna praise her as a hero so antifa looks good, and the lady who is secretly a redneck white supremacist (so secret that everyone knows it) is ok with that because _they_ are secretly there to make antifa look _bad_ because… yaddita yaddita what the FUCK. Man I have been trying to not pay too much attention to all this “Deep State” blather but that’s the Marianas Trench of nutjob conspiracy theories there.
Finally the capper, from the article itself not another Twiitter quote:
> But while this brief moment of hilarity in a very dark time was fun, it shouldn’t distract you from the reasons these protests are happening.
Hmm. Yeah. Fucking HILARIOUS. I’m so sure George Floyd would be pleased with the “seriousness” with which people are taking his horrible fate to heart. “Don’t be DISTRACTED by us burning down all your shit, we got some _really_ good reasons for doing it… oh but that doesn’t mean we have an elaborate theoretical justification for it, like being a bunch of fucking communists taking advantage of a man’s murder to justify burning up some dumb capitalists’ shit, no no any groups systematically burning any shit gotta be them redneck racists.”
Tell you what, why don’t you pussies show some real courage and steal a fucking _bundt_ cake, _then_ I will start taking you as seriously as you deserve. (“Reliable (wink wink) sources say the bundt cake store was actually run by Nazis who fled here after WWII, so yeah don’t worry about what the peaceful protesters (wink wink again) did to the place.”)
Uh, nope. Stupid me. The fucking internet LOVES her. She is a god-damned HERO as far as they are concerned.
I mostly agree with you on this, with one caveat; BLM is not to blame for Cheesecake theft. It’s dumb enough to loot, dumber still to have your picture taken while looting, and dumbest of all is to be treated like some kind of movement hero.
I guest it’s really true; every movement has three kinds of people; leaders, followers, and idiots!
On the other hand, don’t let yourself become too distracted from the fact that the cops became over-agitated and killed someone who was already handcuffed. That’s worth protesting against even if people are dumb!
Well, except right wing protests never seem to have these kinds of problems. Almost as if left wing followers are really a bunch of thugs and wannabe thugs who real just want to loot and burn things, and leadership consists of letting them of their leash and pointing them vaguely in the “correct” direction.
I never said anything about “blame”. Provide support for your claim that this is orchestrated by “racist white supremacists” or fuck off.
> don’t let yourself become too distracted
FUCK YOU. I am not the one who is distracted or distracting. Show me a video of Chauvin hanging from a lamppost, not a girl of “privilege” (ooh, that’ll set em off! “Only we can use that word!” amirite! fuckers) strutting off after looting a store.
I don’t think this is orchestrated by White Supremacists. I’ve said two things consistently throughout this thread.
1.) I suspect that lots of political factions are involved with the rioting, (probably 3-5 major groups in all.)
2.) I don’t think we’ll know who did what for some time. (At the very least we’ll need to wait a month or two for indictments to come out, then for someone to analyze the numbers, and after that we’ll have some idea of what’s really going on.)
Just to clarify: Do I believe that Antifa or Black Block types are responsible for at least some looting or rioting? PROBABLY (I’m more inclined to think Black Block types are involved than Antifa. I’m having a hard time keeping an open mind on the Antifa side of this, because very little evidence of Antifa participation has so far shown up, but that evidence might be sitting in some DA’s outbox, so I’m waiting for actual evidence to make a final judgement.)
Do I believe that White Supremacists are responsible for at least some looting or rioting? YES (There’s been at least some evidence of this from arrest reports, but it might be widely separated individuals. A number of Boogaloo types have been arrested, but the exact racial ideas of these individuals is not yet known.)
Do I believe that jerks of some/no political beliefs are responsible for some of the looting rioting? YES
Do I believe that there are people who are looting/rioting due to purely criminal motives such as stealing stuff? YES
Do I believe that some looting/rioting has taken place purely as a response to police violence against non-violent protestors? YES – This is a well-known phenomenon.
Do I have any idea of the relative numbers of, for example, Antifa vs. White Supremacists vs. Criminals? NO. I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE ABOUT THIS.
And yes, I have definitely argued with people about some of the side issues. But I’m not wedded to a particular theory because I haven’t seen enough evidence. None of this simplifies down to “Antifa against the nice, good police departments of our nation” – or the opposite! The true measure of someone’s cluelessness where these protests are concerned is to try to shove them into a particular box when much of the evidence isn’t available to us yet.
> the nice, good police departments of our nation
If you’re claiming that in any way characterizes _anyhting_ I’ve posted here over the past week or so, let alone my position, you are a lying sack of shit.
No, I’m just pissed because my actual, repeated-multiple-times position keeps getting ignored. Argue with Troutwaxer. Don’t argue with Troutwaxer-in-your*-head.
*Not your head in particular, darrin.
> > @yammuune
Ah crap, I failed to notice the text got mangled by their fancy dumbass Twitter fonts. The quote reads:
> ALL RLLY LOOTING THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY GOD I LOVE THIS. LETS GOOOOOO FUCK CAPITALISM
Even if the actual number of Antifa bitches is 60% of their follower count that’s still a huge number for just New York.
https://imgur.com/a/gJV2pH4
One must keep in mind, as well, that AntiFa is not a monolithic organization but rather a loose confederacy of independent groups operating under the same flag. To be a “member of AntiFa” one need only claim it to be so.
Black Bloc as operating uniform is about the only thing externally common among the groups, to such a degree that using a metric of “Black Bloc == AntiFa” is probably correct within a reasonable margin of error, at least in the U.S.
The folks who will claim “you don’t know that’s AntiFa!” are trying to convince us not to believe our lying eyes. If it looks like AntiFa, talks like AntiFa, and acts like AntiFa, well…
Wow, just saw a bunch of Russian news stories [*] about the rioting that has broken out from the George Floyd protests, not here in the US, but…
In the UK.
In BELGIUM, for crying out loud.
If anything, what I saw of the crowds attacking police (and destroying stores of course) was _more_ vicious than anything I’ve seen locally. Which I’m trying to wrap my little walnut around.
Is there that much police brutality, let alone racially motivated police brutality, in the EU? I thought it was the disgusting little US of A that had all of those problems? Does the EU actually have a conservative right-leaning government, and Winter (plus the entire mass media) has been yanking my chain for decades?
I claimed before that complete disregard for “private” property, and inability to distinguish destruction of said “private” property from actions against the “state”, was symptomatic of communist i.e. left-leaning political thought. This was pooh-poohed as being stupidly naive, because of course it’s much more likely that redneck white supremacists would _dress up_ as dumbass “antifa” wannabe college kids and do exactly the set of things you’d expect an antifa rioter to do, in order to “make antifa look bad”… even though, as I just cited above, the media LOVES what these burka-clad “FUCK CAPITALISM YEAH WOO!!!” white supremacist looters are doing.
So… the liberal paradise that is the EU is actually chock full of white supremacists, who have adopted the same ass-backwards idiotic tactics as the American white supremacists by dressing up as leftist “bored now, let’s burn down capitalism!” red guarders? Despite, again, the media actually having a field day about “how splendid it is to see the flower of European society wiping itself out with such pluck and tenacity”?
Boy, when the chickens come home to roost, they REALLY roost, all over the place.
[*] My wife is Russian, so we have a few Russian channels added to our cable TV package.
> Is there that much police brutality, let alone racially motivated police brutality, in the EU?
I’m sure you’re being rhetorical here, but, well, yes. Have you seen the footage of French police putting down the yellow vest protesters? (for most people probably not, since the international media has tried so hard to ignore it) Holy crow! Or the Spanish forces bashing folks during the recent Catalonian independence movement?
Frankly, I’ll take U.S. policing as it is now over EU policing any day of the week. Those guys are brutal.
> Have you seen the footage of French police putting down the yellow vest protesters?
TBH, no, I hadn’t. But then my other question stands: either all the rhetoric I’ve heard here over the years about the EU being a left liberal paradise is a lie and it’s actually an alt-right conservative enclave…
… or else a brutal police force actually _is_ a direct consequence of leftist government policy.
(Waiting for Winter or whoever to rush in and explain to me how Belgium is a hotbed of ultra-conservative ideology. Can’t possibly be anyone _else’s_ fault now can it?)
If it weren’t for all the death and destruction, it would be kinda fun to watch the experiment play itself out. From an engineering perspective, “when the shit hits the fan” is the best time to get a detailed perspective on the various failure modes of the fan.
My knowledge here is more sketchy than I would like, so take this with a salt lick. I am open to correction. As I understand it, there is a part of EU-wide policing (not necessarily the local level stuff maintained by each country internally) that utilizes national transfers for handling law enforcement. That is for example, Spanish forces would get sent to, say, France or Belgium or whatever, and French forces would get sent to Germany, etc. These police in particular are known for their intense brutality and disregard for the citizenry. The little direct research I have done (vs. the info I’ve picked up by osmosis following EU-related stories from EU sources) says that only certain countries are party to this arrangement; I’m not sure which ones. I’m probably confusing multiple situations, though.
> or else a brutal police force actually _is_ a direct consequence of leftist government policy.
I suspect it’s more cultural, i.e. general authoritarian disregard for the peasantry, than necessarily political.
>That is for example, Spanish forces would get sent to, say, France or Belgium or whatever, and French forces would get sent to Germany, etc. These police in particular are known for their intense brutality and disregard for the citizenry.
You are almost certainly not talking about the European equivalent of U.S. civil police, but about what are generically called gendarmes – that’s the French word, it’s “carabinieri” in Italian, other places they may be called “Civil Guard” or “National Guard”.
These are paramilitary police units originally tasked with bandit suppression and low-level counterinsurgency; in recent times they tend to own domestic counterterrorism. Sometimes they report to the national chief of civil police, if there is one. Sometimes they are an arm of the military. They are not like the U.S. National guard in that they don’t report to provincial governments, they’re more like an FBI with uniforms and armored cars.
In some countries they are the most prestigious and least corrupt arm of law enforcement; in others they are notoriously brutal. The closest U.S. equivalent I can imagine would be if the Texas Rangers operated nationally.
It is not plausible that EU countries would second civil police to each other, the work they do relies too intensely on localized knowledge and connections. It is on the other hand very plausible that they might swap gendarmerie units in any situation where they’re dealing with widespread civil unrest.
That jives with my knowledge, yes. The info I’m pulling on comes from commentary during the first six to nine months of the yellow vests. Some folks were claiming that the forces being brought to bear were not necessarily French but at least some were EU gendarmes, as explanation for why they were being as unrelentingly violent as they were. I cannot speak to the veracity of the claim, and I don’t really care about the exact makeup of those forces. The police response to that protest before AntiFa types and their nationalist analogues started to take advantage of it was awful enough.
But hey, that’s Macron’s France for you. “Let them drive Teslas!”
I researched this topic myself once, it can be confusing to a US reader because we have no really similar institutions.
These paramilitary police are medieval holdovers with very convoluted institutional histories. (I specifically looked at France.)
I’m not as familiar with their history as you, but they strike me as the kind of thing that would date back from the age of absolutism, rather than the medieval period.
I didn’t really dig in too much, this sort of thing can lead to really, really extended random link walks….
But the modern gendarmerie traces its roots back to the organizations under both the Marshall of France and the Constable of France (position established 1060 AD), with various mergers and repurposings and renamings along the way.
>the kind of thing that would date back from the age of absolutism, rather than the medieval period.
That’s broadly correct. While he original French gens d’armes had traditions going back further, their modern functions and organization were lain down during the early modern period of state formation.
What spread the idea around was the brief period of Napoleonic puppet kingdoms in Europe. The conquerors imposed the Code Napoleon and French-style police organization, including gendarmeries, where they could. After the Peace of Vienna the restored monarchies found both too useful to give up.
“It is not plausible that EU countries would second civil police to each other…”
That didn’t bother the producers of The Mallorca Files, a new cop buddy show from the BritBox streaming channel. The protagonists are a British detective (uptight woman) and German detective (laid-back dude) “seconded” to the Spanish police on the island of Mallorca. They are even issued Spanish badges.
> … or else a brutal police force actually _is_ a direct
> consequence of leftist government policy.
It’s a consequence of *government* policy. Sometimes leftist, sometimes not leftist.
There’s two different “brutal policing”, one is when the police are outnumbered by a violent crowd–when police have less force at their disposal than the crowd (should the crowd decide to use it).
The other is when police are dealing with a criminal or group of criminals have have parity to overwhelming force.
In the former you are “brutal” because you cannot afford to lose. You have a lot in front of you and you need to sort it out as fast as possible.
In the latter it gets more complicated. Some things look brutal because it really *IS* the safest way to handle the problem. Kneeling on someone’s neck that way *generally* doesn’t kill them. In this case *as I understand it*, part of the problem was how the other officers were restraining Floyd–it wasn’t just the pressure on the neck, it was the alignment of the body. Had Floyd been in a slightly different position he probably wouldn’t have died and the Democrats would have had to find some other excuse.
And of course sometimes there are cops who just like causing pain, or who are genuinely racist pricks. Generally that’s hard to hide though.
In 2011, the German police fired eighty-five rounds of ammunition.
Total.
For the entire country.
For the entire year.
An average Tuesday in a single large American city can well exceed 85 shots.
I don’t know about other countries, but compared to American cops, the Germans are models of restraint.
To put these 80 shots by the German police in perspective, with four times the population, the US police killed over 1100 people in 2018.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
From the same study, where the US police was involved in 996 fatal shootings, with a fifth of the population, the evil French police, was involved in 26 fatal shootings.
Indeed, the US police is not your friend. And whomever they protect and serve, it does not seem to be the people in the street.
> In 2011, the German police fired eighty-five rounds of ammunition.
Because Germany is all of Europe, right? Are you actually an idiot or do you just pretend to be one on the Internet?
@ktk
” Are you actually an idiot or do you just pretend to be one on the Internet?”
Collecting this data for the EU is not easy, just as it is for the USA. But I have added the numbers that I could find. Go to the link and add the killings for Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries
On a combined population of 320 million there are 53 killings by law enforcement officers in these countries.
The countries are: Malta, Luxembourg, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, United Kingdom, Poland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland
This is pretty close to the total population of the USA and three quarters of the population of EU+Switzerland. If anyone can add numbers for the missing countries, please feel free to do so.
I’m going to toss this out before I head for home, then when I get home I may go back and read everything that’s accumulated in the last couple days, (or may not if I’m tired) but I was thinking about the connections between racism, the War on Drugs, and police brutality, and I’m wondering whether there might be some working-together possible between leftists wanting police reform and Libertarians wanting decriminalization of various substances and behaviors? Any thoughts?
So long as leftists keep banging the disarmament drum, and the big government drum, and all the things about leftists that are on the polar opposite to libertarian thought, I pretty much doubt it. Further, the idea that police reform is a leftist ideal and not a classic-liberal/libertarian one in the first place is a fuckin’ laughable co-opting.
From the perspective of a libertarian, you’re asking us to willingly work with people who hate us and who we perceive as lying snakes, to accomplish things that are already in our bailiwick, thus using us to give them more power. No thanks.
>I’m wondering whether there might be some working-together possible between leftists wanting police reform and Libertarians wanting decriminalization of various substances and behaviors? Any thoughts?
I’m not willing to ally on anything with what leftists have become in 2020.
After years of being the relative moderate who said to other gunfolks that talk of American Civil War 2.0 was overheated nonsense, I’m now living in a world where the hard Marxists of BLM and Antifa are literally burning down American cities and forming “autonomous zones” in the ones they haven’t torched yet.
Ten thousand dead Communists from now might be a plausible time to build bridges with the remains of a shattered, humbled, and decimated left wing. Now isn’t.
Also, they’re not even being honest about what they want, e.g., if you press them on what they mean by “defund the police”, they’ll admit it means some vaguely worded “reforms”. Given their history I suspect they mean make our police more like the British police, i.e., the ones who won’t do anything to stop Muslim grooming gangs, but will arrest you for “hate speech” if you criticize said grooming gangs on social media.
I was watching DarkHorse Podcast #22, which is really creepy because they were at Evergreen, and they’ve been warning people that Evergreen disease was spreading.
One of the things they talk about is coming up with a proper name for this. It isn’t quite like the traditional Motte & Bailey, but it isn’t super far off. I think they settled on “Above and Below” which is apparently used online a bit by or about communism, but is hard to find (try searching for it – I dare you).
The basic idea is that they make a phrase ambiguous by intentionally picking an extreme, but then letting some people say that it isn’t serious, it really means something much less crazy. This creates a spectrum, and each person can, in their own head, set the slider where they are comfortable. This lets the extremists take advantage of a huge mob of useful idiots, very few of which are necessarily in agreement with the extreme position.
And can you imagine the coming cognitive dissonance when millions of chumps wake up in Mogadishu and figure out that they really were marching to abolish the police after all?
I don’t think the people running the protests are dumb enough to let their people actually abolish the police. They need some force to protect them from retaliation form all the conservative gun owners they’re pissing off.
They might allow the police to be defunded after a proper stasi has been set up.
True. As I was saying, they’re only interested in defunding the police departments if they can replace them with their own.
Bingo. The deep love for cancel culture on the part of the ctrl-left shows they would be setting up a Stasi, and volunteering for it, in a heartbeat.
I think “defund the police” means different things to different people, but there are some common ideas:
First, demilitarize the police. Get rid of the armored cars, the battering rams, the automatic weapons, etc. Police should be understood to be civilians.
Second, move things like containment of crazy people and handling drug users/sellers (and possibly other social problems) to some other department (along with some of the police budget.) The police don’t have the training to de-escalate a situation with a schizophrenic/hallucinating patient, but if you sent a couple psych nurses instead… the logic of this should be obvious.
Third, get rid of “warrior”-type trainings and instant demands for compliance and teach cops to de-escalate problems instead of making them worse. I’m aware that this can be both difficult and dangerous, and it’s not always the answer, and I think everyone else understands that too, but an attempt to de-escalate to be the default. (Consider how much not de-escalating costs the U.S. annually – NY alone pays out around 70,000,000/year in “bad cop” money.)
Fourth, get rid of “Qualified Immunity.”
Fifth, change the way cops are investigated after a violent incident. Right now, due to the rules police unions have negotiated, all the advantages are with the officer who committed the act, and this needs to change (you can find the particulars elsewhere; I don’t have the time to dig them up right now.)
Sixth, change the level of influence the policeman’s union has over policy. My own take on this is that the union should have influence over wages, working conditions, relations with supervisors, how it should be handled when someone is given an illegal order, etc., but remove union influence from the process of investigating illegal/violent acts on the part of cops.
Seventh, get cops out of schools and use the money to replace them with guidance counselors, school nurses, psychologists, etc. Nobody should be jailed for ordinary kid stuff, which is what happens when a “school resource officer” is pressed to justify their existence. (Or far worse, turns out to be racist.)
Eighth, if your police department absolutely refuses to reform, disband it and start from scratch. (The number of people advocating anarchy is vanishingly small.)
Attached to all this, and driving all this, is the idea that it should be much, much easier to both fire bad cops and make sure they never work in policing again. Consider Chauvin; not only did he have something like twenty complaints against him, but he was also allowed to train other police officers. This makes no sense and never, ever should have been allowed to happen.
Two points:
Not one of your policy proposals here actually involves reducing the police department’s budget. So, if these are what’s meant by “defund the police”, the people using that slogan are idiots. I choose to believe that “defund the police” means exactly what it says, and the people saying it really do want fewer police, or less capable police.
And, of your seven things to change, 2), 5) and 6) are direct results of Democratic initiatives; 7) is an indirect result of such initiatives, largely in public education; 4) is a judicial creation, crafted to protect the police from politically driven lawsuits, which the Democrats have otherwise expanded and encouraged; and 1) and 3) have been – well, a bipartisan effort. That makes 5 out of 7 that your friends are chiefly responsible for, and none that they’ve opposed.
For instance, to implement 2) we would have to reopen the insane asylums, and reinstate the laws that allowed people to be kept in them indefinitely if they weren’t capable of caring for themselves or were a threat to others. Read up sometime on who was responsible for closing the asylums, and kicking the patients out to live on the streets.
It’s not that anything you suggest is a bad idea. The problem is that most of it can’t be done by Democrats, because it would involve repudiating most of the party’s activities since John Kennedy’s presidency.
First of all, these aren’t my proposals. I’m relaying the proposals of others. I’m not sure what my own policy prescriptions would be – this is clearly a very hard problem I’d like to think things through before endorsing anything.
Second, all of the proposals I’m relaying would be funded by removing funds from the local PD and moving the money to other programs.
So the idea is to have smaller police departments with better skills and less prejudice, and invest the savings in programs which work better. Once again, I’d like to think things through before deciding I like any ideas.
Closing the asylums was probably the worst Democratic policy of the last fifty years. It was well-intentioned, but the ability to give people medication and retrain them in the community didn’t materialize due to Nimby-ism – for which most of the people involved are blameless, and I can certainly understand the concerns with having a halfway-house for psychotics in a neighborhood filled with children.
On the other hand, spending the rest of one’s life in an asylum isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, and brain-chemistry is one of those very hard problems which we can’t quite solved yet.
As for the rest of it, we’re a spoiled society where the major concern is the bottom line and we’re unwilling to accept that being decent human beings involves an element of risk. Enough said on that, I think… getting morose.
Of all those proposals, only reopening asylums would require spending any money. Everything else is a change in policy or law, and wouldn’t cost the taxpayer a dime.
And if anyone shouting “defund the police” actually means “let’s build insane asylums and put the homeless in them”, I am Marie of Romania.
And if anyone shouting “defund the police” actually means “let’s build insane asylums and put the homeless in them”, I am Marie of Romania.
I didn’t think I said that and I don’t think anyone else did either. And once again, I’m reporting, not advocating.
If it were done properly the reduction in police arsenals would actually increase their revenue.
There is a ton of pent up demand for machineguns.
Shortly before I left the area, there was a small local controversy over the Wayne, NJ police department ‘losing’ a full-auto MP5.
It seems the department *had* three such lovelies on the books, until one of them could no longer be accounted for.
So far as I know they never did find the misplaced item. I wonder how much whoever it was got for it. Must have been a lot.
What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable. Closing the books (the full-auto registry) was a compromise with the forces of ‘reasonable gun control’. Needless to say it was never enough.
The (2) and (3) and to a certain extent the other that point in a similar direction were tried during the late 1960s and 1970s. The result was a massive spike in crime, and ultimately a backlash. This is the era from which the phrase “a Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged” come from. The people pushing these demands seem determined to relearn the lessons of that era the hard way.
No, it doesn’t. It’s three words.
The people on the streets chanting it want police GONE.
Their neighbors do not, but they do. The Democrats at the top of the food chain want to spin that as something else because they know that 90 percent of the people in this country–if you sat down with paper and crayons and spelled it out for them–would want nothing to do with it.
The other 10 percent are the criminals.
I used to think police were Civilians, but in many ways they are not.
It is not that they *have* the armored cars and the battering rams, for any large metropolitan area those things have a legitimate purpose–counter terrorist response.
The problem is that they are *used* way too often because police *are* a paramilitary and many of them like to play those games.
Same for automatic weapons.
Your ignorance in this area is STUNNING. Seriously.
Do you know any psych nurses who are willing to go into East LA at 10:30 on a friday night because there’s a call of some dude acting like he’s dusted?
Police get that job because *NO ONE ELSE WANTS IT*. The cops don’t want it. The two cops in my current roster of associates both *hate* fighting naked people in 7/11. They would LOVE to give that job over to someone else, but guess what? NO ONE wants to fight naked people in 7/11.
Again, your ignorance is amazing. Police are taught “verbal judo”, how to control situations and how to “de-escalate”. Some cops think this is bullshit, and all of them know that it only works when the guy they’re dealing with doesn’t really want to fight.
But too many subcultures have “beat a cop” as a status symbol.
How about this, how about you teach people NOT TO PICK FIGHTS WITH ARMED POLICE?
How about we start telling “gansta rappers” that they’re fucking unacceptable, that starting shit with cops is NOT cool?
The thing is that de-escalating won’t have the consequences you think it will. There are probably 1 to 2 million police/citizen interactions every day that are relatively polite, that do not involve force or threats of force, and have non-violent outcomes.
It is only about 2-3 percent of people who are *violent* criminals. If you try to de-escalate with them they will either see it as a sign of weakness and stomp you, or won’t notice it and will get in the first punch. This is just how it is.
There is a way that NYC could cut that in half in about 3 weeks.
Simply state that from x date forward *EVERY* case has to go in front of a judge and jury. You’d see the number of cases cut in half.
See, here’s what big cities do–they calculate the cost of the trial, add some “we could lose” fudge factor and then any time a lawyer sues for less than that number they take a quick look at the case and if it’s not *complete* bollocks they pay it out. They think it’s way cheaper that way.
The problem is that the local lawyers know what that number is, and know what they can get away with. In San Jose in 2002 that number as 35k. If you could get a cop on video pushing you out of the way–even if it was for your own good–you could get 25k paycheck (the lawyer got 10k).
Make every case go to trial and you cut that in half.
Yeah, the blind pig occasionally finds a truffle.
This is another Chesterton’s Fence thing. You don’t understand why those rules are there but you want to tear them down.
The police who are actually out there on the street enforcing the laws have *always* had a difference of understanding with the guys who ride to work from gated communities and rich neighborhoods in chauffeured limousines. Those rules exist because *way* too often the Politicians are willing to throw the cops–who are just enforcing the laws the pols made–under the bus. You find similar rules with most unions, including teachers unions and bus drivers unions.
So no one gets to be on the cops side.
Just how divorced from reality are you? The schools already have massive numbers of counselors and psychologists. They already have nurses on hand.
The “School Resource Officers” are often there *AT THE SCHOOLS REQUEST because they’re having gang and drug problems. And no, a kid shouldn’t be arrested for “ordinary kid stuff”, but it’s often the *school* administration that insists on it, because that “ordinary kid stuff” is something that offends their politics–like the idiot teacher who noticed a *bb gun* over a home school video session and called the police.
Hell, let’s de-fund the *schools* and start sending checks to the parents to arrange their own schooling.
They change their tune remarkably fast when someone armed starts defending himself or his property from them or otherwise threatens *them* with violence.
‘Ten thousand dead Communists from now’ may just become my new motto.
> I’m not willing to ally on anything with what leftists have become in 2020.
I’m sure they’ll return the favour; the Left cannot even make workable alliances with themselves. Their purity-spiral games and Twitter oneupmanship will not allow that to happen. You gain currency on the Left by showing other people how much purer you are than some other person. You gain bonus points if you talk about how someone has “erased” some person’s identity, and you go home with a fuckin giant teddy bear if you close the loop by stomping on someone who hints that purity wars are totally counter-productive (look up “Nathan Taylor” combined with “knitting” for more of that).
Effective political movements work by quickly organising over one issue, and disbanding as soon as their work is done. From an outsider’s perspective, this is why the gun rights movement in the United States is so damn effective; people from every possible socioeconomic background with every possible kind of political difference outside of “I like my guns and I want to keep them” can organise to get laws struck down or new ones enacted or to do a bit of good ol’ civil disobedience, and nobody in that temporary coalition is going to worry that they’re going to be cast out because one time they missed out one of the bytes from “LGBTQIA+” on Twitter, or that they said that women have periods. (If anyone is unfamiliar with why I said that last one look up why the Left currently hate JK Rowling.)
>I’m wondering whether there might be some working-together possible between leftists wanting police reform and Libertarians wanting decriminalization of various substances and behaviors? Any thoughts?
The fundamental political axiom of libertarianism is that government is inherently evil, and the only possible argument in favor of government is that it’s a necessary, lesser evil. The disputes between libertarians are about just how little government is necessary, with answers ranging from “a lot less than what we currently have” to “none at all.”
The fundamental political axiom of left-wing progressivism is that government is inherently good, and that government only does evil when captured by evil anti-government forces. Since government is good, then more-government equals more-good, at least as long as that capture by the anti-government forces of evil can be avoided.
That means any alliance between libertarians and progressive leftists will be at best tactical and temporary. Given the current state of affairs, this libertarian’s answer is Nope to the Nope, and any libertarian who answers differently has to be considered a dangerously poisoned kool-aid drinker.
>The fundamental political axiom of libertarianism is that government is inherently evil,
I think you are mixing anarchists and libertarians. I think most libertarians want the government to enforce contracts and protect property.
>any alliance between libertarians and progressive leftists will be at best tactical and temporary.
Is that bad? IMHO, one of the practical failings “Movement Libertarians” has long been their inability to cooperate politically with others. All too often, they act like they prefer failure to any compromise.
In my experience, “compromise” with prog-left types means giving them everything they want and getting spit on in return. I can see compromise with conservatives and the modern Republicans, but never the left.
> their inability to cooperate politically with others
Obviously the leftists in Chicago have no need at all to “compromise” with me, since they outnumber me about three million to one.
But even supposing you could somehow convince them to come to the table and attempt a compromise in the first place… what form would that compromise take? “Ok, you can keep strong gun control, but in exchange… uh.. could I have… um…”
Which other of my rights oops, sorry, which of my _privileges_ (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8643#comment-2405354) should I beg back, and what _else_ am I losing in order to bring about this “compromise”?
Of course I get that “a good compromise leaves everybody mad” as Calvin said. But asking the left for “police reform” while not even the Bill of Privileges is upheld basically unpacks to “please don’t beat us, we’ll be good.” If you want to call that a “compromise”, then thanks, we’re _already_ kind of compromising in that sense.
None of my rights – which I assert beyond debate – are up for negotiation.
Any attempt to assault my standard is an act of war.
Period.
> what form would that compromise take?
Repackaging something you want into a form that fits a major party’s current obsession. Every special interest group around (but libertarians) is out there doing this right now to advance their political goals. The major party mobs desperately want to ‘do something.’
If you can get 80% of what you want right now, don’t say no to the deal just because it’s not 100% (a typical “L”ibertarian bargaining strategy) Take the easy money and move on. Ditto if the deal is only 80% good, 20% bad… it’s still a net positive deal for you. For now, I’m just asking that “L”libertarians not be losers.
And note, none of this means you need to work with the same party on the next silly thing that comes down the pike.
> If you can get 80% of what you want right now, don’t say no to the deal just because it’s not 100% (a typical “L”ibertarian bargaining strategy)
Uh, I’m not being offered “80% of Constitutional Carry” (whatever that would even mean), I am being “offered” (read “imposed and enforced”) 0%. Calling that me “saying no to the deal” is kind of a weird use of the word “deal” in my opinion.
Oh wait, I see now, I just need to “repackage” Constitutional Carry into a form that fits the Democratic party’s “current obsession” with strong gun control. That’s actually a clever idea. I have to work out a few minor design flaws in my perpetual motion machine first, but after that will get right on it.
The fundamental political axiom of left-wing progressivism is that government is inherently good, and that government only does evil when captured by evil anti-government forces.
This is an awful parody of leftwing thought. Consider that there are multiple sets of freedoms. Some subset of all possible freedoms give advantage to business owners. Some subsets give advantage to governments. Some subsets give advantage to ordinary people. Some subset gives advantage to religious authorities…
The thing governments do is decide who gets the advantages and who doesn’t. The leftwing ideal isn’t that “all government is good” or that “we will use the government to impose complete communist control” (another awful parody of leftwing thought) but that government should be used to give ordinary people – voters and taxpayers – the maximum practical number of advantages while they navigate a difficult world.
Thus unions. Thus laws against prejudice. Thus laws against anonymous campaign contributions. Thus laws which state that your employer can’t fire you for attending a demonstration. Etc. The idea isn’t to take complete control of everything. The idea is to make sure everyone experiences the minimum amount of oppression and has the maximum freedom. So there’s no leftwing argument against getting rid of a law. If a law is creating disadvantage for the ordinary person, you throw it out.
So stopping the drug war isn’t a problem for the left. Stopping the War on Whores is a little more problematic, because there’s a huge faction which is of both the sex=yucky and the whoring=sexually_oppressed opinion and they’ve got a certain amount of power – but the idea isn’t remotely outside leftist thought.
> Consider that there are multiple sets of freedoms.
Um, no? Would you like to provide your definition of “freedoms”? Because it sure sounds a lot more like “privileges.”
> Some subsets give advantage to ordinary people.
What is an “ordinary people”? Oh, I see you define it below.
> The thing governments do is decide who gets the advantages and who doesn’t.
You are, therefore, asserting that it is governments de facto job to pick winners and losers? Fascinating, but not surprising.
Governments are tools used by one group of people to violently coerce other groups of people into doing what the group in power want. That’s it. Attempting to wrest control of this power for your own noble (pfft) ends is just attempting to claim the One Ring for yourself. Altogether evil, even with desire for good.
> The leftwing ideal … [is] that government should be used to give ordinary people – voters and taxpayers – the maximum practical number of advantages while they navigate a difficult world.
Huh. You actually defined something! But, wouldn’t “voters and taxpayers” be, well, all citizens? Which puts paid to your ridiculous claim of “multiple sets of freedoms.” The way you talk, I guess Some People Are More Ordinary Than Others. Not at all surprised.
> Thus unions.
When union membership (or payment of administration fees) is non-voluntary, this resolves to “no freedom of association, no freedom to enter into contracts.”
> Thus laws against prejudice.
Outside of government policy, this resolves to “No freedom of association or expression.”
> Thus laws against anonymous campaign contributions.
“No freedom of speech, no right to privacy.”
> Thus laws which state that your employer can’t fire you for attending a demonstration.
“No freedom of association, no freedom to enter into contracts.”
> Etc.
Wait for it…
> The idea isn’t to take complete control of everything.
Could have fooled me! No, it’s just to take control of “Etc.” Don’t worry, we run the government with what we, right now, decide is the bare minimum of et cetera! Sure, that may change in the next minute to suit our trendy social engineering goals, but hush, child, your betters are talking.
> The idea is to make sure everyone experiences the minimum amount of oppression and has the maximum freedom.
By maximizing the amount of oppression from the government and removing as many liberties as they can get away with. Uh-huh. Ash nazg durbatuluk!
> If a law is creating disadvantage for the ordinary person, you throw it out.
Which I have yet to see someone on the “left wing” actually do. I mean, I’ve seen conservatives/Republicans try to do it, but every time they do so, the Democrats and their media cronies screech like howler monkeys. So, I dunno. Best I can figure is, you really do believe some people are more ordinary than others.
> So stopping the drug war isn’t a problem for the left.
So much so that they haven’t bothered to do it, even given ample opportunity. I call shenanigans.
Oh yes, the “freedom” to enter into contracts with binding-arbitration clauses that guarantee that large, powerful corporations will always prevail over individuals, who must either assent to file their grievances singly and individually and accept whatever outcome the corporate-sponsored arbitrator decides, or not take the job to begin with. Pardon me while I laugh.
Collective bargaining protects individuals. It should be protected.
Jeff, use the brain i know you have. I specified non-voluntary. If a person doesn’t have a choice to be in a union or not, they lose their autonomy and must work at the pleasure of the union. This has a whole host of really shit failure modes for individuals.
Unions are fine, I support the right to unionize. What I don’t support is the apparatus of the state being used to coerce membership or payment into one.
Then you have the problem of free-riders; people who got a better deal but didn’t actually make a contribution and people who aren’t union members make collective bargaining much harder.
So then, if the union isn’t able to be persuasive enough to get people to sign up, we just have to let them force people to comply? Yeah, no, fuck that. I am not a slave.
This also assumes the union is acting in my best interest, which is not necessarily true.
OTOH, in states where union shops are allowed – that is, where paying union dues is a condition of employment – the unions are invariably useless when it comes to protecting workers, and frequently corrupt. You see, they don’t actually have to do anything to earn dues, so they do whatever strikes their fancy. Often that turns out to be agitating for Left causes that have nothing to do with workers’ problems, and which the dues payers strongly oppose.
The existence of employees who didn’t agree to the collective bargain keeps the union honest, and focused on its proper mission.
> Then you have the problem of free-riders; people who got a better deal but didn’t actually make a contribution and people who aren’t union members make collective bargaining much harder.
After pondering this more, it has occurred to me that this concern reveals something rather sinister.
Unions are, ostensibly, about worker protection, yes? Collective bargaining to stem abuse by management, yes? Ok.
If this is true, then an Ideal Union should not care that a given worker is or is not a member, because their mission is to also protect even them!
If someone claims that others are being “free-riders” or “making collective bargaining” (aka “the existence of the union”) more difficult, they are implicitly subordinating all workers to that abstract union corporate entity! It therefore is simply not about the workers, but rather the existence and perpetuation of the union itself!
You would be tearing down one false idol (the employer-employee contract) and raising another in its place (a specific union membership), and then declaring that no others may be raised! Pretty fucking evil shit, really.
I was about to post much the same argument, but I can summarize it into one word: “monopsony”. When union membership is mandatory, economically there is no difference between the [employee / union / employer] relationships versus those of [contractor / agency / client]. Therefore, as a contract agency controlls what tasks its’ contractors will work by buying their labor, a legally mandated union should likewise be viewed as the buyer of its members labor (and then apportions this to the putative employers).
As you point out, not mandating membership then breaks this monopsony position of the union and restores it to the intended relationship.
Except notably absent from your “thussing” is “oh but no you may _not_ possess a tool to actually defend your person from violence, that is the job of the Very Strong and Authoritative Police Force with which we will provide you to help you keep track of which freedoms you still have. (And don’t start whining about that silly old piece of paper claiming you used to have that right; it’s OUR job as government to decide “who gets advantages and who doesn’t”.)
Man, your “awful parody of leftwing thought” sure does sound awesome compared to the ones folks here are coming up with. “Who do I make the check out to” as Morty said.
>This is an awful parody of leftwing thought.
I’m sure you think so, but they are still more accurate assessments of the _results_ of left-wing thought. Meawhile, what you’re saying is the naiive brochure view of leftism, the ‘sounds good’ part, and even that is ‘sounds good until you think about it a little more’. Of course, most leftist footsoldiers think they are in service of these ideals, but in practice, what you call parody always seems to happen ultimately. See also: ‘useful idiots’.
Someone said under another post here IIRC, that it’s like people playing with fire, people who don’t know fire is dangerous. Yes, government power could theoretically be used to do some good, at least on the surface, but you have to think about failure modes, and not just plan for the happy path.
I don’t expect every policy to be successful, particularly when the next person to be elected to same post might reverse/sabotage that policy. But Trump’s current plan is to have a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma on Juneteenth. I’d accept this as one of those stupid, incompetent Trump-style coincidences except that he’s also planning to formally accept the GOP nomination on the anniversary of Axe-Handle Sunday in Jacksonville. At that point the dogwhistles get much too loud to ignore!
I’d expect him to follow up with a barnstorming tour of Rosewood Florida, Colfax Louisiana, Elaine Arkansas, and East St. Louis…
Yes, the Democrats fuck up sometimes – governing is famously difficult – but so do the Republicans, and I’ll take the party which dropped the dogwhistle in the 1960s and hasn’t again picked it up!
So you’re more concerned over a supposed “dog whistle” than the actual affect of policies, for example, the fact the Democrat mayors are currently letting their radicals burn down their own cities?
I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a Republican mayor of a large city. Sorry, but I’m just drawing a blank!
I don’t see how this relates to the post you replied to.
Nevertheless, to answer your question Mayor Kevin Faulconer of San Diego. Which unlike the Democrat controlled cities has declining crime rates and responded to the rioters by increasing rather than decreasing police presence, and thus kept them from destroying the city.
There was looting in San Diego.
https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2020/06/01/business-owners-assess-damage-from-looting-in-aftermath-of-downtown-protest/
https://www.cbs8.com/video/news/local/people-looting-a-cvs-in-downtown-san-diego-during-protests/509-c3bd82f1-cb92-42cf-a285-ca3cdbe3a173
Do you just make shit up? If you want a place without looting and riots, try Camden, NJ. They also disbanded their police dept in 2013.
You say:
> Do you just make shit up?
He said:
> responded to the rioters
English, motherfucker! Do you read it?!
Sort of. The county took over policing and there are now more cops in Camden that there were in 2013.
And a Democratic Mayor – protests only, no riots, no looting!
I’m morally certain that everyone in Jacksonville has forgotten that episode, since I never heard of it before you mentioned it. So the only people who would read any significance into it are the ones already inclined to see Racism! in anything a Republican politician does. You know, crazy people.
If you hear a dogwhistle, you’re a dog. If you see allusions to racism in something when the intended audience doesn’t, it shows you are obsessed with race, not the intended audience.
It took me a second to work through the implications of all this, but you do realize that you just insisted that Trump’s schedule is being made by crazy people. (Hint: I’ll settle for an admission that whoever makes his schedule is incompetent!)
No, you twit. I said you are a crazy person, for claiming that Trump’s schedulers were thinking of an obscure episode in civil rights activism that almost everyone in the USA has long since forgotten when they prepared his schedule.
Are you getting enough sleep before you post? Or drinking heavily? Those can cause problems with reading comprehension.
> Are you getting enough sleep before you post? Or drinking heavily?
Nah, he’s just a religious lunatic repeating the Holy Truth of his priesthood.
I mean, unless he can provide some actual, you know, evidence of his assertion that the event was planned on that date for that reason. But we all know he bloody well can’t.
It’s like a bizarro-world version of Christian numerology. “The event is on The Date! This is a Sign!”
I’m sure you guys are having fun, but I didn’t make the schedule – and you might ask yourself who did? There is (or at least there should be) a whole White House operation aimed at making sure stuff like this doesn’t happen.
Haha, for real? I mean, sure, there’s endless factors that go into acquiring a venue, scheduling, figuring out logistics, and so on, but no, obviously, since it’s on The Date That Offends You, that must be the only reason why!
Shit, Trout, why don’t you just take your psychopathy all the way and claim that even attending an event in the South is a dogwhistle! How DARE he, right?
You’re a nutjob.
The fact that the 1921 massacre in Tulsa and Axe Handle Saturday in Jacksonville in 1960 are “obscure” to you is white privilege at work. If you are black — especially if you live in Tulsa or Jacksonville — there’s a good chance these places and dates are etched in your heart. And it wasn’t just one episode — in Trump’s case, it was two. But this kind of thing has a… a strange way of happening with Republican politicians!
Ronald “Don’t release the hostages till I’m elected” Reagan gave a speech on states’ rights during his 1980 campaign not far from Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights activists in 1964. And, funnily enough, Republicans tend to believe that states have the right to enforce their own segregation laws, but not, say, their own laws on abortion or recreational drugs. So when a Republican talks of “states’ rights”, we know what he really means.
What’s that saying? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action?
> The fact that the 1921 massacre in Tulsa and Axe Handle Saturday in Jacksonville in 1960 are “obscure” to you is white privilege at work.
Jeff Read Translated: “How dare he hold an event on the Sabbath! Verily, only Satan himself would do such a thing! He is an Agent of Evil!”
Personally, I kind of miss when it was just the Christians acting like this.
Out of all the days and all the locations he could have possibly held rallies, he just had to choose days that are remembered as days of horror among African-Americans in two communities, to visit those communities?
Like Troutwaxer said, you’d think Trump would have staff to ensure that his campaign rallies and other engagements would not be misconstrued as dogwhistling, especially after the deeply concerning precedent Reagan sent.
That said, it seems Trump has rescheduled his Tulsa visit to June 20. I’d like to take him at his word that he truly is contrite for giving offense, but alas I’m forced to conclude he did it because he knows he’s lost virtually all legitimacy, and that the election in November can only end in two ways: with Biden as President-elect, or with more riots, fire, and violence — so he’s treading lightly so as not to arouse anger and make things worse, while shoring up what he can of his base. I don’t think it will help. The Trump presidency was a troll meme from the beginning, and now that the lulz have passed and the trolls are facing real consequences for their actions, well…
What exactly is the problem with a Republican candidate having a rally on Juneteenth? What’s the dogwhistle there? Is there some subtle prohibition against Republicans pointed out that our party was founded explicitly to free the slaves, and delivered on that promise, and that the Democrats of the time opposed it? It’s now a racist dogwhistle to remind the Democrats of their own shameful legacy?
I wouldn’t expect a rally to be a stupid, incompetent coincidence. It’s probably another part of Trump’s continuing outreach to African-Americans.
Yeah, I watched most of the rally.
Location was definitely some combination of Republican state government and Republican city government being feasible, and outreach.
Tulsa remembers the 1921 riots, and is not about to let a bunch of outsiders come in to repeat the act, no matter what story they have to justify it. A place that viscerally agrees that those acts were bad, and should not be repeated is exactly the place it makes sense to pick for an event that will be targeted by people who are repeating those offenses against civilization, when you are not willing to provide a reason you can be justly blamed.
Trump’s speech was definitely outreach.
I missed part of the beginning. So he might have addressed this. I was immensely disappointed in him not making a point of calling out BLM and Anti-Fa as being the heirs of the people who burned down Tulsa in 1921.
Places with Democrat Governors or Democrat Mayors are going to interfere with Trump’s attempts to hold events. Places with both will try to let BLM lynch Trump, and are only viable if Trump uses federal troops or federalized National Guard.
BLM was a major project of Obama’s racist nutjobbery. Oklahoma and Utah are states that heavily voted against Obama, and a lot of the Mormons do not care for Trump. Tulsa is the 2nd biggest city in Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City is perhaps a wee bit Democrat aligned. (Kendra Horn won the district in 2018.)
Tulsa makes a ton of sense if he is frustrated with covid restrictions on his usual process for arranging events, and solicited political allies for reasonably available venues.
“I was immensely disappointed in him not making a point of calling out BLM and Anti-Fa as being the heirs of the people who burned down Tulsa in 1921.”
I’m glad you’re a registered fool, because you don’t know the history of the Tulsa Race Riot’s nearly as well as you think you do.
-1 (I’d minus you 100 if I could, because brother, you could really stand to do some research!)
And you don’t know the history of BLM or Antifa. Both are explicitly Marxist orgs. Antifa, in fact, has its roots in the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), the former Communist Party of Germany; they were present at the Comintern. BLM, meanwhile, was founded by radicals who self-admitted to being trained Marxists, and who venerate Marxist cop-hating fugitive, Assata Shakur.
But I get the feeling that, like most left-liberals, you’re just going to stick your fingers in your ears and shout, “LALALALALA-I-AM-NOT-LISTENING-NO-ENEMIES-TO-THE-LEFT-BLM-ARE-NOT-MARXIST.” Yeah, you keep doing that–right up until the radical black supremacist terrorists who literally want to “kill Whitey” put you up against the wall.
In fairness to the exquisitely educated gentleman, the people who carried out the riots, and more chillingly, covered them up for decades, were not communists or strongly aligned with the socialists at the time.
Most likely he has never listened to any of the political oral history of Oklahoma.
He doesn’t know about a guy whose name I never exactly remember, Gene Stipes,a majorly influential figure who joined the Oklahoma Democratic Party in something like 1933, and was still so influential in Oklahoma state politics that when the Feds caught up with him in the 2000s, he was able to get the penalty down to community service advising the state legislature.
Or David Boren, then and now a Democrat, a federal Senator and state Governor, a political career going back until at least the 1970s, and very recently President of the University of Oklahoma, where he was very careful to present himself as hard core social justice left.
There is reason to think that people whose will to power and indifference to human life led them to provide high level political cover to racial massacres were very willing to switch to providing that same support to socialists and communists.
And it was Wilson’s people, who were responsible for the 1919 massacre in Arkansas, and would have been Fake Progressives, the ideological lineage of modern Democrats.
Here, you can fill in the blank. “_______________ is a symptom of poorly-executed capitalism.”
OK.
“The heartbreak of psoriasis is a symptom of poorly-executed capitalism.”
Yes, that makes as much sense as anything else you could put in there.
A white woman accused a black man of raping her. The local information warfare types amplified the demand that something be done. The man was in jail, but that was not good enough for the mob. They burned down a bunch of black neighborhoods. Very much the essence of democracy in action.
The only substantial difference in methods where the listed items are concerned is that these modern riots have more burning, and less killing. Okay, the moderns are not bombing with an aeroplane.
They are incontestably the heirs in method. Methods and tactics are important when talking about whether political organizations are similar or different.
You might have a case where ideology is concerned. Except that you probably know nothing about Oklahoma political history, and that would throw off your models of America’s domestic politics.
Some of the same Oklahomans who are now very eager to proclaim their virtue in opposing white supremacism were very much complicit in the decades long cover up of the Tulsa race riots where the official Truth was concerned. Those specific individuals are perhaps ones who were only ever amoral, and willing to mimic whatever ideology is in fashion.
“The parties switched places” is a claim that has to be true in every state to be broadly true. If someone can point to a single state where it apparently never happened, it is much weaker.
I’ve known Oklahoma Democrats from Little Dixie.
Written history is often official Truth. Oral history can tell interestingly different stories.
Tulsa in 1921 might no longer be really living memory. But the period when it was living memory, is living memory. People now in their seventies, who were young in Oklahoma, sometimes have a lot of oral history about the Tulsa race riots.
I would be surprised if you had any close contact with any Oklahomans in their seventies. Unless it is the likes of Misty Lackey, who came to Oklahoma from Illinois decades ago, already convinced that the Oklahoma Democratic Party and the Illinois Democratic Party, were alike in every significant way. Which period was when the Oklahoma state government was still pretending that the riots had never happened.
Where ideology is concerned, it is far more important whether a group of Americans is more strongly aligned to small r republicanism, or small d democracy, then whether the official history says that they are Right or Left. Labels are easily assumed by frauds, and perhaps most American politicians are frauds using the most convenient label. Methods, political behavior as influenced by beliefs engrained during childhood and during formative political experience, may be a lot more stable in an organization.
At best where a national Democrat’s interests are concerned, neither the Oklahoma Democratic Party nor the Oklahoma Republican Party can or should be trusted to be willing and able to prevent any sort of mass murder. It is not unreasonable for anyone educated in Oklahoma history to conclude that Oklahomans have a choice between gun control, and preventing mass murder.
In conclusion, I think that your research is probably purely the written record, and that if it were still convenient for the Democrats to pretend that the Tulsa Race Riots had never happened, you would believe that they had never happened.
> The idea isn’t to take complete control of everything.
Actually yeah, it is.
Both because the people on the left like H. Clinton, and D. Feinstein feel that they *should* be in control. Oh, and K. Harris. Tell me SHE doesn’t want you under her thumb
And because we aren’t smart enough to avoid unintended consequences, so we keep having to create more rules to fix the flaws in the previous rules.
This was the failure of wage and price controls–which are also the reason that health insurance is tied to your employer. Which they now want to “fix” by abolishing private health insurance and taking over control of the whole health care industry.
Just as I’m sure there are Republican’s you don’t like… I’m definitely not a fan of Kamala Harris – there’s just something about her that bothers me.
Is it her support for treating prisoners as slaves, even after the completion of their sentences, or her support for the idea that a prosecutor shouldn’t be punished for submitting fraudulent documents to the court in order to get a plea bargain?
She’s a horrible, horrible person and she should do much more than just bother you.
What you describe above is all behavior that’s unworthy of a public official, but my concerns are a bit more primal… I felt like she had that sociopath vibe long before I learned any negative facts about her. So yeah, she bothers me. I can’t imagine casting a vote for her for any reason.
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/06/10/capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-first-incident-self-appointed-police-violence/
Lord of the Flies
Time for a militia posse to go hunting
Naaah…. Just make sure that the CHAZ is under quarantine – no. one. leaves. Anyone who wants to join that kind of Hell is welcome to it, but you can’t come back out to bother the rest of us.
Give it less than a month, and all you’ll have to go in with are bodybags and buckets of bleach….
> you can’t come back out to bother the rest of us
Dan said something similar in the Yeet Not thread (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8712#comment-2427056).
Is there any provision in that for folks living in US territory _prior_ to said territory being seized as such an “autonomous zone”, given that the seizure is unlikely (by definition) to be taking place with the consent of all those in that territory?
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit the past few days, and I am stuck at their being (potentially) a very thin line between “I’d rather not abandon a couple hundred grand in property value” and “whoops, guess we shoulda tried to leave yesterday.” If we’re gonna get shot from front and back regardless of which direction my family and I run, then I’m starting to doubt the existence of any viable exit strategy. (Not that I blame you or Dan for that, of course. :D)
In Seattle it’s likelier to be a million, but that’s not particularly important. I’m astounded that any mayor or police department, of any city, regardless of party, would let someone take over one of their precincts! This definitely reflects incompetence.
I’m not sure what should be done about it, however. Rolling back there with a big collection of SWAT teams or sending in the National Guard is not likely to make matters better in the long run. “We abused people. They abused back. So we rolled the armored vehicles into the area and killed them” doesn’t quite send the right message. I guess we’ll see how it plays out. Probably the best strategy is to take things slowly.
I’m not talking about Seattle, I’m talking about the _actual_ condo my family and I own and live in here on the south side of Chicago. This isn’t another hypothetical circle-jerk question, I am genuinely concerned whether an actual threshold will exist between abandoning our home too soon (thus losing its value) or too late (thus putting my family’s lives in danger), and whether I will be able to see it in time if it even did exist..
“Seeing how it plays out” and “taking things slowly” will be extremely shitty advice once the actual building we live in has been set on fire. Since I can’t remember a time when I received non-shitty advice from the left, I guess I can’t complain.
Thank you for highlighting the lovely lesson in typical Prog-Left elitist thinking as shown by Our Pal Trout. “The bad thing only happens to [i]other people[/i] so we’ll just pontificate about it from afar and wait for the ashes to settle.” Complete fucking disconnect.
Well “pontificating from afar” was one of the main themes of the thread from early on. Funny how the Michiganers’ plight, whether one believes justified or not, has been quietly forgotten; and yet nobody now is calling the rioters and CHAZ warlords “fucking idiots”, “fools”, or “bored mass murderers”.
Sigh. I’m also being specific, and definitely not attempting to give you advice about your home.* (Remember please to argue with the real Troutwaxer, not the Troutwaxer in your head.) Meanwhile, nothing in the CHAZ has been set on fire. Anyone on either side who moves to quickly will probably incite violence, at which point they lose the battle.
Meanwhile, I’m astonished that the Seattle power structure is willing to give up a precinct house. It’s a very, very poor move in any game, as the ability to take and hold territory is a basic prerequisite for political power; I think large demonstrations should be honored by passing new laws that address the demonstrators issues, not by ceding territory.
* From the way you’re discussing your home, my beginning assumption is that you’re in a scenario where non-White people are moving into the neighborhood, and questions of personal safety and economic value are foremost in your mind. If that’s the case (and if I’m wrong, please correct me) I’d say that as long as you’re confident that local/state officials will enforce any anti-blockbusting regulations, you should start by getting to know the neighbors.
If the neighbors have college degrees or own a business in some kind of useful trade, (plumber,** electrician, etc.) you probably don’t have to worry as long as they don’t park their trucks on the front lawn. On the other hand, if you’ve got people with non-college non-trade jobs moving into the neighborhood that’s another matter and you may need to move.
For myself I’m in a nice multi-ethnic neighborhood with no obvious problems, but very good and diverse restaurants and very welcoming and diverse neighbors – we moved in a couple months back and I think we’d be pretty good friends with some of them if we weren’t all social distancing!
So by “diverse” you mean high IQ diverse, i.e., East (and maybe South) Asians.
> (Remember please to argue with the real Troutwaxer, not the Troutwaxer in your head.)
I was musing (not to you btw) how much advance warning I might get on riots and “autonomous zones” hitting my own neighborhood, and how much of a hair-trigger I might need to have on any exit strategies. Your direct response to me was “see how it plays out” and “the best strategy is to take things slowly”. Those are _quotes_, are you claiming they’re coming from somewhere inside my head?
> Meanwhile, nothing in the CHAZ has been set on fire.
Yay. Is Raz and his gang of armed thugs still “policing” the (mostly unarmed I would bet) populace under his “rule”, as described in the link in Dan’s first post up above? It certainly wouldn’t be surprising for smart people to be keeping their heads down at a time like this, which is quite different from claiming everyone in the “zone” is perfectly content with that situation.
> you should start by getting to know the neighbors
Wow, you have the gall to tell me not to argue with the “Troutwaxer in [my] head”, then turn around and give snide advice like that to the dumbass me you’ve created in your own head? You have no fucking way of knowing how well I know my neighbors, you sanctimonious piece of shit.
> For myself I’m in a nice multi-ethnic neighborhood with no obvious problems
Gosh WHAT a surprise, I thought I was getting sound advice from someone out there in the trenches dealing with actual shit on an ongoing basis. You and Jeff “bah those farmers up in UP Michigan, which has nothing whatsoever to do with my lifestyle, are fucking idiots” Read sure are working hard to earn your Sensitivity to the Plights of the Commoners cards.
Your property values are likely to be going to shit, anyway. Suspect you’re screwed either way and might be screwed a little less if you sell (even with haircut) and skedaddle ASAP.
Kind of like I wouldn’t want to own real estate in Minneapolis (saw a statistic that something like 1/6 of all open listings in Minneapolis were a week or less old) right now. Good luck finding a non-predatory, non-gov’t-crony buyer there.
Oh yeah, we’re definitely not expecting to sell the place any time soon. :D Either it gets burned down or it doesn’t, and in the meantime I get to listen to Troutwaxer and Jeff Read tell me how wonderful it all is.
It does provide me some amusement to wonder how long it will take warlords — oh, sorry, “duly self-appointed administrators of autonomous zones” — like Raz to graduate from assaulting random inhabitants of their zone to realizing, “Oh, hey, we could go around to all the people who ‘own’ apartments in our zone and make them pay money to us in order to keep their apartments!” With property tax being followed shortly thereafter by income tax. I give them another two or three weeks to have upgraded their cute little Glorious Flower Commune of the People into an exact duplicate of our existing bureaucratic government.
You might not even have to wait that long. They’re already working on a “conflict resolution” council, with 27 seats, one for every “oppressed” identity, with like, six seats specifically for black people, and 12 “mini-seats” for every single Asian ethnicity there is. All lives matter equally, but Black Lives Matter more equally than others. Oh, and get this: 2-3 of the seats are supposed to be for violent criminals, and one of the seats is supposed to be a child! Idiocracy was supposed to be a parody of American life, not a prophecy!
This is essentially a government. These people think that if they change the map, the territory will magically change with it. Fools.
That is too hilarious for words.
When I first read Animal Farm in middle school, I was like, “Yeah pretty cool, but come on, it’s just an _allegory_.”
Pushing towards a century old now and it is still showing Orwell to be one of the most prophetic geniuses (at least in the political arena) of all time.
Jeff Read can chirp all he wants about the Left, and its current darling CHAZ, being more libertarian than libertarians. Sooner or later Boxer always gets trucked off to the knacker’s.
The “conflict resolution council” was almost certainly a troll, though.
Could’ve fooled me. Poe’s Law strikes again!
Better than that, raise a BIGGER concrete wall around it.
Then grant them one of their requests–release all the violent black criminals into their custody for new trials.
Can we talk about the Seattle Autonomous Collective yet?
So the civic ‘authorities’ in Seattle ‘de-escalated’ by abandoning a police station, and by extension the surrounding neighborhood.
The most-definitely-not-Antifa-leftists definitely-white-supremacist troublemakers responded by seizing control of the police station and several blocks of the surrounding neighborhood and declaring their secession from existing oppressive power structures and the establishment of an autonomous collective. (Yep, white supremacists definitely dream of Paris Commune cosplay, *snicker*.)
One of the first things they did was to beg people to bring guns to defend the barricades. Wait, I thought they hated guns.
So after a day they were out of food and begging for donations of vegan snacks, because the homeless people they invited in stole all their food.
Then the leader of the collective was #metoo’d and outed as a sexual abuser, and vowed to leave and commit suicide(!). Ok then.
Then the collective was taken over by some armed ‘rapper’ and his also armed entourage. Some of the first things he did were to institute strict border control (!) and stop-and-frisk style policing.
It is just too perfect for words, too good to be fiction.
Do you have a cite on this? It’s too bizarre for words.
Dan, above, here has a link about the armed ‘rapper.’ Cannot speak to the rest, but also quite interested in more info.
Although, I don’t think it’s bizarre. I think it’s just the playing out of inevitability.
I’d been busy for the past couple days and didn’t have much time for news, but I’m both astounded and amused; this is really happening!
And now the people with simplistic solutions get to learn the real lesson: Even over a six-block zone, government is not easy! I will be watching this closely during my free time.
Contrast what happens when right wing people try to do things like this, e.g., the Bundy ranch, or libertarian micro-nations like Sealand. So no it isn’t that hard, leftists and especially communists are just incompetent at it.
Good government is an extremely boring job, best done by extremely boring people.
A good King does exactly one thing: arrests any exciting man trying to take the crown from him. Golfs otherwise.
A huge number of societal problems are caused by persons of power trying to make their job less boring. Doing challenge runs and taking their country along for the ride. Napoleon could have just stayed in France. But isn’t that lame? So lame.
Words that should be etched in granite.
Napoleon could have just stayed in France.
You’re not wrong.* And Hitler could have stayed in Germany. And I definitely agree with the sentiments.
However… the thing you didn’t note is that, in ruling, the details matter. So when someone says something like “All the rioters are Antifa,” I tend to instinctively recoil, not because I caucus with the Liberals, but because when the ruler believes his/her own propaganda they tend to make rather terrible mistakes. It won’t make a significant difference to wait for the real evidence of who actually got arrested and what their ideologies were – if in fact any given arrestee has an ideology other than “Let’s loot that store.”
* You’re not wrong in spirit, but I must nitpick just a little: After beheading their royals France was attacked by most of it’s neighbors, so Napoleon didn’t have much choice to fight a war. But Napoleon could certainly have returned to France after defeating his attackers.
** BTW, can anyone spot the problem with this visualization? On the bottom left, Covid-19 death statistics will rise through the ranks. You’ll see the date on the bottom right:
https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2637725/
Yes there are a lot of those as well, what Eric calls the “free-stuff army”. Care to take a guess what race they are?
>Yes there are a lot of those as well, what Eric calls the “free-stuff army”. Care to take a guess what race they are?
Race is not the driving variable in this kind of behavior; that’s mistaking accident for essence. High time preference is the real driver.
I don’t expect Troutwaxer to be able to tell time preferences by looking at a person, or for that matter the media to report it. Race on the other hand can be easily determined from the photos accompanying the story, even if the story itself doesn’t mention it.
Lowest white bastardy rate was ~3% and lowest black bastardy rate was 10%. The difference between 3 and 10 is biology being racist, and there is a similar gap in time horizons. However, nobody was studying time horizons in the early 1900s, so even if someone dared collect those numbers we would have little to compare it to.
Current white bastardy rate is ~30%, for blacks, over 60%. If we had numbers for time horizons, it would again be similar, but the difference between 10 and 60 is Progressive racism, not biology.
Wanna bet the ratio of white looters to black looters is similar to 30:60?
Speaking of time horizons, apparently nearly as many black babies are aborted as brought to term. 4.7:5.3
Of course only a white supremacist would suggest that black children would prefer to have fathers. Disparate impact, progressive Hitlerism, etc etc, obviously it’s the wrongest thing to suggest that proggies don’t deserve every vote they’re get. (Especially the post-mortem votes.)
Yeah, again, that burka-clad cheesecake thief in Seattle sure wasn’t black.
Your narrative is confused:
France (still nominally a kingdom) declared war on Austria and Prussia first, then invaded Belgium and was defeated. The allies invaded France with the declared intent of restoring Louis’ royal powers. The Paris mob threw Louis into prison, and the Republic (now) raised fresh armies and conquered Belgium and the Rhineland. Then, with the war nearly a year old, the Republic executed Louis. That brought several more nations into the “First Coalition”. In a frenzy of revolutionary enthusiasm, France raised more armies and defeated the Coalition. Napoleon’s contribution was victory in Italy; he wasn’t in charge yet, and soon went off to Egypt.
The war continued because Britain refused to make peace.
You can do a search for ‘CHAZ’, which seems to be the name for this thing that people have settled on. Short for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, with Capitol Hill being the neighborhood involved.
It’s mainly getting play in alternate media, as the mainstream media does not seem interested in covering this story as it is so problematic for so many narratives.
Leaving aside left vs. right for a moment, if you want to know what’s wrong with policing in the U.S., read this very interesting story of the office fired for not shooting a suicidal suspect. Note some interesting things as you’re reading. First of all, note the poor communication by all involved, particularly the police dispatcher. Note the poor job done of evaluating the shooting; neither the captain in charge nor the police chief of the (small) 35-member department involved ever questioned or formally interviewed the officer who didn’t shoot. Note the instant rejection, by other cops, of the officer who didn’t shoot the suspect. Note the clumsy attempts at a coverup…
https://features.propublica.org/weirton/police-shooting-lethal-force-cop-fired-west-virginia/
So all things considered, I figured this comment would be more apropos in thread over the newer post. It seems that
antifaBLMa mixed group of protesters have “liberated” several blocks in downtown Seattle.If you had asked me anytime before February if this sort of thing could happen, my answer would have been “November 4th, with 20% probability; any other day, less than 1%”. I will be fascinated to see how the city, state, and federal government respond to the Autonomous Zone’s demands — and now also challenge the conclusion of Forbes’ headline. I think at this point some sort of formal division or succession is inevitable — the only remaining question is the actual timeline. [And I now calculate the probability on a repeat event — in any US city — on November 4 at 60-66%.]
I don’t think any formal division is going to be practical for two reasons.
1) Think about what the borders would have to look like. You’ll end up separating cities from their suburbs.
2) Look at how well things are going in the Autonomous Zone. That is what would happen to any left-wing run state without any right-wingers to stop their most insane ideas.
If they wish to autodarwinate and are amenable to restricting it to those who signed up for it….. let them.
The problem is they’re going to insist on subsidies or start sending out raiders to take them, probably both. Also the border is not going to be practical to guard because of point (1) above.
Sell raffle tickets for each guard position.
The opportunity to reduce the number of communists is widely cherished.
Oh, sorry I thought you were attempting to seriously argue for partition. I see this was just a joke proposal, my mistake.
While I very much agree that a long-term division of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone from greater Seattle etc. would be highly damaging and unstable, I see two reasons why treating that way would resolve the problem (both of the Zone and of left-wing nuttery in general) faster:
1. Treating this as a formal demand for secession at the federal level would light a fire under the (Democratic and/or Washington state) politicians who are giving this a “no-see-’em” treatment. This is triply true if, rather than activate the National Guard, the President were to send the State Department to start negotiating the international treaty. Accompany such actions with the argument that ignoring this action is an implicit consent to their autonomy — and by ignoring the protests the more-local politicians are not only ceding authority, but giving implicit support to their other demands. I’m pretty sure at that point the mayor and governor would have something to say in an official capacity regarding the Capitol Hill Zone.
2. Having to talk to an external face who doesn’t share their Humpty-Dumpty language will force them to refine exactly what it is they want. [Item 1 above is an example of this — “autonomous” should mean there is no authority above them.] For another, their list of demands starts off with the complete abolition of the “Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus” (emphasis mine) but then just a half-dozen items later want a retrial of all PoC serving time for violent crimes. Would this retrial then need to occur before we abolish the criminal justice system, or would it suffice to “repatriate” these felons to the Autonomous Zone? Since someone arrested by any city police department can theoretically end up charged in federal courts for their crimes through jurisdictional transfer, is the full court system of the entire US to be abolished? [Again, another plausible reason to treat the CHAZ as a foreign power.] Simply by giving the protesters something to focus their attention on in this manner, you might help prevent the sort of destruction being feared.
Finally, as a secondary meaning, while this particular act of succession is clearly unsustainable, it seems to me ever more likely that some formal split must eventually occur. Consider again why I call this episode “Humpty-Dumpty language” — the protesters here do not expect to be understood as using the literal meaning of their words — the CHAZ does not seek to be autonomous, it demands solutions be implemented by the existing power structures. They have mutally conflicting demands — and rather than point these things out, the current politicians try to sweep such ambiguity under the rug. The longer society as a whole delays in addressing this misuse of language (and I mean address in any manner — even ones less confrontational that what I would propose), the more our overall society can no longer reach mutually agreeable compromises.
Where should I look? At reports from actual Seattlites who say that the Zone is mostly peaceful? Or at the doctored images from Faux News?
BLM went and did what the libertarians have been LARPing about doing for decades! They took the fight to the power structures and then went and formed their own community. We’ve heard a lot of hot air from the right about “exercising our revolutionary right” and so forth, but it was the left that actually walked the walk.
Also, reports from Hackernews indicate that the disastrous conditions inside the CHAZ are way overblown and that the atmosphere inside the Zone is more like a “summer street fair festival”. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time we’d been lied to about what happens in leftist-run areas.
> BLM went and did what the libertarians have been LARPing about doing for decades!
Yeah, taking over an area by force, extorting private businesses, requiring papers for travel… that’s totally what we want to do. /s
“When you Libertarians have some experience running autonomous zones on your own, you can criticize. Meanwhile, don’t tell your brothers what to do.” – Your Mother.
For the record, my actual mother disapproves of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
I’m not sure I approve, but I’m willing to cultivate a sense of amused detachment and see what happens. Hopefully nobody will do anything stupid.
Yeah, you lefties sure are good at huffing on your “amused detachment” when the shit is happening hundreds or thousands of miles away from you.
In a just universe your and Jeff Read’s homes would be the next ones inside a seized “autonomous zone”. Then the rest of _us_ could watch with amused detachment what happens to you.
“Hey! Quit telling people not to tell people what to do! It’s not polite to tell people what to do! So let them tell people what to do! I’m telling you to do this!” — A Sane Person??
I addressed just this issue yesterday in a reply to a different one of your posts.
> Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time we’d been lied to about what happens in leftist-run areas.
You mean like Catalonia?
It was stupid of the various administrations to support coups in Communist countries, but it’s even stupider to blame those trivial challenges for the absolute hell that is Cuba and Venezuela.
Again I ask, why do you love totalitarian dictators so much?
Why? If those coups had succeeded those countries would not be communist hellholes now.
No, just banana-republic hellholes, which would’ve been at least as bad. World-systems theory didn’t come out of thin air.
Venezuela was the richest country in South America before Chavez destroyed it.
There is no point in time after 1945 when a rational person would prefer to be an ordinary citizen living in North Korea over being an ordinary citizen living in South Korea, despite South Korea being a banana republic dictatorship for the first 50 years.
Admittedly, we didn’t support a coup in South Korea to overthrow a Communist regime, but we did fight a war to prevent a Communist regime from conquering the dictatorship, which I feel is roughly equivalent.
Funny that you skipped over, for example, the Holodomor and Walter Duranty when you were thinking about examples of lies told about life in left-wing controlled areas.
I have to wonder, how many people even KNOW about those any more?
I rather firmly disagree, and for one simple reason. Whatever the rhetoric of the protesters says, even after supposedly “took the fight to” the existing power structures, they expect (read: demand — see link in my prior post) that same power structure to provide them a solution, rather than taking action in implementing the better methods they believe in themselves.
Without the CHAZ protesters working to build a new, better system I can’t see their actions as a revolution — it’s the house party thrown by teenagers when the parents are away.
The CHAZ protesters have demonstrated themselves to be comically incompetent at just about everything except taking advantage of the complicity of the ‘authorities’.
Much like modern crybully-style student protest in general, it couldn’t exist (and thrive!) without the complicity of the ‘authorities’ it is supposedly protesting against. The radicals are effectively just proxies of those ‘authorities’, encouraged to push for more and more by authorities who are only looking for an excuse to give in. But who couldn’t otherwise because of the responsibilities of their positions – of course once there’s ‘outrage’ so-called authorities have no choice but to give in and do what they wanted to do in the first place.
And like on campus, so now in our cities.
So it really effectively is the Cultural Revolution. The left has produced and encouraged its Red Guards to come forth and remake everything.
It would be more frightening if they weren’t such IDIOTS, such obvious useless fools.
Mao couldn’t very well dissolve the people and elect another, so to get a more CCP-amenable populace he took a time honored Chinese tradition – burn everything old, which seems to happen from time to time in China – and put a modern ideological spin on it.
Very large scale, very violent social engineering.
Apparently the open borders thing wasn’t working well enough here and it was time for Plan B.
Can I post anything?
I warned you there would be more… (First part of a much longer post, split up due to apparent spamfilter issues)
Third point: The alleged grievance of black Americans about the police is largely faked. Police officers shoot proportionately more blacks than whites – because they encounter proportionately far more black criminals. In comparable circumstances, police are more likely to shoot a white criminal than a black criminal. And police shootings of all sorts are far fewer than murders of blacks by other blacks.
And fewer than all murders of White’s by Whites. The White on White murder rate is around 83 percent, so maybe we White people should do something about that problem before we try to fix anyone else… *sigh*
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053811/white-on-white-murder
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6
>And fewer than all murders of White’s by Whites.
Pay attention to rates. Whites have a lower intercommunal murder rate per capita; volume is higher only because there are more whites. No prize for guessing the lower rate of violence is due to higher average IQ and lower average time preference, because duh!
Now compare white-on-black crime vs. black-on-white crime. Look up the numbers yourself, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
The “Black” rate of crime is what I’d expect from people who are badly off, undereducated, unlikely to be insured, deprived of economic opportunities, and living in an environment which is much more likely to be polluted. The absolute numbers are not what’s wrong with your approach.
The problem with your* approach is that your hypothesis of skin-color being the problem hasn’t been tested (that I’m aware of,) against the obvious counter-hypothesis: Do some digging into the Black socio-economic situation. Find a large group of White people with a matching socio-economic situation. Then compare the numbers where criminality is concerned. If you can point me to a couple good studies, done by people who aren’t Richard Lynn-calibre scumbuckets, I might agree with you. Meanwhile, given the White-on-White murder rate, your claims about the “Black on Black murder rate” are “your shoelace is untied”-level distractions from any serious conversation.
* “Your approach” being a generalized approach by people in your political neighborhood, not a specific Eric Raymond approach
Compare Blacks to rural Whites from West Virginia. Similar level of poverty, the Blacks are much more violent.
In other words you’ll declare anyone who reaches conclusions you don’t like a “scumbucket”.
Also, it’s rather rich for the person trying to get away with committing the base rate fallacy to be throwing around terms like “scumbucket” at people with much more intellectual integrity.
>The “Black” rate of crime is what I’d expect from people who are badly off, undereducated, unlikely to be insured, deprived of economic opportunities, and living in an environment which is much more likely to be polluted.
Except it doesn’t work that way. Greater propensity to crime by blacks runs all the way up the SES scale. Even wealthy blacks commit more crime than wealthy whites. Therefore, poverty is not the dominating driver.
An idiot, or a racist (but I repeat myself) would stop there and say “Aha! I knew it all along! Blacks inferior booga booga!” As though there were something intrinsically broken about SSA genetic markers.
Or…you can do what Murray & Herrnstein did back in 1994 and look a level deeper. Slice the statistics into equal-IQ tranches and notice that within those tranches differences in criminality between black and white populations fall below measurement noise.
The driver of high crime rates is low average IQ and high average time preference. Poverty doesn’t cause crime, especially not the condition of fantastic luxury we are pleased to call “poverty” in the US. If it were otherwise, the parts of the world that are still genuinely poor would have crime rates that would make Chicago South Side look like a garden party.
Blacks aren’t special. Any population with their distribution of IQ and time preference would have broadly the same problems they do. Mistaking this for an effect of racism guarantees that all attempt to remedy those problems will be chasing the wrong causation and will fail.
How exactly is that different from “Blacks have low IQ and low time preferences”?
>How exactly is that different from “Blacks have low IQ and low time preferences”?
Because it puts the causality where it belongs. And that’s not in their melanization or their SSA ancestry. Pick a subpopulation of blacks with the same mean IQ and time preference as whites and you won’t see anything that looks like inferiority, because it won’t be there.
Conversely, pick a population of American whites with the IQ and time preference distribution of American blacks. It’s pretty much guaranteed to have the same problems.
>It’s pretty much guaranteed to have the same problems.
I reread this and realized I’d forgotten something. In fact, a population of American whites with the average IQ of American blacks would have far more severe problems. Much of it would probably require institutionalization and be unable to function in normal society.
I learned this from a late study of comparative IQ in children by Arthur Jensen. A black child with an IQ in the 70-75 range is only slightly subnormal for his peers and can function pretty effectively as a social human, though with some deficits in areas like long-term planning. A white child only gets an IQ that low through some kind of developmental insult, and probably has one or more from a menu of minimal-brain-damage issues – impaired motor control, dyslexia, autism, deviancy in sexual targeting, etc. – that the black child won’t suffer from.
So in this one respect it could be argued that blacks are actually superior (take that, racists!). If you compare equal-IQ tranches far enough down the unfortunate end of the bell curve, whites become pitiable wrecks who can’t survive on their own well before blacks do.
In other words the average IQ of American Blacks is so far below the White range that only Whites who are basically defective outliers have IQs that low.
I must say the logical back flips you then proceed to engage in just to “own the ‘racists’ ” really are something to behold.
>In other words the average IQ of American Blacks is so far below the White range that only Whites who are basically defective outliers have IQs that low.
No, not the average. You have to go another standard deviation further down from there.
The black average of 85 is within the normal range for whites. It’s 5-10 points below that that you start noticing a large difference in breadth of deficits.
>I must say the logical back flips you then proceed to engage in just to “own the ‘racists’ ” really are something to behold.
Racism is like most forms of religion – not dealing with the world as it is, but expressing an unsane emotional fixation about how the believer wants and needs it to be.
The claim is that blacks can function better with a lower IQ than whites — and, if true, that is an unquestioned advantage. CPUs consume gobs of energy and emit lots of waste heat — especially the 3-pound ones made of meat we carry around. The less you have to work them to get shit done, (usually) the better.
>The claim is that blacks can function better with a lower IQ than whites — and, if true, that is an unquestioned advantage.
Quite, if there isn’t some powerful selective pressure in favor of carrying around a lot of extra CPU.
At this point, following Harpending & Cochran, it’s pretty well understood why Ashkenazi Jews evolved to overclock their brains (and got a bunch of nasty genetic diseases as part of the cost). The reason for the much earlier development of high-grade System II thinking in the populations that have it is much less clear.
>So in this one respect it could be argued that blacks are actually superior (take that, racists!)
Not sure how far you want to roll with that, as by the same argument dogs are ‘superior’ to humans.
[Second part]
Furthermore, these outpouring of “rage” are absurdly selective. There was a far more egregious case in Chicago in 2012. Off-duty detective Dante Servin had words with some black people, got in his car, then fired over his shoulder at the people walking away, killing a 22-year-old woman (Rekia Boyd). In 2015, Servin was acquitted in a directed verdict; the judge ruled that since Servin intentionally fired, involuntary manslaughter did not apply, and he should have been charged with murder. There were a few protests, and no riots.
[Third part]
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a 40-year-old white woman in her pajamas (Justine Damond)…
was shot dead by police officer Mohamed Noor (a _S_o_m_a_li refugee, i.e. black). [_s to defeat the spamfilter]
[Full version of comment]
I warned you there would be more…
Third point: The alleged grievance of black Americans about the police is largely faked. Police officers shoot proportionately more blacks than whites – because they encounter proportionately far more black criminals. In comparable circumstances, police are more likely to shoot a white criminal than a black criminal. And police shootings of all sorts are far fewer than murders of blacks by other blacks.
Furthermore, these outpouring of “rage” are absurdly selective. There was a far more egregious case in Chicago in 2012. Off-duty detective Dante Servin had words with some black people, got in his car, then fired over his shoulder at the people walking away, killing a 22-year-old woman (Rekia Boyd). In 2015, Servin was acquitted in a directed verdict; the judge ruled that since Servin intentionally fired, involuntary manslaughter did not apply, and he should have been charged with murder. There were a few protests, and no riots.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a 40-year-old white woman in her pajamas (Justine Damond) was shot dead by police officer Mohamed Noor (a _S_o_m_a_li refugee, i.e. black). [_s added to defeat the spamfilter] There was considerable public outcry but no riots, even though Noor was not charged for eight months. (He eventually got 12 1/2 years; with time off for good behavior, he could be out in 8 years.)
George Floyd was a habitual criminal, caught in the act. He resisted arrest and got roughed up. It’s what cops do to scrotes who kick and claw and spit on and bite arresting officers. Or run away, forcing a foot chase (a Chicago cop once told me “You run, you get hit”). Or just thrash around, requiring the officers to subdue by force. The scrotes know this, but many still act out, hoping to get away or invoke sympathy, or just to hassle the officers. If every act of resisting arrest or assaulting an officer was formally charged and prosecuted, prosecutors and courts would have time for nothing else, and the sentences would be 10 days or a month. So they get roughed up instead.
It’s entirely plausible to argue that the police applied excessive force to George Floyd. But force was necessary, and Floyd was a big man requiring substantial force to subdue, and knee-on-the-neck is a standard Minneapolis PD technique. He had a bad heart and toxic drugs in his system, which almost certainly contributed to his death. He’s been described as an “eggshell” victim: someone who might die from even slightly harsh treatment. Stipulating that Officer Chauvin used excessive force – does the difference between the exactly appropriate level of force and what he actually used amount to “atrocious murder”? He did not use normally lethal force (unlike Servin or Noor), and there is nothing to indicate he wanted Floyd to die. Chauvin should (after a proper investigation, and in IMO) be disciplined, removed from the force, and probably imprisoned for manslaughter; his colleagues should also be disciplined. Anything more will be mob justice masquerading as law – as vile as any KKK lynching.
There is nothing in this case to justify nationwide rioting and looting by blacks. The violence has been ginned up by the professional agitators of BLM, abetted by antifa and various liberal funders, pundits, and officials.
The widespread genuflecting to these bad actors enrages me. (Amazon and Comcast display professions of sympathy on their video channels.)
Remember the riots of 1995? OJ Simpson brutally murdered a white woman and was acquitted by a black-dominated jury; numerous blacks publicly gloated. This flagrant injustice provoked massive protests by whites. Race terrorists such as the KKK incited “protesters” to loot and burn in black neighborhoods, and other areas associated with liberal views on race. Major institutions proclaimed their solidarity with “the white community”.
Of course you don’t remember all that, because it never happened.
In 2000, Prince George’s County (MD) police officer Carlton Jones followed black college student Prince Jones into Virginia and shot him five times in the back. Carlton Jones wasn’t even charged. Do you remember the protests and riots over that killing? No, because there were no protests and riots: Carlton Jones was black, as was the chief of his department and the County Executive.
IOW, shit happens. It happens to everybody, not just blacks (e.g. Justine Damond). It happens in spite of the best efforts of law enforcement agencies to get things right, because LEOs have to make split-second decisions. It happens because many LE agencies, being real-world bureaucracies, are infested with semi-competents, ass-kissers, and intriguers. It does not happen only to blacks, only by whites, only because of “racism”.
BLM incited “protests” by black athletes over the alleged national crime of police shootings of blacks; many liberals expressed support. I wonder what the reaction would be to a similar protest by white athletes over the “national disgrace” of thousands of white women raped by black men every year. Which happens – but as part of a larger and very general problem, just as with police shootings. Focusing on that part of the problem in that way would be seen – rightly – as racial demagoguery. As BLM’s rhetoric should be seen. And not echoed, even by you. It’s the equivalent of Tom Watson howling for the blood of “the lustful Jew” (Atlanta, 1915).
@Rich Rostrum
“IOW, shit happens. It happens to everybody,.”
This type of shit is endemic in the USA. It hardly never happens in Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany etc. When you look at the numbers, the USA is there right in the middle of the developing world, just a little worse than Iraq, and much worse than Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries
@Rich Rostrum
“George Floyd was a habitual criminal, caught in the act. He resisted arrest and got roughed up. ”
This arguments read: The police can execute ex-convicts at will. Which is indeed what happens in the USA.
The USA practically contains a developing country as a subpopulation, plus diversity, plus a press inciting racial hatred and violence.
“contains a developing country as a subpopulation”
In rural areas, you mean. But in every part of the USA, every city, except Honolulu, has a much higher homicide rate than metropolitan London, UK (pop: 8M), or Sydney, Australia (pop 4M).
Also, US urban areas are currently safer than rural areas:
https://thecrimereport.org/2018/05/14/rural-violent-crime-rate-rises-above-u-s-average/
https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/violence-and-abuse
So much for your “diversity”.
Your link does not support your contention. It says that rural areas have gotten marginally less safe than the national average, while rural areas are still safer than urban areas. This is because there’s also suburbs, which the WSJ analysis treats as separate from both urban and rural.
“It says that rural areas have gotten marginally less safe than the national average,”
I am wondering, if rural areas are, on average, less safe then the national average, non-rural areas must be more safe than the national average, and, by implication, more safe than rural areas.
So, what are these non-rural areas that are more safe than the rural areas?
If you had bothered to finish reading the single bloody paragraph you were responding to, you would have seen your answer, you absolute muppet.
> So much for your “diversity”.
So much for your left liberal politics.
You can keep ignoring the repeatedly made points that Minnesota and Minneapolis are Democrat (ie left) controlled, and that the political climate there is exactly the one you yourself espouse. That won’t change the fact that Rich Rostrom is perfectly correct in characterizing this viewpoint as “racial demagoguery”.
> “contains a developing country as a subpopulation”
> In rural areas, you mean
You have that exactly backwards. It is our urban areas, particularly the ones with strong gun control laws, that have the high homicide rates you cite. Our rural areas, particularly the ones with strong gun rights policies, have negligible rates in comparison.
> He did not use normally lethal force (unlike Servin or Noor), and there is nothing to indicate he wanted Floyd to die.
He kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for three further minutes _after_ his partner stated he could no longer detect a pulse.
I’m not claiming Chauvin _intended_ to kill his victim going into the incident, but that fact plus the expression and attitude he evinces in the videos pretty clearly demonstrate a “depraved indifference” for George Floyd’s life (the standard for the original charge of third degree murder; there’s been a lot of speculation here on why the DA would go from that easy to win to “second degree felony murder” so I won’t rehash that).
> George Floyd was a habitual criminal
In Texas perhaps. I have been unable to find evidence, despite a fair bit of googling, of further such activity since serving his sentence and moving to Minnesota. The accusation was of a non-violent crime, and the alleged “fake twenty” has vanished from the face of the earth… which I find strange given that it would be a key element of the police claiming they had any case to begin with. The video and witness accounts present Mr. Floyd as having “collapsed to the ground”, claiming “claustrophobia” — even if that were faked, it would hardly count as “aggressive resistance” (from what i recall of a Minneapolis police procedure manual i saw linked to a while back), let alone an attempt to “kick and claw and spit on and bite arresting officers”.
> It does not happen only to blacks, only by whites, only because of “racism”.
Now that part I agree with completely.
There’s an age cutoff for crime, particularly violent crime. Roughly 35. Floyd moved to Minnesota at 41.
It’s most likely due to declining testosterone. Testosterone is an analgesic which makes risks seem less risky than they are.
“There’s an age cutoff for crime, particularly violent crime. Roughly 35.”
It is earlier, 25-30, and related to maturing of the frontal lobes, which takes a lot of time in men.
Do you have a citation for that? All the evidence I’ve seen points to a later decline. It never really cuts off. There are plenty of aggressive old people out there.
The Age and Crime Relationship
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/60294_Chapter_23.pdf
Look at Figure 1 of:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477370817731706#
And figure 3, p37, in:
http://users.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Piquero_LV_08.pdf
(Only 2 low frequency groups peak beyond 25)
Thank you. Very interesting. I will have to read these properly to see what they identify as having changed over the last few decades.
Your welcome
Nonsense; obvious misandry.
Surprised by the addendum; I would have guessed your reason to not shoot the white nationalists was that they were your friends
>Surprised by the addendum; I would have guessed your reason to not shoot the white nationalists was that they were your friends
Hardly. They’re idiots who couldn’t find their own asses without an instructional video and approach radar. Their “movement” is not tiny and ineffectual by accident.
The problem in this context isn’t the “white nationalists.” It’s the garden-variety racists, scared white people, and clueless morons who get their news from social media or Faux and think Antifa is sending busloads of people to their town. Mention of “White Nationalists” seems like nothing but a distraction ploy in these cases.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/antifa-rumors-spread-local-social-media-no-evidence-n1222486
or ordinary families on vacation…
https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/clallam-county-olympic-peninsula-multiracial-family-harassed-accused-antifa/281-d8570144-f956-4ea2-af26-ccbba91dc4d0
Of particular interest in this regard is the following report from Ohio, where approximately 700 people responded, some heavily armed, to a protest by around 100 local activists, possibly due to rumors of Antifa, and did violence to the peaceful protesters
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/gun-toting-trump-supporters-attack-george-floyd-protesters-in-rural-ohio-town/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8431699/Black-Lives-Matter-protest-80-people-tiny-Ohio-town-overrun-700-armed-counterprotesters.html
>Of particular interest in this regard is the following report from Ohio, where approximately 700 people responded, some heavily armed, to a protest by around 100 local activists, possibly due to rumors of Antifa, and did violence to the peaceful protesters
And the one quote from a local ended with “All lives matter.” Yeah, that sounds like a dangerous redneck to me. I dunno, just maybe they didn’t want their town burned down?
They did violence before anyone started misbehaving, not after. I don’t have a problem with someone stopping, for example, a window-breaker with proportionate force.
>They did violence before anyone started misbehaving, not after,
The locals evidently considered that if you come into their town, and you’re carrying signs for a hard-Marxist organization like BLM, you’re already “misbehaving” and can fairly be presumed a threat.
Considering the pattern in the riots of “peaceful” demonstrations officially ending near mysteriously-appearing pallets of bricks, only to be being oh-so-coincidentally followed by arson and rampage by many of the same “demonstrators” (like, who saw that coming except for everybody), I’m siding with the locals on this one. Best to rough up and scare off the provocateurs before they get to their actual business.
And Antifa is already on notice. If this shit goes down where I happen to be, and the “demonstrators” oh so predictably turn into rioters, it’s weapons-free time for Eric. I never thought this was how I would end up defending my civilization, and I didn’t want it to be this way, but if that’s what the times require…
But there were no mysterious piles of bricks in this town, and if you actually read the links you’d notice a few things. First, that confederate flags and Punisher logos were in evidence. This doesn’t suggest anti-Communism, but pure racism. Second, that many of the license plates on the motorcycles were from out of state and many of the people attacking the protestors were from out of town, all of them apparently responding to false claims on social media that “Antifa is coming.” Which they weren’t because the protest was purely homegrown, which you’d also know if you actually read the links. Also, a brief glance at a map tells me that Bethel Ohio is about 150 miles – as the crow flies – away from the nearest state border, which happens to be with Tennessee – anyone who came from out of state drove at least three hours to get there!
And the only people who actually committed crimes in this town were the racists. Even if BLM is a communist organization, (and it’s not) carrying their signs is not illegal. Neither is a peaceful protest. So you might just ask yourself what you care about most; 1st Amendment peaceful protest in defense against racism, or the right of Conservative/racist media to lie about Antifa coming, and to rile people up to the point where they attack their fellow human beings who have literally not committed a single crime!
You’re on the wrong side here.
> But there were no mysterious piles of bricks in this town
The problem with mysterious piles of bricks is that if you wait for the mysterious piles of bricks to actually be mysteriously delivered, you have already missed your chance to avoid getting a mysterious brick hurled mysteriously at your shop window. Or your head.
I’m not saying I approve of the actions depicted in your links, like pushing around older women. But I didn’t approve of the protesters destroying businesses in my neighborhood either, and I didn’t approve of a bunch of armed thugs seizing a chunk of Seattle either.
The left has been gleefully cheering on the riots and involuntarily imposed “autonomous zones” for weeks now. (“Look! We seized a neighborhood after the police retreated from it, so now we’re better libertarians than you stupid Libertarians, ha ha!”). Then when you finally see people mustering the courage to push back against leftist lawlessness, you all start sputtering indignantly about “right-wing lawlessness”.
Payback’s a bitch, dudes.
Projecting, much?
Far-right groups like the Proud Boys have a KNOWN HISTORY of flash-mobbing peaceful protests and starting shit for the purpose of getting writeups in Breitbart about how dangerously violent leftists are.
Ah yes, more leftist doublespeak about how protestors shutting down (and occasionally beating up) right wing speakers as well as smashing a lot of windows are “peaceful”.
> Far-right groups
Raz and his thugs are far right now?
The burka-clad cheesecake thief in Seattle was far-right now?
The (mostly black teenage) rioters trashing (mostly black-owned) businesses just blocks away from me were far-right now?
Obviously you have actual evidence-based arguments to back those claims up. You certainly wouldn’t be, you know, projecting or anything.
Not wanting your town burned down is white privilege.
This confrontation took place after weeks of violence, riots and looting. Of course the townsfolk assumed the worst of the protestors. Progressives and SJWs always argue that one should take history into account, that one can safely assume that what happened before will happen again and therefore one is justified in taking pre-emptive measures. That is the underlying raison d’etre of cancel culture. So a few of them got a taste of their own medicine and found it bitter? I don’t have a problem with that.
Riots and destruction and murder are described as “Mostly peaceful” portests and the ties to BLM or Antifa can’t be determined. While 700 people, some heavily armed, and the worst that happens is someone gets punched? Someone yells All Lives Matter? This is your evidence for widespread racism?
It is to laugh.
Meanwhile, BLM still peddles in racist conspiracy theories, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” ,that Travon Martin was shot by a ‘racist’. Still favors racist agitators like Shaun ‘Talcum X’ King.
Here’s a free e-book about defunding the police. It was written in 208. I’ve read the first chapter and it seems well-written and it deals with some of the issues we’ve been discussing here. Note that I’m not endorsing the book as I’m not done reading it. I just thought it would be interesting to people.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
Sorry. That should read “written in 2018.”
Your link goes to a self-proclaimed radical website which does not predispose me towards viewing this book favorably. However, if you would grace us with a precis of their argument once you’ve finished I would be interested.
At this point I’ve only read the first chapter. From what I’m read I’m guessing that it goes into greater depth than you’ll read/hear on the news about how/why the police should be defunded and the money spent elsewhere. But it’s the same ideas you’ve read/seen on the news, with greater supporting evidence. (I have no idea whether it’s good evidence, mind you, because I’m only one chapter in, but I’d hope the book is more than a polemic.)
But here’s the deal. It’s free! You click on the right link and you can download the book immediately and read it for yourself. There’s no need to ask for a summary when you can own the entire book for the small price of half-a-dozen mouse clicks!
All that being said, the more I think about this, the more I feel that solving the problems of prejudice requires a solution which is at least partly Libertarian. If we stop criminalizing behavior between consenting adults that would go a very long way towards making sure that the police have less legal ammunition to use against people of color (or White people for that matter.) Combining, for example, a redistribution of monies from the police department towards social services with repealing drug/prostitution laws, and reforming statutory rape laws would go a very long way towards creating a better society.
> the more I feel that solving the problems of prejudice requires a solution which is at least partly Libertarian
Either Step 0 is universal support for the RKBA, or else the plan actually isn’t libertarian at all. If the book is as good as you say, you ought to be able to give an informed guess as to which way the author leans, based on what you’ve read so far.
The last paragraph above discusses my ideas, not the book’s. And I’m not going to spend time reviewing the book for anyone’s benefit because the book is free and you can own it with a minute’s effort.
Sorry, I should have addressed the RKBA issue in my earlier post, so here goes:
Realpolitic would say that you don’t put one ask on hold simply because another ask hasn’t yet been granted. Sometimes you have to develop trust between yourselves and your political partners – even if they’re partners of convenience! So I would say that if you can get enough Democrats to go for ending the drug war you should certainly do it – otherwise you end up looking like you’ve really got only one issue, and the rest are just for show.
Also, it looks to me like the Republicans are going to lose big this year, maybe as big as they lost in 1932. If that’s the case, building some trust and commonalities with the Dems is a good idea for Libertarians. In particular, I doubt that a good vaccine against the Coronavirus will be coming out before the election – minimally it’s a twelve-month process – which means whoever’s president in 2021 will get to be the Vaccine-Giver and Economy Restorer.
It looks to me like the Republicans will lose this year like they did in 1968 – that is, they won’t. After all, as in 1968, the Democrats are showing themselves to be a mix of totally unable, and actively unwilling, to put a stop to civil disorder in the large cities they have ruled uncontested for decades.
In 1932, by contrast, the Republicans were running on a record of bank failures, shuttered businesses and destroyed livelihoods that had gone on for nearly four years, with few signs of recovery apparent. 2020 has nothing like that. We are facing, not a collapse of the economy that state intervention could at least seem to cure, but a breakdown in the organs of the state itself and the social classes most tied to it.
I suspect their plan at this point is a combination of massive voter and campaigner intimidation, i.e., cancel anyone who openly expresses a pro-Republican position. Likely, accompanied with massive voter fraud again anyone who complains about this or even points this out gets canceled.
They could have done this in 2016 too, but didn’t think pulling out all the stops would be necessary.
Also, ncov is excellent air cover for explaining what’s different this time, rather than anyone suspecting that the only thing stopping them earlier was a rare moment of restraint.
The anti-gun side has spent so much time and effort burning any possible trust that they need to spend at least a decade in full prostration-and-gifts mode. Then we might consider not calling them liars and spitting in their faces. Sometimes.
BWAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAH!
Here it is, straight from Notsobrightbart so you can’t accuse me of bias for quoting only librul sources. (Though the poll was conducted by the NYT, so I guess that measn throw it right out, amirite?)
Trump’s support among his base slipping, combined with the likely upsurge in Democratic voters expected from mail-in votes this election — being made to show up at a polling place is itself a disenfranchisement tactic that disproportionately affects the poor and disabled — mean the writing is on the wall for Trump’s political career.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have Democratic control of the Senate and House with Biden in the WH. And then maybe we can start turning this battleship around.
Making voters turn up at a polling place is a basic security measure against several varieties of election fraud. Three examples spring to mind:
1) Forged or stolen ballots
2) Votes cast by dead people, who haven’t been taken off the rolls
3) Bribing or threatening voters
Stopping these practices is exactly why the secret ballot became common practice, and voting by mail makes them trivially easy to commit without detection. Why do you oppose the secret ballot?
>Trump’s support among his base slipping
Ludicrous. Bearing in mind that I’m not part of Trump’s base myself, I’m in enough contact with it to know that any pollster who claims this is sniffing glue and any other claim he/she makes should also be treated as horse exhaust.
In 2016, Trump’s “base” was largely a protest vote – a revulsion against the systemic rottenness exemplified by Hillary Clinton and her blatant contempt for middle America. He was only beginning to build personal loyalty in a lot of heartlanders and working-class people, then. Now it’s different; it really is Trump’s base, to a degree that would greatly disturb me if he were an actual authoritarian. They view pollsters as part of the enemy and won’t talk to them.
The kind of loyalty Trump now commands is dangerous to a republic in part because it doesn’t “slip”. When it does, it tends to transfer to another charismatic leader or fracture violently. The historical analogues I’m thinking of are the strongmen and faction leaders of the late Roman Republic. I believe Trump is a genuine patriotic populist and is thus more like the Gracchi than like (say) Sulla; let’s hope our system is still reformable and he does not meet the end the Gracchi got.
Trump himself is apparently worried enough about his poll numbers that he’s considering dropping out. Again, this is Fox News, not librul biased “fake news”.
Trolls tend to quit when trolling ceases to be fun and they are held to account for the harm they cause.
@Jeff Read
It is not only Fox News that brings this. However, Trump denies he will ever drop out. And we know how he is a man of his word ;-)
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/insiders-to-trump-drop-out-226689
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-2020-reelection-drop-out-withdraw-anthony-scaramucci-a9063621.html
Maybe you two should reread those articles you posted. Trump isn’t considering dropping out. It’s party insiders (i.e. the very corrupt oligarchs you purportedly deplore) insisting he drop out. Then they can go back to pretending to care about the country while getting rich and powerful off its destruction.
Okay, I’m going to come out and admit I was wrong on this one.
I know, I know.
But it turns out that mail-in votes may not result in a Democratic upsurge in November — because the Trump administration is sabotaging the USPS to prevent that from happening.
Remember, Republicans benefit from voter disenfranchisement. Leave it to Trump to turn even our nation’s most essential services, recognized as such since the founding, into political weapons to use in an electoral denial-of-service against the American people.
Lol, vice.
Because the current system for mail-in voting is working so well. Look at what’s happening in New York.
Remember, Democrats always accuse Republicans of voter disenfranchisement to divert attention from their own voter fraud. Remember, our security measures for preventing this are ridiculously lax, and Democrats routinely call even basic common sense procedures like requiring voters to present an ID or removing dead people and illegal immigrants from voter rolls “voter suppression”. Remember, the United States has more registered voters then citizens and heavily Democratic precincts frequently have above 100% turnout.
Jeff Read, I swear, you are the most gullible man on Earth.
Hey! A friend of mine tells me that one of his co-workers has a cousin who works at the Pentagon and who overheard a bunch of colonels planning a coup to make Trump dictator for life! Tell your Congressman to impeach him NOW before this nefarious plot plays out! Panic! The sky is falling!
>overheard a bunch of colonels planning a coup to make Trump dictator for life!
And they were RUSSIAN colonels! RUSSIAN, I tell you!
@Michael Brazier:
Gosh, did you even BOTHER to read the article Jeff Read linked to?
“Motherboard also viewed documents from the same region that laid out detailed plans to reroute mail to sorting facilities further away in order to centralize mail processing even if it moves the mail across further distances. To the union officials, the result of these plans was clear: “This will slow mail processing,” one wrote in large font.”
See, he wrote it in a LARGE FONT. That means it is not only true, it is EXTRA SPECIAL SUPER true. No need to measure actual _numbers_ about whether centralized processing is faster or not, when you have CLAIMS made in LARGE FONTS.
(Although if leftists are now arguing _against_ centralization of bureaucracy, maybe “Panic! The sky is falling!” is an appropriate response… =:O)
And before anyone asks, I DEFINITELY (you can tell that’s not sarcasm because it’s so LARGE) consider it intellectually honest of those on the left to continue ignoring questions about why an eight-year child was shot in the head by those claiming to protest violence against blacks, and instead are burbling on about post office equipment being end-of-lifed. I guess black lives matter, but the Machinery of the State matters even more.
The GOP even admits it, and then backpedals:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/21/trump-adviser-republicans-voter-suppression
And there are numbers on voter suppression
https://www.aclu.org/facts-about-voter-suppression
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-campaign-2020-voter-suppression-consent-decree-1028988/
On the other hand 2 decades of investigations by Republicans have not found evidence of Democratic voting fraud.
And here is some data on voter suppression (in contrast to a deafening silence for data on massive voter fraud):
Widening the Lens on Voter Suppression
https://escholarship.org/content/qt91m3v6xb/qt91m3v6xb.pdf
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Door Carol Anderson
https://books.google.nl/books?hl=nl&lr=&id=KLlHDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT10&dq=usa+voter+suppression+review&ots=gvl3iMCE6K&sig=vLYX2iHGGim6UNEtQgdwWLCG3nU&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=usa%20voter%20suppression%20review&f=false
PASSIVE VOTER SUPPRESSION: CAMPAIGN MOBILIZATION AND THEEFFECTIVE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE POOR
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=nulr
Political Climate, Voter Suppression Policies and Federal Sentencing Outcomes
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/60/5/1155/5810318
I’m not sure who this winted is, but his name is one letter of from pathological liar winter. Also his comment has about the same amount of truth as the typical winter comment.
Keep in mind the ACLU is on record saying censorship is free speech. Keep that in mind when evaluating the validity of their numbers.
Agreed, having more registered voters than citizens and over 100% turnout in heavily D districts is perfectly normal.
Sorry, winted should be winter, obviously.
“Keep in mind the ACLU is on record saying censorship is free speech. ”
Ha ha.
They defend the KKK
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-speech
And gun rights
https://reason.com/2019/04/12/the-aclu-defends-the-rights-of-gun-owner/
So I consider the ACLU a much more trustworthy party than people who yell liar whenever they run out of arguments.
” Agreed, having more registered voters than citizens and over 100% turnout in heavily D districts is perfectly normal.”
State Republican governors collaborating with GOP public prosecutors supported by GOP run congresses are unable to unearth evidence for prosecution of a massive criminal offense? Nor can a GOP president with a GOP dominated congress.
That is a level of incompetence that is unbelievable even for Republicans.
If one of the articles actually contains a good argument, feel free to quote it. Otherwise, given how bad the article was and your track record of lying, I did not think it worth my time to read the rest.
I looked at your first link. It appears to use highly biased language to divert attention from its complete lack of actual evidence for its claims.
For example going through it’s Background and Overview section.
Provisions that were always meant to be temporary, and as the paper admits applied to only certain jurisdictions based on the situation there when the act was passed.
This is the part where they assume their conclusion.
A.k.a., laws that don’t turn voter registration into a joke. Do you know why voter registration was created in the first place?
As opposed to because a student ID, unlike a concealed-handgun license, is frequently issued to people from out of state.
The rest of the article is just as bad. Some highlights:
Would this be the same commission to whom the states refused to provide any of the information it would need to do its job?
Why shouldn’t state senators be eager and “giddy” to pass laws that would make it harder for their opponents to commit voter fraud?
This raises several questions:
Did you read the article before linking to it? If not, why did you link to it? If yes, why did you still link to an article this bad? Are you even capable of telling a good argument from a bad one?
@Eugine Nier:
“As opposed to because a student ID, unlike a concealed-handgun license, is frequently issued to people from out of state.”
Not to mention that it doesn’t have the bearer’s age on it, and (even if not faked) is not issued by a government body.
When I was in grad school (late nineties to early 00’s) my school ID wasn’t valid for anything anywhere off campus. Anyone pretending to expect otherwise is either a loony or selling something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws#Netherlands
The Netherlands certainly don’t accept “student ID” as proof for voter identification. Yet another case of America having to “do as I say not as we do in my homeland” from Winter.
> Realpolitic would say that you don’t put one ask on hold simply because another ask hasn’t yet been granted. […] So I would say that if you can get enough Democrats to go for ending the drug war you should certainly do it – otherwise you end up looking like you’ve really got only one issue
Um, why the fuck should _I_ have to do that, given that I don’t actually give a shit about recreational drugs? If _you_ want to do recreational drugs, and if their being legal would be to your benefit, be my guest; it’s not like _I’ve_ ever dropped a dime on anybody for using or selling or whatever. But why the flaming fuck should I be required to campaign about an issue I don’t care at all about, while back-burnering to the unspecified distant future an issue I actually _do_ care about?
You touted this e-book as a strong defense of “defunding the police” (without even bothering to define exactly what is meant by that phrase). Then when questioned on it you start burbling on about “legalize it man!”. I said up above somewhere that asking the left for “an end to police brutality” while still being denied the basic right to defend one’s person is exactly equivalent to begging them “please don’t hurt us, sirs, we’ll be good”. The same argument applies _even more strongly_ to comparatively trivial issues such as what substances you want to toke; it’s begging yet another privilege from your (armed) Betters, and is strictly isomorphic to someone in the CHAZ meekly asking Raz if the protection money they paid him was sufficient for the week.
You chide me that I “really only have one issue.” I’ve got _plenty_ of issues, believe me. I just see no real point in kneeling down, pressing my forehead to the floor, and asking the Great Benevolent Ones above me to deign to grant me a boon. (It’s not just the humiliation involved, there’s no bloody chance they would do that even if I _did_, so kind of a waste of time.) That’s quite different from “really only having one issue”.
> whoever’s president in 2021 will get to be the Vaccine-Giver and Economy Restorer.
Meh, I’ve seen enough politicians striding down from the mountain, Tablets of Truth in hand, in my lifetime that I don’t anticipate my being able to work up much of an erection about it this time around either. And of course the extent to which they are able to be an “Economy Restorer” will depend critically on just how much of the nose they have to pay through to get said Vaccine from China — but of course I don’t expect _that_ side of the story to be flogged non-stop by CNN, so in terms of superficial outcomes, of course you’re right as usual.
The site doesn’t say how big the download is and I’m on a metered connection. So I was unwilling to ‘spend’ my quota on an unknown quantity. How big is it?
(May I point out the ‘privilege’ of assuming everyone has a big fat unlimited internet connection. It used to be standard to put file sizes against downloads so people could decide.)
My copy of the book is about 500k.
Thank you. But Verso want me to register an account with them to download, a request for my data which I rarely humor. The PDF appears to be available for download elsewhere and I will give it a go, since it appears to be cited a lot. I note, however, that a review on that well known lefty website Vox is highly critical of Vitale’s argument because he handwaves away all conflicting information. I suspected as much when I saw the word ‘radical’. It’s what they do. But if even Vox can see that getting rid of or crippling the police is a bad idea then maybe we shouldn’t get too excited about it.
As I said, I’m not endorsing the book, just making sure that everyone knows it’s available. And I don’t think anyone wants to cripple the police – we just want them to calm down and stop believing that “thin blue line” stuff, and maybe make some adjustments in training and who rolls for a drug or mental-health calls – I don’t think anyone believes that a large society can function with a group of minor bureaucrats tasked with enforcing the law.
Sorry. That should have read, “I don’t think anyone believes that a large society can function without a group of minor bureaucrats tasked with enforcing the law.”
I’m fairly confident you don’t think that “defund the police” means something other than “abolish the police” but you would be dead wrong if you think nobody means that.
Let’s start with the demands I had linked prior: “The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police.”
Or how about this picture taken at the CHAZ? “Literally abolish” leaves very, very little room for alternate interpretation.
> I don’t think anyone believes that a large society can function without a group of minor bureaucrats tasked with enforcing the law.
Don’t be so sure. I personally don’t consider it an axiom at all (and I doubt I’m the only one). Granted it’s a lot like believing in traveling faster than the speed of sound before Chuck Yeager — maybe it really _is_ impossible and I’m just a crackpot. Or maybe it isn’t impossible and we just don’t have the right equipment yet.
There’s a reason I don’t have to go through a gauntlet of “minor bureaucrats” to get my burger when I walk into a McDonalds or Burger King. If there are competing services among which I can choose freely, then the ones with less internal loss from bureaucratic deadweight will tend to perform better. Only a monopoly has the power to pass that loss onto the “customer”.
reply to Darrin, since we’ve reached max nesting:
What are the competing law enforcement services in your burger analogy?
@photondancer
> What are the competing law enforcement services in your burger analogy?
My (admittedly limited) understanding of the libertarian model was that you would have competing security companies you could contract with, paid for the way we currently pay for various contingencies through (private) insurance.
Obviously that’s a long way away from anything that’s currently practical, and equally obviously one can’t simply “subtract off” the police from our current system (leaving everything else “unchanged”) and get anything like a stable society. With a mostly unarmed populace that’s just going to lead to thugs like Raz making their own rules in their “autonomous zones”.
At a minimum, the formal legal system really is competing with vigilantism.
It is simply that vigilantism, as an approach, significantly sucks compared to the Anglo-American policing tradition. So most people in America reflexively opt for the legal system as a way to settle disputes, including those over criminality. Or at least, litigation, arbitration, and meditation over settling things with knives.
From history and prehistory we have a lot of worked examples of other methods, which may well not be wonderful.
@ Alex K.
I don’t think the folks at CHAZ (or CHOC) or whatever they’re calling it today are going to be making policy for anyone.
> I don’t think the folks at CHAZ (or CHOC) or whatever they’re calling it today are going to be making policy for anyone.
OK, now you’re special pleading. Yeah, I don’t think CHAZ/CHOP are going to be making policy for anyone soon enough, especially since the mayor of Seattle finally decided to put an end to it. But that doesn’t mean that their admirers elsewhere won’t get the power to enact their wishes…
Popping top-level for too highly nested comments.
Ok, what about the Minneabolis city council — who specifically say they are “not simply going to glue it back together” — eg. not shifting the bureaucrats under a new name with the same responsibilities? How about Rep Ilhan Omar asking we “reimagine public safety”?
The problem is that you originally said nobody would believe this, even after I had shown evidence of such a belief. If you don’t like my first example, there are plenty others… who do have the power to make this policy happen.
The problem is that “defund the police” covers a multitude of possible policies. It’s one of those vague phrases that sounds good (if you practice a particular politics) but doesn’t really say anything.
It’s kind of like, “let’s have a war on drugs.” Do you mean that we should adopt policies that are easily abused to damage civil liberties, and imprison non-white people, (which is a bad idea for reasons which I don’t have to list on a Libertarian blog) or that we should encourage early medical intervention in the case of kids who have smoked their first joint, which might be a very good idea if handled well.
But given any remotely sane outcome, I can guarantee you that nobody from CHAZ is going to be making serious policy on a state or federal level – they’re just too far out there – and the people in Seattle are already getting sick of them!
There are places where non-white people might indeed be better off without any police “protection” than the current forces:
See here:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/three-cops-fired-after-accidental-dashcam-activation-captures-racist-rants/
The central point in the “defund the police” movement is that for black people in too many jurisdictions, calling the police is more dangerous than dealing with criminals.
Obviously, the policy that will come out in the end is to hire health professionals to handle the mentally ill, and hire&train LEOs that actually “serve and protect” all of the population, including minorities.
I think the problem starts with prosecutors and judges being elected positions. This ensures that “law and order” concerns will be a prosecutor or judge’s foremost issues, and in those states where rascists are a substantial part of the electorate “law and order” can easily become a dogwhistle for “Keep those goddamn N****rs in line!” I think I’d start with reforming the system by which prosecutors and judges are selected to make sure they are not elected positions.
Briefly, the idea would work like this: Five years of experience as a defense attorney would be required to be hired as a prosecutor. After having spent another five years as a prosecutor one would be eligible to be a judge, and thus have at least five years experience on both sides of the courtroom. (I believe most judges these days are former prosecutors, because “law and order” types love to elect former prosecutors as judges, and similarly prefer not to elect defense attorneys.)
Higher-level judges would be promoted from the lower-levels. I have no opinion on how the civil courts would work.
On the prisons side of things, there should be no private prisons, because once you’ve built your private prison, you’re very likely to prefer social/political policies that fill that prison. One might very well believe that “Black Lives Matter,” but if you’ve just invested millions of someone else’s money in a building a private prison, you’re very unlikely to make political donations with the idea that black lives matter in mind!
I’ve also got some very strong feelings about the character of someone who wants to build a private prison – you’d probably find a much better class of people than prison owners if you sold the facilities to rich sexual deviants!
To continue, I think that prisons should not be able to rent out the labor of their convicts – look up the history of prisons in the Jim Crow south if you want some insights as to why I feel that way – and prisons should be as much as possible aimed at reforms rather than making a profit. Obviously this will be not be possible for all prisoners, but perhaps a set of prisons aimed at first-time offenders would be useful – a convict gets one chance to redress their educational lacks and learn social skills/time preference, and if they can’t manage that the first time they do hard time the next time they’re arrested.
Finally get rid of any laws that make consensual decisions between adults a crime – laws against drugs and prostitution are frequently weaponized against folks the police don’t like – the sole exception to this might be laws against being drunk/high in public.
I might address reforms among the police on another post, but that’s enough for now.
Prison guard unions are quite happy to push for social and political policies that require building more non-private prisons. I get how private prisons are one of the Left’s big hates, much like they hate pistol grips on rifles, but it’s hugely dishonest to call out private prisons without mentioning prison guard unions that also contribute to the problem.
I wouldn’t argue with your first sentence. But I did say that I wasn’t going to address how to fix the police – I’m still thinking about that one – so I reject your asinine accusation of dishonesty. (Eight paragraphs wasn’t enough for you?)
As opposed to having prosecutors and judges unaccountable to anyone. Especially, considering the problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t actually exist in reality.
Also the reason people prefer “law and order” types (unfortunately not as much as they should) is that law and order is the basis of civilization, and most people like living in a civilized society. (Although I suppose that’s considered “racist” these days.)
The last time we tried the kind of polices you propose they lead to the 70s crime wave. I realize that was probably before you were born and history education sucks these days. You could for example look up the movie “Taxi Driver” to get a feel for what it was like those days.
Well, since being shot by other Blacks is a far bigger threat to Black lives than the police are, it appears that the people protesting under that slogan don’t.
Oh, the stupid “Black-on-Black” murders thing again. Have you looked up the “White-on-White” murder rate? It’s not much different than the “Black-on-Black” rate…
I think from now on when someone mentions the “Black-on-Black” murder rate I’m going to classify them as someone who uses rhetoric rather than substance.
That is an example of what we in the business call a lie.
> Have you looked up the “White-on-White” murder rate? It’s not much different than the “Black-on-Black” rate…
And this affects an argument about the relative rate of police killing people of any race… how?
If he’s willing to outright lie about crime rates by races, he presumably also doesn’t care about rates of police killing.
The FBI sheet Troutwaxer linked to up above (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8708#comment-2428967) shows a white-on-white rate of 83%, as Troutwaxer stated, and a Black-on-Black rate of about 91%. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the present claim and call these rates “not much different”.
That original post however did call the Black-on-Black rate “fewer than all murders of White’s by Whites”; I’m not sure I could stretch that benefit of the doubt so far if the original claim were still being doubled down on.
Oh, and older than the seventies, thank you very much…
Then you have even less of an excuse for your ignorance and stupidity.
Lead poisoning. ¯\_[]_/¯
Yes, and I’ve got strong opinions about the character of people who propose sweeping reforms of policy areas they know f*** all about based on false premises, especially if said people also seem to have an instinctual aversion to “law and order”.
I don’t see what your link is supposed to show. That a police officer saying a mean word somehow causes Blacks to drop dead? Surely even you aren’t that stupid.
The statistics suggest otherwise. The number of Blacks shot by cops (or the total number of people shot by cops for that matter) is much much smaller then the number of Blacks killed by Blacks.
More likely it will lead to a second round of the Ferguson effect, when following the previous round of BLM protests, police reduced their presence in Black neighborhoods and the number of Blacks killed went up dramatically.
So in summary, winter as usual has no clue what the **** he’s talking about.
If all you’re saying is that “defund the police” is a political platitude, then we have been in agreement this entire time. At the very least, most cries to “defund” does not include by what amount — it could equally plausibly mean “take away all funding” or “take away 0.2%”. Politics is full of such platitudes by two definitions (1. a phrase either trivially true, or rendered meaningless by repetition; 2. a thought-terminating cliché used to quell social, emotional, or cognitive distress). The problem is when such phrases get used as a sort of “et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth” handwave to dog-whistle that the politician has goals beyond what they are comfortable publicly stating. [Isn’t that exactly what the Democrats have been screaming for the past 4 years about Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platitude: that it both does (as a platitude) and does not (as a dog-whistle) mean literally what it says?] So for me, the problem is not looking at the platitude itself, but the context from which we can determine what else might be implied.
Yes! Excellent example — when a (literal) warhawk like Dick Nixon or William J. Clinton says “war on drugs” you can be pretty confident they mean “we had to destroy the community in order to save it”. However, consistent repetition — especially coming from both major parties — will make that phrase have just one meaning. That is not true of “defund the police” … yet, so I’m highly interested in trying to identify what the various speakers could mean by this new platitude.
Trivially true. First, taking the prima facie meaning of “defund”, nearly all police funding is controlled at the municipal (e.g. county / city) level, not state or federal. Second, CHAZ was/is itself a local movement [despite the attempted DC “Black House Zone”, there have been no repeats] — however, this does not mean that CHAZ cannot be used as a marker for the agenda of affiliated groups with wider reach, such as BLM. That is of both immediate and long-term concern, regardless of the fate of the CHAZ.
“Press ⓧ to doubt”. Don’t get me wrong — there’s a pretty good chance you are correct — but I’m viewing this event from a metaphorical thousand miles away (which really is closer to two thousand) and in total honesty as a anarcho-capitalist I personally support the CHAZ. As a result, I don’t have any sense of what the “street level” attitude is in Seattle, but I see a small (but decidedly non-zero) chance that while the general population continues to hold support for the CHAZ protest, Mayor Durkan and other politicans either cannot or will not continue to stomach the risks involved. Since this entire protest is about the government [as embodied in the police] acting in ways which actively harms the community, maintaining the analytical distinction between elected officials, bureaucrats, and plebs is important.
Unfortunately, the people running CHAZ are communists rather than anarcho-capitalists. I agree an autonomous zone run by anarcho-capitalists would probably work much better; however, perhaps not coincidentally; the authorities would never take the kid glove approach to such a zone that they’ve taken with CHAZ.
Well yes, but mostly no on that “unfortunately”.
IMO, one of the immediate (and unavoidable) consequences of the non-aggression principle that most people struggle to accept is this: everyone has the right to be stupid. Most people seem fine if the only examples considered are “small stupidity” — things like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, or fad diets. When you start getting to moderately large instances of stupidity — smoking cancer sticks, or maybe leasing a used car — you can start to see the cracks in their resolve form. Get to truly monstrous scale — like here, with the socialist’s belief that they will eventually overcome the scarcity which defines the fabric of reality — and many people choke on allowing others this level of freedom.
As an anarchist, I have accepted that in the face of stupidity — small or large — the only moral choices I have are to: (a.) try to persuade the idiot in changing their behavior / belief, (b.) ask that they be stupid a safe distance from me and mine (then if they fail in this and actual harm befalls, respond proportionally), and (c.) hope that their failures instruct better that my words did. Since Seattle seems to be well above the minimum-safe-distance, I’ll overlook the socialist part of their attitudes and support their anarchist ones — at least, until the former overwhelms the latter. [It should also be noted that in large part because of that same distance, I can only provide moral support — largely consisting of chanting “Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone!”]
Except what you’re actually doing is cheering on the idiots because they’re a safe distance away from you. In other-words you expect the people who aren’t a safe distance away from the idiots to indulge them, because the idiots aren’t affecting you.
First, you’re ignoring the possibility that the general public of Seattle agrees with the CHAZ — in which case indulgence would be a proper response. Second, I expect the people of Seattle who disagree to publicly and visibly follow rules (a.) and (b.) — to tell the CHAZ they are being stupid and establish their own minimum safe distance — because (surprise surprise) I consider doing anything else a bit stupid. Yet I’ll say it again: everyone has the right to be stupid — and so either way, I have no right to stop people so far away from me from indulging the CHAZ or stupidity like it.
Well, (a) isn’t necessarily that safe these days, and (b) is kind of hard to do when CHAZ sets up in your area.
There’s a difference between saying you have no right to stop CHAZ and to cheer them on.
<sarcasm> What, you’re telling me that supposed liberal anarchists are going around giving other people orders?!? Ça allors! Quelle surprise!! </sarcasm> It’s almost as if I anticipated such a thing might happen when I stated I support their anarchist attitude until it is overwhelmed by the competing totalitarian ideology. So I’m sorry if the verb tense confused there — I find it so very hard to talk clearly about things which occur in attosecond timeframes.
Please, precision matters here too. I am not so much “cheering them on” as I am asking that people either actively oppose them, or allow them room to either succeed or fail through their own acts. [I know that won’t necessarily stop them from saying the mustache-twirling capitalists stole their utopian aspirations again, but a man can dream, right?]
And there’s your problem. Letting them fail “fair and square” in CHAZ isn’t going to convince them any more than Venezuela and the Soviet Union did.
As long as he remembers dreams aren’t reality and doesn’t base his beliefs on wishful thinking.
Thank you for acknowledging that one person’s right to be stupid ends at another person’s face.
I trust you will keep quiet about the COVID lockdown measures, wear a mask, and social-distance as per government directives. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite and in violation of the law and a danger to others.
Sure, but it’s not just swinging fists that matter here — if you invade someone’s personal space playing the childish “I’m not touching you!” game, that’s hardly even a faux-genteel veneer on the same aggression.
It pleases me very much not to live in the rat infested open sewage projects fools call metropolises, and as a result this pandemic has not reached the crisis proportions to necessitate a “lockdown” in my area. [I just checked in google — against a national average of deaths/confirmed cases around 4.7%, my county of residence is sitting at less than half that at 2.1%.] That’s not even to touch on questioning the wisdom of such actions — the state of South Dakota never closed anything, and they currently sit comfortably below 1.5% deaths/cases!
No. Take your damn filthy [rhetorical] paws off my face. On the plot of land you own, you can set the rules — and I do wear a mask in what few businesses around me that request it — but that’s not what you’re doing when your request is phrased as a categorical imperative. Even being “polite” does not make this demand any less an act of aggression. My rule (b.) does not say that you get to always control other people to generate your safe distance — in a common public space, it is up to you to move when you think others are being fools.
Social distancing is the quintessence of rule (b.) — what makes you think I haven’t been? What makes you think I waited for the government’s signal to start? Only the worst sort of fool seeks someone else’s permission to do the right thing.
All at once, then: that’s a laugh, violating immoral laws is not immoral, and before this year I would hear that every other day (albeit for other, non-health related reasons).
The pandemic in Europe is under control. The USA recently had a record high number of new cases.
This kind of thinking is why. Y’all just got us another round of lockdowns because y’all just HAD to bloodymindedly defy sensible directives from the government.
> The USA recently had a record high number of new cases.
Know what we don’t have? A record high number of deaths.
> because y’all just HAD to bloodymindedly defy sensible directives from the government.
You mean like the ones that said mass left-wing protests were all right, because racism is a health crisis, but everyone else had to stay home? Oh gee, why ever would cases be spiking, a couple of incubation periods after the protests started?
Winter, I am disappoint. Usually you do such an impeccable job as A&D’s resident fact-checker.
Of the two stories you linked, one was about Trump supposedly considering dropping out of the 2016 election (he didn’t); the other was from last year and about Anthony Scaramucci speculating that Trump would drop out by March 2020 (he didn’t). I was speaking more specifically about Republican operatives speculating (wishing? hoping?) that Trump would drop out in response to his massive poll slump (currently he’s behind Biden). Thinking on it some, I don’t think he will; the man is pure ego and will see it through to the bitter end (and cry about “rigged elections” when he loses).
Eric,
Agreed, although I think this poses more immediate, actual danger than you do. The mask has slipped?
@Jeff Read
“Winter, I am disappoint. Usually you do such an impeccable job as A&D’s resident fact-checker.”
Sorry, but there are no facts to check. There is only rumor, speculation, and wishful thinking.
Those are coming.
It wasn’t the protests.
My guess was it was the loosening of social-distancing rules and the reopening of bars, beaches, and other areas where people gather closely in significant numbers — which started happening right about the same time. The protesters wore their masks. Because, you know, left-wing crowd, where all the people who give science a modicum of credibility are.
This will be Trump’s legacy — giving strength and support to white supremacists and fumbling the ball on the pandemic. If Biden’s team were smart they’d hammer those two points in the runup to November.
Sure, just like the flooding of Manhatten due to global warming.
White supremacists aren’t the ones burning down our cities.
In Texas, the loosening of social distancing and the reopening of bars, restaurants etc. happened well before the BLM protests. A surge in new cases hit 12 days after the protests, exactly where they were held – no such surge took place before then.
So it damn well was the protests.
Also, “you must not gather in public places, to avoid spreading the virus” is onerous but has some logic to it. “You must not gather, unless you’re demonstrating for today’s pet Leftist cause” has no logic to it at all; it’s obvious partisanship. Every public health authority who said it was fine to protest merely ensured that the American people wouldn’t listen to a single word they said in future. And everyone who says now that the protests didn’t do any harm, but lockdown measures have to continue, discredits himself in the same way.
>And everyone who says now that the protests didn’t do any harm, but lockdown measures have to continue, discredits himself in the same way.
This is the tell that I wasn’t cynical enough.
I actually believed that the lockdowns were about public health, back when they were initiated. I now see that I was wrong. It was lies and power-seeking all the way down.
The fact that the left was willing to close down their indoctrination centers (commonly called public schools) with (almost) no fuss suggests something else must also be going on here.
I think that was typical [apolitical] human shortsightedness, nothing more.
This mostly comes from two factors: first, that the official polling is — again! — showing an unbeatable lead by the Democrat candidate. I am afraid my telepathy is acting flaky from being left in my pants the last time I laundered them, so I’m not going to speculate as to whether Democrats are merely forgetting or deliberately ignoring that the same polls failed to reflect the final Electoral College results 4 years ago — however, I have doubts that the methodological improvements which have been implemented can actually prevent similar errors. [Extremely brief version: Trump deployed unexpected tactics last election, “lighting up” areas which typically did not vote and turning unexpected states into battlegrounds. Polls may assume Trump will be using exactly the same playbook this election; yet were he not to do so the polls would not just be in error but would be inducing iatrogenic errors.] However, this could encourage Democrats into closing public schools if they are led into a false impression of total dominance over voting opinion.
The second plausible factor would be a belief that in this lockdown, social media can control and regulate the Overton window even better than the schools ever did. After all, only children are in schools — but virtually every adult has social media accounts (and when you can’t see friends in person, those accounts appear more important than ever). That approach has seemed safe so far — and it could be bolstered by “echo chamber” effects leading into a similar belief as the first aspect — but since we are just seeing the beginnings of Republican blowback to these actions it remains to see in the overall balance if this was actually effective. [That’s not to mention the problem that just because someone is banned from major platforms like Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean they are completely cut off from the internet. Both “alt-tech” and older systems like IRC connect people in far less controllable fashions.]
In 2016 they deliberately falsified the polls in an attempt to demoralize Trump voters. “You can’t win, don’t even try.”
This year quite a few dissident rightists are utterly convinced that Trump is going to lose regardless, so it might well be sincere on the left too.
Also, the riots signal an increase in vote fraud by at least one order of magnitude.
That’s the trouble with cynicism. After a couple of rounds it looks like you were being too _optimistic_.
Bahahaha. Trump is still locking children in cages, and now he’s kidnapping protesters off the streets and putting them in unmarked vehicles bound for undisclosed locations. And you think the lockdowns are about repression and control?
The orange asshole has so egregiously fumbled the ball that the U.S. alone accounts for a quarter of cases of the ‘rona and a quarter of all deaths from the ‘rona — more than any other country by a wide margin. (And many of those who caught it but did not die will have severe health issues for life.) Lockdowns are the only solution if we want to have any hope of containment. This was not the case when the virus first hit our shores; extensive testing and quarantining those who were infected or at high risk of being infected would have done the trick. Furthermore, having fumbled the ball to the shock and jeers of the nation, he doubled down and declared political war on the very civil servants hired for their expertise to fight the pandemic.
Once again, this is Trump’s legacy: staggering incompetence at actual governance, leadership, and public service, brutal efficiency at silencing, oppressing, and imprisoning dissidents and people of color. It is now morally incumbent on Americans mentally competent enough to be aware of what’s going on and with any conscience whatsoever, to vote for Biden in November — provided we still have free and fair elections by then. It’s no longer a case of respectable disagreement. One candidate served with the greatest president in decades; the other may, objectively, be the worst president in history.
“Trump is still locking children in cages, and now he’s kidnapping protesters off the streets and putting them in unmarked vehicles bound for undisclosed locations. ”
Moreover:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/19/donald-trump-says-may-not-accept-results-november-election/
https://ijr.org/trump-addresses-whether-he-would-accept-results-of-election/
That is the man the Libertarians are supporting in the coming elections. A man using “anonymous” troops to suppress protests and who will feels free to NOT accept the outcome of the next election.
Yeah, Anarchists and Libertarians do not accept Democracy, but they really do support autocratic despots.
Maybe that’s because the Democrats intend to cheat by abusing mail-in voting.
“intend to cheat by abusing mail-in voting.”
Prove that that is an issue. Republicans have tried for years finding proof of voting fraud and were unable to turn up anything.
Still, the Republicans are very successful in suppressing Democratic votes by nonsense requirements and endless (6h) lines at voting stations.
In the end, without voter suppression, Republicans would not be elected:
Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republican-party-voting-reform-coronavirus
Trump adviser: Expect more aggressive poll watching in 2020
https://apnews.com/af2f0ede054d8baebbe1bb6ca47b4895
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/opinion/republicans-and-voter-suppression.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-admit-voter-id-laws-are-aimed-at-democratic-voters
“Let’s adopt this procedure that short short circuits all the security protocols, e.g., secrecy of ballots, having at least someone their to verify that drastic shenanigans aren’t happening, (such as they are) of the old system. But don’t worry their isn’t ‘conclusive evidence’ that this leads to more fraud.”
Seriously do you leftists get some kind of high from spouting this kind of stupidity?
Do you even know the history of the election protection laws you’re trying to dismantle, or the kinds of abuses they were created to prevent?
> Prove that that is an issue.
OK. How about this?
1-in-5 mail-in ballots tossed out in tight Congressional primary race
Or this?
Queens, N.Y., Primary Gives Us a Preview of the Mayhem Mail-in Voting Could Create in November
Or this?
Voter Fraud Complaint Upends Push for Universal Vote-by-Mail in Arizona
Seriously, you really need to get outside your media bubble, Winter.
Oh that’s right. You’re going to dismiss all of these stories just because they’re from right-wing sources. And, you’ll insist that these don’t count, because no one can actually prove that the fraud had anything to do with mail-in voting–or that fraud even took place! You’ll insist that those mean old nasty old Republicans are “suppressing voters” again throwing out those ballots! After all, we have to count all the ballots, because every vote counts–even dead people, illegal aliens, children, pets, and cheating politicians voting more than once.
> A man using “anonymous” troops to suppress protests
Indeed, how simply dreadful that the protesters wearing clear and unambiguous BLM and Antifa insignia and with publicly available personal identifying information are treated so _anonymously_ while engaging in peaceful protests such as burning down black-owned businesses, seizing sections of cities as their personal territory after chasing out the police, and killing 11-, 8-, and four-year old children (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/atlanta-mayor-8-year-old-killed.html).
> Anarchists and Libertarians do not accept Democracy, but they really do support autocratic despots.
So true, you sure got our number there sport! Exactly as true as how left-liberals do not accept a non-leftist despot, but they really do support protesting police brutality by burning down a Wendy’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Rayshard_Brooks) because FUCK CAPITALISM WOO! It’s totally Dave Thomas’s fault we have a bunch of disgusting racist brutal police mixed in amongst our Glorious Worker State Secret but Totally Never Racist And Only Brutal When you Flyover Trash Make Us Police.
>and killing 11-, 8-, and four-year old children
Oh, but you don’t understand! The murderers of those children were Official Oppressed Victims. When they kill, it’s an excusable reaction against “systemic racism”, or somehow Donald Trump’s fault, or both. And if this doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re rayciss.
I hope this clarifies matters. I’m sure the Ministry of Truth that is our news media will soon issue a more detailed explanation, which all right-thinking persons will be required to publicly affirm on pain of being fired from their jobs, having their social-media activity censored, and living in fear that a BLM mob of “peaceful protesters” will visit their home.
Dang it, you spoiled it. I wanted to hear Jeff Read’s explanation of why “locking children in cages” is actually worse than shooting them in the head.
But I’m still loving the “Libertarians support Autocrats” line. That shit never gets old.
“and killing 11-, 8-, and four-year old children”
I have heard nothing about the people arrested and disappeared by anonymous troops having been involved in killing children. That is a connection you are making up.
When you are condoning the arrest and abuse of people because other people did something wrong somewhere else, you are already deep into despotic country.
As far as I am aware of, no one has condoned the killing of children and everyone wants the perpetrators to be brought to justice. But you all condone the arrest of people for their political ideas under the guise of punishing other people who did things somewhere else.
>But you all condone the arrest of people for their political ideas under the guise of punishing other people who did things somewhere else.
The Portland perps aren’t being arrested for their political ideas. They are being arrested because BLM and Antifa pose a prompt threat of vandalism, arson, and bombing to Federal facilities in Portland including courthouses and ICE buildings. This is not hypothetical, crimes of this sort have already been committed and neither organization is hiding its intent to commit more.
Antifa and BLM are, in fact, organizations that have been shooting down black children in the streets. Claiming that this Antifa/BLM guy over here shouldn’t be arrested because it was that Antifa/BLM guy over there was the one that did the murders is exactly like saying this Nazi over here shouldn’t be arrested because other Nazis are the bad guys.
Totalitarian terror has to be eradicated systematically by destroying the organizations that sustain it.
“The Portland perps aren’t being arrested for their political ideas.”
If that was true, they would have been arrested by normal LEOs.
When the powers that be resort to unmarked, anonymous troops that lead people away to undisclosed facilities without formal arrests, we know where we are. And that is not in a good state (pun intended).
@esr
“Antifa and BLM are, in fact, organizations that have been shooting down black children in the streets. ”
You are trying to paint BLM as a clone of IS or Al Qaida. This is exactly what was done to MLK and the civil rights movement with their contemporary equivalents.
Riots happen with large protests, even peaceful ones. Such riots should be prevented. But what we often see is that any disorders are just an excuse to suppress any protest. Which is exactly what you are doing.
>If that was true, they would have been arrested by normal LEOs.
These are normal LEOs – Federal rather than state, but that’s because the Feds have jurisdiction over crimes on or against Federal facilities.
>When the powers that be resort to unmarked, anonymous troops
I don’t know how this legend got started. The arresting agents are uniformed Border Patrol wearing unit patches and ID numbers. Their faces are bare. I’ve read that they’ve been deputized by U.S. marshals, so they’re almost certainly wearing the Marshall Service insignia as well, though I can’t make it out in the videos.
>This is exactly what was done to MLK and the civil rights movement with their contemporary equivalents.
Tell me, did MLK’s civil rights movement gun down black children? There have been at least four of these murders, two in the CHOP/CHAZ and two at other Antifa/BLM demonstrations.
That’s a difference that matters.
I’m not humanist, but BLM is. Let’s measure it.
Assuming the Ferguson effect holds constant, BLM is proposing to kill an extra 900 blacks each year via murder, in order to save 250 from being killed while resisting arrest.
So I guess BLM is the Satanism analogue for humanism.
Black Lives Matter: it’s important to end as many of them as we can. Psychopathic mass-murdering terrorists. As per usual for Marxists.
Fun fact: homicide is easily the leading preventable cause of death for black Americans, at 5% of all deaths. (Top two are old age and accidents.) Being DNC’s bitches has really worked out for them.
This is a lie and vicious propaganda. Anti-fascists have been linked to zero murders in the past 25 years.
Meanwhile, every month or so in the USA it seems that there is another mass shooting — by a right-wing terrorist. One hundred percent of extremist killings in 2018 were committed by right-wingers.
When it comes to violence and death, ALL of it comes from the right. Literally none of it from the left. Small wonder, that; over the past few decades the left have claimed victories in civil rights, women’s rights, and rights for LGBTQ groups, all peacefully obtained. The right’s primary victories have been war, lynchings, shootings, increased surveillance, and the continued appropriation of the assets of the poor for the benefit of the rich. (And those who oppose these things are placed on FBI lists of people to be rounded up and arrested en masse.)
But that can’t be why we vote and speak out the way we do. It has to be a sinister Russian mind virus!
> When it comes to violence and death, ALL of it comes from the right. Literally none of it from the left.
Oh, and I suppose the rioting in MPLS and elsewhere didn’t happen–no, even better, it were committed by right-wing agents provocateurs to frame the left, yeah, that has to be it! Every single time we have violence, it must necessarily, one way or another, be the fault of those awful icky right-wing deplorables, because the left are for peace, love, and justice, and the right are for war, hate, and conquest!
Go ahead. Admit it. You actually like how the rioters are rioting. You want them to keep rioting. You get to blame the death and destruction on the right, and you’ll soon get your Maoist revolution once Trump is out and your puppet president Biden is installed. You don’t really care if people die or lose everything–most of them are icky deplorables and dumb n****rs who are only good for fomenting revolution anyway, and it’s all for a good cause, after all… But you won’t admit any of this in polite company: that would undermine your attempts to help smash the system.
Like with Muslims, the radical leftist wants to chop my head off, and the moderate leftist wants the radical leftist to chop my head off. You secretly want Antifa and BLM to chop my head off.
Word to the wise: come the revolution, watch your back…
> But that can’t be why we vote and speak out the way we do. It has to be a sinister Russian mind virus!
There he is, FBI! There is the KGB agent of influence!
@Xoogler
“Oh, and I suppose the rioting in MPLS and elsewhere didn’t happen–no, even better, it were committed by right-wing agents ”
I did not know Multiprotocol Label Switching gave rise to riots. That is worrying indeed.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching
I am neither claiming a connection, nor condoning any action, either by the rioters or the government.
I am merely pointing out how ridiculous I find it that after weeks of the left screeching “FUCK CAPITALISM! Burn it all down!”, the left are now screeching about their civil rights not being adequately respected. Just how many of your civil rights did you _expect_ to survive the burning down of civilization?
The shit icing on the shit cake is you then expecting _libertarians_ to hang our heads in shame at all of the fallout from the latest clash between the autocratic left and the autocratic right, because yeah, _we’re_ the assholes who have supported all the autocrats from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, on down to the present day.
Why do I get the feeling what Leftists are _really_ pissed off is that the secret police carting folks off in vans to take to the gulags is supposed to be a tool of the left. How dare Trump pull a page from _that_ playbook.
@darin
“screeching “FUCK CAPITALISM! Burn it all down!””
Freedom of speech as opposed to secret renditions?
@darin
“The shit icing on the shit cake is you then expecting _libertarians_ to hang our heads in shame at all of the fallout from the latest clash between the autocratic left and the autocratic right”
A person that was really a proponent of Free Speech once wrote:
That spirit seems to have left the Libertarians (if it ever inspirited them).
So fucking WRITE something instead of shooting four-year-old children in the head.
Are you fuckers SERIOUSLY calling this mass destruction of property and wanton acts of murder “free speech”? I had thought it was merely deflection, but if you’re actually _conflating_ them you can fuck yourselves right off to hell.
> When you are condoning the arrest and abuse of people because other people did something wrong somewhere else, you are already deep into despotic country.
Also, when you sit down and really think long and hard about what you wrote there, actually devote more than a couple dozen brain cells to the question, you might _finally_ start to gain a dim understanding of why some of us have for so long found phrases like “white privilege” and, in certain corners of the interwebs now, “gotta kill ALL the whiteys this time”, so offensive.
@darin
““white privilege” and, in certain corners of the interwebs now, “gotta kill ALL the whiteys this time””
I am not responsible for the madness others sprout. But I do know that two wrongs do not make a right.
Everyone is responsible for his own deeds, and no one should be punished for the deeds of others.
Maybe you should think about this?
> But I do know that two wrongs do not make a right.
> Everyone is responsible for his own deeds, and no one should be punished for the deeds of others.
> Maybe you should think about this?
Uh, yeah, that’s exactly what I _was_ thinking about when I wrote what I did. When “kill ALL the whiteys” is put into practice this time around, what “deeds” are my family being murdered for, if not the deeds of others?
What “deeds” of the Wendy’s owner were they being “punished for” when it was burned down?
What “deeds” were those black children being “punished” for when they were shot in the head?
Maybe you should fucking EXPLAIN the connections here, since I’m obviously having so little success “thinking about this” on my own.
“So true, you sure got our number there sport! Exactly as true as how left-liberals do not accept a non-leftist despot, but they really do support protesting police brutality by burning down a Wendy’s”
Yep, some people were taking the law into their own hands. And that is wrong, as has been said by all parties and politicians.
And it is also a tried and true propaganda trick of despotic regimes everywhere to oppress peaceful protests using “someone somewhere did something wrong” accusations to mean “you are someone, this is somewhere” so you must be doing something wrong.
Not that different from how the CCP is oppressing Hong Kong protests.
I find it funny that you’re comparing Trump’s actions to the CCP, given that it’s Antifa and BLM who are acting like the CCP–hell, they’re acting like the CCP did in mainland China, destroying all relics of the past, punishing people for thinking wrong thoughts, encouraging the young to rat out their parents… Oh, and they’re still doing these things in Hong Kong.
Trump is president, PoTUS, BLM is a civil rights protest movement, as is Antifa.
The CCP is the ruling power of China, the Hong Kong protesters are civil rights activists.
The accusations against BLM/Antifa and the Hong Kong civil rights movements are the same, and they are the same accusations thrown at Iranian protesters, or any other civil rights movement.
See the commonalities?
But I know, no one as blind as a man who does not want to see.
One of these three is not like the others…
> But I know, no one as blind as a man who does not want to see.
Oh, I agree… Except that you are the willfully blind one.
“a man who does not want to see”
Why don’t you click on the fucking links and “see” the pictures of the children who have been shot.
“One of these three is not like the others…”
Says you.
“Why don’t you click on the fucking links and “see” the pictures of the children who have been shot.”
The perpetrators should be put to justice. But it is pure evil to punish others for what these murderers did.
@Winter:
> But it is pure evil to punish others for what these murderers did.
You can continue to ignore my repeatedly pointing out that I never said the “punishments” were “_for_ what these murderers did”. I don’t care, because what I wrote was perfectly clear on the subject.
You and others on the Left can also continue to frame the destruction of public and private property, and the murder of innocent civilians including small children, as “peaceful protests”. I don’t really care what that says about your consciences.
The point being made is simple. After weeks of Left-supported “protests” which through their acts of wanton destruction and murder have made it clear that a primary goal of said protests is the “burning down” of civil order and civil society, for the Left to then point to various “rights” that existed in the prior-to-being-burned-down society, and bleating that those “rights” are being disrespected by the reactionary Right now, makes you look not merely evil but really really foolish.
And no, libertarians like me shaking our heads from the sidelines while you on the Left and your bugbears on the Right go at it once again does not count as us “condoning” the behavior of either side — unless you’re willing to also concede that you really do condone shooting four-year-old black children in the head.
Dodging the question _again_, quelle sur-fucking-prise.
How is burning down a Wendy’s, in front of which a black man was gunned down by police, a “peaceful” protest? How is burning down a PRIVATELY OWNED Wendy’s supposed to bring an end to GOVERNMENT police brutality?
Answer that one, and I will give you a pass on the question of how shooting four-year-old black children in the head is going to accomplish those goals either. To quote Richard Nixon, “I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies.”
“How is burning down a Wendy’s, in front of which a black man was gunned down by police, a “peaceful” protest? How is burning down a PRIVATELY OWNED Wendy’s supposed to bring an end to GOVERNMENT police brutality?”
Are secret arrests of protesters in Portland going to catch those who burned down a shop in Atlanta? Why are people in Oregon being detained secretly for things that happened in Georgia?
What is the difference with secret arrests of protesters in any other dictatorship?
> Why are people in Oregon being detained secretly for things that happened in Georgia?
Nobody is saying that’s _why_ they’re being detained. What I was hoping to find out is why libertarians, who have no fucking control over what CBP[1] are doing in Portland, are de facto (per your claim) “condoning” these actions, any more than leftists such as yourself are “condoning” the destruction of private property as a response to perceived government injustice, and “condoning” the shooting of black children in the head.
[1] As was already pointed out upthread, Customs and Border Patrol came forward immediately to take responsibility for the arrests, prior to CNN reporting on that announcement. So “detained secretly” at this point is a deliberate misrepresentation.
@darin
“What I was hoping to find out is why libertarians, who have no fucking control over what CBP[1] are doing in Portland, are de facto (per your claim) “condoning” these actions, ”
Our host was saying
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8708&cpage=1#comment-2436954
@esr
Which made me conclude that he did not only condone it, but wrote “it’s almost a shame” that this would not lead to worse.
@darin
“Dodging the question _again_, quelle sur-fucking-prise.”
The question being:
Why should protesters in Portland be detained anyway?
Is the right to protest not a fundamental right in the USA?
And the right to protest in Oregon is not curtailed because someone else did something terribly wrong in Georgia.
Except, of course, in the eyes of Trump supporters.
> Is the right to protest not a fundamental right in the USA?
If you really want to spread the meme that shooting four-year-old black children in the head is “a fundamental right” provided it is framed as “protest”, be my guest.
This is like a revolting horrific version of the old “waiter-there’s-a-fly-in-my-soup” joke: “Shh… don’t tell the white supremacists, they’ll want in on it too!”
@darin
“If you really want to spread the meme that shooting four-year-old black children in the head is “a fundamental right” provided it is framed as “protest”, be my guest.”
What did the protesters in Portland have to do with the killing of these children? Why should people not be allowed to protest because other people in other states have shot children?
The connection is still puzzling me.
@Winter:
> Why should people not be allowed to protest because other people in other states have shot children?
If “peaceful protests” in other states have led directly to four-year-old children getting shot in the head, and if precious few protests across the country have _actually_ been peaceful (as in actually NO people getting killed or injured, and actually NO private property being burned or destroyed, as opposed to what the Left calls “peaceful” — which I have no fucking clue at this point what a “non-peaceful” protest would entail, since even the murder of _black_ children isn’t enough to cross that threshold apparently), then it should at least occur to anyone of even a minimal level of intelligence to _consider_ the possibility that folks in other states might want to curtail events _before_ they escalate from “totally absolutely free-speech peaceful” protests (smashing cop car windows, generally setting things on fire without _deliberately_ trapping people in said fires) on up to “oh come on it’s still _peaceful_ why are you making all these connections my head is starting to hurt” protests.
Notice I said CONSIDER the possibility and not CONDONE it. That is use your BRAIN to imagine whether it might happen or not, whether one event might end up influencing someone ELSE (not _you_ of course) to embark on that course of actions. Me pointing and laughing at those who have set their own house on fire (deliberately, by their own stated goal, “FUCK CAPITALISM! BURN IT ALL DOWN!”) and are now running about frantically muttering “there has GOT to be a god-damned fire extinguisher around here SOMEWHERE”, is really not “condoning” arson no matter how much you declare it so.
@darin
“If “peaceful protests” in other states have led directly to four-year-old children getting shot in the head, ”
Sounds nice, until you look at who is doing the arrests, and when.
(btw, no children were murdered in Portland at BLM protests)
When the mayor of Portland is tear-gassed by federal troops while speaking with protesters, that sounds more like a political move:
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/portland-mayor-tear-gassed-at-anti-racism-protest-following-deployment-of-us-federal-troops
The elected mayor of Portland does not want federal troops to squelch civil-rights protests, as does the state of Oregon. So, what is the role of federal troops?
(Breaking out due to replies being too deeply nested)
Winter said:
>>When the powers that be resort to unmarked, anonymous troops
esr said:
> I don’t know how this legend got started. The arresting agents are uniformed Border Patrol wearing unit patches and ID numbers.
That’s easy, CNN. (Well, not sure if it _started_ there but that’s where I saw the arrest in question first reported.)
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/17/unidentified-police-arrests-oregon-lead-vpx.cnn
When I first saw it on TV I didn’t notice the patches saying “POLICE” on their uniforms, and I indeed remember it being presented as completely “anonymous” agents kidnapping some random “peaceful protester”. The above walks it back to the agents’ uniforms clearly marked “POLICE”, but still claims the vehicle was “unmarked” (but not shown in the video). The video above also points out that it was CBP that came forward and took responsibility for that arrest, as opposed to the noble CNN reporters risking all to bring the truth to light.
@darin
“The above walks it back to the agents’ uniforms clearly marked “POLICE”, but still claims the vehicle was “unmarked” (but not shown in the video).”
Yeah yeah:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/17/portland-protests-federal-officers-george-floyd
Since when are armed US Federal agents responsible for keeping the order during civil protests in cities?
> Since when are armed US Federal agents responsible for keeping the order during civil protests in cities?
https://www.justice.gov/archive/jmd/mps/2012/manual/usms.htm
“The mission of the USMS is to enforce federal laws and provide support to virtually all elements of the federal justice system by providing for the security of federal court facilities and the safety of judges and other court personnel; apprehending criminals; exercising custody of federal prisoners and providing for their security and transportation to correctional facilities; executing federal court orders; seizing assets gained by illegal means and providing for the custody, management, and disposal of forfeited assets; assuring the safety of endangered government witnesses and their families; and collecting and disbursing funds.”
Assuming esr is correct about the CBP having been deputized by Oregon US Marshal’s office, their authority in that sense would also be derived from this directive.
Wikipedia says the US Marshals were established by George Washington in 1789, so that answers the “when” part of your question. If _that’s_ not enough history for you I’m not sure how much deeper to dig at this point.
Nice, that the Federal Troops are used to arrest journalists:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/portland-protests-judge-orders-federal-agents-keep-hands-off-journalists/
Not only do these troops arrest civil rights protesters, who are protected by a wall of moms, they also arrest journalists. Something everyone here conveniently ignores.
That is Trump learning from Putin how to do “Democracy” right.
I expect these troops to stay in Portland and other cities right through the elections to maximally interfere with Democrats voting against Trump.
PS, I do not see any overlap between the actions of these Troops and:
Lol, CBS. Keep in mind this is the network responsible for the infamous “peaceful protestors burn down courthouse” headline.
Your continued attempts to get away with referring to violent rioters as “civil rights protesters” does not leave one inclined to believe anything else you write.
It’s kind of hard to have an election when there are violent rioters and other thugs roaming around. If it takes a federal presence on the ground to stop them from intimidating voters or otherwise interfering with the election, well that’s that.
You don’t see any overlap between fighting rioters attempting to burn down federal court houses and “providing for the security of federal court facilities and the safety of judges and other court personnel”? I must ask are you real that dumb, or are you LARPing as an idiot for some perverse reason?
Your continued attempts to get away with referring to violent rioters as “civil rights protesters” does not leave one inclined to believe anything else you write.
It’s kind of hard to have an election when there are violent rioters and other thugs roaming around. If it takes a federal presence on the ground to stop them from intimidating voters or otherwise interfering with the election, well that’s that.
You don’t see any overlap between fighting rioters attempting to burn down federal court houses and “providing for the security of federal court facilities and the safety of judges and other court personnel”? I must ask are you real that dumb, or are you LARPing as an idiot for some perverse reason?
@Eugene_Nier
“Your continued attempts to get away with referring to violent rioters as “civil rights protesters””
Yep, the same accusations have been used against every civil rights protester anywhere in all of history.
“It’s kind of hard to have an election when there are violent rioters and other thugs roaming around.”
The troops are big time ineffective in subduing the protests. Their strategies only make sense if you assume they do not want things to quiet down. On the other hand, they might just be utterly incompetent, like their master is.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
The federal troops, and the president, seem to work really hard to keep people in arms. Tear-gazzing the mayor when he talks with the protesters will help to keep the clashes going. And I have no doubt at all that the troops will stay whatever the situation in the cities.
“You don’t see any overlap between fighting rioters attempting to burn down federal court houses”
The troops are way to far out in the streets to be merely protecting the buildings. We are talking about “wall of moms” protecting the protesters against the troops.
> Yep, the same accusations have been used against every civil rights protester anywhere in all of history.
So? Every Republican President and Presidential candidate has been called “Hitler” by your ilk. That must mean Republicans are actually Churchill, Patton, and MacArthur. See, I can play this game, too!
Oh wait, that’s right, those are white men, who are evil and must be marginalized and destroyed to make up for all the marginalizing and destruction they wrought. You and the Nazis are so very much alike.
> The troops are big time ineffective in subduing the protests.
Actually, they’re quite effective. Rioters are being arrested, which should hopefully lead to the ringleaders being identified and arrested. Then the support for these riots should evaporate. Maybe we’ll even get some of the kingpins out of this.
> Their strategies only make sense if you assume they do not want things to quiet down.
:s/Their/Your:s/they/youFTFY. These “protesters” live to fight and win. If you just concede to them, they’ll just find something else to attack you over. But if you push back on them, they’ll go away and look for someone else to antagonize.
Oh that’s right, you, like Jeff Read, are a “moderate leftist.” You like Burn-Loot-Murder and what they do. You want the riots to continue, so your hated enemies, including me, most of the other people on this thread, and our host, will be killed with no blood spilled on you, so you can keep blaming the violence on Republicans, libertarians, the right, etc, so that your puppet Biden can be installed in the White House, and you can move forward with the project of imposing Global Communism so the ruling elites can have everything, and maybe they’ll throw you a bone for being so helpful to them. Maybe. Or maybe they’ll just kill you after you cease being useful to them. I don’t know. Maybe you even want them to torture and/or kill you; for all I know, you’re a masochist.
All I know is, the radical leftist wants to lop my head off; and the moderate leftist wants the radical leftist to lop my head off.
@Xoogler
“Every Republican President and Presidential candidate has been called “Hitler” by your ilk.”
There is a difference between people in the street calling the powers that be bad things, and those wielding the arms calling protesters bad things.
It seems your political inclinations prevent you from making such a common sense distinction.
@Xoogler
“Oh that’s right, you, like Jeff Read, are a “moderate leftist.” You like Burn-Loot-Murder and what they do.”
You are projecting your own desires.
I want LEOs to keep protests orderly and prevent any violence. That does not mean that police forces should make protests impossible. Most free countries are very good making this distinction. Dictators and would-be dictators do not want to make this distinction.
@Xoogler
“so your hated enemies, including me, most of the other people on this thread, and our host, will be killed with no blood spilled on you,”
As they say:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
If that time ever comes, I hope to have the courage to do such.
“If that was true, you’d be mad at the Democratic city mayors for failing to do that.”
We can be mad at them for not trying. Failing to succeed while trying is a different matter. The Federal troops are failing big here, so why are you not mad at them for failing?
We can be mad at governments for not trying to stop the spread of COVID, stop police killings, or abolish racism. But we cannot be mad at them for failing while doing their best.
Well he wasn’t exactly trying either.
Sort of like all the Deomcratic governors who ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-possitive patients?
Or how about not trying to stop black-on-black killings, which are much much more common then police killings?
Tear gas isn’t exactly a specifically targeted weapon. Therefore, if you don’t want to get tear-gassed, don’t stand next to rioting arsonists. Something that would be obvious to you if you weren’t an idiot.
“Tear gas isn’t exactly a specifically targeted weapon.”
If you shoot, you have a duty to ensure you hit the right target.
It is called criminal incompetence, if it was an accident. But they should have known that the mayor was there and they should have refrained from shooting tear gas.
But I assume you are oke with silencing unwanted voices.
“if you don’t want to get tear-gassed, don’t stand next to rioting arsonists. ”
Keeping the order and talking to protesters is the job of a mayor. That is literally in his job description. Tear gassing protesters is not the job of those who protect federal buildings.
Well, he’d shown remarkably little interest in doing that in the month between the start of the riots and the federal intervention, in fact his lack of interest in keeping order is why the federal government intervened.
Going for the “repeat a lie often enough and in because the truth” strategy with respect to calling the rioters protestors I see.
Btw, the use of federal agents to squelch the civil rights protests does remind me of how federal agents were used against MLK and the civil rights movement during the freedom marches (until Johnson decided to support them).
Oh yeah, it sure is a great thing the Southern Democrats came to power and put racism in its proper place here in the US.
He’s talking about COINTELPRO — a.k.a. what happens when you assume civil-rights protesters are backed by the evil subversive communists hiding under everyone’s bed.
From the wiki page on COINTELPRO:
“Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs.”
Hee hee hee.
Some of the programs, and only on a limited basis. It was Hoover who authorized extended surveillance and active measures to discredit political opponents.
And given what’s transpired since, with REX-84, Operation Garden Plot, and other covert programs, the thought of conducting mass arrest and detainment of political opponents has been giving rightist authoritarians a throbbing boner for decades now up until the present day.
> Hoover
Under the direction of such noted alt-right Republicans as John F Kennedy and (isn’t this where we came in?) LBJ.
> a throbbing boner
Gonna take more than a set of engorged nether regions to catch up to the Gulag Archipelago and the millions dead under the imposed famines in Soviet Ukraine.
@darin
“it sure is a great thing the Southern Democrats came to power and put racism in its proper place here in the US.”
You too had that revelation about Lincoln being a Republican?
Maybe a little history for current day Republicans would be useful:
How Republicans and Democrats switched on civil rights
https://medium.com/everyvote/how-the-republicans-and-democrats-switched-on-civil-rights-in-5-racist-steps-92c1b41480b
Were Republicans really the party of civil rights in the 1960s?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights
You brought up Johnson. Wikipedia describes him as a Democrat from Texas. Is Texas not “Southern” enough for you?
You guys are seriously (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orval_Faubus) claiming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace) that the abuses of the fifties that led directly to the civil rights movement of the sixties, were not perpetrated by Democrats, in particular Southern Democrats? I guess we really _have_ always been at war with Eurasia.
Whoops, forgot the mayor during the Rosa Parks bus boycott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._A._Gayle).
No one denies that they were Democrats. What we’re saying is that ever since Johnson made civil rights a Democratic plank, the racist politicians and their racist supporters, modulo a few diehards like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, defected — to the Republicans. Ever since, even conservative heroes like Ronald “Don’t release the hostages till I get elected” Reagan have been catering to this racist base through covert “dog whistle” politics — because it’s the only way they can win elections. That and obstructionist policies toward voting. (When more people vote, Democrats get into power.)
But even these seem to be flagging due to Trump’s repeated fuckups and general compulsive mendaciousness. The 2020 elections are shaping up to be a rout in favor of the Democrats this year. If the elections are in any wise fair, they will keep the House and gain the Senate and White House, and it could be the end of the Republican Party as a serious political force. Gods willing, it will happen regardless.
> the racist politicians and their racist supporters […] defected — to the Republicans.
So to be clear, the Democrats shot off a splinter group that infected and corrupted their political rivals. And… I’m supposed to find that admirable somehow? And to top it off, I’m also as a libertarian supposed to meekly accept you and Winter’s tongue-lashings for “condoning” the bullshit perpetrated by one side or the other? (This is another “dog whistle” thing right, the lack of evidence of my “condoning” any of these actions is what constitutes the primary evidence for said “condoning”? Yet you guys are Magically protected from condoning shooting four-year children in the head because “Everyone is Responsible for their OWN Deeds — except when We say so”. Thank you Sir may I have another!)
> it could be the end of the Republican Party as a serious political force. Gods willing, it will happen regardless.
They fight, and bite, and fight and fight and bite; it’s the American Mensheviks and Amercian Bolsheviks Show.
“the lack of evidence of my “condoning” any of these actions is what constitutes the primary evidence for said “condoning”? ”
You are defending it here. Or am I wrong and are you condemning the violence of the federal troops?
Or why are you verbally attacking me for defending the right to protest?
Gee, I wonder if it has something to do with you being a lying piece of sh*t?
Sorry, you intentionally conflating rioting, killing random people, and arson with the “right to protest” doesn’t make it so. All it does is make you a lying piece of sh*t.
@Eugene_Nier
“you being a lying piece of sh*t?”
In my experience, name calling comes in when there are no valid arguments left.
“Sorry, you intentionally conflating rioting, killing random people, and arson with the “right to protest” ”
The police is there to protect the freedom of the people, e.g., by preventing violence and riots. They are now used to prevent the people from speaking out.
The new battle cry seems to be:
Libertarians against Free Speech!
“All it does is make you a lying piece of sh*t.”
No arguments? → Name Calling
If you don’t want to be called a liar, stop lying. Of course, that would likely require you to change your entire philosophy since lying appears to be the only way you can support your current one.
As for rational arguments I’ve provided them for you elsewhere in the thread, your response has been to ignore them and keep repeating the same lies, e.g, the rest of your comment.
However, I’d however be perfectly happy to return to rational debate as soon as you’ve demonstrated you’re capable of it.
“If you don’t want to be called a liar, stop lying.”
If you call someone a liar, then show they knowingly speak untruths. Being misinformed is not lying. Having a dispute over the credibility of a news source also does not make one a liar.
My experience with commenters on this blog (and elsewhere) is that “liar” is used to hide a lack of arguments. Because, when there are real arguments, they are volunteered immediately.
On the other hand, if you call people “a lying piece of sh*t.”, I know of no interpretation that would not make this name calling.
We have, repeatedly.
It is, when it crosses over into willful blindness.
Whatever you say, liar.
As Taleb likes to say “if you see fraud and don’t say ‘fraud’, you are a fraud”, and I’m calling you “fraud”.
Which you then proceed to ignore and keep repeating the same falsehoods.
“We have, repeatedly.”
That assertion is not very helpful (is, is not, is, is not). Please, give a concrete example.
Still sounds more like name calling, but now without the scatological reference.
“Which you then proceed to ignore and keep repeating the same falsehoods.”
Like everyone else here, I do miss some comments and I am also not able to follow up on an exponential expanding number of subthreads as every answer seems to introduce 4 new subjects. It is best to simply refer back to what was written in earlier comments, instead of resortingtto name calling.
“So to be clear, the Democrats shot off a splinter group that infected and corrupted their political rivals. And… I’m supposed to find that admirable somehow?”
The really bad racists seem to have moved to the GOP. They now even have a senator arguing chattel slavery was a “necessary evil” for the good of the nation.
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/slavery-was-necessary-evil-claims-u-s-senator-who-also-called-for-state-violence-last-month
That will help the GOP’s credibility in fighting racism.
Bite me I _again_ allowed myself to fall into the trap of not bothering to click a Winter “A&D’s Official Resident Fact-Checker” link.
From the Image halfway down the guardian article (“Union/Confed” means “from a state that fought on that side in the Civil War”), the numbers of supporters of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:
Dem/Union GOP/Union Dem/Confed GOP/Confed
House 144 of 152 137 of 161 8 of 91 0 of 11
Senate 45 of 46 27 of 32 1 of 21 0 of 1
And yes the Guardian is correct to point out that Southern Republican support for the act was obviously dismal — but those numbers are statistical noise compared to all the others anyway. It should at least be obvious that my statement, that the Southern Democrats of the sixties (duh the NINETEEN sixties no I was not switching the topic to the EIGHTEEN sixties, wtf) weren’t exactly the Stalwart Champions of Anti-Racism, deserved a little better than a “bwa ha you thought Lincoln was Republican” schoolyard jeer.
This is not a class in history of US politics. But it is pretty well known that voting for the Civil Rights acts was along geographical lines, not party lines.
My comment was to remind the readers (“remind” being rather optimistic) that all these talks about “The Democrats were the racist party” was about different parties, with a considerable shift in membership as a consequence of the Civil Rights Act.
But Jeff Read already said this.
> voting for the Civil Rights acts was along geographical lines, not party lines
That’s a true statement that ignores the equally true point made in the very article you cited, that “Southern Republicans” made up 1 out of 100 Senators and 11 out of 415 Representatives.
Taking me to task for calling the opposition to the Civil Rights Acts “Southern Democrats”, when my “error” is on the order of 3%, seems pretty misleading to me.
Yes, and the way the
protestersconfirmed rioters repeatedly attempt to destroy the Federal buildings in Portland “does remind me of” Kristallnacht in 1930’s Germany. The problem though is the giant pattern-matching machine we call brains are typically lazy, and want to stop with the first “decent” result; that means while there may be a superficial semblance between the present rioters and the SS, or the Federal response today and 50 years ago, that does not constitute a proof [or even should be a convincing argument] that such a semblance has grounding in reality!Anyone who compares Portland to the Kristalnacht has not understood, or does not want to understand, what happened in Germany in the 1930’s. But I am not surprised here.
Likewise, your attempted analogy to the current events in Portland puts you in the position of revealing just how much you do not understand the events which ended segregation within the USA. If you want to convince me that this is indeed a valid comparison — and I will repeat your exact words for clarity here [emphasis mine]: “the use of federal agents to squelch the civil rights protests does remind me of how federal agents were used against MLK“, then you can very easily answer me this: name the MLK-led protest, and name the federal agency deployed against him. Because the only instance I know of where these two forces actually met was the third Selma to Montgomery march of 1965, and the National Guard was activated to protect the protest, not quell it. [Likewise, what actions of what federal agent prompted the
protestsriots currently in Portland?]@Alex K
“If you want to convince me that this is indeed a valid comparison”
“It reminds me” is just that: When reading how federal forces are used to squelch civil rights protests now, I am reminded of how federal forces were used to squelch civil rights protests in the 1960’s.
Now it is BLM, which has no national leader, so the forces target the protests directly. Then it was MLK that was the target, as the protests then did have a national leader. Moreover, there was ample state level violence directed to the protesters in the 1960’s. No federal help needed on that account.
The big difference now is that BLM has no central organization to target, and has support in the state capitols. The president is on his own now.
At some time, LBJ switched sides and started to support the civil rights movement, using federal personnel. I see that not happen anytime soon now.
I do not see how this post responds to Alex’s questions. It appears to merely repeat the statements being objected to. This thread is long enough, it doesn’t need filibustering.
Sorry to be not clear enough.
The “reminds me” was intentionally vague. When hearing “federal forces” are suppressing civil rights protests, the association is clearly with “federal level interference” with civil rights protests.
It has been admitted a very long time ago that the FBI (a Federal Law Enforcement Force) has interfered with the civil rights protests in which MLK was involved. And MLK was also one of the subjects of this interference/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
I never contested that the federal interference in BLM protests is of a different nature. It is much more openly violent as in the 1960s, when people were, e.g., conveniently assassinated. But the aim of the federal interference is the same now as then: Suppress the protests without addressing the wrongs underlying the protests.
The questions of Alex were just beside the point I wanted to make, so answering his questions would not have cleared my point.
Personally, I do not see why this interpretation is a problem?
No, it is not. Let me put the crux of the difference between BLM and MLK to you, in MLK’s own words, as told in the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” [as always, emphasis mine]: “I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
MLK stood for uniting the country, even across racial differences, and strictly opposed the use of violence in obtaining his goals. BLM take the opposite approach on both of these points. This points well to a reason — which I suspect you experienced only subconsciously — you would be vague. You are arguing from a thousand miles’ remove with people who are far closer, and therefore correspondingly more familiar, with the details of the events in question. That also means you will not be familiar with all but the “highlight reel” of American history; for instance, I am certain that were the question put before BLM protesters, they would consider themselves more heir to Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey, yet both those names are likely less familiar to you than that of MLK! Without that familiarity, why should I trust you to make as accurate comparisons between these events?
Recognizing this ignorance was a part of why I “hedged” my comparison between BLM and Nazi Germany — when I try to think of violence in Europe not tied to a war, I could count all the events I am familiar with on one hand with fingers left over [and all but one are international terrorists]. That doesn’t mean I assume Europe is some peaceful utopia, only that having just one example to draw from to displays the depth of my ignorance.
Again, no. Mere surveillance such as COINTELPRO does not rise to being “suppression”. To suppress requires direct action — as does the alternate wording you use of “interference”. If you truly wish to make this claim, then pointing out the explicit example I am asking for would have indeed cleared up your argument!
People were assassinated in that surveillance program. Just follow the link.
“MLK stood for uniting the country, even across racial differences, and strictly opposed the use of violence in obtaining his goals.”
The protesters were different, no doubt about it. But not all of the early protesters were like MLK, e.g., the Black Panthers did not denounce violence, on the contrary.
But that has nothing to do with my point that there was interference from the FBI and Friends with the civil rights protests in the 1960s and there is still/again federal interference with the civil rights protests now.
According the well known Kristalnacht and Portland riot expert winter. Oh, wait winter is not an expert on either of these things and is in fact a liar and and idiot.
“According the well known Kristalnacht and Portland riot expert
We actually got quite a lot of education around the Kristalnacht , which happened not that far from home. And I have spoken with Germans who have actually lived through the times. You do not have to be an expert to see the lack of any overlap with what is happening in Portland.
On the other hand, if you do not want to see, you simply look the other way.
Well, I admit you’re certainly an expert on looking the other way these days.
Yep, standing up for freedom of speech has become not done in the USA under Trump.
It bizar to see how Libertarians are now defending police brutality against protesters.
Seriously, do you have some pathological need to lie continuously or something?
He’s a left-wing NPC. Of course he does. The entire edifice of leftism is built on lies and half-truths. He has to lie continually to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance. It would be sad, if he weren’t trying consciously or otherwise to destroy Western civilization.
“Seriously, do you have some pathological need to lie continuously or something?”
I just listen to your president, who wants journalists executed:
https://www.ibtimes.com/trump-called-execution-scumbag-journalists-according-john-boltons-new-book-2996013
He wants newspapers and networks closed:
https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/918112884630093825
https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/918267396493922304
He wants to use libel laws to silence the press:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/26/trump-pledges-curb-press-freedom-libel-laws-first-amendment
@Xoogler
“He has to lie continually to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance.”
I do not live in a country where the government denies a pandemic that kills 1000 people a day and already killed 140 thousand people, where the police kills 1000 people a year, where a million people are in prison, where there is a school shooting every week, etc. Maybe the cognitive dissonance is not in me?
“It would be sad, if he weren’t trying consciously or otherwise to destroy Western civilization.”
Is BLM part of “Western civilization”?
Or is “Western civilization” a code word? Like, it is not “Western civilization” if certain people participate?
Is Europe part of “Western civilization”? An is California part of “Western civilization”? Chicago? New York?
(again breaking out due to reply-nesting)
@Winter:
> (btw, no children were murdered in Portland at BLM protests)
Kindly tell me the magic number of children that we are allowed to shoot in the head before you consider it appropriate for the government to intervene.
You said somewhere up above “Riots happen with large protests, even peaceful ones. Such riots should be prevented.”. You must have a clear set of recommendations for _how_ exactly to go about “preventing” said riots and child-murdering, given that any action taken by anyone else is “despotic” by your definition, and anyone like me powerless to intervene in any way is declared by fiat to be “condoning” every action you disapprove of.
And of course the “condoning” only goes one way, because when questions are raised about the Leftist groups burning and destroying private property, and murdering innocent children, you immediately point out how _you_ are “not responsible for the madness others sprout,” and that “Everyone is responsible for his own deeds, and no one should be punished for the deeds of others.”
That is one rock-solid position ya got there. Must be nice!
> The elected mayor of Portland does not want federal troops to squelch civil-rights protests,
Great, and I didn’t want black-owned businesses in my neighborhood burned down and destroyed, and I certainly didn’t want children of ANY race or age to be brutally and senselessly murdered.
I also want a pony. Who gets to decide?
I’d like to point out that, for some reason, these riots don’t happen at right-wing protests, despite attempts by leftist city officials to manufacture them. It’s almost as if the left is more prone to rioting and other violence then the right.
“Kindly tell me the magic number of children that we are allowed to shoot in the head before you consider it appropriate for the government to intervene.”
You tell me? Some children were murdered on the other side of the US. So we should put the US constitution on hold for civil rights protests?
Other question. How many unarmed civilians should be killed by police forces before the potential victim are allowed to protest again?
How about when the number of people killed by police exceeds the excess number of people killed by thugs because the police are under pressure to be “less agressive” due to the BLM protestors. Extrapolating current rates, if the BLM movement stopped right now, I’d expect that would be in a century or two.
“How about when the number of people killed by police exceeds the excess number of people killed by thugs”
Around 1000 people are killed by the police in the USA every year.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02601-9
> You tell me.
WTF? _You_ were the one who said “no children murdered in Portland at BLM protests”, implying that some non-zero number of children would need to be murdered before the government could be allowed (by your standards) to intervene. So, what’s _your_ number?
My number is fucking ZERO by the way, since you asked so nicely.
“I also want a pony. Who gets to decide?”
You are not an elected official responsible for law and order in your city.
But I understand that you think the President is allowed to use tear gass on elected officials he does not like.
Just because one is an elected official doesn’t make you immune to laws against riot and arson.
“doesn’t make you immune to laws against riot and arson.”
What laws did the mayor break? Name them.
“And of course the “condoning” only goes one way, because when questions are raised about the Leftist groups burning and destroying private property, and murdering innocent children, you immediately point out how _you_ are “not responsible for the madness others sprout,” ”
I do not condone any of these. I have not heard a USA politician who does. Any politician I know had condemned these actions and called for the perpetrators to be arrested and tried.
To be clear, I want these people to be tried for crimes. That is a difference with you. You do not seem to feel any need for the Free Speech of the protesters to be upheld.
> You do not seem to feel any need for the Free Speech of the protesters to be upheld.
Point to a post where I said that, or admit that you include shooting children in the head under the rubric of “free speech”. Otherwise, I’m going to have to consider Eugene_Nier’s characterization of you as a liar to be accurate.
Except, in every other thread, you attempt yo get away with referring to the arsonists, rioters, looters, etc. as “peaceful protestors exercising their first amendment rights”.
@Eugene
“peaceful protestors exercising their first amendment rights”.
In every protest, criminals are a minority. Arsonists and other criminals must be stopped.
It seems to me that you are willing to stop all protests because there are, or might be, also criminals.
The right of Free Speech is not conditioned on the behavior of other people elsewhere.
True in the sense that most aren’t willing to start a fire themselves, merely encourage those who are by chanting things like “burn it all down”.
Somehow the right manages to have protests without the place getting trashed and buildings getting set on fire. If the left can’t manage it, maybe their “protests” should be stopped.
Sorry, you don’t get to act as voluntary human shields for arsonists, and then claim that you’re innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with the arsonists and were merely exercising your free speech rights by chanting “burn it all down”.
@darrin
“Point to a post where I said that, or admit that you include shooting children in the head under the rubric of “free speech”.”
I read your comment above:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8708&cpage=1#comment-2437266
@darrin
“I am merely pointing out how ridiculous I find it that after weeks of the left screeching “FUCK CAPITALISM! Burn it all down!”, the left are now screeching about their civil rights not being adequately respected. Just how many of your civil rights did you _expect_ to survive the burning down of civilization?”
I interpreted this comment as saying that you did not care about their rights to protest. This in the light of our host dreaming of getting them shot:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8708&cpage=1#comment-2436954
This was my interpretation. But I understand that this interpretation is wrong and must conclude that you do want to uphold the rights to Freedom of Speech for BLM and Antifa protesters. I apologize for my error.
@darrin
“shooting children in the head under the rubric of “free speech”.”
You write this multiple times, but is there anyone who has claimed that the killing of these children was anything other than a tragedy? Is there anyone protesting in, eg, Portland or Seattle, who considers these killings justified?
I get a very strong impression that these tragedies are repurposed to prevent people from protesting.
Well for starters presumably the people who actually did the killings. Also, the CHAZ “offical” social media accounts referred to the killings as a “successful operation against fascist infiltrators”. However, the vast majority while not explicitly justifying them, sweeps them under the rug and does their best to pretend they didn’t happen.
So sort of like how the BLM movement is repurposing the death of George Floyd to stop law enforcement? Seriously, do you have any self-awareness what so ever?
“Well for starters presumably the people who actually did the killings. ”
For all we know, the guilty people might regret it mightily. We only will know when they are caught.
“So sort of like how the BLM movement is repurposing the death of George Floyd to stop law enforcement?”
A brutal murder, one in a very long list, by a police officer enrages oppressed people. How is that a surprise?
The same happened several times, e.g., Ferguson. Each time, the police force in question was shown to discriminate against black citizens.
But for some, or many, people, black people should not be allowed to protest their oppression.
And when you ask these protesters, I do not think there will be many,vor any, who support the killing of these children.
> For all we know, the guilty people might regret it mightily. We only will know when they are caught.
That’s not how it works. If they “regretted it mightily”, they would have turned themselves in.
This is another of those Leftist diode positions, isn’t it? Only works one way? You’ll deny that of course, but the diagnostics are actually simple.
Imagine Chauvin goes on TV and declares that he “regrets mightily” the crime he committed. That solves everything right? Everyone goes back home, no more protesting, no more hurling palletfuls of bricks or burning down private businesses, no more shooting four-year-olds in the head, no more federal troops providing fodder for nonstop CNN “ain’t society awful” hand-wringing circle jerks?
Imagine Trump “regrets mightily” the mayor of Portland getting “tear-gassed”. And here you go saying such mean things about him, gosh how awful, you can’t say mean things about someone if they “regrets it mightily”, now can you?
> A brutal murder, one in a very long list, by a police officer enrages oppressed people. How is that a surprise?
Oh my. I expressed EXACTLY the same “How is that a surprise?” question at your purported acts of atrocity by government agents. The very fact of expressing this question was repeatedly declared evidence of my “condoning” said acts of alleged atrocity. You further declared yourself, again only on the basis of my expressing such lack of surprise, to be the sole and entire arbiter of my “condoning”, with no arguments made by me granted any weight simply by virtue of your declaring it so by fiat.
Therefore, by your _own_ established metric, and your _own_ single-handedly imposed rules of engagement, your “How is that a surprise?” question inarguably demonstrates that you condone every act of violence that has been perpetrated by “oppressed people” during the course of these riots.
And yes, _I_ get to decide who are the “oppressed people” for this, since you’re the one “condoning” it all which gives me the right to set all the other terms of the argument. Bored teenagers setting local stores on fire? Yep totally oppressed. Guy shooting an eight-year-old girl in the head because her mother was trying to pull into a store parking lot without his permission? Musta been oppressed by _something_. And of course, the burka-clad cheesecake thief in Seattle, you just _know_ she was oppressed. You could tell by how her privileged ass swung back and forth as she strutted off knowing nobody on God’s green earth was going to lift a finger to stop her.
I would say it’s “bizarre” for Leftists to “condone” wanton acts of destruction of private property, and the brutal murder of private citizens including small children, in the name of toppling the regime they had declared themselves opposed to, but, ha, now that would sound silly.
Amazing how many thieves, murders, etc., suddenly “regret it mightily” after getting caught. Also, amazing how many then proceed to do it again after being released.
So you support the right of a thug who just robbed a convenience store to run at a police officer going for his gun without getting shot. Because that’s what happened in Ferguson.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at your continued lying.
They have a right to peacefully protest whatever they want, even if, as here, they’re deluded about the thing they’re protesting.
“Also, amazing how many then proceed to do it again after being released.”
Very few people can kill children without regret. Any claims that BLM activists support killing children is demonizing them.
“So you support the right of a thug who just robbed a convenience store to run at a police officer going for his gun without getting shot.”
No, but the subsequent investigation showed that the Ferguson police force targeted residence for extra fines and fees to improve county finances. In short, black people were fleeced by the police to lower taxes for white people.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/27/ferguson-police-justice-department-deal-proposal
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at your continued lying.”
See above. and:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nypd-officers-commander-told-us-to-target-blacks-hispanics-on-subway
And this was found in many places. The man who killed Floyd had already been at the center of 17 complaints, one of which was that he “frisked” (feeling up) a woman after she drove 10mph to fast. Obviously, there was no dashcam and no audio.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52969205
“They have a right to peacefully protest whatever they want, even if, as here, they’re deluded about the thing they’re protesting.”
They can protest if other people remain peaceful, is that what you say? The right to Free Speech in the US constitution is not depended on the behavior of others.
So these protests are against the fines and fees? Funny how that’s not what they actually claim in their demands.
Speaking of which, did you hear that the BLM people are now demanding that dash cams and body cams be removed because their footage tends to contradict suspects’ claims to be innocent victims of police brutality?
You still haven’t explained why leftists have such a hard time staging a peaceful protest. Almost as if the violence is the point and the “peaceful protest” is the excuse.
Peaceful protesters are often confronted by violent rightist counter-protesters. A friend of my girlfriend’s recently posted an eyewitness account of such a confrontation — and, by the way, the cops did nothing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in a great many cases that sadly go unreported on, it isn’t the left that is initiating the violence. They’re just left with the blame when the smoke clears.
Liar. Leftist protestors, who are violent as a normal state of affairs, are occasionally confronted by small numbers of idiot losers who don’t realize the police bosses are on the side of the leftists and they’re going to get themselves jacked.
The fact you have to flatly contradict the facts like that is an admission of total defeat. I think you deserve to lose. You think you deserve to lose. Agreement has been reached.
Fact check: false.
Corrected version: Rightist conter-protestors frequently get attacked by leftist thugs. Sometimes they defend themselves, this sometimes results in the leftist thugs getting hurt or killed. When this happens the leftists like to portray rightist self-defense as aggression.
Ah, the old Schrodinger’s white nationalist. He’s a “good anti-facist” most of the time, but when the violence becomes embarrassing he transforms into an “evil white nationalist” for just as long as it is rhetorically convenient.
“Schrodinger’s white nationalist”
Love this.
“So these protests are against the fines and fees? Funny how that’s not what they actually claim in their demands.”
Why did I, a non American, did read about these frustrations and demands, and you, an American, did not?
Anyway, protecting your own life and the lives of your husbands and sons has a tendency to be prioritized over matters of money. But the discrimination was obviously then too the cause of the disturbances.
“Speaking of which, did you hear that the BLM people are now demanding that dash cams and body cams be removed”
They demand the rights of privacy. There are no rules enforced that prohibit police officers to view and use the recordings for other purposes. Say, targeting individuals for retaliation.
https://www.newsweek.com/police-body-camera-incident-report-memory-civil-rights-minority-711584
“You still haven’t explained why leftists have such a hard time staging a peaceful protest.”
Anti-government or anti-status quo protests tend to attract violent elements from all sides. They also incite an excessive response from the powers that be. Whether it was the anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the 1970s, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the Student protests of 1968 or the Universal Suffrage demonstration from around 1900 (UK).
Violent elements from all sides in BLM protests:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/outside-influence-extremists-riots-us/index.html
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/17/far-right-boogaloo-boy-killed-officer-after-using-black-lives-matter-protest-as-cover-prosecutors/
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-05-31/officials-see-extremist-groups-disinformation-in-protests
https://www.reviewjournal.com/investigations/boogaloo-arrests-reveal-new-extremist-agenda-to-hijack-protests-2047161/
Americans appear to have forgotten what a “newspaper” is and what it’s used for. A lot of us not on the left tend to think of Fox News or — worse — Breitbart as legitimate news sources. One part of the problem is that we have no way of compensating actual journalists for the hard work they do, especially in this internet economy, and the ad-supported model creates all sorts of incentives, including an “eyeball economy” where outrage drives sales/clicks. See The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free. This also creates a class divide wherein only those able and willing to pay for a newspaper subscription will actually get useful information.
But then again, Americans’ relationship with hard journalism has always been tenuous. “Yellow journalism” was invented here, simply because in a profit-driven model, again, outrage drives sales of papers, so the more extreme and outrageous the stories, the more successful the paper.
Libertarians take note: journalism, like health care, is not a market good; and attempting to apply market forces to it can be ruinous.
> Libertarians take note: journalism, like health care, is not a market good; and attempting to apply market forces to it can be ruinous.
Given that, like health care, putting journalism under the control of the state in any way is even more dangerous, what do you propose we do instead?
A newspaper is a method for well-connected academics to lie to the public.
Well they’re better than most newspapers, at least in the sense of saying things that correspond to reality. However, I agree they’re less “legitimate” in the sense of that they’re less inclined to stick to the official narrative.
Given that they weren’t exactly good with the truth even before the internet, I don’t think that’s really the problem. What the internet actually did is make their lying much more obvious.
> journalism… is not a market good
Wow. Jenkies.
When I started reading this blog literally decades ago, a point would occasionally come up that if people were unwilling to sufficiently defend the Second Amendment, that the First Amendment would functionally have nothing with which to defend itself, and would soon follow the 2nd into irrelevancy. Of course, at the time, folks on the Left would point and laugh, inviting us all to behold the rampant paranoia of those crazy gun nuts. Of COURSE nobody was ever gonna take away anybody’s right to Free Speech. Of COURSE the Left has ALWAYS been about supporting that right in particular, Power to the People baby, Proletarii Vsekh Stran and all that good stuff, because we’ll NEVER get tired of supporting those oppressed victims of the mighty bourgeoisie, and certainly wouldn’t DREAM of eventually curtailing those privileges *cough* sorry RIGHTS. Whatta buncha redneck wackos amirite.
And now here it is in proverbial black and white. Of course you little people don’t need any “right” to a free press of your own any more, the government is more than capable of handling that Important Job. When the Constitutional Congress drafted the Bill of Market Goods as amendments to the Constitution, of course that wasn’t meant to supersede the much more important needs of changing market forces.
Probably because you were reading some account trying to portray them as more reasonable then they actually are.
Except as I mentioned above that’s not a fear based in reality. Unless you mean protesting for the rights of blacks to be able to rob convenience stores and attempt to go for the gun of the cop arresting you without incident.
In any case these claims were debunked in the post you replied to, so you don’t even have the excuse of ignorance you previously pleaded.
Speaking of body cameras, the camera footage from the arrest that included Floyd’s death was just leaked. In does a pretty good job undermining the narrative about him. Interesting how it wasn’t released earlier. That possible has something to do with the fact that the DA is an antifa supporter.
Especially, when they chant things like “burn it all down” and their supporters openly advocate violence.
So police are damned if they don’t use body/dash cams (they’re hiding violence! shriek the SJWs) and damned if they do (they’re using the footage for nefarious means!). Setting someone up so they cannot win is dishonorable.
Honor is a tool of cis-male white supremacy.
Accepting a rigged game is…
Scene: mayor orders cops to stand down. Imagine the cops responded by arresting the mayor.
> Violent elements from all sides in BLM protests:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/outside-influence-extremists-riots-us/index.html
No attempt to quantify (with evidence) relative numbers of “extremists” of one side or other, just lots of “allegations” of this and “aware of” that.
>https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-05-31/officials-see-extremist-groups-disinformation-in-protests
Ditto. Reads like a watered-down version of the CNN article with nothing new added.
>https://www.salon.com/2020/06/17/far-right-boogaloo-boy-killed-officer-after-using-black-lives-matter-protest-as-cover-prosecutors/
‘Carrillo’s attorney Jeffrey Stotter told NBC News that… Carrillo was a father-of-two “left deeply shaken” by his wife’s suicide in 2018. He also told The Sentinel that Carrillo suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2009.”
The _one_ example of actual violence perpetrated by an actual person in the links above is a man with a literal head injury and history of psychiatric problems.
Oh except for:
>https://www.reviewjournal.com/investigations/boogaloo-arrests-reveal-new-extremist-agenda-to-hijack-protests-2047161/
Paywall.
> I interpreted this comment as saying that you did not care about their rights to protest.
That really is either functionally illiterate or deliberate mischaracterization of what I wrote.
If you beat a hornet’s nest with a stick, and get stung by the hornets, and I say “what the hell did you expect to happen?”, that is far from sufficient to declare me “condoning venomous insects”.
> “shooting children in the head under the rubric of “free speech”.”
> You write this multiple times
Because I find your responses to it increasingly unsatisfying, and in no way functionally distinguishable from my responses to your depiction of alleged “civil rights violations”. I see no moral justification on your part for your having granted yourself the absolute right to declare to the world what you claim I condone, and I continue to find it ludicrously hypocritical that similar questions about Left-sanctioned recent violence are rebuffed by your equally absolute declaration that “everyone must answer for their own deeds”, granting yourself complete immunity from any symmetric accusations of what _you_ “condone” or “condemn”.
I’ll quote from the nytimes article I linked to but which was obviously ignored by those claiming that all the violence has been committed by “right extremists”:
“The authorities in Atlanta said that Secoriea had been in a car with her mother and her friend when they tried to enter a parking lot near the Wendy’s. A group blocked the entrance to the parking lot, and at least one person in the crowd started shooting at the car, the police said.”
To clarify, these “peaceful protesters” (unless they’re alt-right extremists I guess, _then_ they would have to give up their “peaceful” card) were protesting the shooting by police of a man in said Wendy’s parking lot who had wrested a weapon away from one of the officers, and proceeded to use that weapon on that officer.
I eagerly await ANYONE on the Left here showing definitively that they don’t condone this sequence of events, by admitting that Rayshard Brooks was very much not in the same category as George Floyd (who was either telling the truth about having a panic attack or at most _passively_ resisting, clearly not the same thing as seizing an officer’s weapon and using it on them), that these two distinct events warranted very distinct responses, and that continued claims that “all killings are done by right-wing extremists” would ignore a metric shitload of cases just like this one and the other murders of children described in the nytimes article.
I _won’t_ expect anyone to actually come out and say that if a white dumbass grabbed a weapon from a cop, used it on the cop, and got shot for it, that it wouldn’t even _make_ the news in the first place, except in one of those “ha-ha-too-dumb-to-live” fluff pieces after a suitable amount of time had passed. That would be a bridge too far obviously, so let’s start with the simple stuff.
> you do want to uphold the rights to Freedom of Speech for BLM and Antifa protesters. I apologize for my error.
Like I said, if anyone wants to actually WRITE something instead of shooting children in the head, I am VERY much in favor of that. If you want to stand in the street with megaphones and posters, even if you’re blocking traffic, hey, still sounds reasonable to me.
Burn down PRIVATE businesses, especially black-owned businesses? Then I’m gonna wonder what the fuck is actually going through your head. I won’t agree that I’m specifically “condoning” any particular government response, but I WILL continue to take your side’s repeated cries of “FUCK CAPITALISM! BURN IT ALL DOWN!” increasingly seriously, and the claims that these are actually right-wing hillbillies in burkas and blackface as prima facie ridiculous.
When you graduate from throwing molotov cocktails (named after the famous Nebraska alt-right terrorist Burt Molotov) not just at black-owned businesses, but at Federal buildings, and _then_ begin bleating about all these civil rights you are supposed to have (or were _used_ to supposed to have, before we started FUCKING CAPITALISM and BURNING IT ALL DOWN), then I refuse to consider it a logical contradiction for me to a) find your position prima facie ludicrous, and yet b) not “condone” any violations of your “oh i didn’t mean burn THOSE down, I was still using them!” actual civil rights.
That becomes increasingly true as the degree to which any civil rights were actually “violated” comes increasingly into question. My initial response to you in regard to the Portland events was predicated on _your_ description of the agents as “anonymous” with “no identifying insignia” and “kidnapping detainees to undisclosed locations” (supported of course by the CNN video I had seen some days previously). When repeated viewing of the CNN video showed the agents’ uniforms _were_ clearly marked POLICE, and that CBP had stepped forward to take responsibility for the arrests, and that the US Marshals of Oregon had deputized them to aid in protecting federal buildings as is clearly included in their mandate and jurisdiction, then yes, I’m going to find your accusations of my “condoning” violations of civil rights that didn’t actually take place.
This really outta be enough by now. Any further Ex Cathedra decrees by Pope Winter XIII about what I “condone” or “don’t condone” will be met by a simple flipped bird.
> find your accusations of my “condoning” violations of civil rights that didn’t actually take place.
“that didn’t actually take place _to be ridiculous_”. Sorry.
@Winter (with posts at max depth):
The wikipedia page lists six names of “assasinated” individuals, all in the Black Panther Party: three of which went to jail (not killed), one who was caught in a shootout while travelling with a violent criminal [their name’s link even goes to said criminal’s page], and two killed in the same police raid, by a city department already known for their excess violence — NOT directly by federal agents. So of all six possible examples on Wikipedia, there’s only one possible example of a true “assasination” (and even then, I would consider the link to COINTELPRO somewhat weak).
@Winter replying to the same post again, about 12 hours later:
Oho, it seems the light finally dawns! So, if the Black Panther Party had both a separate organization and separate methods from MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership, then why should I (or the FBI of the time) not suspect they have different goals?? [It should also be noted that the BPP was not “early” protests, in that they outlived MLK himself rather than being supplanted by him — that one “valid” assassination occurred after MLK’s death.]
Let me unpack that question a half-step for you. If you are willing to look at an act of violence and deem this political “protest”, then I can only conclude you believe the whole of politics is “might makes right” / “let the strongest lead” and everything else is just the sugar coating to make that bitter pill palatable. IMO any use of violence in politics says “I have no argument to support my position, so I will impose it by force” — and therefore violence has no place whatsoever in politics. Accordingly, no democratic society — or any other which rejects “might makes right” — should allow or support actions which would lead to that conclusion. Therefore, if you don’t agree with my statement that no violence is acceptable, then exactly where in the political process do you think that violence belongs?
Again with the “interference”. Since you haven’t picked up on this the last half dozen posts, let me say this explicitly: surveillance is not interference. My watching my neighbor doing their gardening will never constrain their choice of planting. If you want to claim COINTELPRO ran “interference” then you need to point to the action taken. Surprise surprise, the only actions you point to are all against the Black Panthers and not MLK — implying that the FBI was not interfering there, but only when there was threat of violence!
No. Winter was right on this one, too. Because, you know, facts and shit.
It is well known that the FBI tried to convince MLK to commit suicide. Just about every prominent black activist — including Muhammad Ali — was a target of the FBI under operation COINTELPRO-BLACK HATE.
If you’re a protester for civil rights, peace, or humanitarianism who gets any kind of attention at all, expect to become a person of interest to the Feds. Civil rights, peace, and humanitarianism are inimical to the status quo in America.
I knew that popping this top-level risked somebody not checking the prior conversation for context, but fool me went ahead with it anyway. Let me just quote Winter again here for total clarity; as always any emphasis is mine.
Post the first:
Post the second:
So technically if you want to say that what Winter was driving at was, “this [perceived] misbehavior by the government reminds me of this other misbehavior” — then he was right. However, then we come to this post:
So I would say no — that does not support Winter’s actual argument of comparing violence with violence — especially when you go back and look at how he responded to my comparing the current protests with Kristallnacht — despite my immediately stating (albeit as indirectly as Winter has been doing so) that I recognize the comparison is spurious, he still responded as if I was calling the antifa rioters SS troops! No, Winter’s entire argument has been that the US government was racist and evil in the 1960s, it is acting racist and evil today in a highly similar fashion, and pointing to very questionable “evidence” along the way. While the FBI suicide letter is excellent evidence of the misbehavior of COINTELPRO, it is not the sort which supports the argument Winter has been trying to build.
MLK was conveniently assassinated. Shot down just as he was about to lead a march on D.C. to “get our check”, i.e., demand slave reparations. He was fingered by the FBI as the person most likely to become a “messiah” figure, and unify and energize the black power movement into a cohesive, politically powerful whole — something the FBI intended to prevent with COINTELPRO. Very convenient, wouldn’t you say?
There is more evidence to suggest that King was assassinated by a conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, and Mafia than there is to suggest that, say, Vince Foster was murdered by the Clinton family (a favorite conspiracy theory on the right). That includes Loyd Jowers coming out in the 90s and stating that he arranged the hit.
There are two problems I have with viewing the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign as slave reparations.
First (only in I have raised this point here before and will continue to) I repeat—MLK stood for uniting the country, even across racial differences. No — even in a sermon just a few scant months before assassination, he was still saying things like: “You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress [Blacks] in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.” So when he would have been planning the Poor People’s Campaign you say got him assassinated, there would have been explicit effort made to ensure that it was a multi-racial one even to the extent that the letter in the New York Times which gave their demands (link goes to the Congressional Record as the NYT paywalls back issues, if this is online there at all) also said “we march together—black and white, red and brown, country people and slum dwellers, the poor and those who are not” in an effort to see that the demands which arose from it could not be treated as a racial animus, but would lead into a nation-wide improvement. This is spelled out in black and white text in Why We Can’t Wait and I have never seen anything which would convince me this belief had changed in MLK.
My second objection is that “reparations” comes from the verb “to repair”. So to determine if something counts as reparations—and whether the corrective action is suitable—we must also determine the exact nature of the wrong being amended. Was it that President Andrew Johnson overrode General Sherman’s famous “40 acres and a mule” land grant in the aftermath of the Civil War? Perhaps it was the seizure and transport by force of their ancestors away from their homelands? What exact event in American history should we seek to correct? Well, when I look at the demands which were laid before Congress in the link I provided or as they are summarized by wikipedia, the first item is a demand for guaranteed employment. Well, I know a term which is used to describe someone with guaranteed employment — a term still used today to pejoratively describe the low wage, limited advancement positions many working poor occupy — and if that is meant to be an indicator of what must be remediated as the great sin of American racial relations, it is an event I do not see as being in error. [I would also again ask you read Can’t Wait where King lays out his own “case for reparations”. Alas, I cannot link you to a legal online copy of this text.]
I can already hear your objections to that statement, pointing out how the demands were for a meaningful job and living wage employment. Well, my response to that would be much the same as with your next sentence:
If the FBI had any sense (and to be honest, we don’t know; any remaining records will be under judicial seal for another seven years) then by 1968 they would have seen that MLK was one of the best possible leaders for a specifically black movement, since he had such a strong insistence on positive interracial relations and non-violent actions—as opposed to the Black Panther Party and other violent separatists. No, what I see in the public records available is that the concern surrounding MLK was probably less for a new Nat Turner and more imagining a Che Guevara. To be honest I expect the government would have killed him either way, but the way I read the historical record that better explains why the assassination occurred when it did (as opposed to before the much more racially charged 1963 march which gave us the famous “I have a dream” speech, or following the publication of Can’t Wait). While I know a great many amateur scholars want to treat the civil rights demonstrations as purely a domestic issue, we must always remember that they occurred during the very heights of tension on an international stage! We have other historical events to show the federal government were jumping at shadows [again: both domestically and internationally] when it comes to communism. Therefore while what scant evidence there is may be purely circumstantial, I am more confident in the explanation that the Federal government saw quote-unquote “creeping communism” in the Poor People’s Campaign over any other for why MLK was assassinated in that particular historical moment.
>Accordingly, no democratic society — or any other which rejects “might makes right”
Where did you get that impression of democratic societies, that they reject might makes right? Democracy is “he voted on this, so now our might enforcing it is right”.
“Democracy is “he voted on this, so now our might enforcing it is right”.”
In a functional democracy, that is not right. For majorities, there is the Constitution that protects the fundamental rights of minorities.
Either that’s not true (what about the rights of tax protestors, or even to just a lesser degree, a right to not fund something you find personally morally objectionable, like war or Planned Parenthood?), or it’s not the voting that is the beneficial aspect of “democratic” regimes.
I should note, I refuse to categorize any state/government as “rejecting might makes right”.
No, I would agree with Winter on this point. The world is not an absolute binary, with “the perfect” placed against all challengers—nor does our base world of matter allow us direct access to Plato’s world of forms. We must then make compromises from this ideal when constructing instantiations of various concepts—and systems of governance are no exception.
With democracy, the ideal certainly would be achieving perfect unanimity of agreement across the whole of the community. Usually the sacrifice to pragmatism is unanimity — but there is one place in American jurisprudence where that has been elevated, and the sacrifice is to reduce our sampling such that it makes a mockery of the statistical representation of the community (and that’s before the travesty known as voir dire!). In both these cases, the rights of the “oppressed” losers are upheld in that these decisions are not permanent and final; in the very worst cases you must simply plead your arguments before the public again in the next election. But IMO the fact that there always is that “next election” is what truly protects the rights of all people in democracy.
[Afterthought: I see your objection really as being to the traditional meaning of “government” as only the state apparatus, and not in a broader sense as any system of organization, to also include corporations or even a local social club. I fear that using the longer yet clearer “democratic system of governance” phrasing in my original post would have distracted from the point I was attempting to make. All social groups must, at some scale, confront the same sociological and psychological factors inherent in human behavior; therefore if there is indeed a singular ideal structure then it would apply equally to both state and non-state organizations. While there may not be a singular “best” actualization of that ideal due to different pragmatic factors, surely they all attempt to approach the same limit?]
>I see your objection really as being to the traditional meaning of “government” as only the state apparatus, and not in a broader sense as any system of organization
Yes, I object to government, not governance. As for governance, I still don’t think majority voting and democracy is a good method. I like clear responsibility should something go wrong (or right), explicit contracts (as opposed to an implicit, dare I say, fictional “social contract”), and ironclad rights for opting out. (i.e. decentralization)
This doesn’t work if the majority can just change the meaning of “fundamental rights” under the Constitution whenever it likes, by declaring it a living document.
When the side that declares this also declares itself to be pushing for a “functioning democracy”, I become very suspicious of the latter term. I am then compelled to question its meaning, and insist on something in writing.
Functional democracies often get along just fine without a constitution. The UK, for example, doesn’t have one, and it–well, it’s less dysfunctional than the USA.
You should know better than most — the USA is an oligarchical empire cosplaying as a constitutional democratic republic. The Constitution itself, at this point, is just another part of the kayfabe.
Only if you consider police arresting people for making “offensive” posts on social media while turning a blind eye to rape grooming gangs “functional”.
Given that one side of the conflict has for years now declared that “gun ownership is a privilege, not a right”, and now declares that “journalism is not a market good”, it’s certainly quite clear that that side considers the Constitution itself to be an unimportant fraud.
To be honest, at some level I really wish I could force my brain to believe that the vandalism and arson that has taken place blocks away from me, and the slaying of multiple children across the country by people nominally “peacefully protesting” police violence against “their own kind”, was actually just staged.
“We have not got real Democracy when the decision depends upon the people. We shall have real Democracy when the problem depends upon the people. The ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is going to vote about.” – G. K. Chesterton.
In that respect, frankly, the UK is somewhat less democratic than the US (and the EU is not democratic at all.) The UK intelligentsia, which has ruled the country since WWII, ensures that a wide range of subjects, of deep interest to the ordinary man, can’t be introduced into political debate. The US intelligentsia would very much like to do the same, but has lost the power to do so. The people’s will has more weight in the US than it does almost anywhere else.
Knowing you as I do, Jeff, I’m nearly certain that it’s just this intrusion of popular demands into the orderly business of the State that you think is evidence of the USA’s political “dysfunction”. You are a Progressive, a loyal Democrat (note the capitals) and thus a supporter of the oligarchic anti-populist faction in US politics. You were horrified when Trump rode a genuine populist movement into the Presidency, and even more horrified when he governed as he had campaigned. If you were honest with yourself, you would realize that you find Trump horrible because he said just those things the oligarchs wanted no one to say – that is, because he is a democrat.
“White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists”
You’re a genius in IT. You are the village idiot in politics. Also, you are a racist who uses convoluted bullshit to pretend he’s not. Fuck you jerk
Oh yeah buddy?
Everyone is welcome to their opinion but my assessment of your character identifies a large case of “Insufficient Diplomacy”.
You shouldn’t be so rude to ESR in this community, of which many own firearms and assume they can have occasion and right to use them.
> Also, you are a racist
It is pretty wacky, in an entirely unsurprising way, that those providing political cover for the “peaceful protesters” that shoot eight-year-old black girls in the head are _not_ “racists”; while those of us who don’t want any children, black or white or whatever, to be shot in the head, are declared racist by definition.
Let me guess, when you use a word, it means exactly what you want it to mean, doesn’t it? Must be convenient.
It’s also super racist to want blacks to grow up with fathers or have jobs.
https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/08/21/we-told-you-so-new-jersey-election-invalidated-because-of-mail-in-voter-fraud-n823582
“WE TOLD YOU SO: New Jersey Election Invalidated Because of Mail-In Voter Fraud”
Whenever a bad result like this crops up, the two sides involved immediately start disputing whether it’s a common, tip-of-the-iceberg, dog-bites-man example that’s only unusual because it got exposed, or an oddball, one-off, man-bites-dog example that’s a story only because it’s unusual or even unique.
Or: “For every cockroach seen, there are a hundred more in hiding,” vs “The lone bad apple was caught, proving that the system works.”
No doubt; but in this case, it hardly matters. The fact that voting by mail allowed an election to be corrupted so much that a judge ruled its result couldn’t be trusted, and the whole thing would have to be done over, demonstrates that mailed ballots are inherently insecure against fraud. Even if it’s never happened before, it will happen again. Just one massive security failure is enough reason to fix a vulnerability.
Incidentally, the NY Times article linked to from that page is a typical example of modern journalism. The focus is on, not what the people arrested are supposed to have done, but how Republicans are using this event to argue against voting by mail. There is even a remark that the GOP has been arguing “without evidence” that voting by mail invites systematic fraud – as if a mail-in election being invalidated for just that reason isn’t evidence! The Times should be ashamed of themselves for printing such drivel.
The other side will argue that this case had unusual special circumstances, and does NOT demonstrate that mailed ballots are inherently or generally insecure against fraud.
“A mail-in election being invalidated is evidence for systemic fraud!” you say.
“All the mail-in elections where no fraud was seen is evidence that mail-in elections are A-OK!” they’ll answer.
“But that’s because the fraud was hidden, not because it wasn’t there!” you’ll say.
“No! It’s because the fraud wasn’t there, except in your imagination!” they’ll answer.
And round and round…
This requires a rebuttal, rather than a duel of arguments by assertion. The symmetry needs to be broken.
What special circumstances? What could New Jersey have done to stop this ring of frauds, short of not running their election through the mail?
That’s a serious question, not a rhetorical flourish. I think the answer is “nothing”, but I don’t know what the frauds did. The NY Times certainly didn’t feel a need to explain it.
And again, with a security problem – and vote fraud is a security problem – one successful exploit is reason enough to act. Maybe it is the first; but 1) it probably isn’t and 2) the first success proves it can be exploited, so other crooks will repeat the feat until something is done to prevent it. And 2) is the important point. Whether vote fraud never happened before or was just successfully concealed means little, when we can be certain that it will happen again unless something’s done.
Apparently, NJ law allows mail-in voters to designate a “bearer” who can handle the ballot after the original voter, but must themselves sign the ballot / envelope. The common accusation among all four charged individuals was that these signatures were missing from ballots known to be handled by the accused. [The article does list other charges, such as a false voter registration, and both councilman and council-elect were charged with tampering with public records.]
You can’t reduce burglary to zero, nor can you reduce lying to zero. Unlike burglary, lying scales. It only takes one.
The NYT’s audience ought to be ashamed of themselves for being susceptible to such drivel.
It is unsurprising – but still noteworthy – how smoothly 2A extremists shifted from fantasies of self defense against a tyrannical government to fantasies of assisting police in using force against other civilians.
It was never about freedom.
Meanwhile, white supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-terror-threat-dhs-409236
Ok, home many cities have they burned down?
Civilians who were rioting and burning down property. Are you a moron?