inkster
Member

Don’t expect peacfull protest and opening up a ‘conversation about race’ to achieve anything. As Malcom X said: You’ve got to make unreasonable demands to make reasonable gains

Yep. There’s a reason people remember Rodney King’s name, 20 years on. And corona has proved once again how much the US appraises things in terms of economic impact.

This is worth reading for some context:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minneapolis-police-rendered-44-people-unconscious-neck-restraints-five-years-n1220416

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/riots-are-american-way-george-floyd-protests/612466/

Resources for anti racism learning here. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ko1dRVSUtpDntIZ5SrewALLhcMDuhe69Om31oOHIkh8/mobilebasic

The ****

This video of Grand Rapids PD firing a tear gas canister at an unarmed man (right after they maced him) point blank to the face needs to VIRAL. what in the actual **** are these pigs doing pic.twitter.com/rmgC7lA8Bj

— Mayor of Simp City (@jusalotofpain) June 2, 2020

It’s not a question of good cop bad cop, they’re only doing the job for which they’ve been trained and equipped. In a crisis you get an extreme response. A few die, many intimidated, some apologies for a bad apple and a promise that it won’t happen again till next time.

mehr
Subscriber
The ****

Mayor of Simp City
@jusalotofpain
This video of Grand Rapids PD firing a tear gas canister at an unarmed man (right after they maced him) point blank to the face needs to VIRAL. what in the actual **** are these pigs doing

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That is shocking. You can tell by the ricochet how fast that thing is moving. I hope the bloke was ok.

Yup, always the same! ‘Lessons have been learnt’ is always my favourite!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/apple-ceo-tim-cook-email-to-employees-about-george-floyd.html

May have been said before but the difference now is that the police etc have been given a green light to do what they want and now, thanks to Trump, even the City Mayors etc have been undermined.

If many of you are wondering why the cops in the US seem so especially prepared to use violence, violent methods and treat most citizens as if they’re going to kill every cop in sight…. You could worse than look into the activities of Lt Col. Grossman and his training methods that have been adopted by many many US police forces; not least (you’ll be no doubt hugely surprised to hear) the Minneapolis Police Dept.

Killology – why cops in America want to kill you first and ask questions later

Killology – why cops in America want to kill you first and ask questions later

grim reading. worse is that i got served an advert for a belt phone carrier that looks like a gun holster – I wonder what demographic could happily walk around with one of those on…

Policing, protest and changes to COVID-19 control measures …

This paper responds to a Home Office commission to SAGE/SPI-B Security and
Policing Sub-Group for expert advice about the COVID-19 risks from public protest in
the event that lockdown is eased. The commission was received on Tuesday 28th April
2020.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/888551/7a._SPI-B_Policing_Protest_and_Changes_to_COVID-19_Control_Measures_in_the_UK_20200504_S0331_Redacted.pdf

Now the US military are flying helicopters at extremely low level over protesters, in contravention of FAA rules, the crews are fully armed with night-vision equipment, and it seems the FBI are involved, plus the US Coast Guard have been flying an unarmed Reaper drone as well.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33802/military-helicopters-descend-on-washington-in-bizarre-very-low-altitude-show-of-force

The UK model of police enforcement has been very restrained. Our expectation is that this approach of engage, explain, encourage and enforce has helped support high levels of legitimacy for police action and Government policy among the public. The associated strong levels of ‘self-regulation’ seem likely to be carried forward.

you do realise when spoken with a Southern US drawl it sounds like “blast ‘em with tasers”, right?

This weekend Trump was exposed as a coward.

We need to talk about authoritarianism and fascism as movements for weak, insecure men, our misconceptions about so-called "strongmen, and how Trump, an eggshell-brittle little man, became a fascist leader.

1/https://t.co/DPcercX3so

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) June 1, 2020

The most accurate summary of why trump has gained power in the USA from a Georgia professor, well worth a read (will only take a few mins)

Now the psychopath-in-chief has peaceful protestors tear gassed just to allow him free passage to stand in front of a church with a Bible in his hand to pose and pontificate. Scumbag.
https://apnews.com/09f54acd0aadf861ea3aadc5b79c0fd8

I think the whole system there is broken, everyone has access to automatic weapons and more, the Police have become heavy handed because they’re argument can always be “the suspect may have been carrying a hand gun/automatic rifle etc”, gun crime just breeds more gun crime, and there does not seem to be much in way in of investigation when it does go wrong, with systemic racism seemingly the norm in many Police forces.

You then have a penal system run as a big business with a hugely disproportionate number of black prisoners, essentially locked up to work in factories producing goods for sale in private jails providing a free work force.

Finally you have a President who projects an image that this is reasonable, that gun crime is part of constitution and all it takes is a bible and “thoughts and prayers” to appease his followers.

I was stationed on an American base in Germany for a while and remain friends with some of the guys, all Trump supporters, and some of the comments over the last few days have been a real eye-opener.

nickc,

Thanks for hat Killology link. The US police are literally bandits. With homeowners losing more to asset forfeiture than burglary, you are more likely to get robbed by the police than the robbers.

I mentioned Ferguson on here a few days ago, and the degree to which the police had robbed the public there (up 500% in the year before Mike Brown’s murder.) It was also where we saw the full extent of police militarization. US police declared war on the (black) public some time ago. The police are an army without the training. Bandits.

US police declared war on the (black) public some time ago. The police are an army without the training. Bandits.

That sounds hyperbolic to me. At least make some demands. Revolution is for the irresponsible and adolescent.

That sounds hyperbolic to me. At least make some demands. Revolution is for the irresponsible and adolescent.

Oppression is for sensible adults?

Revolution is for the irresponsible and adolescent.

No, it’s for the desperate.

rydster,

Like me sat here in the UK making demands is going to change anything! I’ll give it a go though, just for you.

Put an end to voter supression, which denies citizens (particularly of colour) their citizenship.

Appoint police chiefs and sheriff’s, don’t put these positions up for election as those that vote them in always end up voting for Judge Dredd.

Curtail the power of police unions.

De-militarise the police, take their toys away from them.

Stop funding the police through the fining of the public and asset forfeiture.

Make it impossible for fired police officers to get re hired by other police departments.

Dismantle the prison industrial complex.

All of these things are the cornerstones of police brutality and State oppression. By state oppression I mean not only the Federal State but the individual States. The lack of Federal oversight of policing is perhaps the biggest systemic reason that the US is so plucked up.

Is that hyperbolic enough for you?

As I posted earlier, peaceful protest is an oxymoron.

Someone posted a link here that put it more eloquently.

‘The only thing worse than rebellion is that which causes rebellion’

Unless you have a demand then your ‘protest’ is either a pose or wantonly destructive.

It’s all well and good saying that racism must end but there is no consensus as to what racism actually is.

Civil rights movement wanted equality before the law for example re ending segregation and equal voting rights.

BLM has a bonkers wish list of nonsense.

I’m not saying there aren’t real issues to be addressed but they need properly articulating.

It’s all well and good saying that racism must end but there is no consensus as to what racism actually is.

There’s certainly a consensus amongst most lucid people. It’s hardly complicated

noun prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior

BLM has a bonkers wish list of nonsense.

Source for the list please

There’s certainly a consensus amongst most lucid people. It’s hardly complicated

noun prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior

That doesn’t address the issue of so-called systemic racism perpetrated by social structure and institutions. This is one thing the protests want ‘abolishing’.

I’m not saying this doesn’t exist but it also can’t be pinned down unproblematically either. For example, Critical Race Theory says that core economic and social systems in the West such as Capitalism and liberal-democracy are immanently racist by being built on racist meta-narratives. That’s interesting but it’s also not clear what can be done short of setting fire to everything if that’s true.

There are many in the humanities who think that race should be abandoned as a concept because it’s so protean and nebulous. There is no academic consensus regarding what race is.

rydster…..

You say ‘civil rights movement wanted equality before the law, the ending of segregation and equal voting rights.’

Let’s start there shall we? Is this not what the protesters today are demanding…. still?

You’ve answered your own question. The ‘demands’ of the Civil Rights movement have not been met. Those gains that were achieved 50 years ago have been back pedaled ever since. The same thing happened after the abolition of slavery, within 50 years, by the 1930’s a new tyrany had been legaly set up to reverse many of the freedoms achieved.

Outrageous demands..

BLM’s #WhatMatters2020 will focus on the following issues:

• Racial Injustice
• Police Brutality
• Criminal Justice Reform
• Black Immigration
• Economic Injustice
• LGBTQIA+ and Human Rights
• Environmental Conditions
• Voting Rights & Suppression
• Healthcare
• Government Corruption
• Education
• Commonsense Gun Laws

If those objectives are an issue, then you are the issue.  How they are achieved is up to governments to resolve, and if they don’t then the situation that has arisen is what happens.

The ‘demand’ is that the problems get fixed.

How they get fixed is a job for a progressive government through policy decisions and engagement with the communities and people they serve. Understanding the problems and defining them is part of that job but step one is to acknowledge there is a problem and genuinely start the job of fixing…

It isn’t and shouldn’t be up to protesters to define the solution detail by tiny detail, their goal is to demand change and for their voice to be heard.

Revolution is for the irresponsible and adolescent.

It’s not, unfortunately it is a necessary catalyst for long lasting change as history has shown. Not always for the better I hasten to add. Calling it irresponsible and adolescent is rather, well, irresponsible and adolescent really.

There are many in the humanities who think that race should be abandoned as a concept because it’s so protean and nebulous. There is no academic consensus regarding what race is.

I think that’s what us non-academics have largely reached a consensus on and like to describe, in non-nebulous fashion, as a right load of old bollocks

You’ve as much chance of abandoning race as a concept as you have of abandoning breathing as a concept. As Trumps America is presently demonstrating on a global scale

Probably just me, but it seems that in England a police officers attitude is ‘I uphold the law’. Whereas in America the attitude seems to be ‘I AM the law’

It’s even deeper than that.

Pretty much all of American society is based on power, and the heirarchy associated with that. Now I don’t get my knowledge of America exclusively from TV, but it’s interesting to see the subtle things that come out in the cultural output. For example – you can be summarily fired from your job pretty easily. This means that your boss has a lot of power over you. So you get things like ‘ooh don’t say that about the boss’ and the powerful person has to be pandered to because he’ll fire you. Countless movies contain the ‘you’ll never work in this town again’ threat, because people have power and they can get people to do whatever they want without accountability. I’ve had so many conversations in which threats are thrown into the language as a matter of course, I don’t think many speakers even realise they do it. Look at how often the day is saved in movies by violence from the good guys against the baddies.

This manifests itself in many ways but rampant machismo is very obvious. People threaten each other with violence and other reprisals all the time – it’s about threats and domination. So men (it mostly is) are all trying to dominate one way or the other. This is why there are so many gun nuts – they crave power, and they think the guns give them that. Even ‘responsible’ gun owners talk about the battle they’ll have with the baddie who tries to get them. Why would they talk about it? Because they are fantasising about it. Guns are an absolutely massive part of this. US drivers don’t shout and swear at each other, mostly. Once whilst driving I beeped at someone and gesticulated, my then GF said ‘don’t do that – he might have a gun’. So people are living under constant threat of violence from people who wish to dominate.

This is the behaviour that Trump and the cops are displaying. They wish to dominate by force and threats, because that’s how society works there to a large extent.

An interesting dichotomy at play – lots of videos of US cops being docks, but also some of US cops being cool, taking a knee, imploring colleagues to join them, etc. Also some vids of agitators getting pinged by protestors – lots of stuff going on…

It isn’t and shouldn’t be up to protesters to define the solution detail by tiny detail,

Governments make laws and policy. We should be very clear what they can and can’t deliver.

If I protest about ‘economic justice’ and demand the gov deliver it for me we have a problem of ‘economic justice’ being ill-defined and under-articulated. How will I signal to the government what it is substantively than they need to achieve? What does success look like formally?

It’s not, unfortunately it is a necessary catalyst for long lasting change as history has shown

It’s my experience that westerners talking glibly about revolution have never experienced one.

I’m not talking glibly, just stating it as a historical fact. Revolutions have happened throughout history as catalysts to massive change. France, Russia, Haiti, Cuba, China, Austria, Iran, Italy etc. Are you disputing that fact?

Where I’m from has absolutely no bearing on it. Although I’m from Europe where there has been a shit tonne of revolutions over the years. Were they all irresponsible and adolescent? How different would the world be if they hadn’t have happened?

It’s my experience that westerners talking glibly about revolution have never experienced one.

Surely ‘westerners’ have experienced plenty of revolutions, as they have a tendency to be on the receiving end of them?

Or are academics now saying we should no longer recognise colonialism as a concept?

If I protest about ‘economic justice’ and demand the gov deliver it for me we have a problem of ‘economic justice’ being ill-defined and under-articulated. How will I signal to the government what it is substantively than they need to achieve?

It would start with a government saying:

We hear you, we understand that there is a problem, let’s engage with the groups affected to fully understand the problem, and then we’ll describe how we intend to change/invoke policy to fix it, if you agree with those changes (either by voting that gov in/back in to power) then we can move forward. Along with constant review and engagement with those people that are affected.

Or words and actions to that effect.

A big part of the problem is that there have been decades of the ‘we hear that you’re angry’ bit without much of the rest, or even worse, a demonstrable worsening of the situation.

Demanding individual changes is all well and good but won’t do much to tackle a systemic societal issue, and could even run the risk of a ‘we did the bit you asked for why aren’t you happy now?’ situation.

Real leadership and a genuine desire to tackle issues at a societal level are what’s needed, nobody is offering that (yet), and very few in power are even willing to entertain the idea of it.

So you want the gov to figure out what you want?