2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing

[eddiemccandless]

Stuff like that is just through the looking glass to me. I'm not going to take Vox's cherry picked sample statistics to brainwash myself that I didn't see the stabbings and burning buildings and looted blocks of streets that I saw with my own eyes. Or that I didn't see thousands of people cheer on the active looters. That I didn't hear endless streams of profanities and calls for physical violence against groups of people which again were met with rousing applause from the peaceful protestors. That these peaceful protestors didn't openly brag in public about their loot from the peaceful demonstrations. Yet, these people enjoy generous support, rhetorical and financial, from essentilly the entire Demoratic establishment, some parts of the Republican one too, 90% of the national media, about every single ****ing corporation and tens of % of the general population. But yeah they are the unlikely underdogs fighting The Man. Who we really need to look out for is the occasional white lunatic who shoots several people, then promptly gets the chair or several lifetimes without parole and is hated on by everybody except the tiniest permiles of the general population.

I am not sure if you were referring to my link, but in any case the statistics that I shared are not from Vox. They are from CSIS which is a non partisan organization (you can read their policy here).

Also, the statistics do not invalidate your personal experience. No one is saying that there is no looting and no damage. I don't doubt for a second that you have seen and experienced what you say. I will tell you more, I was in Dallas when the looting happened there, and I saw the people marching right in front of my window. I have a good friend in Chicago who sent me videos of people smashing a car roof literally in front of her apartment, she did not leave the apartment for a week because she was terrified. I know it's real.

I also come from a small town in Tuscany that had a group of people not too different from the Proud Boys and boogaloos, who one night stopped me because I was wearing a red shirt which they thought was one of the "Che Guevara" t-shirts that were popular with teenagers back then. Had I been wearing that, I would probably have been ganged on and sent to the hospital, as happened to other people that I know. Luckily I haven't experienced anything like that in the US, but these things do happen here as well and have become much more frequent in recent years (if you want an example just look at what happened in Michigan, or just look at the track record for the Proud Boys). The study that I sent shows that it got to the point that these kind of organizations are now an actual threat to national security. It most definitely is not the occasional white lunatic, these people are organized.

And once more, BLM does not want to damage anything. All that was needed was for the US government to make a show of good faith and at least attempt to address the situation instead of pretending that everything was fine. That didn't happened, and the protests started. Damage would have happened with or without BLM, these are not organized terrorists, these are angry and scared people that have grown up scared of dealing with the police and are now being told that it's really not a big deal if cops shoot them for no reason.

Neo nazis on the other hand can not be reasoned with. They are racists, they are bigots, and most importantly they are terrified that the white population in the US is slowly but surely becoming a minority. Not a whole lot can be done to address this.

TLDR: statistics do not invalidate your experience, they just show you that your perception of what is happening on a bigger scale is wrong. That is their whole purpose.

 

[Adorno]

If I may point out it seems like the statistics on terrorism and the debate about the recent riots are not quite the same.

BLM does not want to damage anything. ... these are not organized terrorists

None of the violence and looting by protesters is of course defined as terrorism.
Whereas violence by white nationalists, Boogaloo Bois (dear Lord) etc. is part of those statistics (or will be soon).

I will point out though, that BLM was involved in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and negotiated with local authorities.
Their demands were radical, including the complete abolishment of imprisonment/prisons and police in the area e.g.
BLM is a radical left-wing movement, but has managed to establish itself as a moderate anti-racist organisation.

 

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

unfortunately, the vast majority of blm folks do not remotely support complete abolition of police and are far from radical leftists. seattle is a known outlier.

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

ok boomer, facts don't care about your feelings.

No offence but this is how you lose politics + probably invalidate the legitimacy of your own movement. Black people aren't executed en masse by the police, but the (disproportionate) times it does happen deeply affects black communities to the degree that it traumatisez them. Our measures are our feelings. It is not irrational to acknowledge that people are scared.

Your comment is crass, insensitive, uncool, politically ineffective and immoral.

 

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

it is a joke specifically quoting a ****ty shapiro line in response to her ****ty shapiro level post.

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

She opened up and expressed she's actually stressed out and affected and your reply was a shapiro level response. You're not pointing out the irony, you literally just adopted shapiros logic.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Kurczak was clutching pearls about the fact that a mob of thousands of atomised ameriKKKans wasn't disciplined and quiet, and then using this to demand the entire american system denounce BLM as an abstract:

Yet, these people enjoy generous support, rhetorical and financial, from essentilly the entire Demoratic establishment, some parts of the Republican one too, 90% of the national media, about every single ****ing corporation and tens of % of the general population.

^ How can you take something like this seriously if you know even a tiny bit about american politics? This is quite frankly conspiratorial lunacy. BLM is just a slogan that corporations use in fundamentally different contexts to the rioters, the looting has never been promoted or even neutrally acknowledged by any institution and has been repeatedly denounced by any democrat who has talked about it. Also I would love to be proven wrong about republicans supporting the riots, but it genuinely made me laugh a bit seeing it written down.

Welding together the protests and BLM is a neocon sleight of hand that is pretty genius, but in practice there is a gigantic gulf between the american riots and the general mood of institutional reform that corporations and state institutions across the world are trying to latch themselves to. Trying to compare Avery J. Whitewomann, who just wants to hire an inclusivity monitor and put some stupid BLM fliers up in the office, with the protestors who happen to use the same slogan but for vastly different reasons is just ridiculous. I have read probably about a hundred different "response to BLM" letters from every institution I still interact with, and they are all the same: "policekillingpeopleisbadokay also we want to take this opportunity to very loudly and publically do some long overdue inclusivity work butactuallynotreally, we'll do a few Zoom calls and mute all the darkies so the white CEOs can talk for 3 hours about literally nothing"

 

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

yeah that about covers it.

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

Because, despite the mountains of hogwash that exists (not just fabricated by centre/right people, but just as much by left people) I know kurczak and I know that she's 100% a critical person that can be reasoned with. She was spitting facts for 20 pages until she was affected by the protests. I'm sorry for invoking the cliche, but just assuming she's being partisan or that she's just inconvenienced and therefor against BLM means you just lost. You will never have a meaningful conversation. You're done. No political, social nothing reform. Kurczak doesn't give a **** about Proud Boys or whatever, she'll say they suck ****, but that takes literally nothing away from that she feels threatened. Us trying to waive her problems away when she's actually affected is the most online-politically-"savvy"-but actually-in-a-retarded-echochamber thing we can do.

This is analogous to the way that liberals liked to waive away rust belters as dumb, idiot, ignorant rednecks that could be excluded from the political discourse before Trump. When these people are working 40hrs a week and are so ****ing tired that their brains have regressed to the point where they can only regurgitate Trump one-liners. These people have real problems unique to them. Their problems, on average, can be less worse than those faced by black people, but not extending an understanding usually just means that you're not given any. And as a reminder: They vote. Often more reliably than any other demographic.

I assure you if you actively attempt to extend a charitable understanding to them and their unique problems, you and them will notice parallels and they will want to agree with you and help you out. People drop their stupid ****ing guard and hyper partisanship when they notice you just want to understand them. It's a difficult, frustrating process to which unfortunately no satisfactory alternative exists.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Is that you, Rams?

 

[eddiemccandless]

If I may point out it seems like the statistics on terrorism and the debate about the recent riots are not quite the same.

None of the violence and looting by protesters is of course defined as terrorism.
Whereas violence by white nationalists, Boogaloo Bois (dear Lord) etc. is part of those statistics (or will be soon).

This is a good observation, and one that I had begun to address in an original version of my previous post, but then I realized how long it was going to be and I figured I would leave it for someone to point out. Because that at least would mean that they took the time to read it . I have two comments related to that:
1) I don't think it's really possible to know who is doing the violence at a protest, no matter who the protest is from. The two groups clash, mix and infiltrate with each other at these events. There is evidence that the alt right is deliberately using infiltration tactics to generate violence during the protests, and it is my personal opinion that this account for a large number of violence episodes. Of course there is no way to know one way or the other.
2) My point in sharing this statistics was that there is this narrative, that @kurczak seems to have fallen for, that the US is a giant dumpster fire of protests and broken windows because of extreme left activists, and that activities from neo nazis are just a handful of psychos that should not be taken too seriously. This is not the reality, the left extremists do not represent a real threat, while organized alt right does.

A final consideration related to violence from white nationalist being considered terrorism: violence is considered terrorism when it meets certain parameters (this is referenced as 4 in the study I linked, you can see the references if you download the .pdf). Political orientation of who does the violence has nothing to do with how it is classified. You don't see BLM in the statistics because BLM does not do acts of terrorism, as defined in a technical sense by the guidelines. Antifa does.

All of this said, I think that @Cute Anime Girl is saying things that are very true (I find myself saying the strangest things on the internet these days ). I don't think that anyone is here to "win an argument". I am not at least, there's no point in that. My main aim is to try to expose the difference between propaganda and the reality of things, and hopefully in the process deescalate some of the tensions that are plaguing the country. Not that doing so in this forum will really have that much of an impact in the grand scheme of things, but you know. Baby steps.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

Is that you, Rams?

I'm 100% certain purely because of the misuse of "waive".

 

[Lord Brutus]

I'm 100% certain purely because of the misuse of "waive".

Good call, Hawk. Puppet of some sort.

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

All of this said, I think that @Cute Anime Girl is saying things that are very true (I find myself saying the strangest things on the internet these days ).

 

[Adorno]

... the looting has never been promoted or even neutrally acknowledged by any institution and has been repeatedly denounced by any democrat who has talked about it.

... Or that I didn't see thousands of people cheer on the active looters. That I didn't hear endless streams of profanities and calls for physical violence against groups of people which again were met with rousing applause from the peaceful protestors.

I don't mean to speak for Kurczak, but there has been tendencies on the left wing to avoid a harsh tone towards the vandalism.
At times they have been rhetorically twisting and turning to excuse the looting.
Vox had an article emphasising how looting is hurting the cause.

Vandalism and theft aren’t helping

America has a great tradition of civil disobedience. Looters aren’t following it.

www.vox.com

Nobody is speaking in favor of vandalism or theft, but there’s unquestionably a sense in the air on the left that it’s inappropriate to condemn these actions. The sentiment is pervasive on social media, where many on the left make the point that human life matters more than property, as if there’s a hard trade-off between the destruction of property and saving the lives of African Americans.
...
Speaking to Vox’s Terry Nguyen, sociologist Darnell Hunt gamely tried to posit that “protesters are not indiscriminately burning things. They seem to be more focused on chain stores, like Target, or specific cultural icons that represent a system people feel has not served them.”

In Defense of Destroying Property

We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested.

www.thenation.com

Given the racial dimension of these protests, even apparently sympathetic explanations of theft and destruction risk of implying that people of color are reacting from feelings rather than carrying out reasoned, calculated acts with their own perfectly legitimate political logics. Attacking police stations, for example, makes rational sense. It is not the sudden, spontaneous expression of a disordered and irrational mob but the clear enactment of a political position, the fulfillment in some small but concrete way of the central demand being made by protesters across the country: Police need to be defunded, and some police stations need to disappear.

This moment calls for the left to define violence and nonviolence for itself—to decide what nonviolence means in the face of overwhelming state brutality and structural economic and racial injustice. Failure to do so results in a confusion of terms that has serious ethical and political consequences: Property destruction is not synonymous with the violence that is being protested.

People are not objects; broken windows and burnt cars are simply not commensurate with the violence of state-sanctioned murder or the structural violence of poverty that has placed people of color at a disproportionate risk of dying of Covid-19. Plateglass windows don’t bleed. They don’t die and leave loved ones grieving.

Or the looter might want something. Nothing symbolizes the exclusion, deprivation, and gross class inequality that characterizes our current economic system more perfectly than the luxury stores looted in New York City’s SoHo district before the imposition of the curfew. Given that capitalism largely restricts pleasure to the consumption of goods, we should be able to entertain the idea that this taking of unnecessary things—while not a recognizably political act—is understandable or even a justifiable.

Offensive as it is to liberal sensibilities, property destruction may be integral to the success of the current uprising.

The entire article tries to make the looting symbolically okay - a just act of disobedience.
"... define violence and nonviolence for itself"

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Do you expect the article to have a big fat "STEALING THINGS AND BURNING SHOPS IS BAD" disclaimer at the top? In a country where surveys prove time and time again that the vast majority of people are completely opposed to the looting?
Some of the same criticism appears whenever historians try to reassess the extent of the holocaust or holomodor or whatever other sensitive topic they want to be nuanced about, but because there is no oversimplified "GENOCIDE IS VERY BAD" virtue signal, some people immediately tar the writer as a Nazi sympathiser or a tankie or whatever.
Are you so dense that you assume the writers are secretly in favour of looting unless they explicitly denounce it?

Or the looter might want something. Nothing symbolizes the exclusion, deprivation, and gross class inequality that characterizes our current economic system more perfectly than the luxury stores looted in New York City’s SoHo district before the imposition of the curfew. Given that capitalism largely restricts pleasure to the consumption of goods, we should be able to entertain the idea that this taking of unnecessary things—while not a recognizably political act—is understandable or even a justifiable.

Offensive as it is to liberal sensibilities, property destruction may be integral to the success of the current uprising.

For example I disagree with this quote for a number of reasons, but this is a well understood idea in sociology, that violent acts can often have some kind of reasonable or understandable motive behind them. Reasonable =/= good or in favour of. As an extreme example, a person could even analyse the Holocaust in terms of the motives of the perpetrators. But to claim that this means that they are not doing enough to denounce the Holocaust is intellectually dishonest filibustering, and turns any discussion of sensitive topics into a stupid game of virtue signalling.

More importantly, do you really think someone who is willing to go out and smash windows is going to be swayed by what a few democrat politicians and Vox writers say?

 

[Adorno]

I'm not saying the Vox article condones looting. It does the opposite. That is my point.
Vox is left wing and the writers know what goes on there. And they saw it necessary to write an article to other left leaning people about how bad it is to support the looting.

Nobody is speaking in favor of vandalism or theft, but there’s unquestionably a sense in the air on the left that it’s inappropriate to condemn these actions. The sentiment is pervasive on social media ...

I don't t hink any random looter is swayed by anything. It's 'criminal opportunism' (if that's a thing).

(I can't always follow what you say, and don't see why Holocaust is brought up.)

 

[kurczak]

隐藏

Kurczak was clutching pearls about the fact that a mob of thousands of atomised ameriKKKans wasn't disciplined and quiet, and then using this to demand the entire american system denounce BLM as an abstract:

^ How can you take something like this seriously if you know even a tiny bit about american politics? This is quite frankly conspiratorial lunacy. BLM is just a slogan that corporations use in fundamentally different contexts to the rioters, the looting has never been promoted or even neutrally acknowledged by any institution and has been repeatedly denounced by any democrat who has talked about it. Also I would love to be proven wrong about republicans supporting the riots, but it genuinely made me laugh a bit seeing it written down.

Welding together the protests and BLM is a neocon sleight of hand that is pretty genius, but in practice there is a gigantic gulf between the american riots and the general mood of institutional reform that corporations and state institutions across the world are trying to latch themselves to. Trying to compare Avery J. Whitewomann, who just wants to hire an inclusivity monitor and put some stupid BLM fliers up in the office, with the protestors who happen to use the same slogan but for vastly different reasons is just ridiculous. I have read probably about a hundred different "response to BLM" letters from every institution I still interact with, and they are all the same: "policekillingpeopleisbadokay also we want to take this opportunity to very loudly and publically do some long overdue inclusivity work butactuallynotreally, we'll do a few Zoom calls and mute all the darkies so the white CEOs can talk for 3 hours about literally nothing"

I treat BLM with the same broad strokes everyone treats everyone else. I refuse to play their game that when it comes to everyone else, holy ****, are their radars and pattern recognition finely tuned. Everything is systemic here and dog-whistling there, and ACAB and benefiting or suffering from group (lack of) privilege etc etc. But when it comes to them, you couldn't find a a bunch of more rugged philosophical individualists. Compared to them, even Max Stirmer is basically a Marxist sociologist. Nooo, you must not essentialize our movement of irredeemably heterogenous mavericks, nooo it's actually just a broad attitude, not an organization.

Pathetic.

I don't think that Dems and Reps and corps conspire to support BLM. I think only tiny minority of them are actually aligned ideologically and the vast majority of them do so out of fear, because Blacktivism is the sacred cow of contemporary American politics and accusation of racism is far and away the most cost effective attack there is, that saying out loud "theft and arson bad" is now massively controversial, what are you some white supremacist or something.

Btw Mitt ****ing Romney, of all neocons in the Congress, was marching with BLM.

I'll get to the others later

 

[Lord Brutus]

FBI has revealed that the kidnapping-assassination plot against the Governor of Michigan was not an isolated incident since Fascist militias were already targeting the Governor of Virginia. I hope FBI and Homeland Security stay on top of this. What would happen if the US military got involved to shut down these right wing militias and Trump, as commander-in-chief, ordered the Army to stand down?

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

Lil based, ngl.

I don't think that Dems and Reps and corps conspire to support BLM. I think only tiny minority of them are actually aligned ideologically and the vast majority of them do so out of fear...

Compromise: There exists both a recognition that black people have it harder, in parts because of racism, as well as fear and stigma surrounding the subject. Politics being performative means that the stigma is exacerbated, or that the nature of being a politician being dependent on performance means that it's especially vulnerable to said stigmas, hence the fear. And fear is probably a more likely response to a lot of people than doing genuine ethics when they're confronted with the subject.

I do think intelligent Dems would make the distinction between
a. A significant portion of BLM does group oppression Olympics (this is condemnable and causes real harm and should be addressed more) and
b. BLM is a somewhat reactionary-like movement that does probably not have a consistent ideology beyond their belief that ''black people have it hard''. Where the ''black people have it hard'' carries truth, despite the movement's sometimes radical um tendencies/image?

One thing that I try to drill down for myself is that it's important to understand that, just because you don't believe or value things, like, say wholesomeness ^______^, it does not mean that other people are faking it. Probably they genuinely derive some sort of value and satisfaction from the attitude. It is really, really tempting to project our realities onto other people, when, very often, your realities are just disanalogous. I'm saying this because my suspicion is that the woke people actually hurt (financially or otherwise) you, or have severely restricted you expressing yourself, hence the temptation to project it onto other people like the Dems.