LBRod wrote:

Zip City wrote:I don’t trust “the people” to make good choices either.

So here we are

There are those in "Libertarian" circles who would answer fuck off slaver.

Zip City wrote:
Those sound like very reasonable people who have open minds and open hearts

LBRod wrote:

Zip City wrote:
Those sound like very reasonable people who have open minds and open hearts

They are tired of that boot you seem to embrace.

chuckrh wrote:After 2 nights of rioting, downtown Seattle is totally trashed. Now the National Guard has been mobilized. Thing is, there were plenty of peaceful protests with very few incidents like the part of town where I live. It's the idiots who don't really care about the issue at hand but rather are looking for free loot & random destruction that are the problem. We've been through this before with the WTO riots of several years ago. I got caught up in that mess trying to get to my car after a basketball game. I'm afraid our idiot in chief is going to use this as an excuse to try & declare martial law. The US is in deep shit & I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. I hope all of us make it through relatively unscathed. It's starting to look like that isn't going to be possible now though.

305 Engine wrote:

chuckrh wrote:After 2 nights of rioting, downtown Seattle is totally trashed. Now the National Guard has been mobilized. Thing is, there were plenty of peaceful protests with very few incidents like the part of town where I live. It's the idiots who don't really care about the issue at hand but rather are looking for free loot & random destruction that are the problem. We've been through this before with the WTO riots of several years ago. I got caught up in that mess trying to get to my car after a basketball game. I'm afraid our idiot in chief is going to use this as an excuse to try & declare martial law. The US is in deep shit & I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. I hope all of us make it through relatively unscathed. It's starting to look like that isn't going to be possible now though.

Every time I've been on a big demo of any kind, there's ALWAYS a tiny minority that want to escalate it. Often it's self proclaimed anarchists being opportunistic. Or, just general assholes.

More disturbing is the notion that it might be an organised and deliberate attempt to provoke. But, probably best to steer clear of conspiracy theories. What is for certain is that your dipshit in chief will try and take advantage.

chuckrh wrote:

305 Engine wrote:

chuckrh wrote:After 2 nights of rioting, downtown Seattle is totally trashed. Now the National Guard has been mobilized. Thing is, there were plenty of peaceful protests with very few incidents like the part of town where I live. It's the idiots who don't really care about the issue at hand but rather are looking for free loot & random destruction that are the problem. We've been through this before with the WTO riots of several years ago. I got caught up in that mess trying to get to my car after a basketball game. I'm afraid our idiot in chief is going to use this as an excuse to try & declare martial law. The US is in deep shit & I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. I hope all of us make it through relatively unscathed. It's starting to look like that isn't going to be possible now though.

Every time I've been on a big demo of any kind, there's ALWAYS a tiny minority that want to escalate it. Often it's self proclaimed anarchists being opportunistic. Or, just general assholes.

More disturbing is the notion that it might be an organised and deliberate attempt to provoke. But, probably best to steer clear of conspiracy theories. What is for certain is that your dipshit in chief will try and take advantage.

It's 3 nights now & it spread to the suburbs last night. Ugly.

boyyourself wrote:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo

Just thought I would put this here. Salatin is a voice of reason.

beantownbubba wrote:

boyyourself wrote:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo

Just thought I would put this here. Salatin is a voice of reason.

Not exactly the main point but a great takeaway for this city boy: "beeves." Not to be confused w/ The Beav.

beantownbubba wrote:The question was, for those of you around then, where things worse in the late 60's or now. My response generated a fair amount of commentary so I thought I'd post it here:

Version 1: It was worse then. Nothing that has happened so far currently can match the impact of the assassinations of King & Kennedy two months apart, coming so soon (in historical time) after the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X, to be followed by the assassinations at Kent State (for all intents and purposes 1970 was part of the late 60's). In "pop culture" terms, there was Altamont reversing in a matter of mere months the incredible exuberance briefly fostered by Woodstock and the Tate-LaBianco murders which added to the sense that the world was simply out of control.

Version 2: It's worse now because of the level of cynicism and despair; the sense that the system is irretrievably broken, corrupt and unresponsive; the inflammatory and all encompassing nature of social media; and the not to be underestimated presence of Donald Trump, a truly destructive and divisive figure who combines that bad attitude with a level of ignorance and incompetence that could never before even be imagined in a president. While there is a danger in overgeneralizing, I think it's fair to say that there was an underlying sense of optimism about the 60's in that the civil rights movement seemed to actually be working, change through the system seemed possible, the Woodstock moment and even the war protests were undergirded by the beliefs that the government could and would be responsive and that government was fundamentally a vehicle for positive change. I think it's impossible to overgeneralize by saying those beliefs are virtually non-existent these days.

305 Engine wrote: as a non american who loves a lot of things about america (DBT for example) watching whats happening over there is deeply sad. Thoughts with everyone over there, genuinely.

LBRod wrote:What we are going through these days is a partial answer to what if Wallace made it to the White House?

Zip City wrote:I would argue that the current system isn’t broken at all. It’s operating exactly like it was designed

“Anybody wanted something, he gave it to them,” his mother, Odessa Riley, told The Daily Beast. “He extended his good will to those who are sworn to be our protectors.

“He fed the police for free,” she said.

That did not prevent the police from arriving with the National Guard and ordering McAtee’s patrons to disperse for being out after a 9 p.m. weekend curfew.

"It looked like something out of a movie,” a customer named Kris Smith told a local reporter. “It looked like a freaking war zone... This is really what it comes to? We're just having drinks, chilling, and the National Guard pulls up with machine guns?... Never thought I would experience that here in America.”

A cellphone video captured a loud sound that may or may not have been a gunshot. There was a nine-second pause, a considerable time in that circumstance. Then came a dozen shots.

For the previous four nights, people in Louisville had been protesting a police killing there in March as well as last week’s killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Louisville narcotics detectives had fatally wounded a 26-year-old African-American off-duty EMT named Breonna Taylor, bursting through her front door on a no-knock search warrant. Taylor was in bed at the time. She was shot eight times. No drugs were found.

Now, police officers and guard members had shot an African-American chef at the street corner stand where he was realizing his dream, doing well while doing good.

Dahlia Lithwick wrote:Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.

Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.

Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.

whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:embrace the bootlickery

jr29 wrote:

whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:embrace the bootlickery

Scott Walker is the worst.