Is America burning? (Black Lives Matter protests, civil unrest and riots 2020)

[Badgers]

It was faked sadly.
Should not really have posted it.

 

[DaveCinzano]

It was faked sadly.
Should not really have posted it.

It was a real fake, or a fake fake?

When you can't trust the counterfeiters and forgers, it really is a sad day

 

[Jeremiah18.17]

The shadow of Thoth? Egyptian God of wisdom, magic and the moon, with the head of an Ibis......
“As the son of these two deities, who represented order and chaos respectively, he was also the god of equilibrium and balance and associated closely with both the principle of ma'at (divine balance) and the goddess Ma'at who personified this principle (and who was sometimes seen as his wife). Another of his consorts was the goddess Nehemetawy ('She Who Embraces Those In Need") a protector goddess.”

 

[teqniq]

Apparently to be charged with second degree assault

Two suspended Buffalo Police Emergency Response Team officers set to be arraigned Saturday morning

Four sources confirm to 7 Eyewitness News the two suspended Buffalo Police officers involved in the Niagara Square incident Thursday night are set to be arraigned Saturday morning on felony charges.

www.wkbw.com

 

[Mation]

[Realised I can't actually cope with talking about this.]

 

[not-bono-ever]

my kids have told me she didnt post it. fuck knows how they know this

 

[killer b]

my kids have told me she didnt post it. fuck knows how they know this

she's a celebrity who's source of fame is - more or less - posting pictures of herself on social media. It's obvious without even having to check to anyone with even a passing familiarity with her image that she simply wouldn't post a really badly photoshopped image of herself. It's also obvious to anyone who might have spent 20 seconds quickly checking before posting it.

 

[ska invita]

As an aside, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, which summarises a study of one unit's involvement in the Holocaust, based on statements made by the participants themselves, is grimly instructive.

The unit is Reserve Police Battalion 101, a 500-strong group of very average, middle-aged German men, conscripted into a paramilitary/gendarmerie-type police formation in a time of war, and sent to Poland. They are armed and uniformed, but they are not soldiers, and fight no battles. They are police officers, but they enforce no laws and detect no crimes. They are there to guard, to threaten, to search, to coerce, and ultimately to kill. They are not told explicitly what they will be doing before they go. Even after they arrive, they are only given very narrow, task-orientated instructions. And yet without in any real sense being forced to, together these ordinary men killed, murdered, slaughtered 83,000 Jews - 38,000 by gunshot in ‘police actions’, and 43,000 ‘deported’ to Treblinka death camp. Those whose lives were directly extinguished by the men of 101 were typically shot at very close range, close enough to feel warm breath on their skin, close enough for the shooters to be ‘gruesomely besmirched’ by every bullet they delivered into soft flesh and brittle skull and spongy organ. 166 souls snuffed out, 76 at touching distance, on average, per ordinary man.

Browning largely strips away ideological motivations, and focuses on what humans can be made to do to other humans, not by force, but by circumstance and expectation and by the process of breaking down ghastly and complex politico-military policy goals into small, repetitive, discrete parcels of horrific labour for individuals to carry out - divorcing thought from action.

Some take to the job much more enthusiastically than others. Some are transparently sadistic. But some quietly tell their NCO or their officer that they can't stomach any more, today, and are given less distressing jobs for now, taking this thing to that place, or guarding a perimeter, or taking a message to headquarters. Many rely on alcohol to fog over their feelings. Yet at no point does everybody stop. At all times the massacres and train embarkations continue. The machine trundles on, even if periodically parts are swapped out.

It becomes not a matter of this is wrong, but of I cannot do this right now. These ordinary men are not - unlike their victims - compelled at bayonet point; they compel themselves through deference to the whole, to power, to that which they consider ‘authority’, to the body of men to which they belong. To some there is the commitment to Reich und Volk, to the bonds of blood and soil, to a national duty, but mostly it is the in sickness and in health conscious stoicism of codependent relationships. Men doing bad things because if they don't do them, the man beside them will have to do their share too. Men motivated not by a moral code, but by a desire not to be seen as letting down his comrades. Men more worried by shame than slaughter. Men who respond to the horror by considering that this is horrific but it will nevertheless be done, rather than this is horrific and must be stopped. Men who see ways to personally abdicate their direct involvement in the horror - by physical absence, mental absence, ethical justification, pragmatic justification - but who never seek to end the horror itself, because the horror is inevitable and a fact and I just have to do what I have to do to get through this. Me, myself, I; not him, her, them. Pain and trauma is a personal tragedy, not something inflicted upon the actual victims, whose faces quickly all blend into anonymity.

And does any of this matter at all, to the 83,000 corpses they leave behind? No. Dead men, women and children cannot absolve you of anything, not least your murder of them; no more than George Floyd can look upon his own cadaver and the choking chemical clouds that hang over America's towns and cities and consider this to be ‘a great day’. All that is left is the living, and the living can frame their actions any way they choose.

But when the living choose to frame matters in terms of how I didn't personally do anything wrong, yet still stand in armoured phalanxes of anonymous brute force because thin blue line or law and order or it's not perfect but it's all we've got, the body count arithmetic never really changes. You're just one goon in a helmet who skived off for half an hour because your nerves couldn't take whetting your nightstick just now; the other 499 can take up the slack on your 166.

And in thirty minutes' time you will always find reason to rejoin the ranks, because at any point you could have stopped this, and you did not. You always saw yourself as one of 500, never one of 83,000.

really interesting post

ive been wondering about some of the cognitive dissonance going on
theres are a lot of black police officers who will be moved by whats happening...and a lot of the white police officers taking the knee etc who arent all doing so in full cynicism...yet hours later they will be cracking heads as per usual
i dont have anything insightful to say, other than i think many of us live in an unhealthy state of deep contradiction and hypocrisy, not just soldiers and police

 

[Saul Goodman]

Quelle surprise. The guy with the bike has been ID'd. Aaaaand:

View attachment 216306

More Twitter nonsense getting regurgitated as trufax. People should be fact-checking this stuff before posting it.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

[/QUOTE]

Debunking of ‘professional anarchist deadly brick cache’ conspiracy theories:

White House Forced to Retract Claim Viral Videos Prove Antifa Is Plotting Violence

Within minutes, journalists discovered that most of the viral clips of bricks included in a White House video had already been investigated and debunked.

theintercept.com

Last night I spoke at length with relatives who live in the South. They are seriously discussing whether they can continue living in the USA. They were telling me their fears and concerns about the road map they see unfolding for Trump to delay the election and how he is pushing aside the constitution etc.

Anyway, one of the things that came up was this story about bricks. Apparently it’s really happening and it’s “absolutely certain” that boogaloo agitators are behind it. The conversation was moving too fast for me to get chapter and verse on this information. I invited him to please join Urban, at least for a while, to help fill in some gaps and detail on all this.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

((Mation ))

 

[Pickman's model]

really interesting post

ive been wondering about some of the cognitive dissonance going on
theres are a lot of black police officers who will be moved by whats happening...and a lot of the white police officers taking the knee etc who arent all doing so in full cynicism...yet hours later they will be cracking heads as per usual
i dont have anything insightful to say, other than i think many of us live in an unhealthy state of deep contradiction and hypocrisy, not just soldiers and police

Ah but I crack heads more discriminatingly than they do in Minneapolis, say cops in Buffalo

 

[Pickman's model]

Apparently to be charged with second degree assault

Two suspended Buffalo Police Emergency Response Team officers set to be arraigned Saturday morning

Four sources confirm to 7 Eyewitness News the two suspended Buffalo Police officers involved in the Niagara Square incident Thursday night are set to be arraigned Saturday morning on felony charges.

www.wkbw.com

It's a start

 

[ska invita]

Ah but I crack heads more discriminatingly than they do in Minneapolis, say cops in Buffalo

You're a discerning fellow Pickmans, I've often thought that

 

[DaveCinzano]

Addressing the false identifications of the bike path blue bandit:

Mystery solved: Police arrest Kensington man in alleged assault on Capital Crescent Trail

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. (WJLA) – Following five days of mounting social media frenzy, Maryland-National Capital Park Police have arrested the man they believe to be responsible for assaulting three young adults on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda. On Monday, the three teens— ages 18, 19...

wjla.com

 

[petee]

NYPD kettling over here now.
this is new.

‘Kettling’ of Peaceful Protesters Shows Aggressive Shift by N.Y. Police (Published 2020)

Officers have charged and swung batons at demonstrators after curfew with seemingly little provocation. The mayor said he would review any reports of inappropriate enforcement.

www.nytimes.com

 

[YouSir]

More Twitter nonsense getting regurgitated as trufax. People should be fact-checking this stuff before posting it.

Problem is people don't have the capacity to fact check and at this point there are very few trusted outlets they can look to. No one believed early police statements on it, media is variable at best. 'This stranger sounds convincing' is about as good as it gets in most cases. A good resource would be a site/Twitter account operated by trusted journos in collaboration with BLM or something. Imo anyway.

 

[Badgers]

she's a celebrity who's source of fame is - more or less - posting pictures of herself on social media. It's obvious without even having to check to anyone with even a passing familiarity with her image that she simply wouldn't post a really badly photoshopped image of herself. It's also obvious to anyone who might have spent 20 seconds quickly checking before posting it.

You okay x

 

[Saul Goodman]

Problem is people don't have the capacity to fact check and at this point there are very few trusted outlets they can look to. No one believed early police statements on it, media is variable at best. 'This stranger sounds convincing' is about as good as it gets in most cases. A good resource would be a site/Twitter account operated by trusted journos in collaboration with BLM or something. Imo anyway.

Some guy has had his name splashed all over the internet, connecting him to an assault on children, because thousands of people took a Twitter post at face value. The guy could have been killed for it.
If something on Twitter can't be fact-checked, then it shouldn't be reposted. People are pulled up for using Wiki 'facts', and there's a 99.9% greater likelihood of the Wiki facts being actual facts.

 

[killer b]

You okay x

Fine, just a bit bored of threads like this being filled with easily checked bullshit.

 

[Badgers]

Fine, just a bit bored of threads like this being filled with easily checked bullshit.

Fine then

 

[DaveCinzano]

#attackanddethronegod

 

[phillm]

London BLM live from Whitehall.

 

[Dogsauce]

Keep seeing articles referencing an incident where two ‘college students‘ were pulled from a car and tazered by police. Sounds horrible, but the emphasis on them being ‘college students’ (so somehow less deserving of being treated like this?) just makes me think of the Chris Morris ‘Good AIDS/Bad AIDS’ thing. Shouldn’t matter who they were IMO.

 

[teqniq]

BLM demo in Bute park, Cardiff:



Photo credit goes to my daughter - it is actually the best one I could find to give an impression of the size of the crowd.

 

[Sweet FA]

really interesting post

ive been wondering about some of the cognitive dissonance going on
theres are a lot of black police officers who will be moved by whats happening...and a lot of the white police officers taking the knee etc who arent all doing so in full cynicism...yet hours later they will be cracking heads as per usual
i dont have anything insightful to say, other than i think many of us live in an unhealthy state of deep contradiction and hypocrisy, not just soldiers and police

Have you seen Flint Town? I posted about it on the Netflix thread (it's excellent by the way):

Docu-series following police in Flint, Michigan for two years; came out last year I think. It's very good; compelling, warts and all etc. Seeing the Trump campaign unfold and the effect it has on the police department is very telling - the dept pretty much splits (more openly and antagonistically than before) on racial lines. All this is against the background of poisoned water, budget cuts, drugs and violence.

Not particularly cheerful tbf. It is beautifully filmed though.

Flint water crisis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Flint Town review – Netflix's incredible portrait of a town in crisis

Flint came to the world’s attention after a water crisis exposed years of neglect, and this new docu-series digs deeper to give a police-eyed view of systematic decline

www.theguardian.com

 

[DaveCinzano]

Keep seeing articles referencing an incident where two ‘college students‘ were pulled from a car and tazered by police. Sounds horrible, but the emphasis on them being ‘college students’ (so somehow less deserving of being treated like this?) just makes me think of the Chris Morris ‘Good AIDS/Bad AIDS’ thing. Shouldn’t matter who they were IMO.

Here's a news programme interview with Messiah Young and Taniyah Pilgrim, also seems to feature some cop bodycam footage.




Here's Young recounting his experience at a press conference:



Report from Wednesday, in which a cop report is quoted, illustrating the mindset:

"Not being able to see the hands of the passenger and being that she was in my immediate sight I deployed my city issued taser to defuse the situation."

6 Atlanta police officers booked on charges after allegedly using excessive force during protest

Six Atlanta police officers were booked, five on felony charges, Wednesday after allegations of using excessive force during a protest Saturday, according to the sheriff's office.

edition.cnn.com

 

[phillm]

London BLM live from Whitehall.

kicking off a bit. Ish.

Cops have done a rain dance. Prayers answered.

 

[bimble]

really interesting post

ive been wondering about some of the cognitive dissonance going on
theres are a lot of black police officers who will be moved by whats happening...and a lot of the white police officers taking the knee etc who arent all doing so in full cynicism...yet hours later they will be cracking heads as per usual
i dont have anything insightful to say, other than i think many of us live in an unhealthy state of deep contradiction and hypocrisy, not just soldiers and police

yes. This video of a soldier silently chanting along with the protestors, i don't think its been posted here.

 

[Ax^]

kicking off quite a bit now