Is America burning? (Black Lives Matter protests, civil unrest and riots 2020)
- Thread starter Jeremiah18.17
- Start date
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
The US police appear to have absolutely no idea or concept of de-escalation.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Aren't cops supposed to have discipline? Maybe so many people wouldn't protest (which they are legally allowed to do) if the cops acted like how trained professionals are supposed to act, instead of like the bunch of cowardly, jumped-up thugs in uniform that they actually are.
bimble
floofy
3 boogaloos (& ex servicemen) arrested on domestic terrorism charges at the protests. Article says they conspired to try to spark violence. Worth reading.
www.businessinsider.com
3 self-proclaimed members of the far-right 'boogaloo' movement were arrested on domestic terrorism charges for trying to spark violence during protests
According to a June 2 filing, the men discussed "causing an incident to incite chaos and possibly a riot" in response to George Floyd's death.
www.businessinsider.com
He should brick himself into a wall.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
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Tankus
Amused OAP
Some irony that only few week back trump was pushing for Americans to ignore lockdown instructions ,and go out and about against orders....Now he has a non identifiable secret heavily armed paramilitary gassing and beating American citizens if they do ignore , to justly protest brutality ,even the point of even fireing rounds on citizens own properties if they stand on their own porches.
What a week
Shouldn't Europe start sanctions?
What a week
Shouldn't Europe start sanctions?
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
The New Orleans Police Department has been implementing some deescalation strategies, which follows institutional undertakings made (under duress) in response to earlier cops-run-wild fuckery.
I reserve judgement on the sincerity, effectiveness or desirability of the measures in place.
How NOPD showed commitment to 'de-escalation' during an I-10 standoff with protesters Tuesday
It was an image splashed across cable news for the better part of a week, and now it was happening in New Orleans: police in riot gear, wielding shields, standing
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Rather a superficial and inaccurate summary, i would suggest.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
Are we headed for some kind of new McCarthyism? I had a friend send me an opinion piece from the Washington post equating "ANTIFA" with being the same as Nazis. It seems to me that nearly anyone who questions authoritarianism could be labeled as "ANTIFA." Doesn't even have to be true to be effective against your political opponents.
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phillm
Trolling through Life (TM)
Have they no decency. McCarthy's sidekick Roy Cohn was an early mentor of Trump and his lawyer. McCarthy had started on the army with his commie witch hunt. A step too far, not that Trump would have the foggiest about history.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
ANTEEFA surely?
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
I fully endorse getting the more Gallic OHN-tee-FAH rolling
magneze
🎧
Fair. It's what occurred to me though.
Mation
real life adventure worth more than pieces of gold
The protests aren't what's producing more over-reaction from the police. There's a fucktonne of ideology in between them. It's not self-feeding; that's a constant injection of fuel.
magneze
🎧
I put it poorly. The protests are providing more opportunities for confontation. The police could not beat and tear gas people but that keeps happening. Constant fuel, as you say.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
How about: people are protesting because of police violence, to which the police respond with more violence, yet the idea is somehow the latter will stop the former.
Mation
real life adventure worth more than pieces of gold
Yep, I got that that's what you meant in the literal sense.
But I think it's important that we're hyper-vigilant about how we frame it. Imo, that puts the focus on asking how we end the opportunities for confrontation, rather than on how we end the cause of the protests, iyswim.
pinkychukkles
Feed Your Head
the beatings will continue until morale improves
bimble
floofy
Good article here, saying how there are protests happening even in really small agricultural towns and trumpy bits of America, and how unusual this is.
www.buzzfeednews.com
Why The Small Protests In Small Towns Across America Matter
People who’ve watched and participated in the Black Lives Matter movement say that this time feels different. And the prevalence of these small protests is one of many reasons why.
Riots are born of a sense of illegitimacy of power combined with a feeling that there is no choice but to fight back combined with knowing there are lots of others like you. It then needs to convalesce around a group identity that allows the crowd to move as one by following the norms that the group identity is forged around. If any of these links are broken, the riot withers. If police enact an illegitimate display of power against a group of people who have consistently been the victim of it in the past, however, it fuses all those links at once and a riot starts to become inevitable. It is thus very much the police that cause riots — their actions determine which way a protest will proceed.
This is why a lot of policing manuals these days aim to defuse a riot by not treating everyone in a crowd as being the same, but by trying to engage with those segments that seem most amenable to engagement. Everything I am seeing in the US right now, however, reverses this. If you wanted to write a text book on how to escalate tensions, this would be it.
This is why a lot of policing manuals these days aim to defuse a riot by not treating everyone in a crowd as being the same, but by trying to engage with those segments that seem most amenable to engagement. Everything I am seeing in the US right now, however, reverses this. If you wanted to write a text book on how to escalate tensions, this would be it.
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SheilaNaGig
Break requested
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Some smart words of advice here from the ever excellent Peter Gelderloos, for some posting here too. i'm going to post a fair bit of it as i don't think many will read it:
Counterinsurgency: dousing the flames of Minneapolis - June 4, 2020
The concept of the outside agitator is a very old trope. Some of its first uses were to delegitimize the rebellions of enslaved people, suggesting that Africans would not want to rebel on their own or would not be smart enough to do so, and were instead led into rebellion by nefarious white abolitionists from the North. Another early use was against anarchists, who were frequently immigrants, especially in the US movement, and as such, subject to xenophobic prejudices.
The trope of the outside agitator is a psychological operation meant to suggest that those who rebel have no legitimacy. Those who come from outside threaten the closed, localized system of oppressor and oppressed. The outsiders are imputed with evil, ulterior motivations, whereas the authorities are simply motivated by a desire to protect that closed system. And of course they want to protect it: as the oppressors in the closed system, they are the ones who benefit from it. Solidarity and collective power are discouraged, as people are impelled to distrust anyone who does not come from within a very small circle, family member or immediate neighbor. Obedience is normalized while rebellion is portrayed as something sinister.
Another disturbing element of the trope is the suggestion that white people are being irresponsible if they also want to fight against slavery, and people born in other countries are suspect if they also claim to suffer under capitalism. The racist, classist implications translate well to the modern uses of the provocateur bogeyman.
...
However, when someone is accused of being an infiltrator, a false protester, dialogue becomes impossible because, a priori, honest communication is precluded by who they supposedly are. Those who spread this kind of accusation are actually hoping the crowd will rely on the uglier methods it has available to protect itself: beating up the supposed provocateur, and handing them over to the police.
...
Ironically, those who engage in this kind of snitchjacketing are doing something very similar to what Amy Cooper did in Central Park, calling the police and lying about being threatened, knowing full well that the target of her accusation faced police violence.
...
To do that, it is necessary to raise awareness about how counterinsurgency strategies work. In a digital age, one of the most vital areas for improvement is to teach one another how to recognize conspiracy theories, and how to apply basic standards of evidence.
Just because someone on social media says a video is from a certain place or time, or shows a certain thing, does not mean this is true. In fact, social media “evidence” is extremely prone to suggestion. As documented here, the rumor that a black bloc protester was unmasked as a cop went viral after a 2012 protest in Madrid. It did not matter that in the video, one can see that the cop is not actually wearing a mask, and not dressed in typical black bloc fashion. The simple fact that the message accompanying the video made a claim about the cop’s appearance changed the perception of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw it.
It needs to become standard procedure, when people start spreading rumors based on flimsy evidence, to call it out and shut it down.
We will be in a much stronger place once everyone recognizes that conspiracy theories are a right-wing tool, even when they seem subversive. Who can forget the 9-11 Truther movement. What could be more subversive than accusing the government of murdering almost 3,000 of its own citizens? Over time, the right-wing bent of the conspiracy movement became undeniable: the theory promoted anti-Semitic confabulations, it was based on a high valuation of North American lives and absolute apathy to a much greater number of Iraqi and Afghan lives lost, it distracted from the anti-war movement, and it led to the creation of a “Deep State” paranoia that Trump and similar right wingers use constantly.
Counterinsurgency: dousing the flames of Minneapolis - June 4, 2020
The concept of the outside agitator is a very old trope. Some of its first uses were to delegitimize the rebellions of enslaved people, suggesting that Africans would not want to rebel on their own or would not be smart enough to do so, and were instead led into rebellion by nefarious white abolitionists from the North. Another early use was against anarchists, who were frequently immigrants, especially in the US movement, and as such, subject to xenophobic prejudices.
The trope of the outside agitator is a psychological operation meant to suggest that those who rebel have no legitimacy. Those who come from outside threaten the closed, localized system of oppressor and oppressed. The outsiders are imputed with evil, ulterior motivations, whereas the authorities are simply motivated by a desire to protect that closed system. And of course they want to protect it: as the oppressors in the closed system, they are the ones who benefit from it. Solidarity and collective power are discouraged, as people are impelled to distrust anyone who does not come from within a very small circle, family member or immediate neighbor. Obedience is normalized while rebellion is portrayed as something sinister.
Another disturbing element of the trope is the suggestion that white people are being irresponsible if they also want to fight against slavery, and people born in other countries are suspect if they also claim to suffer under capitalism. The racist, classist implications translate well to the modern uses of the provocateur bogeyman.
...
However, when someone is accused of being an infiltrator, a false protester, dialogue becomes impossible because, a priori, honest communication is precluded by who they supposedly are. Those who spread this kind of accusation are actually hoping the crowd will rely on the uglier methods it has available to protect itself: beating up the supposed provocateur, and handing them over to the police.
...
Ironically, those who engage in this kind of snitchjacketing are doing something very similar to what Amy Cooper did in Central Park, calling the police and lying about being threatened, knowing full well that the target of her accusation faced police violence.
...
To do that, it is necessary to raise awareness about how counterinsurgency strategies work. In a digital age, one of the most vital areas for improvement is to teach one another how to recognize conspiracy theories, and how to apply basic standards of evidence.
Just because someone on social media says a video is from a certain place or time, or shows a certain thing, does not mean this is true. In fact, social media “evidence” is extremely prone to suggestion. As documented here, the rumor that a black bloc protester was unmasked as a cop went viral after a 2012 protest in Madrid. It did not matter that in the video, one can see that the cop is not actually wearing a mask, and not dressed in typical black bloc fashion. The simple fact that the message accompanying the video made a claim about the cop’s appearance changed the perception of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw it.
It needs to become standard procedure, when people start spreading rumors based on flimsy evidence, to call it out and shut it down.
We will be in a much stronger place once everyone recognizes that conspiracy theories are a right-wing tool, even when they seem subversive. Who can forget the 9-11 Truther movement. What could be more subversive than accusing the government of murdering almost 3,000 of its own citizens? Over time, the right-wing bent of the conspiracy movement became undeniable: the theory promoted anti-Semitic confabulations, it was based on a high valuation of North American lives and absolute apathy to a much greater number of Iraqi and Afghan lives lost, it distracted from the anti-war movement, and it led to the creation of a “Deep State” paranoia that Trump and similar right wingers use constantly.
Humberto
Relax
They take an oath (at least in the UK) and have been put into a position of trust and authority:
Once they start acting like a gang that wields its power to treat certain sectors of the public according to their own prejudices then they have become a law unto themselves. Brutality, strife and injustice follow. They are more susceptible than most organisations to abuse of power and infiltration by shitheads by their very nature. What needs to happen is a weakening of their power overeach and ability to abuse it. So, examples must be made of serious wrongdoers instead of it being hushed up. Politicians need to take a lead in reforming the culture of the force. No gimmicks, make them open and accountable. Empower the ombudsmen, give teeth to the complaints commissions.
Once they start acting like a gang that wields its power to treat certain sectors of the public according to their own prejudices then they have become a law unto themselves. Brutality, strife and injustice follow. They are more susceptible than most organisations to abuse of power and infiltration by shitheads by their very nature. What needs to happen is a weakening of their power overeach and ability to abuse it. So, examples must be made of serious wrongdoers instead of it being hushed up. Politicians need to take a lead in reforming the culture of the force. No gimmicks, make them open and accountable. Empower the ombudsmen, give teeth to the complaints commissions.
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