[RD] George Floyd and protesting while black

[red_elk]

Still hard to comprehend how people can believe white nationalists or Russian agents are behind the violence.

In Russia certain percentage of people always believe everything bad happening in the country is American or Jewish plot.
Even if somebody pissed in your elevator, it's agents of State Department or the CIA.
Guess USA has similar problem.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Still hard to comprehend how people can actually believe white nationalists or Russian agents are behind the violence.

Don't think anyone believes Russian agents are behind the violence. Spreading misinformation maybe, although there are plenty of others who might do that too.
White nationalists? Increasing racial tension, distracting from the protests, furthering their agenda of presenting black people negatively. Plenty of reasons they might.

That there are outsiders involved seems likely. No hard evidence of who they are has been produced yet but they certainly aren't doing it to help the locals whatever their agenda is.

 

[zxcvbob]

About an hour ago, I turned the TV on to the local CBS affiliate. They were showing a peaceful protest; probably 3 to 4 thousand people on the I-35W bridge at Washington Ave, maybe more; both sides of the freeway. Everyone (protesters and cops) were behaving themselves and the cops were staying way back (they were off camera.) Then a tanker truck (gasoline or milk, most likely) drove thru the crowd; drove kinda fast. Don't think he ran over anybody but pretty sure he ran over a bicycle and maybe hit a few people. Could have been *really* bad. The protesters mobbed the truck and it stopped. I think they pulled the driver out. Couldn't see what if anything happened to the driver. Cops were there in seconds and dispersed the crowd with pepper spray or something. Still no sign of the driver, looking at it from a helicopter camera. Seemed appropriate level of response. SWAT showed up with an armored vehicle but didn't do anything; show of force I guess. The news crew just broadcast it live from the helicopter and the live crew on the ground, without a whole lot of commentary and apologized for some of the language from the crowd (I didn't hear anything bad)

That's all I got. This is news, not opinion, I like to keep those separated as much as possible.

 

[Commodore]

But I just wonder, what people actually want? what to change?

The details may be different depending on where someone is on the political spectrum, but the general feeling and common overall theme was summed up pretty well by @Cloud_Strife :

People aren't even safe in their own homes let alone street when the police are around

That is what most Americans, no matter their political leanings, want. No matter what your interaction with the police is here, from the smallest traffic stop to instances like the one that spurred these protests, they treat the common citizen like some kind of subhuman animal that needs to controlled. They see themselves as our masters and anyone who doesn't lick their boots with sufficient vigor gets a baton across the face, a bullet in their chest or a knee on their neck.

Americans are simply getting tired of having our liberties trampled on by these little tyrants and are at the point where they are starting to fight back. For example, here in Cincinnati someone shot one of the riot police in the head. The cop's helmet deflected the round so he didn't die, but that just goes to show that people are losing their fear and are becoming more willing to use lethal force against the police.

 

[cardgame]

Nah, the cops are not acting like victims. They're acting like an occupying army. Which, in many places in the US, they basically are.

The actual army has higher standards for occupying foreign territory than cops do

 

[Mouthwash]

White nationalists? Increasing racial tension, distracting from the protests, furthering their agenda of presenting black people negatively. Plenty of reasons they might.

Must be a lot of black white nationalists in the USA.

That there are outsiders involved seems likely. No hard evidence of who they are has been produced yet but they certainly aren't doing it to help the locals whatever their agenda is.

'Heighten the contradictions.'

(That just refers to those who might be deliberately encouraging or justifying the violence, like certain posters on this thread. The actual looters are doing it for very clear reasons.)

 

[Birdjaguar]

I mean, I'm not opposed to knocking it down and rebuilding it from the ground up.

Looting and burning minority-owned small businesses is a funny way of helping out minorities.

If you're referring to the looting, why would you assume that there is an idea behind it?

The real looting took place a few weeks ago when $500 billion went to corporate America and citizens only got $1200.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The real looting took place a few weeks ago when $500 billion went to corporate America and citizens only got $1200.

If any significant proportion of you qualify that works out at a few hundred billion as well.

 

[rah]

Hmm let's see, now that Chicago has locked down where the looting was last night. The looting has moved to places where the police can't be all at once. There own neighborhoods. And now their leaders are complaining on why the police aren't covering everything. They're looting food stores in food deserts and wonder why there are so few food stores. Or looting all their drug stores, to the point where their leaders are asking for drug stores in surrounding areas to import in drugs for Senior citizens in their area. It is self defeating. They just keep moving to where the police are not.
And for the record, every black leader that has been interviewed, have called out the looters and disowning them.
On the other side we've seen lots of footage of police officers standing arm in arm with the peaceful protesters. That is at least heartening.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Hmm let's see, now that Chicago has locked down where the looting was last night. The looting has moved to places where the police can't be all at once. There own neighborhoods. And now their leaders are complaining on why the police aren't covering everything. They're looting food stores in food deserts and wonder why there are so few food stores. Or looting all their drug stores, to the point where their leaders are asking for drug stores in surrounding areas to import in drugs for Senior citizens in their area. It is self defeating. They just keep moving to where the police are not.
And for the record, every black leader that has been interviewed, have called out the looters and disowning them.
On the other side we've seen lots of footage of police officers standing arm in arm with the peaceful protesters. That is at least heartening.

Who is the "they" in your statement?

 

[rah]

I was trying to avoid the use of the word criminal. What word would you suggest

 

[Takhisis]

I think this article is pretty notable: https://www.economist.com/united-st...arked-by-george-floyds-death-are-still-raging
Not because it contains information you don't already know, but because of the slight suggestion police forces are tacitly working with far-right groups to make things worse. That would have been completely unthinkable a few years from a magazine like The Economist concerning the US.
The description of police behaviour in the opening paragraph is also that would have been more fitting of a country like Russia.

I'm reading the text:

Spoiler :

FOR SEVERAL days, Americans have awakened to searing images. A police station in Minneapolis engulfed in flames. A police truck in New York driving into a sea of protesters. Scores of riot policemen, unidentifiable behind their helmets and face shields, storming down a residential street in Minneapolis, and firing paint rounds at people who did not run inside quickly enough. Joyce Beatty, an African-American congresswoman from Ohio, pepper-sprayed by police while trying to quell a confrontation. Police in multiple cities appeared to deliberately target journalists with rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters.

The proximate cause for the protests was the killing of George Floyd, who died on May 25th after Derek Chauvin, then an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department, pressed his knee into Mr Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes—almost three of them after police failed to detect Mr Floyd’s pulse. On May 29th Mr Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Mr Chauvin is expected to appear in court today. Protesters in Minneapolis had been clamouring for his arrest for three days, since mobile-phone footage of Mr Floyd’s death went viral. But his arrest did not quell the demonstrations that Mr Floyd’s death sparked. Over the weekend, they spread. America is now wracked by the most widespread, sustained unrest it has seen in more than 50 years.
Rallies that began peacefully during the day have turned violent at night. At least 75 cities across America have seen protests over the past several days. Governors in at least 11 states have called up the National Guard, and dozens of mayors declared curfews. These measures may calm things down, but they may not: protests following the death of Freddie Grey at the hands of police officers in Baltimore, and Michael Brown, killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, lasted for weeks—and those were not nearly as widespread.

That is in part because the current outcry is about more than just Mr Floyd. Protesters in Georgia commemorated Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man killed while jogging by two white men who chased him in a truck and shot him to death, claiming they believed, without evidence, that he was a burglar. It took weeks before local officials charged the father and son who chased and killed Mr Arbury.

In Louisville, Kentucky, protesters marched in memory of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency-room technician whom police officers killed while executing a “no-knock” warrant at her apartment (police claim they identified themselves; the family disputes this). Crowds across America have chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot”, a slogan used to draw attention to the abnormally high number of police killings in America—1,099 people last year—particularly of African-Americans, who are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police.

Precisely who is responsible for the protests’ more destructive aspects remains unclear—but those aspects have been widespread, and risk undermining support for essential reforms to American policing. Vice News has reported that far-right groups have infiltrated demonstrations, intending to spark racial violence. Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, blamed white supremacists, and said he has seen “evidence of some pretty sophisticated attempts to cause problems”. Police across America have often appeared far more eager to escalate than de-escalate violent confrontations.
When racial unrest spread across American cities in 1967, then-president Lyndon Johnson formed a commission to investigate its causes. “We seek more than the uneasy calm of martial law,” he said, in a nationally televised speech. “We seek peace that is based on one man’s respect for another man...We seek a public order that is built on steady progress in meeting the needs of all of our people.”

America’s current president has made no such address. Although Donald Trump called Mr Floyd’s death “a grave tragedy” and has said that “healing not hatred, justice not chaos, are the mission at hand”, he has also suggested that looters should be shot without trial. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29th, echoing a phrase used by Miami’s white police chief in 1967, who boasted, “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.” He has warned of “vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” being turned against protesters outside the White House, and of unleashing “the unlimited power of our military”.

Coming from Mr Trump—who has pardoned Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL convicted of posing with a corpse, whom fellow officers accused of shooting Iraqi civilians; as well as Joe Arpaio, a police sheriff convicted of contempt of court for failing to stop his department’s racial profiling—this rhetoric is unsurprising. And while one might imagine that a violent summer during a pandemic and a period of mass unemployment might dent a sitting president’s chances of re-election, widespread revulsion at civic unrest helped put Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968. Mr Trump no doubt hopes for the same effect this year.

1) In Minnesota, a black CNN journalist was arrested together with his crew while they were broadcasting live. He has a Spanish surname to boot.
2) As I posted in another thread, I just heard Monty Burns' voice saying ‘release the hounds’ when I first read that.

It's getting surreal.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Broken glass, broken hearts, broken faith with the social structures that once bound us together for better or worse. Blame everywhere, empathy nowhere; we look at each other and imagine villains and foes. There's 100,000 of us freshly in the grave and millions more hunkered down in fear of an invisible enemy we have failed to muster the will to effectively fight. Countless families are worrying about how they'll make rent or put food food on the table and countless more live in perpetual fear of those that were sworn to protect. Half our leaders revel in the chaos for the chance it presents to exploit and divide and the other half have proven unable to stop the madness.

The rest of the world is taking stock of their dead and rallying to provide for one another while we seem to be fixated on a path to cleanse ourselves with fire. I wax cringe poetic because I don't know how else to express this anguish in a way that will connect with people; I feel all of the ideals that this country was founded on have been subverted to service greed. Many of us would like Jesus to take the wheel but it's been greed in the driver seat for decades.

It was greed that justified shackling other human beings, greed that pushed us to exploit our own children in the factories and the mills, greed that gutted the pension funds and saddled generations with unmanageable debt. Greed drew the red lines, greed created the underclass and the other that is feared and loathed in turn. It is probably not a coincidence that the word commonwealth never caught on instead of state, and it certainly isn't a coincidence that we justify our presently collapsing economic system with the phrase 'greed is good'.

It is easy to blame the looters for doing something wrong and easier still to blame the cops for doing something worse, but if we are ever going to find our way out of this morass we must come to terms that our unbridled greed has been unconscionable and the source of endless misery and injustice.

I feel shame and pain and endless anxiety and I sometimes wish for the apocalyptic asteroid to end it all for good because if there is a light at the end of this tunnel it's been blocked by a troll trying to work on his suntan.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I was trying to avoid the use of the word criminal. What word would you suggest

I was trying to figure out what in your mind separates "their" neighborhoods from yours. What identifies "their" drugstores. Why protesters locking arms with "your" police are the good protesters where the rest are bad.

 

[Takhisis]

They're looting food stores in food deserts and wonder why there are so few food stores.

Is looting such a recurrent event that it results in the place being a food desert? Because you make it sound as if you were talking about living on the Hungarian border in the year 920.

 

[rah]

Is looting such a recurrent event that it results in the place being a food desert? Because you make it sound as if you were talking about living on the Hungarian border in the year 920.

Theft and vandalism has drastically impacted profitability and discouraged investment. Those that exist are usually given tax breaks and such to encourage them.

Why protesters locking arms with "your" police are the good protesters where the rest are bad.

the good protesters are the peaceful ones. the bad ones are those using the peaceful ones as cover to perform criminal activities.
Seems pretty clear to me. Most of the city leaders (and local ones) seem to agree.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

the good protesters are the peaceful ones. the bad ones are those using the peaceful ones as cover to perform criminal activities.
Seems pretty clear to me. Most of the city leaders (and local ones) seem to agree.

Do you think the "good" protesters who are locking arms with the police are going to drive reforms in the police departments and wider criminal justice system?

Since you are among the people who are not likely to be impacted by the injustices in that system it is reasonable that you are not personally driven to demand such reforms. Is "being moved" by the sight of these arm locked appeasers likely to incite you to make such demands? Or are you more likely to make such demands when "they" start escaping from their food deserts and start burning neighborhoods like yours?

@Ajidica this line of questioning applies to you too, in some ways. You have been part of the peaceful protests for how long? Is there any indication that they worked?

So how do you appoint yourself as authority on what protesters "should be doing"? Don't you serve better as an example of what they should not?

 

[red_elk]

Russian journalist was pepper sprayed in the face by Minneapolis police.
https://www.rt.com/news/490326-russia-journalist-minneapolis-police/

This is unacceptable. Russia is gravely concerned about human right violations of US regime.

 

[Joij21]

Moderator Action: Given the fact that this is a rather charged subject to tackle, and that tempers are beginning to fray, I am making this an RD thread. Behave accordingly, please

What's an RD thread?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

What's an RD thread?

Never quote mod text, and if you have questions for them send a PM. Even here there are rules.

An RD thread is more stringently moderated. There is less tolerance for sliding off the topic, particularly in a trolling or flaming way.

It's sort of like a road construction zone...the same vehicle code applies, but fines may be doubled.