[phobosanomaly]

I'm sorry that you're offended.

I'm talking about the United States in 2020, not the former Soviet Bloc.

Our threat vector is local police, not the state surveillance apparatus.

Don't know if you happened to catch it on the news, but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.

[randomchars]

> I'm sorry that you're offended.

No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety.

You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?

[phobosanomaly]

Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States.

Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word.

They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa.

The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.

It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States.

Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity.

A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing.

If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America.

I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree.

But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.

[michaelt]

> The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother?

Because a tough, macho president, who is also a rules-breaking maverick, decides he wants every protester who was anywhere near that burned-down police station locked up.

> Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.

You've got a very different impression of them to me, then.

[phobosanomaly]

"Prosecutors declined to pursue many of the cases because they concluded the protesters were exercising their basic civil rights."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre...

'Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation's most senior military officer is calling that excursion "a mistake."'

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

Despite the fact that the GOP will stand behind the president no matter what he does (even attempting a coup it seems), there is a younger generation (even within the GOP) who is a bit more grounded (e.g. Jeff Flake), and in ten years Mitch McConnell will be nothing more than a footnote in history.

If the courts keep throwing out Rudy's embarassingly-constructed cases, that fellow you're referring to is gone in a month, which is a pretty big difference from a puppet regime in the former Soviet Bloc.

Our country has been through a lot, but she has some life in her yet. Bear in mind that the younger generations have a very different political ideology than that of their parents. We are currently witnessing the death-throes of the political dominance of my parent's generation. They will slowly fade away and be replaced with a more forward-thinking and fresh approach to the same tired old problems. Glass half-full.

[Clubber]

Police have been harassing people for decades in the US. To assign it exclusively to Trump ignores this history and it also assumes it will go away in January. We just elected the guy who unapologetically wrote the crime bill and California's "top cop." Based on their resume, It will probably get worse under their leadership.

[officeplant]

>Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people.

Given that policing in the US was founded to protect wealthy merchant types (later evolved into slave beating union busting monsters), they've always been the enemy of the people.

[phobosanomaly]

You're absolutely right. The institution of policing has for several hundred years been a team of enforcers for use by the ruling classes. It has historically been used to maintain social, economic, and racial disenfranchisement.

And there are plenty of cops who should absolutely not have a modicum of the power they now have. But, in 2020, it's important to recognize that 'police' are not a monolithic state entity, and there are plenty of good, kind officers who truly make an effort to 'protect and serve.' Let's get the bad ones the hell out of there, take some of the pressure off of the good ones so they're not acting as community mental health counselors, and maybe work to disarm folks on both sides so they don't have to enter every situation wondering if someone is going to murk them through a tinted window on a traffic stop.

It's a complicated situation that demands empathy and nuance on all sides.

[xyzzyz]

> but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.

Sounds more like you are the threat vector, with the whole burning things down thing and stuff.

[phobosanomaly]

Ah, well, fair enough.

It's 'we' as in 'we' rowdy Americans getting out and exercising the First Amendment, with a minority of protestors committing some property crimes along the way. A common sentiment among those who committed those property crimes was 'no one listened to us before we started burning buildings,' and in this sense I have a sympathy for their claims. I don't believe that the 2020 protests will ultimately be found to have been on the wrong side of history.

My grandfather, as an old old man, still referred to MLK as the 'bane of the south.' In his time, the civil unrest of the Civil Rights movement was an unforgivable disruption to the lives of ordinary white folks, and...well, we all know 50 years later that this was such a trivial complaint in the face of the great progress made in healing a society still dealing with the ripple effects of a most monstrous institution, which our nation firmly embraced without hesitation upon its founding. We are still grappling with the fact that when my father was a boy African Americans had to enter through the 'colored' entrance, and the song 'Strange Fruit' was disturbingly still relevant. Remember Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. That's not that long ago. The wounds are still raw.

The vast majority of protestors were peaceful, and the point of the protests was that law enforcement should no longer be able to commit violence with impunity against those without a voice.

Many, including myself, have expressed sorrow at the damage done to small businesses over the course of the civil actions. But, it's good to see a robust and healthy willingness of the citizenry to turn out in order to oppose just the kind of targeting of the little guy that our friend from the former Soviet Bloc is concerned about.

[throwaways885]

Sorry but the first amendment does not cover burning things down. Talk, hold signs, sure, but not violence.

You and your comrades are dangerous.

People would not have been condemning BLM if it wasn't for the burning.

[phobosanomaly]

It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence:

"Rather, the [Department of Homeland Security] bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-cause...

Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.

Does that invalidate the movement?

How am I in particular dangerous? No need to clutch at pearls comrade. Feel free to be unafraid. No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.

[throwaways885]

I agree with you on your first point, but in a previous comment you openly associated with the people [burning stuff down].

> No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.

The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence.

Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.

[phobosanomaly]

I agree with your sentiment that violence is not the answer.

I personally harbor no ill-will towards you, and I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.

[HexagonalKitten]

> It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence:

Yeah, all of Antifa and a lot of BLM. And yes, a lot of unaffiliated looters.

> www.washingtonpost.com - who-cause-the-violence (it wasn't antifa)

The WaPo article you mention clearly has TDS, and it supported Biden who said Antifa didn't exist. It probably won't be that accurate in this regard. I'd suggest looking for streams from people at the protests.

Videos of Antifa violence are everywhere, and there are comparatively few (and minor) videos of right-wingers. Considering how social media is left-dominated, it doesn't seem to be censorship related, leaving you to just conclude that Antifa was much more violent.

And from reports from friends who were at various rallies, the level of potential violence was incredibly lop-sided. The worst Proud Boys protest in Portland had the PBs shooting people with paintballs if they tried to block or attack vehicles. The worst Antifa violence was straight-up unprovoked murder. Second-worst was throwing molotovs at counter-protestors and cops. Or maybe trying to burn down residential high-rises with people in them. And with 190+ night of it, there were a lot of runners-up.

> Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.

There were a few days where the majority seemed to be sincere, but once the big crowds left it was just anti-society vandals. All the statue-removal fights, for instance, were entirely warriors and no poets. Portland doesn't seem to have ever had a single sincere protest, and there are now articles about actual black BLM members telling Portland Antifa off for ruining their credibility.

> Does that invalidate the movement?

No, not at all. But you can't reasonably claim huge turnouts of mostly peaceful people because there were months of violence. The majority, by far, was unreasonable and violent. People were killing in the first day of looting in Minneapolis. The days of protest in Kenosha were violent from hour one.

But what does invalidate BLM is that the organization has known scammers for leaders, supports nonsense such as marxism and ending the nuclear family, etc. It supports black disempowerment through rhetoric that calls hard work and good fathering 'White'. It actively supports looters, both in words and money, even when they burn down black areas. It decries all personal responsibility. (Read many of the black voices who say this.)

When protestors/rioters in Minneapolis burned the first police station it was a good target. Nobody lived there, or did business from there. Nobody's life was destroyed and the cops had to work out of an ugly warehouse for a while which is a stinging rebuke in a way a few days off with pay isn't. Good target selection, good effect. And most people recognized it and they didn't get a lot of flack for that burning.

Later that night blocks of the city burned, where people lived and did business. Many lives were destroyed and some lost that night. And BLM came out strongly in support of the violence, most of which was against black people.

> I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.

Sure, but you wouldn't wish BLM on your worst enemy. They aren't actually focused on anything that will help, they just push the lies about Breonna, Floyd, Blake, and others.