Blowback
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There are a lot of people who have been affected by the so-called "protests" in the last few days.
I can't help but thing there's going to be a lot of backlash about this.
As I posted in another thread, there's been a lot of violence in my area. Stores have been looted, people have been injured.
In what world are these "protests" productive? This is like a toddler having a temper tantrum because he didn't get what he wants.
I'm not disputing the frustration, I'm wondering what all of this is going to accomplish. If anything, it will make things worse, not better.
@George-K You are thinking what I was thinking. People who are on the sidelines and see the rioters burning stuff and breaking stuff - that in no way makes me want to go to their side an support them.
I just don't get it.
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The rioting mob managed to assassinate at least one police officer last night in Oakland. I'm sure there are others. It is being called a targeted shooting because the man was in uniform.
I saw a post about it on NextDoor. It was labeled "Trigger Warning - RIP <name of officer>". The "Trigger warning" verbiage was not ironic. In the post, the poster made it clear that the thread was not to be about anybody's opinions about the protest. Just a memorial to the officer.
So we're at a point where we can't openly express disgust at mob assassinations of police officers, because there's always two sides to every story.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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I'm not disputing the frustration, I'm wondering what all of this is going to accomplish. If anything, it will make things worse, not better.
Kevin Williamson on Rioting, again
That was well worth the read.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
I'm not disputing the frustration, I'm wondering what all of this is going to accomplish. If anything, it will make things worse, not better.
Kevin Williamson on Rioting, again
That was well worth the read.
I talked with my kids (3 of them are pretty "woke") about this, and said that I remember 67, 68 and others. WHat's happening now is not of the scale we saw then, with entire neighborhoods burning, etc.
I also pointed out that these riots accomplished precious little (as you mentioned regarding Watts).
What, specifically is the goal here. I don't get it, and I didn't then. Nothing changed in the late 60's, I told them, and it won't now.
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TG and Aqua's comments sort of preface my thinking here. The riots -- and the pissed-off protests that are maybe on the cusp of turning into riots -- are all about stupid. It is likely that if you asked any of those people what they are hoping to accomplish, they wouldn't have much of an answer. Just some silly crap about "getting what's mine". That's if they didn't just scream in your face because they're in some kind of blind funtime stupid zone.
Stupid doesn't need a reason. Certainly not a thought-out one.
The honestly outraged, that is. Not talking about the manipulators.
The acid test: if for some reason any of you reading these threads took it into your head to join in with the looting and destruction, wouldn't you feel a little stupid? Bashing the Target TV set with a hammer? Wouldn't you find yourself hoping your coworkers don't see you doing this crazy shit? IOW, wouldn't the senselessness of what you were doing be a turnoff? Be embarrassing as hell? Yeah.
If there is no common ground, there can be no accommodation, no solution. Each time the lemmings run amok, we'll be faced with the same frustration, the same unreachable minds, the same brick wall. We've seen that.
Like Aqua said, these are not committee meetings. They are wild and furious and directionless and goal-less, until they burn out.
I don't know what to do, either.
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We have given a megaphone to a bunch of spoiled children who need their asses kicked. You cant reason with a spoiled child. This crowd will have to be dealt with the same way a spoiled child throwing a tantrum should be dealt with. "Sit down and shut up, or I'm going to bust your ass".
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Yes there are plenty of good parallels between how the progressives want to treat a society and how an overly permissive parent wants to treat their child. Neither work well, and for the same reasons. Which makes sense when you realize that the ideas in our heads that shape our behaviors and identities come primarily from two places, our parents and the broader culture we're born into.
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Like Aqua said, these are not committee meetings. They are wild and furious and directionless and goal-less, until they burn out.
I don't know what to do, either.
I should mention that the vast majority of these gatherings are peaceful. Vast. If you like police officers and don't have any experience protesting, or ever wanted to protest, or had anything you felt you had to protest, it's not fun to consider that. And that proportion of peaceful protesting to rioting doesn't fix any windows or bring any businesses back. But it's important to consider if you're more interested in understanding what's going on than condemning people you don't identify with.
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It doesn't matter much to me that the vast majority of demonstrations are peaceful when 100% of the people who took to the streets are too brainwashed by pop culture to accept that sometimes a bad white cop will do something terrible to a person with black skin, and it doesn't mean there's a hugely important systemic problem we need to fix to prevent it from ever happening again.
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@Aqua-Letifer said in Blowback:
Like Aqua said, these are not committee meetings. They are wild and furious and directionless and goal-less, until they burn out.
I don't know what to do, either.
I should mention that the vast majority of these gatherings are peaceful. Vast. If you like police officers and don't have any experience protesting, or ever wanted to protest, or had anything you felt you had to protest, it's not fun to consider that. And that proportion of peaceful protesting to rioting doesn't fix any windows or bring any businesses back. But it's important to consider if you're more interested in understanding what's going on than condemning people you don't identify with.
Yep. I propose giving only one out of every 500 protesters a loaded AR-15, with carts blanche to use it. The vast majority of protesters will be peaceful, but that dude shooting people and property is gonna really liven things up!
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Trying to make excuses for this bunch of spoiled brats by saying the "vast majority are peaceful" is about silly. It like a kid that burns your house down but you don't hold him accountable because the vast majority of the time he's a sweet kid.
When I see them protesting over the 77 year old retired black cop who was shot to death by some of these "peaceful" people I might listen. When I see Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson at his funeral talking about how the black community needs to step up to the plate I might listen.
But as long as I see these "peaceful protesters" showing up day after day to march down the street venting their spleens while violent things are using them for cover, and while they are telling white people they need to apologize, the only fucking point being to promote some socialist utopian wish list fantasy, every mother's son of them can kiss my ass, and I will continue to address them like the silly, childish shit headed fools that they are.
Let one of the little bastard tell me to apologize and I'll show them how quick they can bleed.
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The actual purpose of the mass demonstrations (or riots, or uprisings, or whatever you wish to call them) seemed to be simply the performance of rage; they didn’t need to have a point because they were good in themselves. As Democratic voters rose up against Democratic systems in Democratic cities, many Democrats seemed less than wholly opposed to what was happening. The Democratic attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, spoke for many when she said, “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.” Public rage was recast as cleansing, refreshing, even nurturing. Yet a gas station doesn’t grow back as easily as a tree. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle noted on Twitter that when she moved to Washington, D.C., in 2007, “the major retail corridors on 14th Street & H Street were just beginning to recover” from the effects of the 1968 riots...
Since cities and states are dealing with the fiscal disaster of the lockdown and will presumably have to reduce funding for most everything, “reduce funding for the police” would at least seem to be an achievable goal. New York City, for instance, was as of mid-May already facing an estimated $9.5 billion budget gap over the next two years, according to an independent budget office, and will have to cut spending in many areas. But the protesters are adamant that reduced funding for the police should be accompanied by increased funding for social programs.
This is a strange request to make when you are defending a movement that is cleaning out Target and Apple and Macy’s, putting more people out of work and causing unknown damage to the urban revenue base — property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes. “We demand more government spending as we destroy the government’s sources of tax revenue” is not a particularly cogent argument. So we’re back to where we started: What was the point?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Charges were elevated against Derek Chauvin, and three of his fellow officers—those who were onlooking—were arrested and charged. Let's just start with that. The claim that they've done nothing is already horseshit.
But also, Breonna Taylor's case was reopened. Minneapolis has banned the use of chokeholds. Dallas promulgated a new "duty to intervene" rule that now requires officers to stop their own who are engaging in inappropriate use of force. New Jersey’s attorney general reported that for the first time in 20 years, the state will update its use-of-force guidelines. And here in Maryland, the state created a bipartisan police reform work group to make recommendations to the state regarding proper policing.
