The Riots of 2020

Posted by: tungsten

Posted by: chupacabra

Posted by: tungsten

How much do you want a bet that the liquor store in that picture is not owned by a billionaire plutocrat, but by a regular family that is already struggling due to COVID?  People usually understand this after their teen years.  

I will admit that riots grab the attention of the politicians and the public, but it is the peaceful protests that followed that are moving the needle now.  

Actually I spent my early childhood living just up the hill in a modest rambler a few miles from the fire in that pic and just below us on River Rd. lived the Bouchards. I played with RoyLee as a child. His father owned Skool Liqours, again, not far from the location of that fire. He and his wife sported brand new Cadillacs every other year. They were very wealthy. Who did they sell to? Mostly Natives and blacks. I'm sure they had insurance. As did Minnehaha Lake Spirits and Liquors who've probably made fortune off of sales to the very peeps who burned down their store. Boo fucking hoo.

The owning class laughs at peaceful protest. They think you're chumps. There's only been some movement because the "people" are restive. You're a fool to think otherwise.

When you put it that way the owners were probably thrilled their business burned to the ground. /s  This whole time I thought it was the billionaires pulling the strings that were the problem, but now it's any business owner that can afford nice cars.  The owning class?  You are inventing groups of people to make you feel better about cheering the fires.  If they are laughing at the protests and cashing in insurance riches then it is OK to cheer for the looters.

Whatever man.  You have an odd way of looking at the world.

Posted by: aShogunNamedMarcus

Posted by: chupacabra

What I hope comes from all of this is a real honest conversation on both sides.  It is obvious that large parts of society have been dismissive on the plight of black people and that is being faced by a lot more people today than last year, but this has to get past identity too.  American cops kill 10 times that of other developed nations and half of those people are white.  This is not just a problem of race, it is a problem of class, guns, wealth inequality, education, opportunity, culture, and the war on drugs.  This is not going to end with sensitivity training or firing all the white cops.

Can we start by not blaming the cops 100% of the time? In other words, the cops arent doing drive bys. They do respond to calls. Something happens in the middle to end. Some places may soon find out what happens when there is zero policing.

This a strawman argument if I ever saw one.  Cops are terrible at policing themselves at that has been demonstrated over and over, but they don't get blamed 100% of the time.  They rarely get blamed.  They get blamed when it is obvious that they killed someone that didn't deserve it.  If there wasn't a video of George Floyd's death would the cops have been blamed?  If they punished the bad cops as they should on a consistent basis it wouldn't be an issue, but time and time again they get paid leave and never see a day of jail time.  Interactions with police that lead to someone's death have gone up significantly over the years even though violent crime keeps decreasing.  When Chauvin left the courtroom a mob of his fellow cops cheered for him.  They have brought this on themselves.

You are missing my point.  The cops need to change their ways, but obviously they still need to deal with criminals and that will lead to some death on occasion, but they can't keep making excuses for themselves.  There is not going to be "copless" parts of America by defunding.  By shifting the resources from the police to communities you will see fewer drivebys.  I have heard a lot of great ways to do this.  Start by relieving them of traffic duties and ending the war on drugs.

Maybe if the cops stopped closing ranks and flat out lying about police incidents they'd have some credibility... like the 75 year old man that was shoved, and fractured his skull as a result. Buffalo police statement on that when they didn't realize there was footage was:

"During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell."

Also - this thread title is ignorant.

Posted by: Couch_Surfer

Maybe if the cops stopped closing ranks and flat out lying about police incidents they'd have some credibility... like the 75 year old man that was shoved, and fractured his skull as a result. Buffalo police statement on that when they didn't realize there was footage was:

"During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell."

Also - this thread title is ignorant.

^^^^, especially since the rioting has died off.

Posted by: chupacabra

Whatever man. You have an odd way of looking at the world.

At least my eyes are open. 

Disenfranchise people from obtaining access to wealth, health and the levers of power but ensure access to liquor and drugs.

Long a traditional owning class formula in amerika.

The rhetorical form at work is to claim that ‘passive’ violence is the result of natural processes (e.g. urban decay), while the active violence that is its product is caused by malevolent actors (e.g. ‘super-predators’). This distinction between active and passive destruction— in the current case between political rebellion and an economic system that has left vast swaths of the U.S. in ruins, has analog in ye olde war films. By locating the physical destruction of businesses and neighborhoods in local struggles between ‘crime’ and the police, its true sources are kept hidden and the economic beneficiaries of social carnage are kept in power.

Poor neighborhoods are plantations where rents are harvested, and poverty wages paid.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/the-necessity-of-rebellion/print/

Posted by: tungsten

At least my eyes are open.

Too bad they’re hemmed in by a narrow set of blinders.

Does personal responsibility figure anywhere in this diatribe of yours?

Posted by: syncro

Posted by: tungsten

At least my eyes are open. 

Too bad they’re hemmed I’m by a narrow set of blinders. 

Does personal responsibility figure anywhere in this diatribe of yours?

Yeah, for the owning classes, but their wealth precludes morality.

Posted by: tungsten

Posted by: chupacabra

Whatever man. You have an odd way of looking at the world.

At least my eyes are open.

Disenfranchise people from obtaining access to wealth, health and the levers of power but ensure access to liquor and drugs.

Long a traditional owning class formula in amerika.

The rhetorical form at work is to claim that ‘passive’ violence is the result of natural processes (e.g. urban decay), while the active violence that is its product is caused by malevolent actors (e.g. ‘super-predators’). This distinction between active and passive destruction— in the current case between political rebellion and an economic system that has left vast swaths of the U.S. in ruins, has analog in ye olde war films. By locating the physical destruction of businesses and neighborhoods in local struggles between ‘crime’ and the police, its true sources are kept hidden and the economic beneficiaries of social carnage are kept in power.

Poor neighborhoods are plantations where rents are harvested, and poverty wages paid.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/the-necessity-of-rebellion/print/

So fuck the Bouchards for accessing wealth by owning a liquor store? Should we make poor neighborhoods dry to keep the poors can focus on being less poor? Liquor stores are not the only burning businesses, just the one in the picture you just happened to use. Here is a list of damaged businesses. Very few of them are liquor stores.

https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-st-paul-buildings-are-damaged-looted-after-george-floyd-protests-riots/569930671/

I was raised by my mom on a shoestring budget. No vacations. Hand me down clothes. Second hand Christmas presents. If you wanted to make cash where I grew up, you grew weed. I don't need you or Counterpunch to mansplain what the struggle looks like.

Posted by: tungsten

Yeah, for the owning classes, but their wealth precludes morality.

What about the “working class”?

Posted by: chupacabra

Posted by: tungstenI was raised by my mom on a shoestring budget. No vacations. Hand me down clothes. Second hand Christmas presents. If you wanted to make cash where I grew up, you grew weed. I don't need you or Counterpunch to mansplain what the struggle looks like.

Omg are you black did the pigs shake you down ever time you left the house you live Canada fucker you have healthcare ffs you couldn't possibly compare your experience with theirs. lol...the nerve!

So fuck the Bouchards

Yeah fuck the Buchards RoyLee was an entitled little shit who let my pet hamster escape.

Anyways, his mom wore too much make up and jewelry. Overcompensating I guess.

Like white guys from Canada equating their upbringing to that of blacks living in an amerikkan ghetto.

Posted by: syncro

Posted by: tungsten

Yeah, for the owning classes, but their wealth precludes morality.

What about the “working class”?

One. More. Time. It's the responsibility of the working classes to light shit on fire until the owning classes yield.

You do know that the only reason we have a 40hr work week, labour unions and other things you take for granted is because men and women fought pitched battles in the streets with police and burned shit down. Right?

There is only one way to defeat these forces of occupation and the ruling elites they protect. It is not through voting. It will come from the streets, where tens of thousands of courageous men and women, facing arrest, indiscriminate police violence, economic despair and the threat of Covid-19, are fighting for not only an end to racism, but for freedom.

https://scheerpost.com/2020/06/02/the-treason-of-the-ruling-class/

tungsten makes Trump sound sane and logical.

I'll do insane and illogical to trumps sane and logical any day.

I may have already posted this but it so good you should read it again...

The U.S. has witnessed repeated waves of race-based riots over the last two centuries. The first “great riot” of the modern era was the Draft Riot of 1863 that took place in New York. Lasting four days, July 13-16, it was a violent white reaction to the imposition of the Civil War draft – and was anti-black, anti-rich, anti-Republican. White rioters, mostly working-class Irish immigants, attacked draft headquaters, home of the wealthy and burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum. African Americans were violently attacked, some shot, some hung and some thrown in the river to drown. An estimated 120 people were killed and 2,000 injured; 11 black men were lynched. Union troops who had fought in the Battle of Gettysburg were called in to quell the riot.

Riots during the 20th century cluster in two phases — during the first half and during the second half of the century. The riots of the first half of the 20th century follow the pattern of the Draft Riot in which whites (including many policemen) attacked African Americans. These riots peaked between 1917 to 1921, reflecting the social dislocation precipitated by industrialization, the Great Migration and World War I. The second wave started with the Harlem Riot of 1935 and persists to today; these riots peaked between 1964 and 1968. These riots are often labeled “urban rebellions” and involve mostly African Americans (and also Hispanics) venting their rage against racist conditions (e.g., ecomomic discrimination, mounting urban dislocation, police brutality). In addiition, there were numerous other riots that mark out the century........

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/riots-an-all-american-tradition/print/

Posted by: tungsten

One. More. Time. It's the responsibility of the working classes to light shit on fire until the owning classes yield.

You do know that the only reason we have a 40hr work week, labour unions and other things you take for granted is because men and women fought pitched battles in the streets with police and burned shit down. Right?

There is only one way to defeat these forces of occupation and the ruling elites they protect. It is not through voting. It will come from the streets, where tens of thousands of courageous men and women, facing arrest, indiscriminate police violence, economic despair and the threat of Covid-19, are fighting for not only an end to racism, but for freedom.

https://scheerpost.com/2020/06/02/the-treason-of-the-ruling-class/

Or you know, people could choose a different path that starts with educating themselves about things like political systems, voting, etc and go from there. But then the question is why don't more people do that, especially in the information age that has existed for say the past 20 years? Well, probably the single biggest factor that determines an individual's success in life is their family background. Even more than IQ. This is why the poverty trap exists. We are our parents. Sure people can rise up out of poverty, but typically those people would have had parents with strong work ethics. Ask chup about his family life and he will probably tell you that his mom busted her ass to get shit done and because of that he is now an individual who does the same thing. So I find the idea nowadays that people must light shit on fie to make change is mostly BS. Sure it can be effective to draw attention to an issue, particularly one that has been dismissed for decades in the case of systemic racism against POC, but the working class have the tools they need these days to initiate change without lighting shit on fire.

This whole vid linked is worth a watch, but the bit related to my post start at 6:00. I'll drop a warning that some people don't like Sowell as he puts less weight on race as the reason why Black Americans are held back and more that they are victims of their own attitudes and beliefs. Sowell is a conservative, so of course that figures into his thinking. FWIW I disagree with the part where the interviewer dismisses victimization as that can be part of the family experience. That said, and as Sowell often alludes to, the idea of personal responsibility has to figure into the equation somewhere. People eventually figure out on their own that HFW is required to get ahead and you're either willing and capable of doing it or not. Sure we are products of our conditioning, but eventually we get to determine our own conditioning if we want to, even if you got a shit start in life. One thing is sure though, ideological rantings on a small mtb site aren't going to make a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7hmTRT8tb4