Trump Thread

[Tuuvi]

I'm only going to offer a reply to the highlighted portion of THAT nonsense:

You just don't get it, do you? You have absolutely no clue as to why the protests are happening. And your very terminology of 'riots' tells me which side of the barricades you are.....

I don't agree with Greyblades' viewpoint, but he is right that the Democrats share some blame for the riots, because if the Democrats would've listened to BLM and done something to reign in the police sooner George Floyd's murder could have been prevented and the riots wouldn't have happened. The Democrats in Democrat controlled cities have failed to address racist policing and police brutality.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The Democrats in Democrat controlled cities have failed to address racist policing and police brutality.

It goes well beyond politics. Republicans and Democrats alike have failed.....for decades and longer. It's a systemic failing of the American people. We use the cry of freedom as our calling card, yet we continually brutalize anyone who stands in the way of our perceived progress. Just ask the American Indian about our governmental policies. We've never honored a single treaty with Native Americans, and US colleges even today continue to receive huge endowment bonuses from land that we stole from them (see my earlier post on that topic).

Americans, as a group, are spoiled by the riches we've raped from our lands, and we've continually exploited those perceived as 'not American'----blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, etc. Even our own women do not escape exploitation.

It's not something that our political system, as it exists today, is capable of solving, IMHO. Certainly not solvable during one term of a presidency. It will only begin to be solved when the American people decide to alter their way of thinking, and the way that they live. Unfortunately, I don't have much faith in that happening

[Montmorency]

Good essay by Ezra Klein.
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/212799...s-george-floyd

Officers of the state conduct a public lynching. Cities erupt in protest, then in riots. And then the state demands of its critics what it refuses to ask of itself — nonviolence. This serves a dual purpose: It sets a bar for legitimate protest that few human beings can clear. And it discredits the revolutionary teachings of nonviolence by coating them in hypocrisy and cynicism.

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls that the school year “could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.” But the stories rang hollow, because the teachings were hollow. “How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned?” he asks.

Lodged within that question is the seed of a better world. What if our society did not scorn those values? What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?

Nonviolence is a strange word: It describes itself as the absence of its opposite. It thus presents as a void where violence should be, a narcotized forgiveness that is fine for saints to practice but irresponsible for policymakers to attempt. It is too easy to imagine disorder, crime, and anarchy stepping into that void. That is what we are taught to imagine.

“Nonviolence is very often associated with passivity and failing to respond in an effective way to aggression or violence,” says Judith Butler, the Berkeley social theorist and author of The Force of Nonviolence. “It’s understood in the popular imagination to be a place of internal equanimity or harmony.”

But that is not what nonviolence is, nor what its theorists and practitioners teach. Gandhi was startlingly clear on this, in passages that defy our flattened excerpts of his teachings. He loathed passivity and thought violence preferable. “If an individual or group of people are unable or unwilling to follow” nonviolence, he wrote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence worse than violence.”

In the face of injustice, the absence of violence is not preferable to violence. It is only nonviolence that is preferable to violence. And it is only preferable because it is likelier to work. But like anything worth doing, it is hard — arguably much harder than violence.

“For King, the fundamental question of politics is how you go on in community with each other,” says Harvard’s Terry. “Destroying your enemy makes it impossible to go on in community together. But so does fear. You need forms of politics that allow you to avoid the emotions that make it impossible to go on together.”

The state puts tremendous resources and effort into developing the technologies of violence and training its agents in their use. It puts tremendous resources — both legal and political — into reducing the risk of violence to its own agents, even as it increases the risk of violence to those they meet. The tragic shooting of Rayshard Brooks is testament to the costs of this strategy: If the agents of the state who’d been called to respond to a man sleeping in a Wendy’s drive-through hadn’t been carrying tasers and guns, Brooks would be alive today.

The question nonviolence asks is what if the state put, at the least, equal energy and effort into developing tools of nonviolence and training agents in their use? What if it was more willing to absorb harm to itself than to inflict harm on others, precisely because that strategy would lead to more security, safety, and harmony for all? And what if it replaced its emphasis on punishment and reprisal with a courageous pursuit of forgiveness and change?

This question does not need to start with the hardest cases — say, when the police are called to intervene in a live shootout. The vast majority of police calls are to nonviolent incidents. What if the agents who responded to those calls were, themselves, trained in the tools of nonviolence: mediators, crisis counselors, accident report writers, or even police without guns, batons, or tear gas? We have successful pilots, like the Cahoots program in Eugene, Oregon, and other cities are beginning to follow suit. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, for instance, has announced a police reform road map in which police will no longer respond to non-criminal complaints.

And even in the cases where violence is ongoing, there may be space for nonviolent approaches. What if cities convened respected elders in the community who were prepared to answers calls for intervention — is it possible that deploying a beloved local priest, or teacher, might calm a violent situation that badges, guns, and shouted demands for compliance would escalate?

King understood this as both a form of violence unto itself and a spur to violence for those who are crushed beneath it. And he was right. We know, for instance, that Medicaid expansion leads to significant reductions in crime. We know that SNAP benefits reduce crime. We know that education reduces crime. There is evidence that restricting welfare benefits increased crime. A more compassionate state will create a less violent society. There is a reason King saw the struggle for racial equity as intimately intertwined with the struggle for economic equity. A state that sought to help its citizens flourish, to forgive and uplift them when they faltered, would build structures of economic support that were kindest to those who needed the most help, rather than treating them with suspicion, anger, and contempt, and looking for reasons to abandon them to hopelessness.

I will not pretend, in this piece, to be able to fully imagine the workings of a state that truly seeks to follow the ethos of nonviolence wherever it can. A state that practices forgiveness, that seeks change, that pursues the harmony of community rather than the false peace of incarceration. It is easy, of course, to imagine the difficulties and dangers of that path. But let us not sugarcoat the harms of the path we have chosen instead: We are a violent society surrounded by a violent state, a country that locks up more of its own than any country on earth, in which agents of the government slowly choke citizens to death while bystanders beg them to stop, leading to riots that the state then uses as an excuse to deploy yet more violence in the name of order. It is time to ask a different question, find different answers, pursue better goals.

I don't agree with Greyblades' viewpoint, but he is right that the Democrats share some blame for the riots, because if the Democrats would've listened to BLM and done something to reign in the police sooner George Floyd's murder could have been prevented and the riots wouldn't have happened. The Democrats in Democrat controlled cities have failed to address racist policing and police brutality.

Samurai is right, when you say "Democrats" have failed to reign in police you are somewhat misattributing agency. The more precise framing is that urban voters have refused to elect politicians who would confront police, in a context where doing so would tend to be punished by those same voters. If white people and people of color, or the urban electorates more broadly, have overlapping anxieties about law and order that mitigate against electing radicals, you can't really blame elected officials for not being radicals - or at least you shouldn't prioritize that blame.

(You can definitely blame Bill de Blasio though, who was elected almost especially on a police reform plank and has proceeded to act as a doormat for the rest of his mayoralty after the first time the NYPD put up a show of force. )

Meanwhile, Democrats are the only ones in power who will do anything at all to reform police as opposed to let them run wild. the Obama administration enforced over a dozen consent decrees against municipal PDs, a function Trump has effectively abolished.

Our beef is with the American people in the end. One of the most damaging precepts among much of the left is the notion that the electorate is secretly much further left of the politicians it habitually elects. Exceedingly few actually want to участки и тюрьмы сравнять с землёй (level precincts and prisons to the ground), but at the moment there may be scope to persuade swathes of the public across cities and states to support the pacification of the police power in the broad sense. There is some evidence that most communities, including black ones, want more government agents in their neighborhoods, probably because they implicitly value the legitimacy and problem-solving capacity of the state (if not necessarily as presently configured in their particular experience). The case for changing what we offer them in the first place is perhaps the space for generating consensus.

[edyzmedieval]

I've watched the whole show of force from all sides in the past month with a mixture of hope, cynicism and a good dose of reality that things will budge just a bit and won't move forwards that much.

Some of the results are definitely positive - removing statues of Leopold IInd (why is this still around????) - some results which were very questionable (defacing Churchill...uhh?), some results which were ideas with a certain intent but with a horrendously bad implementation (defunding the police).

Fact of the matter is, protesting is part of a healthy democracy and having them so lit up in the past month shows that people desperately want things to change. For good reason, mind you, but any single deviation from that mark (looting) is going to significantly hurt the desire for change for the general population. Because it often occurs that while Joe who owns a small business and heartily supports BLM is forced to shutdown because his store was defaced and looted, this is only going to bite you back.

Which is a shame because the concern of the protests is very, very valid.

[CrossLOPER]

some results which were very questionable (defacing Churchill...uhh?), some results which were ideas with a certain intent but with a horrendously bad implementation (defunding the police).

Churchill had a fetishistic love of maintaining colonies, which is inherently racist. "Defunding" the police is more of a rallying cry to solve the issue of why a massive chunk of a city's budget goes into creating a poorly trained, heavily armed police force.

[Gilrandir]

Churchill had a fetishistic love of maintaining colonies, which is inherently racist. "Defunding" the police is more of a rallying cry to solve the issue of why a massive chunk of a city's budget goes into creating a poorly trained, heavily armed police force.

AFAIK, all Founding Fathers were slave owners. Let's burn all the money that have their portraits.

[rory_20_uk]

Is there anything that has been created by any culture that would be acceptable to the current culture? I can't think of anything - even things that were viewed as OK a decade or so ago now are viewed as an issue.

I can't think of anything. Is there anything?

[Gilrandir]

Is there anything that has been created by any culture that would be acceptable to the current culture? I can't think of anything - even things that were viewed as OK a decade or so ago now are viewed as an issue.

I can't think of anything. Is there anything?

Tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality by Greeks and extensive tattooing of the body by Maoris.

[Montmorency]

Recent Wall Street Journal Trump interview.

Mr. Bender: There may be people who are critical of you no matter what. But why didn’t you pray? Why didn’t you read something from scripture? Why didn’t you bring someone from the black community? Or a parishioner?

Mr. Trump: Well, I was standing outside on a sidewalk. It was very, very noisy, as you can imagine. The protesters, who, the day before tried to burn down the church…You know, everyone was saying, Oh, they were so wonderful. They weren’t wonderful. They tried to burn down the church. And it was, they told me, the same group. A similar group. So you have people screaming all over the place. And I didn’t think it was exactly the right time to pray. I’m on the sidewalk. And the church itself, I didn’t want to go in because they had a lot of insurance reasons. You know, the church was boarded up. The entire church was boarded up, and I knew that. So I went there, stood there, held up the Bible, talked to a few people and then we left. I came back and I got bad publicity.

But I also, if you think about it, I went to West Point over the weekend, made a very good speech, according to everybody. They said the speech was one of the best. The kids thought it was one of the best they’d ever heard. Stood up there for a long time saluting. Were you there?

Mr. Bender: No, but I watched. It looked like a really nice day.

Mr. Trump: Yeah. After the helicopters came over, the hats went up, the general said, Sir, Are you ready? I said, I’m ready. And he led me to a ramp that was long and steep and slippery. And I said, I got a problem because I wear, you know, the leather bottom shoes. I can show them to you if you like. Same pair. And you know what I mea, they’re slippery. I like them better than the rubber because they don’t catch. So they’re better for this. But they’re not good for ramps. I said, General, I got a problem here. That ramp is slippery.…

So I’m going to go real easy. So I did. And then the last 10 feet I ran down. They always stop it just before I ran, they always stop it. So, I spent three hours between speeches and saluting people and they end up, all they talked about is ramp. … If you would have seen this ramp, it was like an ice skating rink. So I’m the only one that can happen. But the church is an interesting thing. I mean, here I spent three hours on stage, the sun pouring in and I saluted 1,106 cadets, and that’s not easy. Even the general said, That’s amazing. Other presidents would never have been able to do it. Because usually they do the first 10. They do 10 honor rolls, and then they go home. I stayed there for hours. And what do I do? I get publicity about walking down a ramp. And does he have Parkinson’s? I don’t think so.

What it is to experience a man as a spiritual phenomenon.

AFAIK, all Founding Fathers were slave owners. Let's burn all the money that have their portraits.

Maybe someday. Though we were set to exchange Andrew Jackson Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill until Trump delayed the implementation indefinitely.

Is there anything that has been created by any culture that would be acceptable to the current culture? I can't think of anything - even things that were viewed as OK a decade or so ago now are viewed as an issue.

I can't think of anything. Is there anything?

Leaving aside that there are champions of liberty in every era, do you really think that anyone with a demerit is the same as everyone else? These things can and must be decided on a case-by-case basis. The odious come before the merely problematic in the weighing of honor and disgrace.

Now, if you really wanted to get into it, you could instantiate the debate on memorialization, e.g. should we memorialize political figures at all vs. should we memorialize significant figures who have a mixed record.

And herein lies the problem - heavily militarised police have nothing in common with democracy, why do I need my local riot police to wear automatic rifles?

But defunding the police completely, how do you solve it? Who do you replace them with?

There are naturally a few steps down from dissolving all offices of the policing, investigative, and security functions. I'm glad for the abolitionist voices, they help the rest move the ball forward.


More relevant to Trump news, the White House just fired Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the court of the Southern District of New York, also known as the "Sovereign District." SDNY has been the been the federal jurisdiction most heavily involved in investigating Trump and many of his associates, as well as Turkish and Russian chicanery (that Trump promised to end*), securing multiple convictions. This follows the many other firings this year of civil servants who have investigated or testified against Trump.

*Man, Trump sure loves canoodling with dictators, such as in the other recent revelation that in a meeting with Xi Jinping he approved of his War-on-Terror-modeled Uighur black sites, in addition to asking for electoral favors in the form of Chinese state subsidies to American farmers.