Former British Colony in Downward Spiral of Ethnic Violence, State Security Impunity

[ReluctantSamurai]

Which, in view of his criminal past he didn't deserve.

Your opinion...noted....time to move on, I think.

Everybody was proclaimed equal irrespective of their sex, age, race, and so on.

I think the Polish killed and buried at Katyn might have an issue with that. Even after refusing to classify the killings as a war crime in the early 1990's, the Soviet answer to the whole issue was to blame it on Stalin. How Communist of them

But methinks we are getting waaay off-topic here

[Gilrandir]

I think the Polish killed and buried at Katyn might have an issue with that. Even after refusing to classify the killings as a war crime in the early 1990's, the Soviet answer to the whole issue was to blame it on Stalin. How Communist of them

The massacre had nothing to do with inequality issues - just exterminating the useless/dangerous people. And in this respect all were equal - people with certain political views could be disposed of, irrespective of their race, nationality, sex and so on.

But you forget about the difference between officially proclaimed doctrine and the actual practice. The latter included anti-semitism, the policy of eradicating national sentiment, melting all nationalities of the USSR into one ubernational entity - the Soviet people, criminal persecition of homosexuals and a lot of other things that were at odds with the officially sanctioned ideology of equality.

But methinks we are getting waaay off-topic here

I agree. Just look and the thread title.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The massacre had nothing to do with inequality issues - just exterminating the useless/dangerous people. And in this respect all were equal - people with certain political views could be disposed of, irrespective of their race, nationality, sex and so on.

But you forget about the difference between officially proclaimed doctrine and the actual practice. The latter included anti-semitism, the policy of eradicating national sentiment, melting all nationalities of the USSR into one ubernational entity - the Soviet people, criminal persecition of homosexuals and a lot of other things that were at odds with the officially sanctioned ideology of equality.



I agree. Just look and the thread title.

I have always thought that the Stalinist Soviet state was fairly "ecumenical" in its treatment of others. ANYBODY who could be vaguely considered as being a threat somehow, someway, in the not-too-distant future was ripe for exploitation and/or extermination.

This did not make the Stalinist state any LESS despicably evil than the Nazi state.

[Idaho]

I would greatly be obliged if you cited anything of my posts that enable you to make such a conclusion.

I don't think you would be obliged
I think you would argue the toss. I don't think you are able to see the problem.

[Gilrandir]

I don't think you would be obliged
I think you would argue the toss. I don't think you are able to see the problem.

And you would prefer people to take your words lying down?

I see. Well, I've been through it with Brenus. He threw accusations at me and when I gave my arguments he resorted to the unbeatable you-just-don't-understand tactics.

A humorist called Mikhail Zhvanetsky said once: "The best behavior in a dispute is to take a closer look at your opponent and then demolish his arguments by focusing on his deficiencies, like that: How can a bald person with such a nose offer his opinion on the performance of Herbert von Karajan? Let him first grow some hair, correct his nose and then have his say!"

You do the same. Branding somebody as racist/nazi/obcurantist/... is a perfect move after which one doesn't have to offer any proofs of such a conclusion and may cease arguing since it is useless to try to prove something to a racist/nazi/obcurantist/... An impeccable move. Way to go.

[Idaho]

There are indisputable facts:

Arrest rates for black people is way above white people (actual rates of criminality are not that different).

Conviction rates are far higher for black people.

Prison population is far higher for black people.

Deaths during arrest and in custody are far higher for black people.

Instead of facing up to this, you obfuscate and dissemble. You try and find possible reasons why it can't be due to systemic racism. You try really, really hard to put it down to something else. This says much. This tells us that you have pre-existing opinions that you want to maintain. I know from personal experience of Eastern Europe, from the experience of black people in eastern Europe, and from observation of political and cultural norms in that part of the world - racism is endemic and thinking is akin to how it was here 20 years ago.

[Gilrandir]

There are indisputable facts:

Arrest rates for black people is way above white people (actual rates of criminality are not that different).

Conviction rates are far higher for black people.

Prison population is far higher for black people.

Deaths during arrest and in custody are far higher for black people.

Instead of facing up to this, you obfuscate and dissemble. You try and find possible reasons why it can't be due to systemic racism.

Show me my post where I denied it. You must have mixed me up with someone else.

What I consistently tried to argue is that police brutality should be punished but making a saint and a martyr out of a hardened criminal is another extermity many people indulge in. Irrespective of the race of the victim.

You try really, really hard to put it down to something else. This says much. This tells us that you have pre-existing opinions that you want to maintain.

All of us have pre-existing opinions. And you too. Or does your mind change with the rising and the setting of a few suns?

My pre-existing opinion is that everyone should be treated equally and perpetrators should be punished and their race shouldn't be an issue. But as the case of OJ Simpson showed, it is only a wishful thinking.

I know from personal experience of Eastern Europe, from the experience of black people in eastern Europe, and from observation of political and cultural norms in that part of the world - racism is endemic and thinking is akin to how it was here 20 years ago.

Racism is in evidence everywhere so there is no point in singling out some region of the world. But if we try to implicate personal experience, I can counterpose mine.

When I was in America as an exchange student and lived in the dorms, I met a local black student in the corridor every now and then. When he saw me he exclaimed "Hey, Russia!" every time, although I explained more than once that I was from Ukraine. What would he say if I exclaimed "Hey, Nigeria/Congo/Cameroon/Gabon?" But did I do it? No, I kept smiling and explaining. Was it racism/xenophobia/arrogance of that student?

In your accusations I see the reverberations of a witchhunt that has started in the world after Floyd's murder.

https://wwos.nine.com.au/news/nba-an...0-e0ffacb3302d

[ReluctantSamurai]

making a saint and a martyr out of a hardened criminal is another extermity many people indulge in

This statement is just another example of arrogant profiling, so prevalent in today's society. If this 'once a criminal, always a criminal' attitude were true, then many of today's professional athlete's could easily be lumped into that category. There are many athletes who came from very rough neighborhoods who were gang-bangers, drug users & pushers, and have done time in some way, shape or form. Yet, these athletes learned from their mistakes and went on to become good fathers, husbands, and role models. This kind of story is, of course, not limited to athletes, but the premise is still the same...not letting one's past determine your present or future.

This 'saint out of a hardened criminal' is exactly the same rhetoric being used by the MPD:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/...iminal-record/

The June 1, 2020, letter by Kroll, whom Snopes could not reach for this report, inspired a wave of claims online about Floyd’s alleged arrests and incarcerations before his death — mostly among people who seemed to be searching for evidence that either the actions by the Minneapolis police officer who choked Floyd were justified, or memorials to honor him were unnecessary.

It fits into what psychologists have called the just-world hypothesis, which is a cognitive bias where people believe that the world is just and orderly, and people get what they deserve. It is difficult for people to believe that bad things can happen to good people or to people who don’t deserve it. This is because if people know that these things do happen, they have to decide whether they want to do something about it or sit by silently knowing that there is injustice happening around them.

I don’t trust the motivations of the folks bringing this forward. … Of course they’re asking, ‘Why isn’t [Floyd’s criminal history] covered in the major media?’ And it’s because it’s not relevant to this kind of story. What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis has nothing to do with what happened to him, what he did, in 2007.

We shouldn’t conflate the complexity of a person’s life with an event that ended with their life being lost — those moments and that time is relevant, but not a criminal conviction from years prior because this is supposedly a country where, when you’ve served your sentence, you’re now able to go rebuild your life, as what he was trying to do.

In January 2013, after Floyd was paroled for the aggravated robbery, people who knew him said he returned to Houston’s Third Ward “with his head on right.” He organized events with local pastors, served as a mentor for people living in his public housing complex, and was affectionately called “Big Floyd” or “the O.G.” (original gangster) as a title of respect for someone who’d learned from his experiences. Then in 2014, Floyd, a father of five, decided to move to Minneapolis to find a new job and start a new chapter.

Dying with your face pinned to a street pavement, because you supposedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, is a really shitty way to die, and what you did 13yrs ago should have no bearing on the manner of your death. But all too often, the color of one's skin does have a bearing on these types of police brutality, one more death in a long trail stretching back decades. Enough is enough, which is the point about the BLM movement you continually gloss over. Stop bitching that the 'poster child' of this movement has a criminal past.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The wonder isn't that BLM is protesting and trying to turn society on its ear -- it is their patience for mostly doing so in non-violent manner and with as much respect for the law as they are displaying.

Heard Limbaugh bloviating that BLM was "not about civil rights" but was about marxist "socialism."

I found myself wondering why he thought the latter obviated the former, and thinking to myself "OF COURSE they would turn towards Marxism, it is not as though the current system and the current two parties have done them much of a favor after all."

[Gilrandir]

This statement is just another example of arrogant profiling, so prevalent in today's society. If this 'once a criminal, always a criminal' attitude were true, then many of today's professional athlete's could easily be lumped into that category.

In the case of Floyd, it is not "once" a criminal, but like "half a dozen times a criminal". While it is possible to agree to "errare humanum est" when it happens once, the same logic can't be applied to numerous repeated felonies.

This 'saint out of a hardened criminal' is exactly the same rhetoric being used by the MPD:

In communicating with non-authentic speakers it is strongly advisable to reduce the usage of acronyms to the minimum. I don't know what are the MPD. The dictionary gave tons of possible options starting with Multiple Personality Disorder down to Maintenance Planning Document with Microwave Power Device and Map Pictorial Display in between.

Dying with your face pinned to a street pavement, because you supposedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, is a really shitty way to die, and what you did 13yrs ago should have no bearing on the manner of your death. But all too often, the color of one's skin does have a bearing on these types of police brutality, one more death in a long trail stretching back decades. Enough is enough, which is the point about the BLM movement you continually gloss over. Stop bitching that the 'poster child' of this movement has a criminal past.

Like I said, being squinted one way gives a distorted overall picture of a human pesonality. Today people tend to focus on one aspect and play down the other. All I do is try to consider both. And I would say it if the victim was white as well. For me all lives matter.

[Idaho]

Racism is in evidence everywhere so there is no point in singling out some region of the world. But if we try to implicate personal experience, I can counterpose mine.

When I was in America as an exchange student and lived in the dorms, I met a local black student in the corridor every now and then. When he saw me he exclaimed "Hey, Russia!" every time, although I explained more than once that I was from Ukraine. What would he say if I exclaimed "Hey, Nigeria/Congo/Cameroon/Gabon?" But did I do it? No, I kept smiling and explaining. Was it racism/xenophobia/arrogance of that student?

Wow. I didn't realise you'd been subjected to such devastating and systemic racism. And that this legitimately underpinned your prejudice and life experience... Honestly that example is pathetic. One idiot person trolling you (or maybe just being geographically clueless like 95% of Americans) is presented as countervailing material for 400 years of systemic abuse and marginalisation?

[Gilrandir]

Wow. I didn't realise you'd been subjected to such devastating and systemic racism. And that this legitimately underpinned your prejudice and life experience... Honestly that example is pathetic. One idiot person trolling you (or maybe just being geographically clueless like 95% of Americans) is presented as countervailing material for 400 years of systemic abuse and marginalisation?

You missed the point. It was to show that personal experience may be misleading in trying to gauge the level of racism anywhere.

And my prejudice is against being biased in any direction: both against denying racist implications and against seeing them in every single case, both against ignoring racial issues and against swooping down on people who believe that all lives matter (like that NBA announcer).

[ReluctantSamurai]

I don't know what are the MPD

Minneapolis Police Department, who employed the four officers responsible for George Floyd's death. Uhmm...if you had read the article I provided in the link, what MPD meant would've become self-evident

the same logic can't be applied to numerous repeated felonies.

You continually fixate on the fact that George Floyd wasn't a model citizen (far from it), and therefore doesn't deserve to be the 'poster child' of the BLM, nor deserved to buried in a manner chosen by his family. It could have just as easily been Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery, or any of thousands of black individuals who have been killed by police brutality and white supremacists. To hide behind 'all lives matter' is simply a smokescreen to hide your lack of understanding of what BLM really means. Of course all lives matter, but seemingly some matter less to you. And of course it's impossible to truly understand what it's like to be a black person if your skin color is white.

it is not as though the current system and the current two parties have done them much of a favor after all

And it's going to be a very long struggle to change that system, a struggle that will probably continue longer than my remaining time, unfortunately.....

[Gilrandir]

Minneapolis Police Department, who employed the four officers responsible for George Floyd's death.

So now to say something that MPD said is like saying something that Hitler said? Why don't you then disband it and hire totally new people if all of them are so vile?

[ReluctantSamurai]

Why don't you then disband it and hire totally new people if all of them are so vile?

Now you are just putting words into my mouth that I never said. Obviously I don't have that kind of power, but if I did, what I would do is to put in place a system outside of local authorities that reviews every single officer who accumulates a number of misconduct complaints (as Derek Chauvin did), and an accounting of the $193.3 million dollars USD that is allotted for their budget to see if that money is being well spent. And by well spent I mean is violent crime being controlled, are there programs in place that involve the community in police work, is there a y-o-y decline in complaints against the police department, etc. Perhaps then, situations like the George Floyd killing don't happen.

So now to say something that MPD said is like saying something that Hitler said?

Strawman argument. Is the Ford Motor Company a fascist sympathizer because Henry Ford was? C'mon man.....

[Gilrandir]

Strawman argument. Is the Ford Motor Company a fascist sympathizer because Henry Ford was? C'mon man.....

That's what I was trying to say. I have my opinion and I don't know what MPD or any other PD think.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I wasn't trying to compare your thought process with the MPD, nor accusing you of being fascist. Just read the article, if you haven't already. Sorry if your disdain for the messenger is distracting you from getting the message.

[Montmorency]

I recommend this article on BLM protests in small-town America for its truly striking accounts of sentiment and courage there. Unfortunately the victim-blaming attitudes of the "moderates" expressed here are too common, including in the Backroom.
@Idaho
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...matter-protest

Lois Dennis started teaching second grade in the village of Bethel, Ohio — official population just under 2,800 — back in 1976. People in town call her Mrs. Dennis. And that’s the name people used online when they started denouncing what happened that Sunday afternoon in June when Bethel made national news for an explosion of violence on its streets: I can’t believe they did that to Mrs. Dennis.

Lois’s adult daughter, Andrea, was visiting from Chicago. Earlier in the week, they’d heard that local substitute history teacher Alicia Gee was planning a small demonstration in Bethel in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. They made some signs on poster board, and Lois put on a blue T-shirt with “I TEACH” and the Superman logo.

They parked at the middle school and began walking east on Plane Street, the main thoroughfare through the village. “That’s when we were accosted by the counterprotesters,” Andrea recalled. “They started pushing us, being aggressive, yelling at us. We couldn’t believe it. We were stunned.”

On one side of the street, they saw around 50 Bethel residents — teachers, city council members, hairdressers, retirees — who’d shown up for the BLM demonstration. On the other, there were hundreds of people, including representatives from four different biker gangs, who, at the invitation of a local construction worker, had come to “protect” the town from looters and rioters and rumored antifa. Ultimately, the number of people “uptown,” as Bethel residents refer to the center of the village, swelled to over 800.

Watching footage of the day, you can see the energy grow darker and heavier. You can hear a man yell “you came to the wrong fucking town,” a woman scream “you’re supporting the goddamn niggers,” another man threaten to “break your fucking jaw, bitch.” You can see rifles and handguns and a literal bag full of baseball bats. You can see a woman in a pink sweatshirt repeatedly calling a Black woman the n-word. You can see people grabbing sign after sign from the pro-BLM demonstrators and ripping them to shreds. You can see a biker come up behind Nick Reardon and punch him directly in the skull. And you can see the police officers watching the encounter do nothing.

“People were screaming at us to go back where we came from,” Anwen Darcy, who attended the demonstration with her mom and sister, recalled. “But I was looking around, and I saw Mrs. Dennis, who’d been a teacher for 30 years. I saw my mom, who’d been on the PTA for years and served as the drama director. I saw the woman who ran all the prom fundraisers and a city councilman. The people yelling at us weren’t from here, because if they were, they would’ve known we were home.”

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When Lois and Andrea first entered the scene, someone yanked Lois’s sign and tore it in half. She didn’t recognize that person, or any of the others pushing her around. But later, once she’d made it to the rest of the demonstrators, she looked across the street. Like everyone else, she saw people she knew. She got in a “stare down,” as her daughter later described, with one of her former colleagues.

“Lois, I cannot believe you’re here,” the other teacher yelled.

Andrea and her mom knew it was time to go. When they arrived home, Lois walked straight to the backyard to debrief with her husband and drink a glass of water. Andrea thought her mom would be mad at her. But Lois was resolute. “I wanted to be there,” she said. “I needed to be there.”

Lois Dennis needed to be there, she later told me, because when she was a kid, growing up 30 minutes away in Ripley, Ohio, she would spend her summers at the local pool. From that pool, she could see a nearby hillside. And on that hillside, silently watching the kids in the pool, were her Black classmates. The schools weren’t segregated. But private pools still could be. “I never questioned or asked why. That’s why I want to stand with Black Lives Matter — that sort of quiet racism, that’s accepted for so many years, and never questioned.”

A lot of people have stories like Lois’s. Some of those stories are about how a place like Bethel, whose official slogan is “small town, big heart,” have ignored or left unexamined years of overt and covert racism. But others have different stories: of what it felt like to be the only Black person, the only Filipino family, the only mixed kid in your class. Stories of isolation, and fear, and of trying to make yourself invisible.

The people who showed up to “protect” the town say a Black Lives Matter demonstration doesn’t belong in a place like Bethel, Ohio. There’s no need, they say, for those sorts of conversations. Others blame the demonstrators for giving Bethel a bad name: for the dozens of articles in the national press, the outsiders flooding local Facebook comment sections, the Wikipedia entry for the village briefly changed to describe it as “composed of many, many racists.” After what happened on June 14, the village instituted a curfew — the first anyone in town can remember.

“I’ve known Lois Dennis and her husband my whole life,” Andrew Stober, who runs the Facebook Group “Bethel Bitching Together,” told me. “I love them and respect them. But was it really the right thing to do, bringing that protest here? It’s okay to have one of those in the city, but in a predominantly white town — what they were doing was basically doing was inviting racists in.”

If there hadn’t been a protest, the reasoning goes, there wouldn’t have been a problem, and everything in Bethel would’ve been like it always has been: just fine. But what happened on that Sunday afternoon showed just how unsustainable that belief has become.

Bethel is at once wholly singular and totally indistinguishable from hundreds of other towns of its size and stature scattered across the United States. You can still buy a home, a pretty big one, for under $100,000, and one of several foreclosed properties for significantly less. There’s one high school, one middle school, one Ben Franklin five-and-dime — where people go for everything from quilting supplies to Halloween costumes — and one feed store.

It feels like there’s about one church per person, but none of them have many young people anymore. In 2016, 68.4% of the county voted for Trump. The last time the county went for a Democrat in a presidential election, it was for Lyndon B. Johnson. There’s an old movie theater in downtown Bethel, opened in 1938. For years, it was the pride of the village. In 2015, a Kickstarter to raise enough money to buy a digital projector stalled out at $2,400. Now there’s just a fading Ant-Man poster. There used to be a local paper, but that got absorbed into a regional one. There used to be a solid grocery store, but that’s turned into a Save-a-Lot, a low-cost cousin to Grocery Outlet.

“We’ve got the trifecta,” one resident said. “Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar.” “On the main drag, there’s always a business trying to make it,” Laurie Jones-Dick, who’s lived in town since 1977, told me. “It’ll be there for a few months, maybe a few years. But then it’s gone.”

None of this is a new story in rural America. But to those who’ve watched Bethel’s slow decline, that doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply felt. A lot of the young people grow up and go away. Others stay but struggle to find work outside the schools or the service industry. People don’t talk a lot about the opioids or the meth, but everyone knows someone who’s died in the last decade from one or the other.

Community members fought for years to get a levy passed to support the village’s schools. When the local pool was sold to the city, the insurance costs were too high, and officials shut it down entirely. A smattering of events, fairs, and festivals in the area have been cut for lack of funding. There’s still a Christmas parade, but the remaining activities are church-affiliated in some way. A few years ago, the village’s one non-chain restaurant, the Blue Haven, famous for its homemade pies, shut its doors. “After Sunday, people keep saying, you know, if the Blue Haven was still around, all of this never would’ve happened,” Andrea Dennis told me.

“There aren’t many events to look forward to anymore,” Anwen Darcy explained. “Things like Pioneer Days or whatever, it might not sound like a big deal, but that’s the stuff that knits a community together. Now it’s just a bunch of people loosely living together in the same place.”

And that place is a distinctly Ohioan version of Appalachia. As one local saying goes, it’s “as far North as you can be and not be South, and as far South as you can be and not be North.” Several homes in the uptown area, as the center of the village is called, were stops on the Underground Railroad. In 1844, former US senator Thomas Morris, a Bethel resident, ran for vice president under a third party advocating to abolish slavery. The first mayor of the town was the father of President Ulysses S. Grant.

Still, when the Klan revived across America in the 1910s, more than 1,000 people joined in surrounding Clermont County, and local newspapers recounted its activities the same way they’d cover the work of, say, the local Red Cross. Nearly a century later, KKK literature, some of it aimed at recruitment, began popping up all over Bethel — including on the doorstep of James and Olivia Hundley and their six children. “This is something I would expect to tell my children that their ancestors experienced,” Olivia Hundley said in 2005. “Nothing that they would actually have to experience themselves.” These days, few in town can remember that family, or when they moved.

On the bus to away football games, a former cheerleader reported, the players would talk about “beating those niggers” on the opposing team. An administrator at a local school, according to one former teacher, used to brag about going to the “race riots” in the ‘60s with baseball bats. Another teacher posted on Facebook that just this year, a white student told a student of color that “his family would have owned her,” while another raised his fist, in class, and yelled “white power!”

Guadalupe Rodriguez, who graduated from high school this spring, arrived in Bethel in third grade. “For years I would tell myself that people didn’t really do much, they just made fun of my name,” she said. “But I guess I just got used to it. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize how differently I was treated. There are so many people in the community who supported me, but then there was this whole other group of people that just didn’t think I should exist.”

The shock of these stories has faded for many white residents — or has just been ignored. They maintain that Bethel is not racist; there’s no need for any fundamental reexamination of how power and race align in a town that’s more than 96% white. “Mayhem, racism, and anger does not describe this village in any way,” Village Council member Bryan Coogan told me in an email. “I have lived all over this great country and moved to Bethel to stay away from just the sort of stuff I just described.”

As Joe Manning, a local ironworker upset by the demonstration, put it on Facebook: “There hasn’t been any trouble in this town until all this shit started. I just don’t understand why people don’t just keep to themselves.”

Alicia Gee, who helped organize the Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bethel, Ohio.

Alicia Gee has chunky auburn bangs, oversized glasses with thick red frames, and the general look of a high school art teacher on a teen CW comedy. Like many people who showed up for the demonstration that she helped plan on Sunday, she’s lived her entire life in Bethel, marrying her high school sweetheart and raising two children.

Apart from substitute teaching, she has served as a children’s minister, worked for Girl Scouts of Western Ohio, completed her master’s in education, and, most recently, helps run a local art collective. She’s a third-generation Bethel resident, and her father, Ron Dunn, is a member of the Village Council.

When Gee started putting together the idea for a demonstration, she had been inspired by the small gatherings and vigils in towns just as small as Bethel, and just as conservative. But Gee was also mindful about how her community would view the event. “We knew that whatever we chose to do had to be simple,” she said, “but we also wanted to make it a big tent to include people.” They were careful to label the gathering as a demonstration — a way of showing up in solidarity. Not a protest.

The organizers didn’t want to limit the gathering to people they already knew — which meant posting it on the Facebook Group that has filled the vacuum left by the departure of the local news. Gee posted the announcement late at night. The next morning when she woke up, there were messages on the post and in her inbox with the same theme: You can’t bring this into our town.

At this point, protests and demonstrations had been happening all over the United States for weeks. Depending on where someone got their news, and how much credence they gave to Facebook rumors, it was easy to believe that such gatherings would devolve into riot and ruin. “There’s this common narrative,” Gee explained, “that if someone stands for Black Lives, then it’s automatically a ‘protest.’ And if it’s a protest, then it’s automatically a riot, which is automatically looting, and busing in people who will swarm the town and destroy it.”

And the antifa rumors that had been working their way through small towns didn’t help. “I had a conversation with the mayor, and he wanted to know if any of the organizers were antifa,” Gee told me. “And he had this very confused look on his face when I told him that we’re all against fascism, but antifa isn’t, like, an organized group the way that he thought it was.”

When Gee was planning the demonstration, she imagined there would be a few people who showed up with Trump flags. Maybe someone would throw a soda at them. That was before she heard about the bikers.

The plans for a Black Lives Matter event pissed a lot of people off. But one of the people it upset was Lonnie Meade. Meade grew up in Bethel, installs floors, and, in his spare time, is a pretty successful drag racer. He posts frequently to Facebook, mixing memes about political correctness with photos of his cars and young daughter.

Several people told me they remembered Meade from high school in the ‘90s. After school, there wasn’t much else to do, and kids would put together fights in local barns. Lonnie was one of them. (Meade did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, other than to say that the fights were with boxing gloves, and that “I don’t want to speak to any media as a conservative white male that loves his country, the media twist it as if you’re a white supremacist or a ‘counter protesters’ and I am neither.”)

When Meade read about the demonstration, he began broadcasting on Facebook Live. “Sunday at 3 o’clock, they’re supposed to be bringing a Black Lives Matter,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you right now, I hope that everybody that feels like me, I hope we outnumber those people a thousand to one, and not let that shit happen here in our little town of Bethel.”

“You’re not going to bring hate to our town,” he continued. “We don’t have hate in it right now. You’re gonna bring hate.”

On the morning of the protest, Jason Eblin took the pulpit at Northside Baptist, a congregation that, most weeks, hovers between 40 and 50 people. Eblin moved to Bethel three years ago when the lead pastor at the church, Ben Hurst, was paralyzed in an accident. Eblin had served as associate pastor ever since. His wife grew up here, and her family all lives in town, but, he told me, “I’m still an outsider.”

Eblin knew that if he talked about Black Lives Matter in his sermon that Sunday, he would get “in some hot water.” But he also thought it would be irresponsible, a dereliction of duty, for the church not to address it. “I’ve been told that maybe this isn’t really the best time to talk about it,” he told me. “But how can we ignore it? Jesus spoke out about racism and prejudice, so if he can talk about it, so can we.”

In his sermon, Eblin said he’d seen one of Lonnie’s videos and heard people saying that there wasn’t anything wrong with Bethel — that everyone loves everyone. But then he recalled his own research as he talked to people before moving to the town. “It was confirmed by people, even in this church, that Bethel is known for its churches,” he said, “but also for being a racist town.”

“Is that an unfair statement about this town?” he asked his congregation. “Well, that’s its reputation. And if it’s unfounded, then what better way of trying to correct it than saying it’s not who we are? If someone’s trying to go through peacefully and say ‘Black lives matter’ [...] then say ‘yeah, Black lives matter.’ And I hope I matter to you. Because we all matter to the Lord.”

The bikers started showing up in Bethel a few hours after Eblin stepped down from the pulpit. They parked their motorcycles and began pacing the sidewalks. Meade went live on Facebook. “What I’m asking for is to come up here and protect your community,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to go down for sure. I’ve seen three or four antifa people walking together with backpacks, scoping out the crowds and seeing what we have. It’s a pretty freaky situation, I won’t lie to you.”

The post, like the one before, was shared hundreds of times.

While Meade was broadcasting, Gee was out on the country roads, on her way back from picking up Guadalupe Rodriguez who lives, in her words, “in the middle of nowhere.” They didn’t have good service, but Gee started getting calls from people in town, saying the bikers were already there. Organizers made the decision to move the demonstration a block west, hoping to avoid confrontation.

As Gee set up water and Gatorade, Rodriguez, who’d been designated as the official documentarian, started taking photos. A few dozen demonstrators trickled in, and Gee walked back and forth, greeting them. Her dad was standing on the far end of the block and saw a group of eight “burly-looking men” headed their way. “Here they come,” he yelled.

At first, it was just a few dozen people headed their way. Then it was a few hundred. “At that point, something came over me,” Gee recalled. “I just thought, if this is what we have to do, this is what we have to do. I’m not running away.”

The bikers stayed on the other side of the street for a few minutes, but then they started crossing the street, encroaching more and more on the demonstration space. The handful of police officers there to supervise spaced themselves throughout the crowd, but could do little to keep them separated.

“It felt like a swarm,” Gee said. And in the middle of it was a white car with two women standing out of a moon roof, recording everything. One of those women, Kelly Fogwell, had gone to high school with Lonnie Meade. After graduation, she’d left town to teach and eventually go to grad school, but had returned home in 2014 to live with her mom, Kathy Newman, who stood beside her. They’d decided, even before the bikers arrived, that they’d stay in their car as an additional layer of protecting themselves from exposure to COVID-19.

Newman had grown up as one of nine kids on a farm in Kentucky without a phone or running water. She eventually made her way to college at the University of Cincinnati, where, in 1970, right after Kent State, she participated in a peace march through the streets of the city. “We didn’t know if we were going to get shot,” she recalled. She stepped back from political organizing while she raised her kids, but has reentered activism over the past decade. “I’ve been to a lot of protests, and most of them are very boring,” she said. “Especially since I don’t really like chanting.”

In the weeks leading up to the demonstration, Newman had been watching what had happened to protesters in Seattle, and Minneapolis, and New York. “I’ve watched videos on how to hold your hands if you get arrested, and what your legal rights are as a protester,” she told me. She got a gallon of milk, found an old paintball mask, and threw them both in the car, just in case.

But their problem wasn’t the police — that much was immediately apparent. Videos of the event, now viewed millions of times, showed men in motorcycle vests embroidered with BIKERS FOR TRUMP with baseball bats menacing everyone in their path. Some people yelled go home and yanked signs, while others hurled slurs and attempted to knock phones from the hands of those filming. If you were a demonstrator, just standing in place made you a target.

“I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve looked at so many faces and seen zero empathy,” Anwen Darcy said. “There was just no recognition that they were speaking to other human beings. We were just an obstacle to them. And it was so bizarre to have a guy in a confederate bandana tell me that I better watch where I go, because he’s going to take me to his truck and tear me apart. I heard it in the moment, and I was like, Whatever. But then you think about it when you get home, and you’re like, Oh, this is what he meant by that.”

“I’ve never been in the presence of so much palpable hate,” Laurie Jones-Dick, Darcy’s mother, said. “It was like the air was throbbing.”

When Anwen Darcy was at the demonstration, getting called “a smug Princess Leia bitch” (her hair was in buns), she noticed there was a particular type of sign that seemed to enrage people on the other side: anything to do with “white privilege.”

“A lot of people have gotten something, whether it’s a little house or a truck or a piece of land, and they’re happy about it, and they don’t want it taken away,” she told me. To them, the protests signify a move to take that little bit that they do have, that they’ve worked so long to achieve.

“People said to me, ‘I’ve had cops follow me in stores. How dare you say I’ve had white privilege?’” Darcy said. “But if they get drunk and disorderly, they don’t get killed. They get tased and put in a drunk tank. They can’t see that sliver of privilege that’s still theirs. So see the idea of white privilege as a threat and devaluing their experience.”

“I get that they feel lost and terrified,” Darcy continued. “But I also wish that they could funnel that into something other than beating up women and children in the street.”

But other residents think that the people lining the street — including, in some cases, the bikers — weren’t mad or scared. They were just trying to protect the town from what they perceived as a very real outside threat. Andrew Stober, the moderator of the Facebook Group “Bethel Bitching Together,” knows that antifa stands for antifascist. He thinks that members of the group show up after BLM protests, vandalize and loot, and give BLM a bad name — and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t show up in Bethel, too.

Stober started “Bethel Bitching Together” last year as a joke when another Facebook Group, “Bethel Banding Together,” seemed to devolve into, well, bitching. In his group, he lets people talk about whatever’s on their minds. He doesn’t moderate much, but has a zero tolerance policy, he said, for slurs and racists. He likes to think of himself as a pretty open-minded, curious guy. He went to college. He’s been to seven countries. He’s a volunteer wrestling coach for elementary school kids. He lived for years in Over-the-Rhine, the predominantly Black area of Cincinnati. One time he got robbed and nearly stabbed in downtown Cincinnati, but “instead of being a racist about it,” he just went down to the block where he had been attacked and got a job as a bouncer. These days, he spends his time at his fishing camp on the Ohio River, running his window cleaning business, and hanging out with his son.

In the week leading up to the protest, Stober saw Facebook posts alleging that antifa had plans to appear in the area. He couldn’t confirm them, but thought the threat should be taken seriously. “When antifa threatens to burn down stuff within two miles of your town, don’t you go down and protect businesses?” he asked me. “I saw Lonnie’s videos, and I was like, Hey, you know what? Good for you. Protect your town. He wasn’t saying anything racist. He was just standing up and saying that stuff’s not gonna come here.”

Stober said that if he still owned property uptown, where the demonstration took place, he would’ve been there. Instead, he stayed home to work in the garden. But his fellow wrestling coach Jeffrey Botts was there, guarding his family’s veterinary practice, and Stober applauded him. “We worked our whole lives for these businesses,” he said. “God bless those people for protecting their own stuff.”

He hates that Bethel’s name has been smeared — especially by people who’ve moved away. “It’s hard to see the posts,” he said, “talking about this good old boy mentality, saying we’re all rednecks. But I’m a college-educated, world-traveling window cleaner. These people say they’re so glad they left Bethel, that they have interracial children and now feel like they can’t come back, and I’m like, Be the change, don’t be the problem.”

“They walked away, started a life somewhere, haven’t been back in so many years,” Stober continued. “It’s easy to criticize from afar. I don’t know one person who’s really racist. Do I think people get singled out by the police? I do. But I don’t think it happens in Bethel.”

In one of Lonnie Meade’s Facebook videos describing and defending what happened in Bethel, he mentions a Black student from his high school — someone, he said, whom he never had any problems with. That high school student went by Ernie back then. Now he goes by Ray, and he lives in Cincinnati with his girlfriend and young son.

When I reached Ray Riley in the week after the demonstration, he’d watched about as much of the videos as he felt was necessary. But he’d had years to think about his time in Bethel as the only Black kid, the sort of person whom people like Meade bring up as evidence of their lack of racism.

“My time there was like the definition of the phrase ‘social isolation,’” he told me. “I had a couple of people that I hung out with from time to time, one from a town over. But I had very few friends in the actual school.” He arrived in Bethel in middle school and moved in with his stepdad, who was white. “As far as race relations go, he wasn’t the best informed,” Riley said. “He wasn’t savvy enough to understand that I wouldn’t be living in the same America as he would. He tried to raise me to go through life the same way he did. And that just wasn’t the way it worked.”

Riley described himself as a big, athletic guy in high school, which is part of why, he says, people didn’t bully him physically. “But they bullied me in their own ways,” he said. The fathers of the girls he dated didn’t like him. “I got the feeling that if I wasn’t a minority, they wouldn’t have been quite as opposed,” he said. “Sometimes there are just, let’s say, subtle hints you can pick up on.”

“I was dismissed as kind of stupid by my teachers,” he said. “Which I don’t think I am.” He remembers Meade as someone on the periphery, always trying to start a fight, including a few times with him. It never happened, but it didn’t surprise him that Meade was behind what happened on Sunday — or that the rest of the town reacted the way it did.

“I knew they were going to run into trouble,” he said. “The question was how much? There’s an undercurrent of hatred in that small town, in all those surrounding towns. I saw it. I swam in it. I survived it. I didn’t exactly thrive in it. The first chance I got, I ran like hell. Because they don’t like the other, and I was always the other.”

They can’t understand themselves as racist, Riley said, because they cannot empathize with the experience of it. They can’t see it because they haven’t felt it or listened when others described it. Their closest experience is hearing the phrase “Black lives matter” and thinking that it is actually racist against white people.

“They’ve been taught all their lives that if you work hard, everything’s gonna be just fine,” Riley said. “But they see now that they worked hard, and did the work, and they didn’t get what was promised. They’re so mad, and they turn that hatred inward and feel inadequate. But Trump says, ‘No, I can ease your pain. These people over there, they’re to blame. It’s their fault.’”

“People have been telling you that your bigotry is bad, and you should feel bad,” he continued. “But Trump is there to tell you: It’s good.”

It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that Riley started telling me all the things that had happened to him as a child in Bethel. He listed them offhandedly, like reciting the groceries he needed at the store. The police had stopped him dozens of times without cause. An officer used to refer to him as “Tyrone” every time he saw him. One time, when Riley entered a restaurant in a nearby town, a white dude started singing Dixie and replacing the words with racial slurs. Another time he was riding his 10-speed and turned around in a driveway, and saw someone come out onto the porch. It was one of his classmates. He started yelling: “Get out of my driveway, nigger.”

“I could tell you stories for hours,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t fully grasp how wrong it was. It was just my life.”

There was no local television news to document what happened in Bethel on that Sunday afternoon. Only video from phones, which spread quickly on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, eventually sparking dozens of stories in the national and local press. “A peaceful protester in Bethel, Ohio was sucker-punched in the head right in front of police officers,” Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown tweeted, “and they did nothing about it.”

The day after the demonstration, a smattering of people, including two Black men who grew up in the area, drove in from out of town. Some talked at length with Meade and shook hands. The press took photos. But it didn’t feel like anything had been fixed. Not even close.

Members of the Historical Society are mad. Coworkers are mad. Quilting circle members are mad. Family members are mad. But some people are sorry, too. Andrea told me that one of the counterprotesters who refused to leave her and her mom alone had reached out to arrange a phone call. Others have messaged her on Facebook to say, I saw my aunt in that video, and I’m so sorry. Andrea’s brother, a former wrestling coach, coached the son of one of the men who was most vocal toward his mom at the protest. That man has since apologized.

“I’m open to accepting these apologies,” Andrea said. “But this is about deeper issues. It’s not, like, an individual thing. People have said that we should press charges, but I dunno. I feel bad. All over the country, they’re trash-talking Bethel, saying we should bulldoze the entire town. And that really hurts.”

The local pastors, including Pastor Eblin, convened a walk through the village, praying over the sights of conflict. Eblin’s co-pastor, Ben Hurst, wrote an op-ed for USA Today, claiming that in his two decades in Bethel, he had “not witnessed any kind of racist comment publicly or privately.” Their disparate reactions to the demonstration sparked a much larger dialogue between the two men. “We’ve had to have some heart-to-heart conversations,” Eblin told me. “Because he knows these people. He’s been here for 20 years and is able to say, Hey, we can do better.”

“The town’s called Bethel,” Eblin pointed out. “It’s a town of meaning. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is happening in a place with the name of the House of God. I just wish people would’ve seen God’s people shining, and not that hate.”

“No one’s apologized to me,” Gee said. “And the Village Council hasn’t apologized or articulated any real condemnation of the actions that were perpetrated on us. There’s a lot of calls for discussion right now, but the call is kind of like, hey, person who was abused, you should sit down with your abuser. The people who are calling for us to sit down together, they’re not recognizing that.”

Like everyone else I spoke with, Gee would do it all over again. There’s a lot of processing, and reckoning — particularly among the white participants — that what they experienced was just a brief window into what people of color experience navigating a world still shaped, in every corner, by white supremacy.

With time, Gee said, they’ll move forward. “This is such a country thing to say, but in the big city, if you’re an organizer, you might know a bunch of people, and have a fair amount of connections, but you don’t know everyone. Here in the village, I know everyone. I know where people live and I taught their children — that very easily opens that door for conversation and change.”

“These conversations are important,” she continued. “They’ve moved from you were attacked to what does this mean? They haven’t been happening for decades. But here we are. And it’s time.”●

My assumption is the contrary: if the police in general maltreats blacks, so black policemen are also held responsible for such malpractice.

Black police qua police? I agree.

If there is no registration for gun ownership there is no possible way to correctly gauge the number of guns owned by any race.

This information is generally accessed or estimated the same way most national gun ownership data are: voluntary survey. For example

The only other way I know of would be modeling using economic data relating to production, sales, and federal background checks.

Yet when given a choice you always opt for racial explanation?

Systematic, general, well-documented causes will tend to have more explanatory power toward consistent, convergent events than assuming random chance in any instance. In the interpretation of human affairs, the latter is usually relegated to producing humorous effect in movies.

So you have to be old and experienced to learn to condone submitting counterfeit money if you know the person who did it?

If one believes a customer has paid with counterfeit money, there are a number of approaches to take. I agree that one doesn't have to be old and experienced to realize that.

And that is why he was buried in a golden casket?

Floyd Mayweather paid for it, and Floyd's family accepted it. Why do the man's funerary arrangements bother you so much?

Being buried in gold is a sign of profound veneration. Which, in view of his criminal past he didn't deserve.

Why would anyone care what you think he deserved? Did you bury him?

1. I didn't defend Bandera. My point was and is that we should know all the details of any person and see both the bad and the good sides to him. And each person should be lauded for what good he did, and denounced for what bad he did. In the case of Bandera many people see only what they choose to, forgetting the opposite. I tried to show all sides of his personality. But it is a usual story with many other historical figures like Bohdan Kmelnitsky who fought to liberate Ukraine from Poland, but in this fight mass atrocities against the Polish and the Jews happened.

Why is such a nuanced treatment reserved to your countryman, who was definitely a pretty ruthless mass killer on par with Che Guevara. It has to be objectively certain he threatened more people with guns than Floyd did, if that's what it takes.

BLM: The murder of George Floyd is another sorry episode in our deeply unjust system of policing and governance.
Gilrandir: But he was no angel.

Anyone: Wasn't Bandera a war criminal?
Gilrandir: We have to take the good with the bad.

2. There is no criterion to judge a person to be better or worse

Well then, that's an interesting worldview. I don't understand how to make it consistent with your earlier criticism of Floyd or the likes of Zelensky or Putin though, if all those individuals are no better or worse than you.

I believe that assessing Floyd (or any other person for that matter) we should also try to see all his possible worlds and assess them. Current obsession with him tends to ignore the shadiest aspects of his personality which makes his overall portrait lop-sided.

But whose obsession is it? You're the one fixated on George Floyd as a person. If you felt so strongly you would have no shortage of alternates to Floyd to associate, yet you don't. As in,

BLM: The murder of George Floyd is another sorry episode in our deeply unjust system of policing and governance.
Gilrandir: But he was no angel.

Anyone: Wasn't Bandera a war criminal?
Gilrandir: We have to take the good with the bad.

the first case is one where the individual person is irrelevant to the purpose or activities of a movement, yet becomes more deserving of scrutiny than when the individual is the very subject. I'm just highlighting the disparate consideration you're affording.

Do you remember that ther was no racism in the USSR and all people were proclaimed equal? Moreover, the Soviet ideology contrasted the free Soviet society where all were treated the same with capitalist countries that were grounded on oppression of other races in colonies and metropolis.

The famously egalitarian Soviet Union in which non-Russians could count on the good will and protection of the Russian state. It would be truer to say everyone in the Soviet Union had free housing than that there was no racism. There was no racism in the Soviet Union the way the Western (white) working class were living in desperate poverty, waiting for their moment to rise up against the capitalist class, which is to say it was just legitimating propaganda.

In the book "Поднятая целина" by Sholokhov one of the characters (Makar Nagulnov) was a strong partisan of interracial marriages. The whole movie "Цирк" is a story of an American circus lady who had a black son and was censured and even ostracized in the USA so she had to come to the USSR where she and her son could finally find the land of milk and honey. Soviet leaders often met with the leaders of African ex-colonies and supported them in all possible ways. African students studied in Soviet universities. So the official doctrine was anything but racist.

The documentation of formal and cultural racism in the Soviet Union is so overwhelming I have to believe you're trolling me.

It was the official doctrine of the Communists since the inception of the USSR. Everybody was proclaimed equal irrespective of their sex, age, race, and so on.

We were 150 years ahead of you in the Declaration of Independence, but it didn't solve that problem for posterity.

The massacre had nothing to do with inequality issues - just exterminating the useless/dangerous people. And in this respect all were equal - people with certain political views could be disposed of, irrespective of their race, nationality, sex and so on.

All the minorities Stalin massacred, deported to Siberia/Central Asia, or merely imposed legal discrimination against, are erased in this telling. And Stalin himself had a particular animosity toward Polish people.

But you forget about the difference between officially proclaimed doctrine and the actual practice. The latter included anti-semitism, the policy of eradicating national sentiment, melting all nationalities of the USSR into one ubernational entity - the Soviet people, criminal persecition of homosexuals and a lot of other things that were at odds with the officially sanctioned ideology of equality.

So - were you representing the foregoing quotes as true facts or not??? If not, why say it?

Like, I still remember a year or two ago when you (fairly) became irritated with me for using a Russian ethnic slur for Ukrainians.

Thus, representing Africa as a dangerous land in a children's poem is devoid of any racial issues. Australia, Amazonia, Indochina could be used as well if it suited the metrics of the poem. As is the way with Americans, they see race and gender where there is none.

First of all, even had the USSR had the best racial record of any society in human history that would not change the facts around this specific artifact. Iran is famously known as the land of no homosexuals whatsoever, you see, but if people were to indulge in same-sex intercourse in Iran, that activity would not somehow become conceptually titrated into something else entirely. See also, "В СССР секса нет."

You present a scenario in which the author innocuously wanted to generate a poem about wild animals and cannibals in a dangerous land, and had such a specific meter in mind that he had no choice but to go with Africa.

That's insultingly stupid.

You identify no evidence for such a process, and it is made preposterous by the inclusion of references to gorillas, sharks, and crocodiles - to fit all these words into a bare meter requires premeditation on the text. So the author almost certainly set out to write about Africa, relying on assumptions and tropes about Africa that were widespread around Europe at the time, which tropes you must acknowledge as racist. You also suggest he could also have considered writing about the Amazon, Indochina, or Australia instead, somehow not realizing that this reinforces the racism, since in all cases these were perceived as wild lands full of wild animals and similarly-wild people. How did this escape your notice?

But in the first analysis, the poem is itself racist in its actual content, and the content cannot become non-racist by appeal to convenience. Prioritizing the metrics - as if that could even possibly have been the primary consideration - to justify that content is itself racist. The author could at least have averted the overt racism by writing about a fictional place, though the very concept would have been inescapably informed by his context.

On a sidenote, I read a critic's take on feminism in Tolkien's books and the critic claimed that when Frodo and Sam went through Shelob's tunnel it was a reflection of penetration into female pudenda and the growths that were on the walls where like pubic hair.

Don't become like that in treating simple stories.

There's no symbolic transitivity here, just recognition of straight reproduction of very well-worn racist ideas. I'm saying a cigar is a cigar, you're saying maybe it's a lollipop.

And disregarding his character makes the whole picture incomplete and biased.

Rule of law is definitionally meant to operate independent of the character of individuals.

You do the same. Branding somebody as racist/nazi/obcurantist/... is a perfect move after which one doesn't have to offer any proofs of such a conclusion and may cease arguing since it is useless to try to prove something to a racist/nazi/obcurantist/... An impeccable move. Way to go.

Whether someone is a racist/Nazi/obscurantist tends to have a much greater material relevance to a person's positions and their evaluation than does their hairstyle. I'm sure you wouldn't entertain, for example:

A: Ukraine should surrender to the imperial will of Russia.
B: Isn't Putin documented paying you a million rubles to say this?
A: DEBATE ME

What I consistently tried to argue is that police brutality should be punished but making a saint and a martyr out of a hardened criminal is another extermity many people indulge in. Irrespective of the race of the victim.

Of course, we know that's not what's going on here, but let's say it were and Black Lives Matter were all about the valorous martyr George Floyd and his slaying at the hands of the dastardly lawmen. That would still be more salutary than whining about it in light of the "other extremity" of state violence and impunity.

All of us have pre-existing opinions. And you too. Or does your mind change with the rising and the setting of a few suns?

So long as we're leaning on aphorisms here, sir, when the facts change I change my mind.

My pre-existing opinion is that everyone should be treated equally and perpetrators should be punished and their race shouldn't be an issue.

In a racially-unequal society, to treat people equally the inequality must be corrected. This should strike you as trivially correct, yet you implicitly accept the maintenance of racial hierarchy when you say "their race shouldn't be an issue." It shouldn't be an issue, but it is an issue; we should remedy that, but it can't be accomplished by blusterous denial - just the opposite.

When I was in America as an exchange student and lived in the dorms, I met a local black student in the corridor every now and then. When he saw me he exclaimed "Hey, Russia!" every time, although I explained more than once that I was from Ukraine. What would he say if I exclaimed "Hey, Nigeria/Congo/Cameroon/Gabon?" But did I do it? No, I kept smiling and explaining. Was it racism/xenophobia/arrogance of that student?

It's America-centrism and a lack of global awareness, which you can and should criticize. Is it much of a hindrance for English-speaking Ukrainians though? No, of course not - they're still white after all.

In your accusations I see the reverberations of a witchhunt that has started in the world after Floyd's murder.

https://wwos.nine.com.au/news/nba-an...0-e0ffacb3302d

Just like that nasty ol' McCarthyist witch hunt against Russians!

All I do is try to consider both.

To what end other than derailment? Hitler's armies burned many villages in Ukraine, yet I would be a true scumbag to interject that perhaps some of the villagers were racists, misogynists, thieves, murderers, and that consequently we should frame that likelihood alongside our criticism of anti-partisan operations.

For me all lives matter.

But do black lives matter? If you can't say black lives matter, then saying all lives matter is just a lie and a red herring to diminish the cause of justice.

You missed the point. It was to show that personal experience may be misleading in trying to gauge the level of racism anywhere.

It's a good thing that one's personal experience is not the limit of knowledge, other than in a phenomenological sense.

And my prejudice is against being biased in any direction: both against denying racist implications and against seeing them in every single case, both against ignoring racial issues and against swooping down on people who believe that all lives matter (like that NBA announcer).

You've definitely presented as being biased in one direction, so if that is something you prefer not to be you should re-assess your worldview.

You remind me of the Russian-language radio host who vehemently objected to the sight of "white boys and girls kneeling for a black."

So now to say something that MPD said is like saying something that Hitler said? Why don't you then disband it and hire totally new people if all of them are so vile?

That is similar to the stated intent of the Minneapolis city council. Police departments have been disbanded before, and there have been many advocates of doing so in particular cases today as falling short of outright abolition.

I wish you had read a little about the debates in this country over the past month-and-a-half, since if you had you would have more perspective on both the extant problems and the possible solutions. They're far from parochial debates, and can give insight to civil-police relations and strategies anywhere, so you won't be bored.

The wonder isn't that BLM is protesting and trying to turn society on its ear -- it is their patience for mostly doing so in non-violent manner and with as much respect for the law as they are displaying.

Heard Limbaugh bloviating that BLM was "not about civil rights" but was about marxist "socialism."

I found myself wondering why he thought the latter obviated the former, and thinking to myself "OF COURSE they would turn towards Marxism, it is not as though the current system and the current two parties have done them much of a favor after all."

The hell of it is, if the US actually had tens of millions of Marxists (in higher proportion than in all time before, apparently) then we might be well on our way to putting paid to fascist filth like Limbaugh once and for all. If only! But he has no appreciation for the fact that most Americans want justice from and comity with his ilk, rather than revenge or revolution.

[Gilrandir]

To hide behind 'all lives matter' is simply a smokescreen to hide your lack of understanding of what BLM really means. Of course all lives matter, but seemingly some matter less to you.

That's your arbitrary opinion. Just like I might read BLM as other lives don't.

Why is such a nuanced treatment reserved to your countryman, who was definitely a pretty ruthless mass killer on par with Che Guevara. It has to be objectively certain he threatened more people with guns than Floyd did, if that's what it takes.

BLM: The murder of George Floyd is another sorry episode in our deeply unjust system of policing and governance.
Gilrandir: But he was no angel.

Anyone: Wasn't Bandera a war criminal?
Gilrandir: We have to take the good with the bad.

Aren't you tired of this Bandera squabble?

He was no angel, you are right. BUT: he spent most of his life before WWII in the Polish prison ans during WWII in the concentration camp. Mass killer from prison?

Then, to call someone a war criminal you should have a court's decision. The trial that could have done it was the Nuremberg trial. Neither UPA nor Bandera were found guilty of war crimes there.

Well then, that's an interesting worldview. I don't understand how to make it consistent with your earlier criticism of Floyd or the likes of Zelensky or Putin though, if all those individuals are no better or worse than you.

Evaluation is always subjective. For some people Putin is a god, for others a devil.

The famously egalitarian Soviet Union in which non-Russians could count on the good will and protection of the Russian state. It would be truer to say everyone in the Soviet Union had free housing than that there was no racism. There was no racism in the Soviet Union the way the Western (white) working class were living in desperate poverty, waiting for their moment to rise up against the capitalist class, which is to say it was just legitimating propaganda.
The documentation of formal and cultural racism in the Soviet Union is so overwhelming I have to believe you're trolling me.

People of other races than white in the USSR could be counted on the fingers of a hand. How can you find racist practices in a country with virtually monorace? It is like to try to calculate the number of car accidents in a village where there are no car owners.

We were 150 years ahead of you in the Declaration of Independence, but it didn't solve that problem for posterity.

See above.

All the minorities Stalin massacred, deported to Siberia/Central Asia, or merely imposed legal discrimination against, are erased in this telling. And Stalin himself had a particular animosity toward Polish people.

The latter needs a proof. But even if he did I don't see how it bears on racism. Xenophobia - perhaps, but racism?

You present a scenario in which the author innocuously wanted to generate a poem about wild animals and cannibals in a dangerous land, and had such a specific meter in mind that he had no choice but to go with Africa.

That's insultingly stupid.

You identify no evidence for such a process, and it is made preposterous by the inclusion of references to gorillas, sharks, and crocodiles - to fit all these words into a bare meter requires premeditation on the text. So the author almost certainly set out to write about Africa, relying on assumptions and tropes about Africa that were widespread around Europe at the time, which tropes you must acknowledge as racist. You also suggest he could also have considered writing about the Amazon, Indochina, or Australia instead, somehow not realizing that this reinforces the racism, since in all cases these were perceived as wild lands full of wild animals and similarly-wild people. How did this escape your notice?

But in the first analysis, the poem is itself racist in its actual content, and the content cannot become non-racist by appeal to convenience. Prioritizing the metrics - as if that could even possibly have been the primary consideration - to justify that content is itself racist. The author could at least have averted the overt racism by writing about a fictional place, though the very concept would have been inescapably informed by his context.

I offered a possible usage of Africa, you gave your take on the issue. I don't see why yours is better than mine. Even if we accept your view that Chukovsky was painting Africa as a dangerous place, why is it racist? Is saying that Queens/Harlem a dangerous place racist? I am more inclined to think that calling Africa a dangerous place is more like "everywhere outside our Soviet Motherland is dangerous".

I repeat: as long as can remember myself a Soviet kid teachers and TV were talking my ears off with stories of poor Africans who were oppressed by capitalists from Europe and poor black Americans who were tortured by KKK. And the mission of Soviet country and all its citizens is to help them in all possible ways. So talking of racism in the USSR as a part of ideology is ridiculous.

Of course, we know that's not what's going on here, but let's say it were and Black Lives Matter were all about the valorous martyr George Floyd and his slaying at the hands of the dastardly lawmen. That would still be more salutary than whining about it in light of the "other extremity" of state violence and impunity.

As I was told by Sarmatian once, you can never form an objective opinion of events which are going on in the street outside your house. You have to be geographically and emotionally removed form the epicenter to do that. While geography can be debated, emotions are often crucial. Being emotionally invested forbids you from being objective.

In a racially-unequal society, to treat people equally the inequality must be corrected. This should strike you as trivially correct, yet you implicitly accept the maintenance of racial hierarchy when you say "their race shouldn't be an issue."

As long as crimes and brutality are concerned it shouldn't. A murderer should always be a murderer. If you implicate race OJ Simpson isn't found to be one.

But do black lives matter? If you can't say black lives matter, then saying all lives matter is just a lie and a red herring to diminish the cause of justice.

I can use "black lives matter" only if after this sentence comes a continuation like "as well as other lives do".

You've definitely presented as being biased in one direction, so if that is something you prefer not to be you should re-assess your worldview.

Can I apply this conclusion and advice to yourself?

You remind me of the Russian-language radio host who vehemently objected to the sight of "white boys and girls kneeling for a black."

I support it when a black deserves it. Not just because he is black. Otherwise it is like on March 8 people of the USSR congratulated women on being women.

That is similar to the stated intent of the Minneapolis city council. Police departments have been disbanded before, and there have been many advocates of doing so in particular cases today as falling short of outright abolition.

Doesn't it reek of collective responsibility? If some policemen (especially black ones) had nothing to do with the crime and moreover condemned it why should they be fired? And can they sue the city and be reinstalled in their jobs?

I wish you had read a little about the debates in this country over the past month-and-a-half, since if you had you would have more perspective on both the extant problems and the possible solutions. They're far from parochial debates, and can give insight to civil-police relations and strategies anywhere, so you won't be bored.

I can respond with your lines:

It's America-centrism and a lack of global awareness, which you can and should criticize.

I have my own joys and sorrows to pay events in the USA more than a cursory attention. As probably you do about events in Ukraine or anywhere else outside the US.

And another sidenote:
if you pick up a week old debate don't expect me to react to 29 (!!!) comments of yours.

[Idaho]

..both against denying racist implications and against seeing them in every single case...

In the case of systemic racism throughout the criminal justice system, the evidence is stark and clear.

You and Montmorency need to learn brevity. Both your last posts are tldr. Honestly - get an editor, learn some pith.

[Gilrandir]

You and Montmorency need to learn brevity. Both your last posts are tldr. Honestly - get an editor

Will you be one?

[Montmorency]

In the case of systemic racism throughout the criminal justice system, the evidence is stark and clear.

You and Montmorency need to learn brevity. Both your last posts are tldr. Honestly - get an editor, learn some pith.

But in brevity much of the substance I intend to relay may be lost, and then what's the point? For example, what's the TLDR of the article I reposted? That there are a lotta white power troglodytes in the deep places of the country. That's pithy, but does it even bear saying? Meanwhile all the little details and points that give texture (at least) languish in the lacuna.

Aren't you tired of this Bandera squabble?

He was no angel, you are right. BUT: he spent most of his life before WWII in the Polish prison ans during WWII in the concentration camp. Mass killer from prison?

Then, to call someone a war criminal you should have a court's decision. The trial that could have done it was the Nuremberg trial. Neither UPA nor Bandera were found guilty of war crimes there.

Besides this dramatically thinning the ranks of history's war criminals - almost none have ever been tried and convicted - I again notice you are more charitable to Bandera, who apparently never had the disgrace to be associated with alleged intent to defraud with counterfeit currency. Why are you so comparatively charitable here?

Evaluation is always subjective. For some people Putin is a god, for others a devil.

So? Is he more or less of a god or a devil than you, and if there is no answer to the question then what is there ever to discuss?

People of other races than white in the USSR could be counted on the fingers of a hand. How can you find racist practices in a country with virtually monorace? It is like to try to calculate the number of car accidents in a village where there are no car owners.

Leaving aside the ethnic hierarchies of "white" that put Russians above all the rest and counting Jews as white (which Russians, Ukrainians, and the like certainly did not), you conspicuously erase all the Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Koreans, Siberian tribes, etc.

Like, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia are famously ethnically-diverse - do you think we're that ignorant here as to take your assertion for granted?

But even if every single Soviet citizen had been a ethnic Russian with alabaster skin, and the Soviet government had no intermediaries to the outside world other than other white Europeans, that would not preclude Soviet people from holding racist attitudes that could manifest into practice if given the opportunity.

The latter needs a proof. But even if he did I don't see how it bears on racism. Xenophobia - perhaps, but racism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish...on_of_the_NKVD

What is the distinction you're making between racism and xenophobia here, which are generally seen to overlap almost completely? It's especially strange in light of the fact that these genocidal actions were taken against internal populations subject to the state. Stalin could not be said to be more "xenophobic" toward Kalmyks than Hitler was toward German Jews or Euro-Americans were toward African-Americans.

I offered a possible usage of Africa, you gave your take on the issue. I don't see why yours is better than mine. Even if we accept your view that Chukovsky was painting Africa as a dangerous place, why is it racist? Is saying that Queens/Harlem a dangerous place racist? I am more inclined to think that calling Africa a dangerous place is more like "everywhere outside our Soviet Motherland is dangerous".

Your take was incoherent.

Because they're the same exact ideas that had currency throughout Europe at the time, and these ideas dehumanized Africans as animalistic, childlike, unintelligent, etc.

I repeat: as long as can remember myself a Soviet kid teachers and TV were talking my ears off with stories of poor Africans who were oppressed by capitalists from Europe and poor black Americans who were tortured by KKK. And the mission of Soviet country and all its citizens is to help them in all possible ways. So talking of racism in the USSR as a part of ideology is ridiculous.

I never referred to Marxist-Leninist dogma on paper, which as you said proclaimed the equality of people, but to culture and government in practice. Emphasizing the helplessness and subordinacy of a people and your role as their savior is not the pinnacle of anti-racism by the way.

As long as crimes and brutality are concerned it shouldn't. A murderer should always be a murderer. If you implicate race OJ Simpson isn't found to be one.

So what would you have done about the unfair and oppressive treatment of black people at all points in the justice and carceral systems, as well as the systemic practices and conditions that leave them more liable to be preyed upon by the former? If it satisfies you to see millions of black men tormented because one celebrity was not convicted, that is a wholly disproportionate set of priorities and one I suspect you would not apply to white people.

I can use "black lives matter" only if after this sentence comes a continuation like "as well as other lives do".

That's the whole point. If it helps, modify to slogan to read "Black Lives Matter Too."

Can I apply this conclusion and advice to yourself?

Only if you believe everyone is right and no one is wrong.

I support it when a black deserves it. Not just because he is black. Otherwise it is like on March 8 people of the USSR congratulated women on being women.

The point being that the racist host conflated kneeling in solidarity and in protest of injustice with kneeling as an expression of fealty toward black supremacy, or of celebration of a particular person. For such people there can only be one hierarchy or another.

Men are congratulated for being men every day. Didn't they teach you about the whole premise of bringing attention to women for even a day? Not surprising you would be dismissive toward both non-whites and women, as these issues tend to be correlated.

Doesn't it reek of collective responsibility? If some policemen (especially black ones) had nothing to do with the crime and moreover condemned it why should they be fired? And can they sue the city and be reinstalled in their jobs?

Collective responsibility? As a government institution of course there is collective responsibility, and this type of excuse was laughed out of the room in Nuremberg I might add.

In a very concrete sense too there is collective responsibility, as corrupt or violent police cannot persist in their positions without the active encouragement, training, and support of other police and their leadership: the sergeants, the detectives, the captains, the chiefs, the commissioners, the arbitrators, the prosecutors, the police unions, even the city governments. Bad cops are not bad apples, they are the natural product of a whole rotten orchard.

The police who have nothing to do with police crimes and moreover condemn them tend to be forced out of their jobs as police. It's a kind of selection effect, and it's the meaning behind the Thin Blue Line.

Here's a recent article on the Minneapolis police reform process (Samurai, you might be interested in this one.).
https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2020/...ce-department/
I am not sure what kind of valid legal complaint they could have, as their agencies would only be terminated following modification of the city charter by popular referendum. The city charter currently mandates the establishment of a police force.

I have my own joys and sorrows to pay events in the USA more than a cursory attention. As probably you do about events in Ukraine or anywhere else outside the US.

That's fine, but I don't make a point of offering awfully tone-deaf and ignorant comments about ongoing social conflicts in Ukraine.

if you pick up a week old debate don't expect me to react to 29 (!!!) comments of yours

??

[Gilrandir]

Besides this dramatically thinning the ranks of history's war criminals - almost none have ever been tried and convicted - I again notice you are more charitable to Bandera, who apparently never had the disgrace to be associated with alleged intent to defraud with counterfeit currency. Why are you so comparatively charitable here?

It has nothing to do with charity. I pay attnetion to the facts that are overlooked by the lopsided presentation. If only the good is stressed I remind of the bad and vice versa as I did with the national hero of Ukraine Bohdan Khmelnytsky. I could say a few unpleasnat words about Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise whose portraits are on Ukrainian money, btw.

So? Is he more or less of a god or a devil than you, and if there is no answer to the question then what is there ever to discuss?

Attitudes. You may have failed to notice but this forum (as probably all social media) is about expressing attitudes.

Leaving aside the ethnic hierarchies of "white" that put Russians above all the rest and counting Jews as white (which Russians, Ukrainians, and the like certainly did not), you conspicuously erase all the Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Koreans, Siberian tribes, etc.

Like, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia are famously ethnically-diverse - do you think we're that ignorant here as to take your assertion for granted?

But even if every single Soviet citizen had been a ethnic Russian with alabaster skin, and the Soviet government had no intermediaries to the outside world other than other white Europeans, that would not preclude Soviet people from holding racist attitudes that could manifest into practice if given the opportunity.

Since officially all Soviet people were brethern supposed to converge into a pan-ethnic entity one of these days racist attitudes were never shaped into "Kazakhs shouldn't be accepted to Universities" or "Let's not hire him because he is an Uzbek". Moreover, in national republics it could be vice versa with stressing prevalence of local nations over Russians.

What is the distinction you're making between racism and xenophobia here, which are generally seen to overlap almost completely? It's especially strange in light of the fact that these genocidal actions were taken against internal populations subject to the state. Stalin could not be said to be more "xenophobic" toward Kalmyks than Hitler was toward German Jews or Euro-Americans were toward African-Americans.

Classically, xenophobia is the fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Not necesserily of other race. And for the Soviet people all foreigners were supposed to be capitalists' agents dreaming of destroying the most beautiful country in the world. And internal populations were "our home traitors or foreing spies" that have to be dealt with.

Because they're the same exact ideas that had currency throughout Europe at the time, and these ideas dehumanized Africans as animalistic, childlike, unintelligent, etc.

With no interent in eveidence, Soviet people who were separated from Europe and the rest of the world by the iron curtain were unaware of current ideological trends elsewhere. Even if it was otherwise with Chukovsky the ideological pressure of the Party and severe censorship wouldn't permit him to publish anything that was at odds with the official policy of the Party especially propagating racism in children's verses.

By the way, I watched Trip to America again the other day and noticed some characters giving derogatory remarks about Africa. Was it racism? Or if they were blacks it wasn't? Just arrogance of Americans as to the poor uncultured areas? The same could be said of Chukovsky's verses, in my view.

So what would you have done about the unfair and oppressive treatment of black people at all points in the justice and carceral systems, as well as the systemic practices and conditions that leave them more liable to be preyed upon by the former? If it satisfies you to see millions of black men tormented because one celebrity was not convicted, that is a wholly disproportionate set of priorities and one I suspect you would not apply to white people.

No torments satisfy me. But I again pay attention to the facts which differ from the general tendency.

That's the whole point. If it helps, modify to slogan to read "Black Lives Matter Too."

That's a perfect idea. But I can't modify slogans of a political movement. If BLM supporters do it I would welcome the change. But would they? I doubt.

The police who have nothing to do with police crimes and moreover condemn them tend to be forced out of their jobs as police.

So can we surmise that 12%+ of cops who are black and aren't forced of their jobs nationwide are in agreement with racist practices exercised by their PDs?

That's fine, but I don't make a point of offering awfully tone-deaf and ignorant comments about ongoing social conflicts in Ukraine.

I express my take on the issue. You may qualify it as you like. Being emotionally invested impacts your objectivity (if it is attainable in such issues). Like when I criticized Trump my comments didn't seem to you tone-deaf and ignorant. How come? Not because they chime with your attitude?

[ReluctantSamurai]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/u...e-abolish.html

Protesters’ cries to defund or abolish the police are often not meant literally. Rather, they are demands to rethink a law enforcement system from the ground up and to grapple with deeply ingrained issues, including employing officers who do not live in the city they police — as is done in Minneapolis — and sending armed officers to respond to situations that turn out not to be crimes, as when a mentally ill person is in distress.

If you have never experienced what is is like to actually know the officers who are policing you, and have them as neighbors, my experience with a pilot project on the east side of Detroit shows that in-city or in-neighborhood officers is extremely important.

As part of a larger project to overhaul the DPD in 2013, the East English Village section of Detroit began deploying NPO's (Neighborhood Police Officers) to patrol the nearly 2100 homes in the district. These were part of the DPD, and were trained at the Detroit Police Training Academy. It was required that they live in the district, and they were allowed to purchase homes foreclosed by the city at a reduced price, if they so desired.

EEV held regular monthly meetings to discuss Village events and as a way to get to know other residents of the community. The NPO's (there were 3) were always present at the meetings, and people could discuss local problems with them and arrive at solutions. It wasn't long before you knew them by name, and they knew yours. Folks almost always brought baked goods or other food items for the NPO's, even though the Village provided food for the meeting. The first time I saw this I thought, who does that? The captain from the 5th Precinct attended quarterly with reports on crime rates, types of crimes, etc. I lived in EEV for 6 years, and every year drug related crimes, as well as violent crimes decreased y-o-y. This is not to say everything in Detroit is smelling like roses, because there are still large swaths of the city that could be used as a set for filming an episode of The Walking Dead. But it's a start, and other areas of the city are now trying out the same approach.

An anecdotal story as to how integrated the NPO's became: EEV sponsors various friendly competitions amongst homeowners, and one of them is a landscaping contest. The only award is street bragging rights, and a plaque awarding 1st, 2d, or 3d in the competition. Several blocks down my street lived an elderly woman with the proverbial 'green thumb'. Impeccable yard full of colorful flowers, shrubs and trees. Of course she always took 1st, but nobody grumbled...the place was a beautiful reflection of the community.

Unfortunately, it's a big city, and bad big-city things happen. Some kids decided to have a little "fun" at her expense, and tore up the yard one evening, ripping out a lot of shrubbery and destroyed her flower beds. In response, EEV folks got together on a weekend, and repaired/replanted her entire yard with the Village footing the bill for the new plants and shrubs. Every one of those NPO's showed up at one time or another over the weekend to put in some work. Again, who does that?

Anyway, Idaho will probably be bitching this is tl:dr, so enough BTW, all the NPO's are black, and so is the district captain.

[ReluctantSamurai]

A follow-up on the "Ken & Karen" story from St. Louis:

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...0225dd287.html

[Montmorency]

Of interest:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.7/publ...ing-the-police

Mobile, community-based crisis programs employ first responders that are not police to address disturbances where crimes are not being committed. One of the nation’s longest-running examples is CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets — in Eugene, Oregon. CAHOOTS has inspired similar programs in other cities in the region, including the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland and Portland Street Response in Oregon.

Such programs take police out of the equation when someone is going through a mental health crisis, struggling with substance abuse, or experiencing homelessness. When police show up, situations can escalate, and the use of force can be disproportionate, especially towards Black people; a 2016 study estimated that 20% to 50% of fatal encounters with law enforcement involved someone with a mental illness. Advocates say the CAHOOTS model shows those encounters aren’t inevitable: Less than 1% of the calls that CAHOOTS responds to need police assistance. The CAHOOTS system relies on trauma-informed de-escalation and harm reduction, which reduces calls to police, averts harmful arrest-release-repeat cycles, and prevents violent police encounters.

THE WHITE BIRD CLINIC in Eugene started CAHOOTS 31 years ago as an alternative for people who felt alienated or disenfranchised from systems that had failed them, CAHOOTS Operations Coordinator Tim Black said in an interview. “We’re there to listen, we’re there to empathize, and we’re there to really reflect on what they’re going through,” and to discuss ways to access resources to help them. CAHOOTS — a free, 24/7 community service — is funded by Eugene and neighboring Springfield at a cost of around $2 million, equal to just over 2% of their police departments’ annual budgets. The program is currently fundraising to expand and make up for COVID-19-related budget cuts.

Under the model, instead of police, a medic and a mental health worker are dispatched for calls such as welfare checks or potential overdoses. In 2017, such teams answered 17% of the Eugene Police Department’s overall call volume. This has saved the city, on average, $8.5 million each year from 2014-2017, according to the White Bird Clinic.

hough CAHOOTS uses the police department’s central dispatch, it is distinct from the department. Employees do not carry guns or wear uniforms; instead, they wear casual hoodies and drive vans with a dove painted on the side. CAHOOTS’ methods are designed to prevent escalation, Black said. “If an officer enters that situation with power, with authority, with that uniform and a command presence, that situation is really likely to escalate.”

It’s a false assumption that people experiencing a mental health crisis will respond violently, Black said, and a police response is often unnecessary. CAHOOTS fielded over 24,000 calls last year; less than 1% of them needed assistance from police, and no one has ever been seriously injured.

CAHOOTS differs from other mental health partnerships with the police in important ways: Staff employ “unconditional positive regard,” a phrase from psychology that means complete support and acceptance for the people they encounter, and the organization is run as a “consensus collective,” rather than a hierarchy. Every employee’s voice carries equal weight.

Each crisis worker completes 500 hours of training in areas including medical care, conflict resolution and crisis counseling. Around 60% of CAHOOTS’ patients are homeless, and about 30% have severe or persistent mental illness. “The patient that we’re serving is the expert in their situation,” Black said. “They know that we’re a voluntary resource and that we’re not going to take their rights away just because we’ve shown up on scene.”

It has nothing to do with charity. I pay attnetion to the facts that are overlooked by the lopsided presentation.

That's not how you're presenting. You interposed yourself to redirect attention from malgovernance and racial repression to the mixed record of a murdered man. To do this implies that you believe the latter should be emphasized in place of the former.

Attitudes. You may have failed to notice but this forum (as probably all social media) is about expressing attitudes.

OK, but why and whence? Are we here reproducing irritable gestures lacking mental ingredients? It's impossible to say, but I like to assume that if I believed 'Trump is awful in every way but ultimately there is no philosophical justification for that belief' I wouldn't bother to post about it.

Since officially all Soviet people were brethern supposed to converge into a pan-ethnic entity one of these days racist attitudes were never shaped into "Kazakhs shouldn't be accepted to Universities" or "Let's not hire him because he is an Uzbek". Moreover, in national republics it could be vice versa with stressing prevalence of local nations over Russians.

Classically, xenophobia is the fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Not necesserily of other race. And for the Soviet people all foreigners were supposed to be capitalists' agents dreaming of destroying the most beautiful country in the world. And internal populations were "our home traitors or foreing spies" that have to be dealt with.

They could be deviationists, spies, saboteurs, (((rootless cosmopolitans)))...

These labels and the force behind them were applied in an ethnically-discriminatory way as a general practice, but time and again it was constructed as an essentially ethnic disturbance against the state. Perpetually with non-Russians or Turkic peoples, but of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhdanov_Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish...cist_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot

With no interent in eveidence, Soviet people who were separated from Europe and the rest of the world by the iron curtain were unaware of current ideological trends elsewhere.

The Soviet people were not so shut off from Europe that they abraded away the entire cultural and intellectual influence of the 19th century - indeed, the opposite was the case. The Soviet government was intensely interested in promulgating cultural products of Europe in the domains of art, architecture, literature, language, music, etc. In any case we are speaking of widespread ideas so common and basic that they were not much questioned, like the concept of marriage.

Even if it was otherwise with Chukovsky the ideological pressure of the Party and severe censorship wouldn't permit him to publish anything that was at odds with the official policy of the Party especially propagating racism in children's verses.

You beg the question in assuming party functionaries would be non-racist in identifying racism.

So far, you've been leaning on the excuses that the author had no choice but to wax poetic about the savagery of Africa (and that this would be non-racist in any case), that Russians were too isolated to have a concept of anti-African racism, or that the writings could not by any Scottish definition be racist if the Soviet government permitted their publication. Do you really not see the problem here?

By the way, I watched Trip to America again the other day and noticed some characters giving derogatory remarks about Africa. Was it racism? Or if they were blacks it wasn't? Just arrogance of Americans as to the poor uncultured areas? The same could be said of Chukovsky's verses, in my view.

If you mean Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, I haven't seen it since I was a small child so I can't comment on what you heard. But, where would black Americans get racist ideas about Africa (or themselves) from? From white Americans.

No torments satisfy me. But I again pay attention to the facts which differ from the general tendency.

It's tempting to rephrase that as, 'prefer alternative facts that dispense the need to grapple with racial conflict.' You've taken the time to emphasize an individual victim's crimes, challenge the idea of the presence of racism in policing, defend police outside the set of those in the act of committing egregious crimes, deprioritize black lives in the context of those lives being at issue, and... plus some of the most far-fetched Soviet revisionism I've ever encountered.

But you're recalcitrant toward the question of advancing racial equality in the US or elsewhere.

What does it all amount to?

That's a perfect idea. But I can't modify slogans of a political movement. If BLM supporters do it I would welcome the change. But would they? I doubt.

If only they had formed a collective council to issue dogma proclaiming the most promising strategy to orient the movement around satisfying the intuitions of the, uhhhh, racially-skeptical. Maybe they assumed people of good will could work it out independently.

There are so many easily-digestible images, skits, videos breaking the Lives issue down, but here's this one.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1278796654443888641

So can we surmise that 12%+ of cops who are black and aren't forced of their jobs nationwide are in agreement with racist practices exercised by their PDs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omert%C3%A0

I express my take on the issue. You may qualify it as you like. Being emotionally invested impacts your objectivity (if it is attainable in such issues). Like when I criticized Trump my comments didn't seem to you tone-deaf and ignorant. How come? Not because they chime with your attitude?

I don't recall you criticizing Trump, but it is possible that I take issue with meritless, incorrect, or otherwise objectionable comments and don't take issue with comments that are not such.

If I told you that Ukraine is a country that exists, what complaint would you raise? None, and moreover it would be beneath your notice for response. In telling you though that Ukraine is the manor of a Martian grandee populated by cow-human hybrids, I would be offending any number of perspectives at a staggering level.

TLDR: Wrong is not due any tribute paid to right.

[Gilrandir]

That's not how you're presenting. You interposed yourself to redirect attention from malgovernance and racial repression to the mixed record of a murdered man. To do this implies that you believe the latter should be emphasized in place of the former.

That's your impression. I speak of no emphasis but of awareness of negative sides which being emotionally invested many Americans tend to overlook or intentionally downplay.

OK, but why and whence? Are we here reproducing irritable gestures lacking mental ingredients?

Even if mental ingredients are aplenty still communicating in the social media is about exchanging personal attitudes mostly.

These labels and the force behind them were applied in an ethnically-discriminatory way as a general practice, but time and again it was constructed as an essentially ethnic disturbance against the state.

Ethnic! Not racial. Ethnic-focused purges were often aimed at white people who were deemed to differ politically (like the Baltic peoples and Ukrainians deported to Syberia).

The Soviet people were not so shut off from Europe that they abraded away the entire cultural and intellectual influence of the 19th century - indeed, the opposite was the case. The Soviet government was intensely interested in promulgating cultural products of Europe in the domains of art, architecture, literature, language, music, etc. In any case we are speaking of widespread ideas so common and basic that they were not much questioned, like the concept of marriage.

This is totally wrong. Soviet authotities were interested in separating the USSR from the rest of the world and creating an entirely new society with entirely new ideology, art, literature, science and even language (see Newspeak) that had nothing to do whatsoever with the practices of rotten capitalism. And if any person working in these spheres was spotted bringing in чуждые веяния and преклонения перед Западом he was at best censured and at worst incarcerated or shot.

You beg the question in assuming party functionaries would be non-racist in identifying racism.

Since anti-racism was a part of official ideology and party functionaries were acutely alert to any (even imaginary) deviations from it I believe my statement holds.

So far, you've been leaning on the excuses that the author had no choice but to wax poetic about the savagery of Africa (and that this would be non-racist in any case), that Russians were too isolated to have a concept of anti-African racism, or that the writings could not by any Scottish definition be racist if the Soviet government permitted their publication. Do you really not see the problem here?

I don't. I wasn't leaning on excuses. I offered plenty of assumptions why Africa was used in the verse and some of them (or all of them taken together) might have served as a plausible explanation. For you, it is easier to explain it by racism (insulting the Scottish along the way), and get done with it. Yet neither you nor me will get down to the core since it is only Chukovsky himself or the people who were deep in his counsels may offer the answer.

If you mean Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, I haven't seen it since I was a small child so I can't comment on what you heard. But, where would black Americans get racist ideas about Africa (or themselves) from? From white Americans.

So American blacks humiliating African blacks is racism? Wouldn't xenophobia be a better fit?

And speaking of racism in movies. I can name plenty of films where the main/super hero is white, as well as many movies (often the same) where the archvillain is white. I also can recall a fair number of movies where the good guy is black (Equalizer, Blade, Book of Eli, all of Dwayne Johnson movies - even the black Hercules seemed appropriate to the director), but somehow the archvillain can never be black (the only exception I can think of is Demolition Man). Isn't that racist?

You've taken the time to emphasize an individual victim's crimes, challenge the idea of the presence of racism in policing,

I never said it was absent, I was surprised at how the black cops can participate in it.

defend police outside the set of those in the act of committing egregious crimes,

Why should good policemen be punihsed if they didn't do anything worth condemnation?

deprioritize black lives in the context of those lives being at issue,

You have suggested Black Lives Matter Too so you depriotized black lives yourself putting them on par with other lives. Which I totally agree with.

and... plus some of the most far-fetched Soviet revisionism I've ever encountered.

You consider explaining official Soviet ideology revisionism? Way to go.

But you're recalcitrant toward the question of advancing racial equality in the US or elsewhere.

If you read my posts again you would definitely see my basic tenet: all people should get equal treatment and be equally punished for whatever crime they committed. If you call this recalcitrance... Carry on!

What does it all amount to?

Arbitrary assumptions, based on misinterpretations and subsequent witchhunt.

If only they had formed a collective council to issue dogma proclaiming the most promising strategy to orient the movement around satisfying the intuitions of the, uhhhh, racially-skeptical. Maybe they assumed people of good will could work it out independently.

To be branded racist as that NBA announcer and get ostracized?

I don't recall you criticizing Trump, but it is possible that I take issue with meritless, incorrect, or otherwise objectionable comments and don't take issue with comments that are not such.

You are right. I didn't criticize him. I mocked him. But since this seems to be the attitude of ALL the people on these boards no one batted an eyelid. That's how attitudes in social media work.

In telling you though that Ukraine is the manor of a Martian grandee populated by cow-human hybrids, I would be offending any number of perspectives at a staggering level.

Judging from the percentage of Zelensky's supporters I would have to agree to this. Ruefully.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The broken link on the above "Ken & Karen" story has been fixed.

[Montmorency]

More evidence that the 2020 BLM protest wave is the biggest in American history. If the Women's March of 2017 had been the distinction-holder with at least 1% of the population participating, the BLM protests may have involved well over 5% of the population. That could be literally unprecedented in American history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...rowd-size.html

The protests may also be benefitting from a country that is more conditioned to protesting. The adversarial stance that the Trump administration has taken on issues like guns, climate change and immigration has led to more protests than under any other presidency since the Cold War.

More than 40 percent of counties in the United States — at least 1,360 — have had a protest. Unlike with past Black Lives Matter protests, nearly 95 percent of counties that had a protest recently are majority white, and nearly three-quarters of the counties are more than 75 percent white.

So this is what now, the top 5 protest movements in American history all under Trump?



Vstavaj strana ogromnaja

This is totally wrong. Soviet authotities were interested in separating the USSR from the rest of the world and creating an entirely new society with entirely new ideology, art, literature, science and even language (see Newspeak) that had nothing to do whatsoever with the practices of rotten capitalism. And if any person working in these spheres was spotted bringing in чуждые веяния and преклонения перед Западом he was at best censured and at worst incarcerated or shot.

I'm not even going to pursue whatever equivocation you're engaging in, but the Soviet Union was very much a place where classical history, Italian opera, and Shakespeare were elevated. Aside from their own colonial engagements in the East, everything Russians knew of indigenous peoples of the wider world was filtered through the writings of racist Europeans. The assumptions popularly disseminated a hundred years ago haven't changed that much.

Another example of Western influence:

Since anti-racism was a part of official ideology and party functionaries were acutely alert to any (even imaginary) deviations from it I believe my statement holds.

There is no reason to believe they were acutely alert to deviations from anti-racism even as you would define it (which does not hew to the typical usage).

I don't. I wasn't leaning on excuses. I offered plenty of assumptions why Africa was used in the verse and some of them (or all of them taken together) might have served as a plausible explanation. For you, it is easier to explain it by racism (insulting the Scottish along the way), and get done with it. Yet neither you nor me will get down to the core since it is only Chukovsky himself or the people who were deep in his counsels may offer the answer.

If oral expressions of intent were the only form of communication or learning then we wouldn't have a civilization. Hard to believe a student of literary analysis could say something like that. We can read the words he author wrote and take their meaning both literally and in historical and cultural context.

So American blacks humiliating African blacks is racism? Wouldn't xenophobia be a better fit?

An African American personally bullying a black African as such could be xenophobic, but the derogatory discourse itself around Africa is not something African Americans invented.

And speaking of racism in movies. I can name plenty of films where the main/super hero is white, as well as many movies (often the same) where the archvillain is white. I also can recall a fair number of movies where the good guy is black (Equalizer, Blade, Book of Eli, all of Dwayne Johnson movies - even the black Hercules seemed appropriate to the director), but somehow the archvillain can never be black (the only exception I can think of is Demolition Man). Isn't that racist?

You don't know much about American cinema if you think black villains are uncommon. Even worse if you think there ought to be a racial 'balance' in villains, or that this would preclude or remedy racism. Next tell me what you think of the ways characters are framed.

Why should good policemen be punihsed if they didn't do anything worth condemnation?

Why should good Communists be punished by Ukraine breaking away from USSR if they didn't do anything worth condemnation? Red herring.

If an institution is defective then it will, as I belabor, concertively corrupt someone who was "good" coming in because the actors all work toward the same goals and norms. If these are self-serving and harmful to the general public, then it is impossible to persist within the institution without acceding to and becoming implicated in these practices. Good cops would have intervened against their colleague Chauvin and confidently brought him up for misconduct, rather than acting the cheerful accomplice.

But there is a common track for identifying those who can be reabsorbed or rehabilitated into reconstructed institutions. With police for example, one method that has been used in various times and places is to allow them to reapply for work in the new agencies, submitting to thorough review of their records and heightened recruitment standards. If they don't make the cut, they can't say they weren't given a chance.

You have suggested Black Lives Matter Too so you depriotized black lives yourself putting them on par with other lives. Which I totally agree with.

Your problem is that you defensively interpret "Black Lives Matter" as 'putting blacks above me', but the meaning is quite plain in that 'you are not above blacks'. It's an invitation (especially to complacent whites) to give some attention to the onerous burdens placed on them by a stubbornly-supremacist society. It's really simple.

You consider explaining official Soviet ideology revisionism? Way to go.

Не говори ерунды.

To be branded racist as that NBA announcer and get ostracized?

All Lives Matter is a racist slogan whose universal usage is to disingenuously belittle non-whites. Everyone already agrees that "All Lives Matter." Not everyone agrees that black lives matter as well. This inconsistency is at the heart of racism.

[Papewaio]

The wonder isn't that BLM is protesting and trying to turn society on its ear -- it is their patience for mostly doing so in non-violent manner and with as much respect for the law as they are displaying.

Heard Limbaugh bloviating that BLM was "not about civil rights" but was about marxist "socialism."

I found myself wondering why he thought the latter obviated the former, and thinking to myself "OF COURSE they would turn towards Marxism, it is not as though the current system and the current two parties have done them much of a favor after all."

Was it marxist socialism or cultural socialism that he referred to?