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

[Hooahguy]

I'm not sure its that simple. If he was on his own property there would be a strong self-defense case (at least with the second killing, the first one is murkier) but the undisputed fact is that he, an underage teen who shouldn't have been carrying a weapon in the first place, crossed state lines and killed people. And then went back across state lines after killing two people which may be an added charge. Murder requires intent so it will hinge on whether or not a jury agrees that going to a site of protests with a rifle is intent to kill. Whether or not he had the personal intent to cause violence isnt clear, but at the same time its hard to see going into another state with a rifle as anything but provocative. I do not doubt that the defense will argue that he was being a patriot to protect people and got caught up in the mob but who knows how a jury will see it.

There was another killing in Portland last night, this time an alt-right militia guy who was the victim. This is going to get so much worse before it gets any better.

[Shaka_Khan]

Either way the jury chooses, I'm afraid that there'll be a lot of upset people.

[Pannonian]

I'm not sure its that simple. If he was on his own property there would be a strong self-defense case (at least with the second killing, the first one is murkier) but the undisputed fact is that he, an underage teen who shouldn't have been carrying a weapon in the first place, crossed state lines and killed people. And then went back across state lines after killing two people which may be an added charge. Murder requires intent so it will hinge on whether or not a jury agrees that going to a site of protests with a rifle is intent to kill. Whether or not he had the personal intent to cause violence isnt clear, but at the same time its hard to see going into another state with a rifle as anything but provocative. I do not doubt that the defense will argue that he was being a patriot to protect people and got caught up in the mob but who knows how a jury will see it.

There was another killing in Portland last night, this time an alt-right militia guy who was the victim. This is going to get so much worse before it gets any better.

It's every American's right to go hunting with a rifle. He went out hunting, bagged himself 2 kills, and went home. How much more American can you get? That his prey were fellow Americans is besides the point.

[Montmorency]

Ugh, did I really say traduce when I meant impede?


I posted about this a couple years back, but I sure damn hope it isn't looking increasingly timely/prescient vis-a-vis the mood on particular sectors of the left.

1. At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence. How serious the bourgeois democrats are about an alliance in which the proletariat has equal power and equal rights is demonstrated by the Breslau democrats, who are conducting a furious campaign in their organ, the Neue Oder Zeitung, against independently organized workers, whom they call ‘socialists’. In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier. Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction. During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises – the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.

2. To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.

Replace "bourgeois democrats" with "establishment Democrats," replace "petty bourgeoisie" with "neoliberal" or "PMC," and with a couple tweaks you could repost this as OC in some corners of the Internet.

More on the killing of a Patriot Prayer member in Portland: https://heavy.com/news/2020/08/michael-reinoehl/

Some refreshers on what the Republican Party and their militias have been up to in Oregon lately:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...ill-chaos.html
https://psmag.com/ideas/what-the-ore...-the-far-right

This is to my knowledge the first time one of these militia men has been killed at any protest in however many years or decades, maybe ever. Whether or not it is determined that the killer was a leftist (i.e. Horst Wessel style assassination), I expect militia aggression to escalate. The mainstream Republican embrace of Wisconsin shooter Rittenhouse is a strong indicator.

[Montmorency]

How apt, Pan.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...dment-n1238918

Analysis: [Rittenhouse] attorney plans to argue that the teen was part of a “well regulated Militia” mentioned in the Second Amendment.

It is not about being legitimate or not, it is about the lack of common sense. Protesters demand "law and order and justice", as you say, but by that they mean all these FOR THEMSELVES, and not for those who happened to own shops on a wrong street. If this is "justice for all" why do you attack innocent people's property? They aren't included into all? How are they guilty in the depravity of the police? Do the rioters realize that they alienate people by looting?

Are you talking about your opinion or someone else's opinion? If it's someone else's opinion, then why are you hung up? If it's your opinion, then it matters how you would relate to a more destructive Maidan movement. Explain yourself.

Rioters don't care who they're alienating because they rarely have a political motive in looting. As a subset relation, most rioters are probably supportive of BLM, but few BLM participants and supporters are rioters. This is unsurprising when you consider that BLM, like most mass protest movements, is not a top-down hierarchical organization but a banner and symbol people relate to. BLM can't control people around protest areas; they're not police. Here's an example of an ideological argument in favor of looting. You might be on slightly less-shaky ground if BLM organizers were trying to foment and coordinate violence.

I'm not comfortable with the fact that innocent people's property was targeted on one simple reason - that it was located in a wrong place.

And the idea that civil protests could be held WITHOUT any looting never seems to occur to you.

No, it's exactly that the protests are generally peaceful that should occur to you! Here was the latest big one.

From what I've observed most of the major arson and commercial vandalism takes place at night, whereas most protesters are active by day. If the police have what it takes to physically assault groups in their hundreds and thousands, surely they can cruise around commercial premises on patrols to discourage looting (during those timeframes when sentiment is running hot).

What's grimly funny about it is that in the 1960s the civil rights movement and parallel social unrest was much more violent/militant and much less popular than it is today ("the riot is the language of the unheard" - MLK).

Maybe thinking about it this way will help: When private persons suffer financial or other damages simply because they or their business, workplace, or place of patronage were in the wrong place it is a source of distress or harm to them and it doesn't really help anything. But you seem to be under the incorrect apprehensions that this kind of activity is more widespread and more calculated than it actually is. In reality most of the responsibility falls on government and police for failing to protect the People, from end to end. If someone is alarmed by looting or other disorder or violence, they should presumably have an interest in identifying causes and solutions. It's pretty straightforward, as is captured by the slogan "no justice, no peace." Civil peace is secured by the curing of grievances, not by further repression or dismissal. The fact that police refuse to curtail looting or arson directly buttresses the purported grievances and goals of BLM.

This is one of your ideas that has been ascribed to me but never was voiced or hinted by me.

My two basic frustrations connected with the issue were (and are):
1. One should't be making a saint out of a hardened criminal.
2. Innocent people and their property shouldn't be targeted in a political movement against the authorities.

Floyd's not a saint, he's a victim, as is always the case. No one treats him like a saint. The protesters killed by government forces in Kiev didn't need to be saints to be victims. His family and friends of course have a high opinion of him, as the friends and family of the fascist killed in Portland have for him. From all I've seen Floyd was the better man, but that's beside the point. This sort of police abuse (and if you have such distaste for Floyd you can pick one of the dozens of other well-known names to emphasize) would be unconscionable if it happened to a freaking former death camp commandant.

Most BLM supporters (and there are tens of millions) agree. So you're contradicting yourself. If your support of a cause is independent of its content and context, but dependent on the presence or absence of any property damage, then you just don't support it and never did, which is the operative fact. Exactly as I ascribed.

You seem to be getting worked up. Try to read what I wrote instead of putting YOUR ideas and expectations into MY head. This is what I wrote in post # 206:

if they limit their activities to protecting their families and property, their ideology doens't matter to me. When they start excessive actions, hang them on the lamp posts. Next to looters.

Doesn't seem relevant in the context of people who don't fit that description. I have the measure of your expectations. You think protesters are an inherent threat and favor proactive organized resistance to them. It's what you're actually saying. If that's not representative of your beliefs, try communicating in a way that isn't contrary to them.

And I help but notice your staunch attempts to whitewash (or is the politically correct term blackwash?) marauding. Phrases like "condemn them if you must" or "are you comfortable now" together with emphasizing that it was mostly fancy shops that were plundered suggest that you yourself don't condemn, but justify and even approve of the looting.

I do have at least as much sympathy about losses to small business owners than about fur coats and designer labels, and I think it's bad that more prestigious establishments receive more attention as though they're somehow more valuable (other than in net worth or revenue). That's all.

If you care about incidental damage to businesses but don't care about racism, inequality, and oppression then your moral compass is poorly calibrated. It's more like saying, Soviet soldiers are rapists* so I wish the Nazis could have secured their surrender (logically, their enslavement or annihilation). You can try caring about both. Indeed, it should be very easy to do so when the preservation of one and the other are mutually aligned and furthered! To say it plainly, BLM is anti-riot, Trump and the police are pro-riot. Make your choice.

*Orthogonal: Probably more rapists among Soviet soldiers than among BLM supporters or the American public at large. And at least they had guns, tanks, and planes.

"Those reach

*reech

[Hooahguy]

Speaking of trying to make a sinner out of a victim, this is pretty sinister-

Drug suspect offered July plea deal if he would admit Breonna Taylor part of 'organized crime syndicate'

Jamarcus Glover, the focus of a series of Louisville police raids, including one in which officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, was offered a plea bargain last month if he would say that Taylor was a member of his “organized crime syndicate,” records show.

As part of the July 13 offer, Glover was to acknowledge that over a period of time through April 22 he and several “co-defendants,” including Taylor, engaged in organized crime by trafficking large amounts of drugs “into the Louisville community.”

Glover, a convicted felon with a history of drug trafficking, turned down the plea offer from the Jefferson Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office. It would have resulted in a possible 10-year prison sentence on charges of criminal syndication, drug trafficking and gun charges.

If he had taken the plea, Glover could possibly had been released on probation instead of serving prison time. That decision would have been up to the sentencing judge.

The crime syndicate organization, according to the plea offer obtained by WDRB News, sold drugs mainly from abandoned or vacant houses on Elliott Avenue in the Russell neighborhood.

Taylor lived about 10 miles away in an apartment on Springfield Drive.

[Viking]

But the thing you should keep in mind is that left-wing elements have had very little power to implement their vision, so what you have is a very fragmented intellectual landscape filtered through the symbolic elements mainstream politicians are most willing to coopt. There is no real consensus-making force to create the kind of rigorous standardization you seem to be hinting at, which to a certain degree has probably never been achieved in any context. And ultimately, the problems you adumbrate are the ones we should prefer to have to the ones we do have. No one can afford to wait upon the auspicious advent of the Ultimate Final Solution to X.

I am not asking for the the ultimate solution, but that there is a decent attempt to verify that it is an actual solution.

Why are the failures of state and society to be loaded onto the most marginal, since that's logically what you're pointing to?

Now you seem to be taking a perspective of ethics. What interests me is causality. The thesis is this more or less this: add a typical Western society and mass migration of people from specific non-Western cultures, and you likely get a bad outcome.

It's like chemistry: you don't say that the flammable material or the flame is to blame for the combustion that follows; that's just the result that you get when you put the two near each other.

I'm not aware of any comprehensive national program to uplift minorities in the West, though there might have been something vaguely gesturing at that in the big Communist countries, PRC and USSR

I imagine that in the case of the Soviet Union there would have been a degree of ethnic segregation involved, cf. the ethnic composition of the countries that broke free and the current republics in the Russian Federation.

One of the most powerful in the long-term, at least in terms that aren't strictly material, is school integration (the material component is indirect, in the upgraded services and education non-whites experience). The practical difficulty with this policy is that it is enormously unpopular with white parents, even liberal ones, who in extremity have, and have had, a strong tendency to relocate to evade integration. This is a problem with white parents!

I haven't studied closely what causes ethnic segregation in Europe, but in a 'free' country, people move as they see fit; parents do what they think is best for their children. That's part of the rules of the reality that you are dealing with. If you cannot convince people to break this behaviour, then this particular battle will never be won, and it will not be something you can rely on to advance other goals.

I would say though that those who believe in multiethnic societies and agree with the immigration policy in Europe should be the first to volunteer to stay behind, or move in, and blend. You certainly should not expect people who disagree with the policy to do so, and if you cannot get enough supporters of the policy to do this, that would tell you something.

It's just, you're worried about the nebulous possibility that non-ethnic Swedes will soon both gain enough social power and ethnic animosity toward ethnic Swedes (but not whites in general?) as to distinctly marginalize ethnic Swedes [...] The former future remains a fever dream, while the latter has a definite and ongoing continuation.

The possibility isn't very nebulous, it's basic math combined with observations of common human behaviour.

What percentage of the population in Sweden, and most other European countries, were Muslims just a few decades ago? Close to 0. Now it might be over 8 in Sweden, and if you add in other non-Muslim groups that might be relevant here, you are presumably somewhere above 10%. So from 0% to over 10% in a matter of decades, and no guarantee that the trend is going to stop or reverse anytime soon. Tipping 50% is not very unrealistic, and inter-ethnic violence is commonly found in human societies.

It is not a 'fever dream', it is an outcome of significant probability unless the immigration policy is radically changed, which is precisely what I am campaigning for.

but not very worried about the racism and disadvantages faced by those populations up through the present.

Those issues would not have existed if they or their ancestors had not migrated in the first place. They had their lands, full of people like themselves who would never discriminate against them on this basis. It is a problem that did not need to exist! The whole situation is just pointless.

If racism from ethnic Europeans is the among the greatest issues faced by such individuals today, migrating to the country where their ancestors migrated from would solve that important issue firmly; hardly a single ethnic European around there to bother them. The wealth they have accumulated in Europe might even be enough to propel them right into the upper middle class in their new home country.

I might be more sympathetic to small groups that may be too small or too dispersed to realistically maintain a state of their own, or in cases of ethnic persecution. But even then, the rule of thumb should be that refugees should go to the most culturally similar countries. And regardless of sympathy, at some point you will run into the limits of what is physically possible.

The picture is of course also complicated by the fact that the countries they migrate from often are rather ethnically diverse themselves, but these ethnic groups, naturally, tend to be more closely related to one another than any of them would be to an ethnic group found halfway around the globe.

Ultimately, those are the countries where most of the members of the ethnic groups in question live (or used to); scattering around globally will not strengthen their causes or resolve the issues they face.

What do you mean by "received?" The article conveys that these are legally-valid organizations that receive some sort of payment for "business" from the state, which I assume is in the context of a Swedish educational system where private schools are subsidized by the state. Am I off-base or missing something?

"from the Swedish state" was missing from the sentence. Most of the money was received in the context of education, yes.

Well, not really if one accepts that people deserve to be treated well but don't deserve to be mistreated.

Deserve to be treated well, but not to be treated to anything. At some point the favour done is greater than what could be expected or demanded - obviously dependent on the cultural and ethical framework applied. In my book, the treatment discussed here very much goes beyond what can be expected.

1. States have very limited inherent authority to traduce the external and internal movement of people, because people have a natural right not to be traduced in their movements.

Moving around the world is not that hard; settling is a different matter.

if one accepts the fundamental equality of persons then they are almost irrefutable

People don't see everyone as equal - there are some people they would invite for coffee (friends), and others they are not immediately inclined to (strangers). A similar argument shouldn't be too hard to make on a national level.

I don't think this concept of equality is compatible with humans. It might have a value as an aspiration, particularly when it comes to governance and law, and other professional settings. When taken literally or near-literally in many other contexts, I think it could quickly do more harm than good.

While "work well" is a load-bearing phrase here with indefinite meaning, I would say that in our world it will not be possible to achieve an additive effect of 'countries that solved all their problems unite to do even better'; I don't know whether it is possible or available, but for countries to improve or even maintain their existing positives and advantages, they will have to take a leap and cooperate synergistically

To me it seems like you are advocating literal bootstrapping. That a from something bad, something good should emerge. That a commission with active criminals in important roles should deliver on ending crime.

I think that all democratic countries need to do, is to survive. Dictatorships have two serious flaws in their fundament: a predisposition for popular revolts, and the transition of power. Both frequently provide the opportunity for a transition to democracy, and sooner or later, democracy is likely to stick.

Per the response to some of the previous excerpts, consider how many simultaneous and overlapping civilizational crises and upheavals we face. Inequality and oligarchy, fascism, climate change, cultural change... - to say nothing of unique national issues. No one country has the luxury of simply resolving these sequentially and then moving on to other concerns, no more than a human being has a chance of 'perfecting their own private life' before engaging with their community.

I am not arguing against continuing international co-operation.

You've been saying that for a decade, that heterogeneity creates an unacceptable level of friction, and therefore homogeneity is the top priority, but I continue to reject that as in practice both naive and immoral. The core of Reaction is not opposition to external difference but internal difference; no one is safe. And to the extent, as you would retort, Reaction is empowered by ethnic flux, this would seem to be a short-term phenomenon. Rising generations of more diverse populations appear better placed to resist Reaction. (It will be interesting to compare South Korea and Japan to Europe in 20 years now that they've opened themselves to immigration.)

Meanwhile, the US has not only elected a charlatan brazen to the point of inanity to the office of president, he also stands a realistic chance of re-election. Hungary may or may not be on the path to a dictatorship, but I don't think it can be said that it has sunk quite that low in its choice of prime minister as the US has in its choice of president.

If we revisit the US in 20-30 years time, my prediction is that the US will still be a troubled country; finding itself in a situation comparable to, or worse, than where it is today - and that it is independent of Trump losing or winning the upcoming election. Hungary, on the other hand, might be on the mend, with Orban out of the office.

As I've sometimes pointed out, no - it is exactly the failure of democracy in many places throughout the world over the past generation that should be deeply alarming to all of us in so-called "mature" democracies, because the human limitation is a universal one and manifests everywhere. The past five years should really amply demonstrate this point, don't you think, the inherent fragility of rooted institutions (that typically have only really been that rooted for 20, 50, 100 years at most)? Liberal democracy is not an achievement but a permanent struggle, a tenuous order under siege from its enemies, analogous to the fictional conflict between Jedi and Sith in surprising ways. Even though it is consistently shown that most modern humans want some level of democracy in their lives, democracy is difficult to establish, difficult to maintain, and easy to subvert.

I am not immediately aware of any modern state transitioning from democracy to dictatorship that had a relatively well-functioning democracy for more than a human lifespan.

If we take Germany as an example, and if we for the sake of the argument say that the German Empire was decently democratic by the standards of that time (which I presume it was not), then from the empire's inception in 1871 to Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, 62 years had passed.

On the other hand, if you count only from the inception of the Weimar Republic in 1918 (which might almost be equally justifiable), then only 15 years had passed. Add the fact that a united German territory or state didn't exist until the inception of the German Empire, the combination of a relatively new state (with the Weimar Republic at one point replacing the empire, to shake up things even more), the foundation for democracy in Germany was weak, and so the transition to a dictatorship became all the more probable (i.e. it didn't have to be Hitler, it could have been royalists or communists, or someone else).

What do you think of the essay I linked?

I've only skimmed it, but I see that I take issue with its fundament:

The inhabitants of a political community are more like strangers who find themselves locked in a very large room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association united in pursuit of a common purpose. They are not co-members of some potentially evolutionarily fundamental unit of human society, like the band or tribe of 50-500 persons. They are not what nationalists falsely claim co-nationals to be: members of some pre- or extrapolitical social whole that can make its will felt through politics, some social soul that wears the state as a body. They are not the particular subset of humanity united by allegiance to some particular political ideal, at any level of abstraction; even if most people had sufficient political knowledge and sufficiently coherent views to qualify as holding an ideal, polities contain perennial diversity of such ideals, and many political values and norms find adherents across international boundaries.

This in on a spectrum - living on the countryside is different from living in a city. In the same respect - social cohesion - living in a city of a 100 000 might also be significantly different from living in a city of 10 million. Then add in ethnicities co-residing. And the dominant culture (if any) of a country, and how it contributes to the concept of kinship in society. It's a subject worthy of a chapter itself.

When it comes to the talk about the "city of God, this is a perspective I would find equally useful at an international level, with countries as metaphorical individuals.

[Gilrandir]

Are you talking about your opinion or someone else's opinion? If it's someone else's opinion, then why are you hung up? If it's your opinion, then it matters how you would relate to a more destructive Maidan movement. Explain yourself.

You don't seem to have been reading carefully what I wrote. I spoke not of destructive or non-destructive public protests (including Maidan), but of destruction/violence aimed at the authorities vs innocent fellow citizens. In this the current BLM protests/riots differ from the ones I mentioned.

Rioters don't care who they're alienating because they rarely have a political motive in looting. As a subset relation, most rioters are probably supportive of BLM, but few BLM participants and supporters are rioters. This is unsurprising when you consider that BLM, like most mass protest movements, is not a top-down hierarchical organization but a banner and symbol people relate to. BLM can't control people around protest areas; they're not police. Here's an example of an ideological argument in favor of looting. You might be on slightly less-shaky ground if BLM organizers were trying to foment and coordinate violence.

To say it plainly, BLM is anti-riot

Then why don't BLM say openly that they have nothing to do with the riots and call to the police to stop riots even using force? Because I have an impression that if the police try to use force against rioters BLM would strongly criticize it.

Doesn't seem relevant in the context of people who don't fit that description.

It is alwasy the story with you. Whenever an unsavory fact surfaces it somehow is irrelevant.

You think protesters are an inherent threat and favor proactive organized resistance to them. It's what you're actually saying. If that's not representative of your beliefs, try communicating in a way that isn't contrary to them.

NFAC are a threat, in my view. As well as riots. As long as protest are peaceful it's fine. But since one can hardly say when protests will turn into riots, it is natural to be cautious about them.

If you care about incidental damage to businesses but don't care about racism, inequality, and oppression then your moral compass is poorly calibrated.

My compass says both are bad. You seem to be of an opinion that the damage is the price you have to willingly pay to stop racism and oppression so why go on squealing about such petty things.

BLM is anti-riot, Trump and the police are pro-riot. Make your choice.

My choice is the absence of riots. And forwarding political agenda without hurting the innocent. Putting myself into the shoes of those who suffered damage I would say that it doesn't matter how it is achieved. Whether BLM representatives reason with rioters or the police forcefully stop them - I want to feel safe and suffer no losses.


By the way, watched ALL episodes of the travel show we have discussed where the blondes toured Africa. Nowhere - NOWHERE - in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Botswana and some other countries I don't remember - there happened any assaults at them. On the contrary, locals are presented as friendly people who are ready to host tourists. So definitely your conlusion that Africa was intentionally presented as a dangerous place by staging up the Johannesburg episode is fallacious. Being rasist the show would have featured such assaults at least in more locations than one.

[ReluctantSamurai]

My choice is the absence of riots.

You can say that because the color of your skin is white.

[Gilrandir]

You can say that because the color of your skin is white.

So you mean that if I were black I would enjoy rioting?

[ReluctantSamurai]

So you mean that if I were black I would enjoy rioting?

Question---do you know, or have any friends who are POC? I'm not asking this to be flippant. The answer goes to understanding why POC riot (and no, I do not condone violent protesting).

[CrossLOPER]

So you mean that if I were black I would enjoy rioting?

He means that your view of "public order" in relation to tradeoffs would be different if you were black in the US.

[Pannonian]

He means that your view of "public order" in relation to tradeoffs would be different if you were black in the US.

Eg. If you're white you'll probably see the police as the maintainers of law and order. If you're black you may well see the police as an unaccountable life-threatening force. What BLM has done is highlighted the validity of the second view.

[Gilrandir]

Question---do you know, or have any friends who are POC? I'm not asking this to be flippant. The answer goes to understanding why POC riot (and no, I do not condone violent protesting).

Eg. If you're white you'll probably see the police as the maintainers of law and order. If you're black you may well see the police as an unaccountable life-threatening force. What BLM has done is highlighted the validity of the second view.

It doesn't matter what friends I have or how black people view the police. If riot is aimed against innocent people and their property I am totally against it. If protesters have issues with authorities/police they should attack police precincts, town halls, and any other administrative buildings. Otherwise it is picking the target that can't defend itself and has nothing to do with racism or police brutality. I'm surprised that I have to explain such basics to people.

[rory_20_uk]

It doesn't matter what friends I have or how black people view the police. If riot is aimed against innocent people and their property I am totally against it. If protesters have issues with authorities/police they should attack police precincts, town halls, and any other administrative buildings. Otherwise it is picking the target that can't defend itself and has nothing to do with racism or police brutality. I'm surprised that I have to explain such basics to people.

In an ideal world where everyone acts rationally then yes... of course. Look at all the Uprisings in Eastern Europe. They certainly were not solely aimed at the apparatus of the state (although I suppose everything was indirectly owned by the state) but it was eventually these protests and uprisings that changed things.

The British left India not so much due to the peaceful protest but over the upset of the Indian Army and concerns they might not follow the orders of the British officers.

And even when protesters have no intent of damaging other people's property, others can and do join with exactly that aim in mind - be that gun toting rednecks or bog standard looters.

[ReluctantSamurai]

It doesn't matter what friends I have or how black people view the police. If riot is aimed against innocent people and their property I am totally against it.

Actually, it does. For someone whose skin color is white you can grasp intellectually what POC experience, but you can never feel the pain. Reading about it is one thing, but to talk to someone who's been there and see the far away look they get in their eyes as they relate past experinces, and then then the anger that spreads across their face, is another. I doubt anyone here is condoning violence against private property and innocent people. Decades of racism and repression, combined with all the additional stress brought on by the pandemic and the resulting economy crash, can be just too much for some. The anger boils over and it's easier to lash out then to kneel and pray.

I'm surprised that I have to explain such basics to people.

You need to get down off of your high horse and walk a mile in a black person's shoes, to use a very old saying. To sit in your comfortable home and decry rioting and bloviate about how POC should act is simply arrogance without experience.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Humans are not entirely rational decision makers.

In a purely rational decision-making model, the rioting and destruction/violence associated with it should not factor in at all. After all, the shops and such being destroyed are local in most cases, further damaging a community that already is facing economic hardship -- one of the hardships engendering the protest/riot in the first place.

In a purely rational decision-making model, the protesters themselves would call the authorities to have them stop and arrest those who are not protesting but looting and vandalizing while they themselves remain peaceful, using appropriate civil unrest aimed strictly at government and other authorities deemed to be part of the oppression. That has probably even happened a time or two.

But emotions run high and anger makes violence seem a viable choice, police worry that intervening will make things worse or get them trapped by a mob, people assume that someone else should be taking care of it...
And yes, some folks take the excuse of a large protest to loot and pillage when they believe they will face no consequences. Often, they are correct as to pursue and stop the looters would end up including scads of legitimate protesters in police-enacted violence aimed at the looters. Rational choices are not always made.

Furthermore, on a macro level that many of the protesters might not even be able to voice, the shops etc. being looted are a PART of the overall socioeconomic system which appears to be designed to hold them back, marginalize them, and render their very lives at greater risk then some other person living two zipcodes West. If you feel that the entirety of the extent system is robbing you of your chances in life and threatening you, I would imagine it is a bit more difficult to remind yourself that, rationally, the looting and destruction will not of itself accomplish your objectives.

So is it wrong? YES. Should it be stopped? YES. Is it appropriate to line up the jackboots and impose order? Probably not, because the order imposed will only re-engender the same problem unless you want a police state forever.

[Gilrandir]

You need to get down off of your high horse and walk a mile in a black person's shoes, to use a very old saying. To sit in your comfortable home and decry rioting and bloviate about how POC should act is simply arrogance without experience.

You don't need experience, just a moral compass, to see right from wrong. As Aragorn put it, 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.'
Whatever emotions the rioters and looters have (if it's not simple greed) they don't justify what they do - hurting the innocent. If you get a message from IRS that you still owe the state a thousand dollars and are angered, would you go setting afire your neighbors' houses? And if BLM doesn't mind what happens "under their auspices" it hurts their reputation of justice-seekers.

[Gilrandir]

Humans are not entirely rational decision makers.

In a purely rational decision-making model, the rioting and destruction/violence associated with it should not factor in at all. After all, the shops and such being destroyed are local in most cases, further damaging a community that already is facing economic hardship -- one of the hardships engendering the protest/riot in the first place.

In a purely rational decision-making model, the protesters themselves would call the authorities to have them stop and arrest those who are not protesting but looting and vandalizing while they themselves remain peaceful, using appropriate civil unrest aimed strictly at government and other authorities deemed to be part of the oppression. That has probably even happened a time or two.

But emotions run high and anger makes violence seem a viable choice, police worry that intervening will make things worse or get them trapped by a mob, people assume that someone else should be taking care of it...
And yes, some folks take the excuse of a large protest to loot and pillage when they believe they will face no consequences. Often, they are correct as to pursue and stop the looters would end up including scads of legitimate protesters in police-enacted violence aimed at the looters. Rational choices are not always made.

Furthermore, on a macro level that many of the protesters might not even be able to voice, the shops etc. being looted are a PART of the overall socioeconomic system which appears to be designed to hold them back, marginalize them, and render their very lives at greater risk then some other person living two zipcodes West. If you feel that the entirety of the extent system is robbing you of your chances in life and threatening you, I would imagine it is a bit more difficult to remind yourself that, rationally, the looting and destruction will not of itself accomplish your objectives.

So is it wrong? YES. Should it be stopped? YES. Is it appropriate to line up the jackboots and impose order? Probably not, because the order imposed will only re-engender the same problem unless you want a police state forever.

This is all very judicious, but non-violent (or at least, those that don't target thrid party agents) protests aren't that rare now or in the past. I gave a whole list of examples, and in the USA MLK succeeded in it. I don't believe the grudge of BLM today is greater than the protesters of the 1960s, or other political movements throughout the world.

[ReluctantSamurai]

And if BLM doesn't mind what happens "under their auspices" it hurts their reputation of justice-seekers.

You do realize the the vast majority of BLM protests are peaceful---by a wide margin. Of course those get little to no media coverage because it's muuuuch better for ratings to see protesters framed against a backdrop of burning buildings. Protesters tried to intervene in Kenosha, and two died as a result. Of course scenes like these go completely under the radar:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/us/cl...rnd/index.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-...shire-52964509

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/u...s-cleanup.html

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...y-george-floyd

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/...193014397.html

Then of course, not all the rioters are part of the BLM movement:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/...-right-antifa/

But while the White House beat the drum for a crackdown on a leaderless movement on the left, law enforcement offices across the country were sharing detailed reports of far-right extremists seeking to attack the protesters and police during the country’s historic demonstrations, a trove of newly leaked documents reveals.

[...] the impulse to paint both sides of the political spectrum with the same brush, despite the fact that only the far right is actively killing people, is among the most dangerous features of modern American law enforcement. In his review of the documents produced in response to the recent protests, German said purported “threats” from antifa were routinely overblown, often framed vandalism as terrorism and were typically absent of concrete evidence of serious criminal activity.

Yet the leaked materials show that on May 29, two days before Trump tweeted that antifa would be labeled a terrorist organization and Barr issued his DOJ statement, the president’s own DHS analysts issued an open source intelligence report detailing how a white supremacist channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, was encouraging followers to capitalize on the unrest by targeting the police with Molotov cocktails and firearms.

While a variety of groups had been linked to the unrest, the FBI noted that “much of the violence and vandalism is perpetrated by opportunistic, individual actors acting without specific direction.” Nonetheless, the bureau would “continue to aggressively … seek to corroborate whether or not there is in fact an organized effort to incite violence by either known criminal groups or domestic violent extremists,” which apparently included running down “uncorroborated intelligence about alleged participation of Venezuelan and Nicaraguan socialist groups.”

“This is a case where there is a long casualty list carried out by the white power movement, which has declared war against the country,” she said. “And there is, I think, a quite localized social movement of people who oppose it, but who have not attacked civilians, who have not attacked infrastructure, who have not attempted to overthrow the country.”

Of course there are BLM protesters who promote violence and rioting, but they are far outnumbered by what the radical right-wingers are doing.

The case of these two dudes happened two days ago:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edwi/pr...earms-offenses

As alleged in the criminal complaint, on September 1, 2020, the Kenosha Police Department advised FBI that a law enforcement agency in Iowa had received a tip that Karmo and an unidentified male were in possession of firearms and traveling from Missouri to Kenosha, Wisconsin. FBI agents subsequently located and detained Karmo and Smith at a hotel in Pleasant Prairie, which is located near Kenosha. After receiving consent to search Karmo and Smith’s vehicle and hotel room, FBI agents recovered an Armory AR-15 assault rifle, a Mossberg 500 AB 12-Gauge shotgun, two handguns, a silencer, ammunition, body armor, a drone, and other materials. Karmo has prior felony convictions. Smith has a prior misdemeanor domestic battery conviction and acknowledged regular drug use. Consequently, both Karmo and Smith were prohibited from possessing firearms and ammunition on September 1, 2020.

You don't need experience, just a moral compass, to see right from wrong.

You are beating a dead horse there. Noone is claiming rioting is right...it's not. But you do need experience to understand why protests can become violent, and in understanding the why, you can try to address the causes.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

This is all very judicious, but non-violent (or at least, those that don't target thrid party agents) protests aren't that rare now or in the past. I gave a whole list of examples, and in the USA MLK succeeded in it. I don't believe the grudge of BLM today is greater than the protesters of the 1960s, or other political movements throughout the world.

It is not greater, it is a continuance.

[Gilrandir]

But you do need experience to understand why protests can become violent, and in understanding the why, you can try to address the causes.

My experience tells me that protests CAN be held without targeting the innocent, and I gave multiple examples where they were and are like that. I don't buy the argument that the current ones in the USA are somehow unique so one should condone rioting as a natural part of them.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I don't buy the argument that the current ones in the USA are somehow unique so one should condone rioting as a natural part of them.

Don't recall anyone saying riots in the US are 'unique'. Tone deaf to the POC experience, I guess I don't condone rioting or hurting innocent people, and neither do the vast majority of BLM supporters. You have a bone to pick with BLM, so go ahead and gnaw at it.

[Gilrandir]

Don't recall anyone saying riots in the US are 'unique'. Tone deaf to the POC experience, I guess I don't condone rioting or hurting innocent people, and neither do the vast majority of BLM supporters. You have a bone to pick with BLM, so go ahead and gnaw at it.

You vehemently defend BLM and when I upbraid them for not disowning rioters, you send me to argue with abstract them. A very convenient and consistent position like:
- They are good guys!
- But they don't say they have nothing to do with the bad guys!
- Go and tell them that! But they are good guys!

[Montmorency]

Years ago, in the early days of BLM, I used to think that at least American police were much less corrupt in ways petty or grand than in some other countries.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v...courtesy-cards

On the LASD, one of the world's largest police departments and one of the major police force's for the Los Angeles area, being overrun with criminal gangs (not that I want to make too much of a distinction between overrun by criminal gangs and being a criminal gang in itself).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...g-problem.html


I found this bit remarkable from one older summary of events surrounding the Rittenhouse incident in Kenosha:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...inal-complaint

Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth could not explain in a press conference Wednesday why police did not detain Rittenhouse then, saying officers have "incredible tunnel vision" in those situations because of the noise.

What's amusing is that tunnel vision or hearing (I forget the term) during action is a real phenomenon, but not one police officers ever seem to accommodate in the people they confront. And of course, it should be noted that the police on the scene were just parked around or slowly cruising in armored vehicles in a calm spot, surrounded by massive backup. So if we can imagine police in those conditions were having an extreme physiological response, what must it be like for a normal human surrounded by a contingent of screaming, hulking, armed police?

In what is surely a very swell development, the feds have killed Reinoehl (suspect/confessor in the killing of the militiaman in Portland) while moving in to arrest him. Apparently no body cams.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/us/po...ler/index.html
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/...245487235.html

You don't seem to have been reading carefully what I wrote. I spoke not of destructive or non-destructive public protests (including Maidan), but of destruction/violence aimed at the authorities vs innocent fellow citizens. In this the current BLM protests/riots differ from the ones I mentioned.

So why didn't you answer when I asked about this with regard to Maidan? Did you support the removal of the Yanukovych government? If so, you would no longer have endorsed that objective had there been, to your knowledge, any private property damage? If not, why not? If so, why is a revolutionary overthrow of government without apparent property damage more legitimate than a protest against police abuse with any such damage?

Then why don't BLM say openly that they have nothing to do with the riots and call to the police to stop riots even using force? Because I have an impression that if the police try to use force against rioters BLM would strongly criticize it.

BLM is not a centralized organization, but you can look up any number of its member-activists disclaiming rioting and looting. Others might have tactical disagreements. At any rate, even with total unity of mind it would be impossible for a few hundred organizers to regulate 20 million protesters.

Why would someone supporting BLM want police to "use force" to stop rioters? Leaving aside that rioting can best be prevented without force, leaving aside that it is generally unacceptable to apply violence to persons to prevent violence to inert objects, they don't trust the police!! And for good reason, as you should grasp by now. Why would they invite police violence in the name of appeasing the least-sympathetic whites? I mean wow, you don't accept that black people could self-organize to stop the police with force, yet those efforts would be more socially-productive.

It is alwasy the story with you. Whenever an unsavory fact surfaces it somehow is irrelevant.

Maybe because it isn't, as I am constantly left to take the time to explain. It's annoying that basically every time you decline to defend your position, as though you don't feel the need to. I reasonably get the sense don't care about black lives under any circumstances and wish they would stop making a fuss, but why should someone respect that? It's not self-evident.

NFAC are a threat, in my view.

Why? A threat to whom? I would rather take my chances among NFAC than among the Azov Battalion (who would certainly be the type to be brutalizing American protesters).

But since one can hardly say when protests will turn into riots, it is natural to be cautious about them.

Seems to be fairly predictable. When police attack or surround protesters, rioting is likely. When you see a loose group assembled in an otherwise-deserted area off the main streets, rioting is likely. If you see geared or heavily disguised people capering at night, rioting is likely. Caution is a function of situational awareness on the scene.

My compass says both are bad.

Your words don't comport with your compass. You have never deigned to criticize racism in these pages, though you have strenuously denied or diminished it as a problem.

Let's submit arguendo that BLM protests are 'overrun' with violent criminals. In light of the fact that police institutions across the country are themselves overrun with violent criminals, and your ostensible moral compass that rejects both, and emphasizing that all else being equal a single criminal among the government executive is considerably more damaging to society than a private citizen, how could an orientation towards condemning the former while shielding the latter be counted as anything other than a betrayal of the postulated moral compass?

And that's all in the most nightmarish scenario of BLM. The disparate consideration becomes even less defensible against the reality.

You seem to be of an opinion that the damage is the price you have to willingly pay to stop racism and oppression so why go on squealing about such petty things.

Damage is the price black people pay living in a racist society. Damage is the price a racist society pays for refusing to reform itself. These are linked.



But you are at best indifferent to the latter whereas you are willing to use force at the hint of the former. Example 101 of where your consideration lies. Aspire to heal and prevent damage instead of framing a zero-sum struggle.

My choice is the absence of riots.

"No justice, no peace" is an old observation. In what sense is your choice - What exactly are you choosing that is available to choose? Can I choose to have superpowers or to be king of the world? - the absence of riots at all? If that were the object you would have to assess how to achieve the status of the absence of riots over baldly asserting its favorability.

And forwarding political agenda without hurting the innocent.

No political agenda has ever advanced without a cost, and yet your implicit standard is that the status quo that hurts innocents must always remain extant in case the effort to change it chances to hurt innocents. It's perverted in the Kafkian way, and furthermore it's spurious garbage that no one believes. If you believed such a platitude as "forwarding a political agenda without hurting the innocent" you would have to condemn Ukraine's secession from the USSR for its disruptiveness. Even worse, it could be used to argue that it would have been better for African-Americans to remain enslaved in perpetuity rather than generate a scenario in which someone got hurt (beyond the daily slings of bondage) in the process of emancipation. It renders unimportant the abuses of the most powerful, while inflating those of the least powerful. In reality what everyone attempts to do is apply their values to a given situation, assess the causalities, and weigh costs and benefits. What do you propose be done about the government hurting the innocent? If the answer is nothing, then it's just that you disagree with this specific political agenda at its root, which disagreement you would then have to justify.

I prefer to achieve the most benefit and least harm, and one auspiciously reinforces the other here. You cannot claim to want innocents preserved if you advocate for things that indisputably harm innocents, it's just an obvious inconsistency (or fig leaf). It's like one declaring in favor of Trump over Biden because if Biden is elected, someone somewhere could die as a result. Or, more to the topic, like when 19th century white supremacists argued that 'the black race' was naturally indisposed to freedom and self-governance and so had to be controlled for their own good, yet some of the same people - later on, post-emancipation - argued that investment in black rights or material status was illegitimate as an usurpation of black freedom.

Putting myself into the shoes of those who suffered damage I would say that it doesn't matter how it is achieved. Whether BLM representatives reason with rioters or the police forcefully stop them - I want to feel safe and suffer no losses.

Try putting yourself in the shoes of black people, who might also want to feel safe and suffer no losses. Your display of total disregard of the validity of Black grievances, in its lack of imagination, is like the mirror image of the philosophy of the NFAC people. They might say the same thing as the quoted verbatim from their perspective, with the adjustment of "Whether BLM representatives reason with rioters or the police forcefully stop them" to "Whether whites reform themselves or the government accepts separatism." Meanwhile, I note, they're still suffering for their innate traits, while from your keyboard you are - not.

Please rank the following in order of your preference as potential means to stopping or preventing rioting, with the grant that "it doesn't matter how it is achieved":

*Repeal and replace police
*Ethnic cleansing
*Wait for energies to dissipate
*$1 trillion in reparations

By the way, watched ALL episodes of the travel show we have discussed where the blondes toured Africa. Nowhere - NOWHERE - in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Botswana and some other countries I don't remember - there happened any assaults at them. On the contrary, locals are presented as friendly people who are ready to host tourists. So definitely your conlusion that Africa was intentionally presented as a dangerous place by staging up the Johannesburg episode is fallacious. Being rasist the show would have featured such assaults at least in more locations than one.

Totally illogical, here and in abstract toward any application. Refer to the description of the start of the episode for its racist presentation and priming. The altercation was staged (not to say that spontaneous events are otherwise unscripted in reality TV). What happens in the rest of the show is not only irrelevant to the one episode, it is an absurd standard to establish that every episode would have to have the same racist content for that content to be racist in a single episode, just as we could reject the suggestion that a Klan lyncher cannot be racist on account of all the days he doesn't go about lynching. Ultimately it was you who tried to use the video as evidence for your insistence on African criminality. You did that. Not the show, you.

This is all very judicious, but non-violent (or at least, those that don't target thrid party agents) protests aren't that rare now or in the past. I gave a whole list of examples, and in the USA MLK succeeded in it. I don't believe the grudge of BLM today is greater than the protesters of the 1960s, or other political movements throughout the world.

You don't know much about MLK or the civil rights movement. Which is fine given that you're not American, but you should know that your glib designation of priorities goes against everything King stood for. He saw your sort of white as one of the foremost hindrances to black advancement. That is why, in his time, MLK had marginally more white approval than abolishing police does now.
http://gsjhr.ms.ds.iscte.pt/2017-18/...l%20Rights.pdf
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/...81315023403-14

The 1960s civil rights era was much more violent than this one, and in contrast with the present many of its most prominent leaders were quite famous for advocating violence, separatism, or militant self-organization.

My experience tells me that protests CAN be held without targeting the innocent,

And so they are! But if you're returning to demanding a perfectly-domesticate mass movement, let it be known that this rhetoric is malicious or hostile 100% of the time as no examples of such movements exist at scale, nor could they.


Here's what it comes down to. Do you accept that racism is pervasive and bad? Do you accept that police, for example, need systemic and systematic reform? If all that is agreeable, then the nature of the conflict is much narrowed. But there hasn't been much indication that these are shared premises. When black people and allies demand accountability for the violent criminality of the police, I watched you wave the substance aside and emphasize your offense at the aesthetics of the movement. When there's any private property destruction in the course of public mobilization, you accord it full salience on the other hand. When, in all this, you needlessly set the absence of rioting and the presence of activism against each other as though incompatible, you should perceive how you appear to reveal your priority to be the suppression of civil rights. Instead of asking the question of how to secure justice for everyone, you've asked us to accept that the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier a single whole window is worth more than any depth or quantity of human suffering. That is, you invite a dilemma that is unsound in its construction, yet independent of truth-value the imbalance on your terms is so evident that one ought to interrogate themselves as to how they produced it.

Whatever emotions the rioters and looters have (if it's not simple greed) they don't justify what they do

Bottom line: Can you or can you not maintain that thought while affirming the need for sociopolitical change in the direction heralded by B. Not once in this thread have I asked you to uphold militant tactics, but I do expect a baseline on problems and solutions. If you can't meet that low level of regard, then you make yourself an obstacle to justice and the reference point of those who do demand militant direct action and thereby deny everyone's stated interests in reality, including your own. Tell me that black lives aren't worth less than others and that something should be done to realize that, and I can see to cosigning a condemnation of rioting.

Question---do you know, or have any friends who are POC? I'm not asking this to be flippant. The answer goes to understanding why POC riot (and no, I do not condone violent protesting).

For the record - though it's impossible to compile a detailed breakdown, arrest records and mobile videos are some support for the observation - plenty of white people are included among looters. I doubt they're all or mostly ideological (anarchists), but it is whatever it is.



I predict Gil keeps on railing that chicken, but all in all he is at least not much worse on this issue than the median white, as a conversation I recently spectated serves to remind us. Some highlights:

1. The scene (previously embedded in thread) in National Lampoon's Vacation where the family drives into the ghetto and gets their hubcaps lifted by hostile natives is true life and an example of why it is dangerous to go anywhere near black people.
2. Democrats won't win the election because Trump has bikers and other people with guns on his side.
3. The American nation is suicidal ("kamikaze") for empowering non-whites.
4. Young people today are too readily exposed to people of different races, which allows them to see each other as not bad people and increases white sympathy for and awareness of the inequalities confronting black Americans. This is harmful brainwashing.
5. Actually no, no one genuinely feels anything for black lives because blacks are trash. (Incidentally, South Asians are dirty cockroaches who should be sterilized.)

It's hard to match the open Nazi depravity of that sort of value system. However, the same fixated belief in widespread riots is present as here, and it clearly has a pernicious influence. Such as in the shared anxiety about rioters traveling about to target YOUR neighborhood and make YOU unsafe, which just doesn't happen (meanwhile, violent right-wing agitators are constantly invading city streets from their suburbs, exurbs, and rural holdings).

[Gilrandir]

Years ago, in the early days of BLM, I used to think that at least American police were much less corrupt in ways petty or grand than in some other countries.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v...courtesy-cards

On the LASD, one of the world's largest police departments and one of the major police force's for the Los Angeles area, being overrun with criminal gangs (not that I want to make too much of a distinction between overrun by criminal gangs and being a criminal gang in itself).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...g-problem.html


I found this bit remarkable from one older summary of events surrounding the Rittenhouse incident in Kenosha:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...inal-complaint



What's amusing is that tunnel vision or hearing (I forget the term) during action is a real phenomenon, but not one police officers ever seem to accommodate in the people they confront. And of course, it should be noted that the police on the scene were just parked around or slowly cruising in armored vehicles in a calm spot, surrounded by massive backup. So if we can imagine police in those conditions were having an extreme physiological response, what must it be like for a normal human surrounded by a contingent of screaming, hulking, armed police?

In what is surely a very swell development, the feds have killed Reinoehl (suspect/confessor in the killing of the militiaman in Portland) while moving in to arrest him. Apparently no body cams.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/us/po...ler/index.html
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/...245487235.html




So why didn't you answer when I asked about this with regard to Maidan? Did you support the removal of the Yanukovych government? If so, you would no longer have endorsed that objective had there been, to your knowledge, any private property damage? If not, why not? If so, why is a revolutionary overthrow of government without apparent property damage more legitimate than a protest against police abuse with any such damage?



BLM is not a centralized organization, but you can look up any number of its member-activists disclaiming rioting and looting. Others might have tactical disagreements. At any rate, even with total unity of mind it would be impossible for a few hundred organizers to regulate 20 million protesters.

Why would someone supporting BLM want police to "use force" to stop rioters? Leaving aside that rioting can best be prevented without force, leaving aside that it is generally unacceptable to apply violence to persons to prevent violence to inert objects, they don't trust the police!! And for good reason, as you should grasp by now. Why would they invite police violence in the name of appeasing the least-sympathetic whites? I mean wow, you don't accept that black people could self-organize to stop the police with force, yet those efforts would be more socially-productive.



Maybe because it isn't, as I am constantly left to take the time to explain. It's annoying that basically every time you decline to defend your position, as though you don't feel the need to. I reasonably get the sense don't care about black lives under any circumstances and wish they would stop making a fuss, but why should someone respect that? It's not self-evident.



Why? A threat to whom? I would rather take my chances among NFAC than among the Azov Battalion (who would certainly be the type to be brutalizing American protesters).



Seems to be fairly predictable. When police attack or surround protesters, rioting is likely. When you see a loose group assembled in an otherwise-deserted area off the main streets, rioting is likely. If you see geared or heavily disguised people capering at night, rioting is likely. Caution is a function of situational awareness on the scene.



Your words don't comport with your compass. You have never deigned to criticize racism in these pages, though you have strenuously denied or diminished it as a problem.

Let's submit arguendo that BLM protests are 'overrun' with violent criminals. In light of the fact that police institutions across the country are themselves overrun with violent criminals, and your ostensible moral compass that rejects both, and emphasizing that all else being equal a single criminal among the government executive is considerably more damaging to society than a private citizen, how could an orientation towards condemning the former while shielding the latter be counted as anything other than a betrayal of the postulated moral compass?

And that's all in the most nightmarish scenario of BLM. The disparate consideration becomes even less defensible against the reality.



Damage is the price black people pay living in a racist society. Damage is the price a racist society pays for refusing to reform itself. These are linked.



But you are at best indifferent to the latter whereas you are willing to use force at the hint of the former. Example 101 of where your consideration lies. Aspire to heal and prevent damage instead of framing a zero-sum struggle.



"No justice, no peace" is an old observation. In what sense is your choice - What exactly are you choosing that is available to choose? Can I choose to have superpowers or to be king of the world? - the absence of riots at all? If that were the object you would have to assess how to achieve the status of the absence of riots over baldly asserting its favorability.



No political agenda has ever advanced without a cost, and yet your implicit standard is that the status quo that hurts innocents must always remain extant in case the effort to change it chances to hurt innocents. It's perverted in the Kafkian way, and furthermore it's spurious garbage that no one believes. If you believed such a platitude as "forwarding a political agenda without hurting the innocent" you would have to condemn Ukraine's secession from the USSR for its disruptiveness. Even worse, it could be used to argue that it would have been better for African-Americans to remain enslaved in perpetuity rather than generate a scenario in which someone got hurt (beyond the daily slings of bondage) in the process of emancipation. It renders unimportant the abuses of the most powerful, while inflating those of the least powerful. In reality what everyone attempts to do is apply their values to a given situation, assess the causalities, and weigh costs and benefits. What do you propose be done about the government hurting the innocent? If the answer is nothing, then it's just that you disagree with this specific political agenda at its root, which disagreement you would then have to justify.

I prefer to achieve the most benefit and least harm, and one auspiciously reinforces the other here. You cannot claim to want innocents preserved if you advocate for things that indisputably harm innocents, it's just an obvious inconsistency (or fig leaf). It's like one declaring in favor of Trump over Biden because if Biden is elected, someone somewhere could die as a result. Or, more to the topic, like when 19th century white supremacists argued that 'the black race' was naturally indisposed to freedom and self-governance and so had to be controlled for their own good, yet some of the same people - later on, post-emancipation - argued that investment in black rights or material status was illegitimate as an usurpation of black freedom.



Try putting yourself in the shoes of black people, who might also want to feel safe and suffer no losses. Your display of total disregard of the validity of Black grievances, in its lack of imagination, is like the mirror image of the philosophy of the NFAC people. They might say the same thing as the quoted verbatim from their perspective, with the adjustment of "Whether BLM representatives reason with rioters or the police forcefully stop them" to "Whether whites reform themselves or the government accepts separatism." Meanwhile, I note, they're still suffering for their innate traits, while from your keyboard you are - not.

Please rank the following in order of your preference as potential means to stopping or preventing rioting, with the grant that "it doesn't matter how it is achieved":

*Repeal and replace police
*Ethnic cleansing
*Wait for energies to dissipate
*$1 trillion in reparations



Totally illogical, here and in abstract toward any application. Refer to the description of the start of the episode for its racist presentation and priming. The altercation was staged (not to say that spontaneous events are otherwise unscripted in reality TV). What happens in the rest of the show is not only irrelevant to the one episode, it is an absurd standard to establish that every episode would have to have the same racist content for that content to be racist in a single episode, just as we could reject the suggestion that a Klan lyncher cannot be racist on account of all the days he doesn't go about lynching. Ultimately it was you who tried to use the video as evidence for your insistence on African criminality. You did that. Not the show, you.



You don't know much about MLK or the civil rights movement. Which is fine given that you're not American, but you should know that your glib designation of priorities goes against everything King stood for. He saw your sort of white as one of the foremost hindrances to black advancement. That is why, in his time, MLK had marginally more white approval than abolishing police does now.
http://gsjhr.ms.ds.iscte.pt/2017-18/...l%20Rights.pdf
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/...81315023403-14

The 1960s civil rights era was much more violent than this one, and in contrast with the present many of its most prominent leaders were quite famous for advocating violence, separatism, or militant self-organization.



And so they are! But if you're returning to demanding a perfectly-domesticate mass movement, let it be known that this rhetoric is malicious or hostile 100% of the time as no examples of such movements exist at scale, nor could they.


Here's what it comes down to. Do you accept that racism is pervasive and bad? Do you accept that police, for example, need systemic and systematic reform? If all that is agreeable, then the nature of the conflict is much narrowed. But there hasn't been much indication that these are shared premises. When black people and allies demand accountability for the violent criminality of the police, I watched you wave the substance aside and emphasize your offense at the aesthetics of the movement. When there's any private property destruction in the course of public mobilization, you accord it full salience on the other hand. When, in all this, you needlessly set the absence of rioting and the presence of activism against each other as though incompatible, you should perceive how you appear to reveal your priority to be the suppression of civil rights. Instead of asking the question of how to secure justice for everyone, you've asked us to accept that the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier a single whole window is worth more than any depth or quantity of human suffering. That is, you invite a dilemma that is unsound in its construction, yet independent of truth-value the imbalance on your terms is so evident that one ought to interrogate themselves as to how they produced it.



Bottom line: Can you or can you not maintain that thought while affirming the need for sociopolitical change in the direction heralded by B. Not once in this thread have I asked you to uphold militant tactics, but I do expect a baseline on problems and solutions. If you can't meet that low level of regard, then you make yourself an obstacle to justice and the reference point of those who do demand militant direct action and thereby deny everyone's stated interests in reality, including your own. Tell me that black lives aren't worth less than others and that something should be done to realize that, and I can see to cosigning a condemnation of rioting.





For the record - though it's impossible to compile a detailed breakdown, arrest records and mobile videos are some support for the observation - plenty of white people are included among looters. I doubt they're all or mostly ideological (anarchists), but it is whatever it is.

Spent a couple of days writing "that chicken" (Montmorency 2020, p. 13498)?

My final words:
1. Racism is bad (apparently, you want every post of mine to start with these words because your every post says I NEVER told that - which is a lie).
2. Racism is not pervasive.
3. Demanding justice protesters mustn't deal out injustice.
4. If protesters must attack someboby, it should be police stations and administrative buildings. Fight the real perpetrators, not your neighbors.
5. BLM must explicitly condemn riots without any "tactical disagreements".
6. NFAC is a threat because they want a part of the country to be forcibly turned into a separate monoracial state. If they are so brave with their guns, shoot at the police if this is the root of the problem.
7. When Ukraine separated from the USSR not a single window was smashed.
8. Own up to the fact that your stance may not be always right.
9. Learn to read carefully what I wrote instead of reiterating your ideas of what I must be thinking.

[Montmorency]

Yep, it turns out the feds murdered Reinoehl as retaliation.
https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1304086151842664448

Goddamn Horst Wessel affair playing out in days rather than years - as expected of the 21st century.

Spent a couple of days writing "that chicken" (Montmorency 2020, p. 13498)?

My final words:
1. Racism is bad (apparently, you want every post of mine to start with these words because your every post says I NEVER told that - which is a lie).
2. Racism is not pervasive.
3. Demanding justice protesters mustn't deal out injustice.
4. If protesters must attack someboby, it should be police stations and administrative buildings. Fight the real perpetrators, not your neighbors.
5. BLM must explicitly condemn riots without any "tactical disagreements".
6. NFAC is a threat because they want a part of the country to be forcibly turned into a separate monoracial state. If they are so brave with their guns, shoot at the police if this is the root of the problem.
7. When Ukraine separated from the USSR not a single window was smashed.
8. Own up to the fact that your stance may not be always right.
9. Learn to read carefully what I wrote instead of reiterating your ideas of what I must be thinking.

An obstinate and self-contradictory interlocutor is very wearisome to engage with. It takes effort to muster a measure of grace and restraint in responding to your comments.

I don't believe you believe racism is bad, since you reject so many opportunities in this thread to concretely condemn it. That you don't accept that it is pervasive just goes to show...

I agree that 'collateral damage' is undesirable. I never asked you to embrace it. What I have consistently objected to in this thread is your automatic dismissal of racism and the experiences of non-whites in practice (and not just racism, criminal cops hurt us all in the end) in contrast to your instant plaintive concern for someone else's property a world away. The reality is that it's genuinely sad when someone's home or livelihood is unaccountably damaged. But the opinion of someone who wrongly frames that in opposition to a social movement or a social issue, as though it's an exclusive choice between them, and as though the objectives of reform or the underlying problems they reflect are no longer operative - that person's opinion simply doesn't matter because they don't care about justice or about causality. Their colors are plain.

The NFAC ideology does not demonstrate the dangerousness of the organization, which is the logical step you overlook. NFAC has no power to influence anything, nor any friends in power. Same as above, your focus on this relative triviality alongside dismissal of the actual, demonstrable, present and ongoing threats facing the country exposes fatally compromised priorities.

Ukrainian secession and Soviet dissolution ruined thousands, if not millions, of lives. But that's not reason enough to oppose it.

You have been overwhelmingly factually wrong throughout this thread, in some shocking and unanticipated ways. You've contradicted yourself in your declarations of personal sentiment multiple times. I can't take you seriously when you recommend epistemic humility.

Think more carefully about what your positions are and what you write about them. I do understand you, I just reproach you.

I am not asking for the the ultimate solution, but that there is a decent attempt to verify that it is an actual solution.

So what are you asking for in practical terms, and to whom are you directing it? We could apply the desire for a comprehensive long-term plan on the course of human development in any number of domains, and maybe it would be right to begin demanding such, but you wouldn't really expect a civic, governmental, or business leader to have one one hand. What comes after the climate transition? What sort of relationship should civilization have to interstellar travel? I'm sure someone has thought about it, but it's not a question that should really hinder us in taking steps in the present. Find answers to academic subjects in academic literature.

Now you seem to be taking a perspective of ethics. What interests me is causality. The thesis is this more or less this: add a typical Western society and mass migration of people from specific non-Western cultures, and you likely get a bad outcome.

That's not clear at all, though of course "bad outcome" is vague. Moreover, such an assertion - with all attendant implications - needs to be justified overwhelmingly, not the other way around. Ultimately the ethics of the situation are tied to a high degree with the perceived causalities, though alarmists are put in a bind by the demonstrable utilitarian fact that immigrants from poorer to richer countries tend to get better off than they were/would have been.

I imagine that in the case of the Soviet Union there would have been a degree of ethnic segregation involved, cf. the ethnic composition of the countries that broke free and the current republics in the Russian Federation.

It's not surprising that the Soviet model relied on ethnic-Russian colonization throughout the regions, but there was also an =goal - ideological or otherwise - of promoting cultural exchange and labor migration among the lesser and greater minority groups (and not just to the extent that Stalin deported a lot of ethnic groups to Siberia or Central Asia.) The dynamics would naturally be different under an authoritarian Russian-supremacist regime compared to a hypothetical pluralist democracy, if that's where you're heading. It should be noted that most of the traditional sub-national ethnic groups in Russia itself are simply few in number, other than Tatars. Today, Russia relies on - often seasonal - labor migration of millions of Kazakhs and other Central Asians, but to my knowledge there's otherwise not many great reasons or incentives for non-Russian populations as populations to move about into Russia or among the Eastern European countries today, especially on a permanent basis. I could be wrong.

I haven't studied closely what causes ethnic segregation in Europe, but in a 'free' country, people move as they see fit; parents do what they think is best for their children. That's part of the rules of the reality that you are dealing with. If you cannot convince people to break this behaviour, then this particular battle will never be won, and it will not be something you can rely on to advance other goals.

I would say though that those who believe in multiethnic societies and agree with the immigration policy in Europe should be the first to volunteer to stay behind, or move in, and blend. You certainly should not expect people who disagree with the policy to do so, and if you cannot get enough supporters of the policy to do this, that would tell you something.

Of course it's not so simple as a matter of "freedom" and choice if one group is economically and socially disadvantaged, except in the ironic aphorism of Anatole France on the equality of the law.

It would tell us something, that there is some level of hypocrisy or inconsistency even among liberals. But in the United States, during the era of the formation of modern segregated municipalities, there were virtually no such liberals among the white population; aversion towards blacks was near-universal, and this aversion was given the tools of actualization by government support and subsidies to whites, the housing boom, the highway boom, and the proliferation of private automobiles. These days when there is hypocrisy, it manifests in the choice of where to move to (not so much the choice to move away). There is still a persistent tendency to stereotype a geographic concentration of black people (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) as a presumptively-"bad" area, independent of relevant attributes like infrastructure, amenities, crime level (a fraught analysis itself as we have seen), income level, or anything else that might influence the suitability of domicile.

Attitudes change, but slowly. The most effective known tool to breaking these behavioral patterns, as far as I know, is enforcing the integration of schools. It stands to reason that there is a unique effect following close and extended direct exposure, in all directions, during childhood. (New York City is one of the most residentially and educationally-segregated cities in the country vis-a-vis African Americans, and my high school was overwhelmingly East Asian, so I have the relatively-unusual psychology of being more familiar with people of Asian descent as an American than with people of African descent. My sister attended a more evenly-split school in terms of the major racial categories, and I wonder if she isn't in some ways better off.)

The possibility isn't very nebulous, it's basic math combined with observations of common human behaviour.

Conflict is fine and normal; that what democracy is there for. Sectarian conflict of the sort you seem to darkly hint it is not inevitable, and offloading your quasi-probabilistic fears of a potential risk of serious conflict generations down the line onto minorities is unacceptable in my view (not that it would be acceptable the other way around). Instead of sanctifying xenophobia, let's do the work of cooperation and coexistence. Again, it's your onus to argue against that prospective causality and ethic.

More concrete limitations on your speculation about a future Sweden:

Ethnic Swedes, going by past performance in other societies, are set to retain the overwhelming share of economic, political, and cultural power even should they form less than 50% of the country at some point (itself really not likely in our lifetimes). Insofar as they do not it would be because a more equal arrangement between groups is attained, in which case the bases of serious conflict are removed.

The sources of conflict between ethnic groups are not merely qualitatively distinct, but will also reflect common tensions in the wider society (i.e. the common politics). Even in an early stage, immigrants will not be purely alien presence but will intersect with preexisting cleavages. For example, in a mapping of individual political beliefs and objectives onto the national context. It is then the individuals and subgroups, among all populations, who adopt an exclusionary agenda that disrupt the dynamic and introduce insoluble conflict.

Those issues would not have existed if they or their ancestors had not migrated in the first place. They had their lands, full of people like themselves who would never discriminate against them on this basis. It is a problem that did not need to exist! The whole situation is just pointless.

You know the bolded is simply not true and has never been true. The existence of people is the oldest and most pervasive problem of all, doesn't mean you can go Thanos on them.

Something you missed, Viking: Women are around half the population in every country. You can't segregate nations by gender (this is a surprisingly common premise in cartoons). Sexual minorities exist in every country. Religious minorities exist in every country. Lower classes exist in every country. Reactionaries will always react. They've been doing the same shit as now throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in all the same places. They learn nothing and remember everything. There's no appeasing them for long. At some point you just have to put them down, jetzt erst recht.

The existence of difficulties for some people as a consequence of ethnic interface cannot in itself militate for apartheid, for the construction and restriction of outsiders, whether preemptive or reactive. Not if one entertains the equality of humans at even an abstract level. Your anxiety or inconvenience does not simply negate the rights of others.

I might be more sympathetic to small groups that may be too small or too dispersed to realistically maintain a state of their own, or in cases of ethnic persecution. But even then, the rule of thumb should be that refugees should go to the most culturally similar countries. And regardless of sympathy, at some point you will run into the limits of what is physically possible.

"Physically impossible" is a strange way of describing the effects of sectarian animosity. Why is "immigrants" something that triggers physical impossibility and demands relief, but racism isn't? The burden should be on the unjust to change, and it should be our superordinate goal to facilitate that change, everywhere it manifests (which, contrary to the premise of a philosophical natural state of ethnic segregation, is everywhere in some form), because such prejudice is always harmful and injurious to all our interests.

Ultimately, those are the countries where most of the members of the ethnic groups in question live (or used to); scattering around globally will not strengthen their causes or resolve the issues they face.

First of all, why would be relevant to the question of immigration policy and obligations, and second, why would we take it for granted?

It might be that Kurds are more similar to Turks than to French people, or Tunisians to Moroccans, but there is no question that a typical Kurd or Tunisian is better off in France than in Turkey or Morocco.

In my book, the treatment discussed here very much goes beyond what can be expected.

Moving around the world is not that hard; settling is a different matter.

People don't see everyone as equal - there are some people they would invite for coffee (friends), and others they are not immediately inclined to (strangers). A similar argument shouldn't be too hard to make on a national level.

I don't think this concept of equality is compatible with humans. It might have a value as an aspiration, particularly when it comes to governance and law, and other professional settings. When taken literally or near-literally in many other contexts, I think it could quickly do more harm than good.

For foreigners of a different complexion to live among you, be afforded the opportunity to participate in the polity and society, and not be denied resources necessary for that participation is too much to ask in your view? That's a fundamental disagreement.

How you personally relate to individuals, in terms of intimacy, is categorically different from what sorts of duties humans have to each other collectively, and what sort of harms and derogations are legitimate to apply.

To me it seems like you are advocating literal bootstrapping. That a from something bad, something good should emerge. That a commission with active criminals in important roles should deliver on ending crime.

I think that all democratic countries need to do, is to survive. Dictatorships have two serious flaws in their fundament: a predisposition for popular revolts, and the transition of power. Both frequently provide the opportunity for a transition to democracy, and sooner or later, democracy is likely to stick.

Bootstrapping? I'm referring to cooperation, which is possible today. Bootstrapping might be relevant to transcending a fragmentary world order, but there isn't a dichotomy holding us back from identifying and securing goals (e.g. international labor and environmental standards). In a more limited sense of bootstrapping, an actor with the will and influence to secure such programs needs to arise and realize the possible as something to subsequently build on. (Naturally the only extant candidate is the US.)

We don't have that kind of time, and no one who lives or comes to live under violent and oppressive tyranny would likely be satisfied with the theoretical effect of long-term historical cycles. (You certainly aren't satisfied with allowing the less dire cultural growing pains to 'sort themselves out.') Don't you feel it strange, that by this implication a subject of Suharto's New Guinea should be more resolute in the face of their challenges than some European having to accept that subject as a neighbor and citizen?

I am not arguing against continuing international co-operation.

I am arguing for an unprecedented level of international cooperation, not just intergovernmental but increasingly transpolitan, as needed for the scale and universality of 21st century problems.

Meanwhile, the US has not only elected a charlatan brazen to the point of inanity to the office of president, he also stands a realistic chance of re-election. Hungary may or may not be on the path to a dictatorship, but I don't think it can be said that it has sunk quite that low in its choice of prime minister as the US has in its choice of president.

If we revisit the US in 20-30 years time, my prediction is that the US will still be a troubled country; finding itself in a situation comparable to, or worse, than where it is today - and that it is independent of Trump losing or winning the upcoming election. Hungary, on the other hand, might be on the mend, with Orban out of the office.

The fact that the American leader is worse than the Hungarian one is kind of an unforeseeable historical accident. Trump is one of the worst leaders in history, or is magnified in that status by the enormity of his authority and responsibility compared to all others who have come to hold power or status in other times and places. However, working with less time in office, less popular and parliamentary support, than Orban, and given the smaller size and lower complexity of Hungary compared to the US, we can say that - so far - Trump has not been as successful as Orban in his dictatorial ambitions. And of course Orban has an actual ideological program that he has made progress on, which in a Trump cannot manifest beyond raw troglodytic instinct.

But anyway, while I don't have much understanding of the underlying tensions and challenges facing Hungary, I see little reason to take your precept for granted that Hungary's ethnic composition makes its problems less durable or more soluble than the US's.

I am not immediately aware of any modern state transitioning from democracy to dictatorship that had a relatively well-functioning democracy for more than a human lifespan.

Well, yes. my point is that it was arrogant and complacent of the post-Cold War West to assume itself "mature" and judge the struggling states of the Second and Third Worlds as mere deviations or failures. None of us were ever safe, as we're increasingly forced to confront.

This in on a spectrum - living on the countryside is different from living in a city. In the same respect - social cohesion - living in a city of a 100 000 might also be significantly different from living in a city of 10 million. Then add in ethnicities co-residing. And the dominant culture (if any) of a country, and how it contributes to the concept of kinship in society. It's a subject worthy of a chapter itself.

Different organizing principles - conscious ones - have been applied with varying effects and outcomes. But these are ultimately fictions. The author's insight is that we can, philosophically at least, dispose of those fictions and realize the true fractal and intersecting character of existing groups (which vary wildly by context) before reducing to the atomic individual. Thus it captures the reality of both individual and collective existence prior to the jurisdictional stratification of government and state. I treasure this insight because I've increasingly converged on some of its elements myself over the years, in observing the treatment of and divisions among Muslim immigrants and refugees, as compared to the true alienation of the American Republican from all recognizable morality and reality. (As I've sometimes mused in the Backroom, if we can declare elements among immigrants, or even the mere presence of immigrants, a prospective threat to our way of life and restrict them accordingly, why can't we abuse and disenfranchise those conationals of ours who are actually a clear and present danger as a demographic? There's no accepting the former over the latter without embracing grotesque ultranationalism and falling right into that selfsame category, except maybe in the cynical practical sense that the resistance of marginalized immigrant groups is easier to overwhelm than that of large swathes of the mainstream society.)

The ramifications as to the value or legitimacy of idealized unity and community in a limited jurisdiction versus radical disunity and contestation bounded by humanistic solidarity are challenging...

A thought: In smaller or less-complex (this may be an imprecise formulation, as what I'm really referring to is social bases of power) societies, authoritarianism is by the historical record more readily available based on - for example - the smaller number of stakeholders and institutions that need to be captured. On a global scale, assuming distributed actors of roughly comparable levels of wealth, resources, education, etc. it should be very difficult to overcome the numerous competing interests to establish authoritarianism.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Hot take I almost posted on facebook: I try to purposely forget 9/11 and pretend it never happened. I don't see how people can find the courage to think about the first responder's who gave so much and who we so deeply betrayed for 18 years with our greed and our hatred towards all things government. 18 years we let those men and women die slowly of respiratory diseases and cancer without even so much as a promise that they would be taken care of.

The twin towers no longer represent heroism to me, it's just a reminder of how toxic our society is to the idea of goodwill and entitlement.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The twin towers no longer represent heroism to me, it's just a reminder of how toxic our society is to the idea of goodwill and entitlement.

And the toxicity continues in our attitude today. Thousands of firefighters and other emergency personnel on the line, during a pandemic, in the Western USA. Hardly a peep from Capital Hill, and none from Fearless Leader other than to excoriate California by saying "You gotta clean your floors." And then threaten to withhold federal funds....

It's evident by the folks who refuse any protocol what-so-ever to reduce the transmission of SARS-2, yet if they contract COVID-19, expect medical personnel to do their best to save their lives.

[Gilrandir]

An obstinate and self-contradictory interlocutor is very wearisome to engage with. It takes effort to muster a measure of grace and restraint in responding to your comments.

I don't believe you believe racism is bad, since you reject so many opportunities in this thread to concretely condemn it. That you don't accept that it is pervasive just goes to show...

I agree that 'collateral damage' is undesirable. I never asked you to embrace it. What I have consistently objected to in this thread is your automatic dismissal of racism and the experiences of non-whites in practice (and not just racism, criminal cops hurt us all in the end) in contrast to your instant plaintive concern for someone else's property a world away. The reality is that it's genuinely sad when someone's home or livelihood is unaccountably damaged. But the opinion of someone who wrongly frames that in opposition to a social movement or a social issue, as though it's an exclusive choice between them, and as though the objectives of reform or the underlying problems they reflect are no longer operative - that person's opinion simply doesn't matter because they don't care about justice or about causality. Their colors are plain.

The NFAC ideology does not demonstrate the dangerousness of the organization, which is the logical step you overlook. NFAC has no power to influence anything, nor any friends in power. Same as above, your focus on this relative triviality alongside dismissal of the actual, demonstrable, present and ongoing threats facing the country exposes fatally compromised priorities.

Ukrainian secession and Soviet dissolution ruined thousands, if not millions, of lives. But that's not reason enough to oppose it.

You have been overwhelmingly factually wrong throughout this thread, in some shocking and unanticipated ways. You've contradicted yourself in your declarations of personal sentiment multiple times. I can't take you seriously when you recommend epistemic humility.

Think more carefully about what your positions are and what you write about them. I do understand you, I just reproach you.

From my perspective, I can apply most of the epithets you have bestowed on me to you as well.
That is why I see no reason of continuing the cyclic argument with a tunnel-visioned person who is inconsistent in his claims, dismissive of or blind to the evident facts, who avoids unpleasant admissions, shifts the subject of the conversation, and gauges the stance of the opponent by construing this stance himself and calculating the number of times the opponent mentions universal truths. And adopts and edifying attitude, at that.

So, have nice riots.