George Floyd

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I believe I heard our mayor (LA) Eric Garcetti on the radio yesterday speaking, however abstractly, about the movement of social progress, framing it as a climb up a seemingly infinite mountain. He said that the young people only see how far there is left to go, while older people have a better sense, from experience, of however much progress has been made.

Anyway, that's a good clip.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Yeah this is something I often think when you watch that Drugs Inc programme or whatever. You see these gangs - even cartel related - with pitbulls, massive stashes of knives, ridiculous guns (massive shotguns and assault rifles, even flame-throwers and grenade launchers sometimes) and metal reinforced doors on the trap house and all kinds of crazy stuff.... but when the full SWAT team rolls up in an armoured vehicle with a team of guys with years of training, bullet proof vests etc, it takes maybe ten seconds before the whole crew are on the floor facedown in handcuffs.

wonder if all that ammo is to protect them against being ripped off or attacked by rival gangs, not necessarily for defending against police raids.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Well it's that and also penis replacement for sure... the point is that even a heavily armed cartel killing squad cannot fight back against the military. So some redneck with a confederate flag and a rusty flintlock he inherited from his grandpappy thinking he's keeping the government in its place is sadly mistaken.
 

Leo

Well-known member
they're probably expressing their warped perception of "freedom", multiplied by too many hours playing video games.
 

Leo

Well-known member
....and, the Dow closes up 527 points, NASDAQ within 2% of its all-time high.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the movement of social progress, framing it as a climb up a seemingly infinite mountain
that is not how history works. it is a tidy myth. actual social progress progresses in fits and starts. sometimes it stalls. sometimes it goes backwards. when it does progress, it's uneven and messy.

it also elides the fact that, as droid said, rights have to be actively claimed and defended. that is, like all politics, usually a messy process.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sure, I seen programmes about them in Mexico and so on... huge armoured and crazy stuff and the police is both corrupt and unable to deal so only the army has the hardware to compete. And the cartels are very very scary don't get me wrong, the things they do have re-defined the levels to which organised crime has sunken and so on... but even so, I think that if you had the most heavily armed cartel division against its US army equivalent then I don't think they could defeat trained soldiers. There's a lot more to defeating them than that though of course.
I guess my point is that some guy with a shotgun in his attic is not suddenly ready to uphold the constitution against a rogue government at any given moment, in exactly the same way that the meth-addled, albeit heavily armed, drug dealers aren't ready to find their doors suddenly blown off and hundreds of steroid pumped police/soldiers pointing guns at them and standing on their heads.
It's a false idea... the government is not gonna say "Hey guys, we're abandoning the constitution, if you care to try and stop us meet us by the Washington Monument on Friday 5pm, bring your thousand best men and what weapons you've got and we'll sort it out like men" - the constitution and republic gets whittled away bit by bit (and sometimes by big bits as we're seeing now) and the men with guns are too busy dick measuring and so on to realise they're on the wrong side.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
these protests have done a fantastic job, under the circumstances, of staying on message

anyone who's ever been to a mass demonstration knows how chaotic they are, even without violence. mass movements in general are unwieldy by their nature. it is indeed much easier to disrupt a message than it is to stay on message. the media - which even if it's neutral or favorable, will reduce everything to soundbites - will do that, as well as active disruption via disinformation, provocateur action, etc. that is all worse when the President is continuously spouting nonsense, threatening to shoot everyone, etc.

and yet for all that, the vast majority of the country seems to know why this is happening. there is very widespread sympathy with the causes if not all the actions - even there, it seems to me like people are pretty well aware that looting and protests shouldn't be conflated even if there's overlap (there's always overlap in any situation of social chaos). much of the credit for that should go to the people who've been doing BLM etc for the last few years - since Ferguson, basically. that Overton window has shifted dramatically.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
....and, the Dow closes up 527 points, NASDAQ within 2% of its all-time high.
another thing I saw suggested today is stock (and bond) markets have become too big to fail

that if central banks were to allow assets to be priced correctly given the information out there - record unemployment, Great Depression II looming, uncertain COVID response going forward, massive social unrest - they would plummet so rapidly the financial system would collapse. which they can't allow to happen (indeed, European Central Bank about to do another round of bond-buying). investors/money managers know this, and act accordingly.

idk if it's true but it has the ring of truth to it
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
yall probably saw that the Defense Secretary came out today and unequivocally opposed Trump's threat to use active duty troops to quell protests?

that's something I had been wondering about, the willingness of the military to follow his orders

Esper is a Trump yes-man so if he's breaking with the President over this, clearly it's indicative of significant unease in the military establishment

I also wonder about the willingness of individual American soldiers to shoot Americans en masse

not that it rules anything out, but I'm still more worried about unofficial, plausibly deniable paramilitary violence. you don't need any establishment for that. chaos and disinformation are excellent cover. the cops and military at lower levels are probably rife with white supremacists etc.
 

version

Well-known member
not that it rules anything out, but I'm still more worried about unofficial, plausibly deniable paramilitary violence. you don't need any establishment for that. chaos and disinformation are excellent cover. the cops and military at lower levels are probably rife with white supremacists etc.

I can't remember whether droid posted it or I found it via something droid posted, but one of the militia groups photographed in Philly was posing for photos with the police.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
that's how these things work. not officially sanctioned, but sanctioned. if it's questioned, it isn't/wasn't officially sanctioned.

each case is unique, but some elements always exist - plausible deniability and some level of government/paramilitary collusion.

I disagree with droid about a Day of the Rope scenario - such a thing could only happen after white supremacists openly control a chunk of, or the entire country - as indeed is the case in The Turner Diaries, and was the case with Kristallnacht

but some unofficial, extrajudicial killings, or even just beatings and intimidation? very easily. this country has a very long history of extrajudicial violence against black people, and activists for that matter (look up how labor organizers were treated prior to the post-WWII Keynesian compromise). and in this age of data it's not hard to find people - doxxing has been a thing for a long time now.
 

version

Well-known member
Apparently when Ted Cruz put forward a bill last year he used the terms "Antifa" and "left-wing activists" interchangeably. Slippery bastard.
 

Leo

Well-known member
...and, right on cue, Defense Sec Esper reverses himself on use of troops. probably too late, trump demands total loyalty, just a matter of time before Esper is spending his time coming up with the name of his podcast.

General Mattis might persuade some conservatives/Repubs to stand up.

yeah...who am I kidding, won't happen.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
idk man, I think much of the conservative establishment remains extremely wary of Trump. of course a portion of it outright loathes him.

and I think even law and order types would be deeply uneasy, at best, about openly unleashing soldiers on Americans

look at Esper - he made sure to call George Floyd's murder a "horrible crime", "tragedy we've seen repeated too many times"

the danger is in the beast the conservative establishment unleashed, was all too happy to ride to power, and is now completely unable to control

William Buckley etc - for all I disagree with their beliefs - spent decades trying to cleanse the GOP of crazy people, conspiracy theorists, John Birch types

after Obama was elected the GOP was perfectly to let them all back in. maybe they thought they could hold the tiger by its tail. maybe they didn't think about the potential consequences at all.

people may forget that the Tea Party etc was originally astroturfed - but it tapped into very real feelings

that and similar things 1) gave those feelings legitimacy 2) allowed them to coalesce into solidity

not that liberals aren't also complicit - they abandoned working-class people 30ish years ago, then were totally non-plussed at the easily foreseeable, if delayed, consequences of that strategy

Trump's election obviously rode these waves, and is the ultimate legimitization of those feelings for those who feel them
 
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