zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Noam calls the uprising and the popular support for them, ‘unprecedented.’

My own view, is different. The uprising may be unprecedented, but i dont buy into the idea there is great public support for it. My evidence is simple – Bernie vs Biden. The DEMOCRAT voters had a choice. They chose Biden.

I wouldn’t mix those 2 things up.

One, yes, is unprecedented. Unless you can name the last time there were massive protests in 700 towns and cities for 2 weeks.

The other is just machine politics winning.

One marxist term that’s really useful in times like this is “uneven developments” which (briefly) just means that processes are complicated and you don’t expect all things to be going at the same pace at the same time. People are not as attuned to democratic machine politics and tend to normalize it. People are also deeply affected by issues involving human rights and equality before the law–there is a source of raw power and energy to draw on there. In the summer of 2020 that raw energy got tapped by the issue of policing and racial injustice in a way that has never happened before (if you look back at the civil rights era, civil rights demonstrations polled negatively).

The war has many fronts. Some are doing better than others right now. But then–no one could have guessed in advance that what happened this summer would happen.

…

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Well, like i said, the uprising may be ‘unprecedented’ but I think a small minority of actual-voters understand the underlying systemic-problem. We can call that uneven development, or we can just call it same ole sorry ass corporotacracy.
I think it translates into mostly cosmetic changes. Democrat-Party type changes.

Thats just my prediction. Hope it plays out better than that. Of course, i might be wrong. Etc.

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Well, it would be better if it wasn’t anonymous. How do we know its not fake?

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Well this is just one man’s subjective view, but it doesn’t seem fake to me. Way too much detail for that. You deal with cops at least part of the time. How accurate does it seem to you.

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Oh its totally accurate, LoL. But i am wary. I just dont wanna read, a month from now, that it was some bored undergrad in his basement who wanted to trash the cops, etc.

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“I know, Ma. I’m a-tryin’. But them deputies- Did you ever see a deputy that didn’t have a fat ass? An’ they waggle their ass an’ flop their gun aroun’. Ma”, he said, “if it was the law they was workin’ with, why we could take it. But it ain’t the law. They’re a-working away at our spirits. They’re a-tryin’ to make us cringe an’ crawl like a whipped bitch. They’re tryin’ to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on’y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin’ a sock at a cop. They’re working on our decency”.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Cal wrote:

Robinson’s criticism of Taibbi’s article is a perfect illustration of what Taibbi is criticizing. I’ll just use Robinson’s first example of the professor who created a controversy by not censoring MLK’s “Birmingham Jail” that intentionally uses provocative language and by showing disturbing images of a documentary about lynching even though some students objected.

A college history class should include material that does make people uncomfortable. Or if some material is inappropriate, the university should make that decision and share that expectation with the professor.

Robinson’s own solution to this situation seems to be part of the problem that Taibbi is criticizing.

Here’s Robinson:

Today I’m going to read from Letter From Birmingham Jail. The letter contains the n-word. I am considering saying it aloud because I think it’s important to hear exactly what King wrote rather than my censored version of what King wrote, but I know the word is very painful and if anyone would like to object, I will omit it. Also, I plan to screen a video about civil rights today that contains both the word and a graphic depiction of lynching. The video uses these on the theory that it is important for us to see and hear the uncomfortable truth.” I think actually when you present things this way students will feel respected and are less likely to complain. The problem was actually that the professor did not care what the students thought of what he did and said.

Sorry, 18 year olds don’t get to decide what is censored. Again, if the university and professionals want to make that decision, fine.

Here’s the problem with Robinson’s suggestion: What if a racist student or a student who just wants to be an ass objects to seeing a documentary with disturbing images or objects to reading a poem about a lynching? Do you omit an important part of the course because of one objection?

The link that Robinson contains a sentence about protesters calling for the firing of the history professor in this example AND another professor who refused to delay or cancel exams at UCLA because of Floyd’s death.

_________________________________________
Richard Wright–“Between the World and Me”

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.

=====================

Well, I am having trouble focusing in on what the issue is exactly. Maybe i’m just having a pandemic-fuzzy-thinking week, I dunno.

But i can think of all kinds of ‘gray area examples’ that go in various directions. What if a BLM protest representative is being interviewed about how black men are being victimized…and the interviewer says “what about how black men victimize black women?” Well…shit. Men ‘do’ victimize women, so there is something important about the question. But what is the agenda here? And is the timing of the question right? But shouldnt we be able to discuss all tricky issues? Etc, etc, and so forth.

To your professor example — Maybe the kids arent really ‘deciding what gets censored’ — maybe the professor is just being sensitive, or nice, or open to listening and dialogue about stuff. I dunno. It depends on so many factors, and motivations. For me, the issue can unwind in so many directions it just gets….unfocused. Or i get unfocused. I dunno.

Heck Taibbi even brought up Russiagate. Which is a whole can of worms by itself, which i will not open, here. 🙂

I got nuthin.

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———–
“To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
———–
“Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.”
― Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season
————
“The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
—————-
“Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
————
“Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
—————

—————–

zn wrote:

zn wrote:

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

Highly recommended read.

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Well, it would be better if it wasn’t anonymous. How do we know its not fake?

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Shannon Sharpe on racism and owners.

Oh my goodness. Stick with it for the 18-19 minute mark. Excellent stuff.

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Of course, Rogan had him on:

Seattle. An enigma wrapped in a conundrum.
The chief of police says they dont know who to negotiate with because no-one is in charge…

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Nikkita Oliver:https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/nikkita-oliver-on-seattles-extraordinary-protests
“Building People Power”: Nikkita Oliver on Seattle’s Extraordinary Protests and What Comes Next

The activist and former mayoral candidate has been an integral part of protests that led to the creation of a seven-block, police-free “autonomous zone” in a central Seattle neighborhood—whether Trump likes it or not.

By Jacob Uitti
June 11, 2020

In Seattle, as in nearly every major city in America, protesters clashed with police for over a week in early June, demanding justice for George Floyd and other victims of racial violence and police brutality. But what happened next, and is still happening, was completely different. On Monday the police effectively abandoned the area surrounding the East Precinct police station, allowing protesters to establish a seven-block area they are calling the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

Within that space protests are ongoing, but so are history lectures, art exhibits, movie nights (Ava DuVernay’s 13th screened Tuesday), concerts, town hall meetings, and street art. There is no formal leadership of the Seattle protests, but among the most prominent figures is Nikkita Oliver, who ran for mayor in 2017 and was the first candidate of the independent Seattle Peoples Party. Also the codirector of the Creative Justice Northwest program, Oliver has been busy organizing protests, facilitating communication among the various groups, and getting down to the autonomous zone when she can—which sometimes means at 3 a.m.

The CHAZ has drawn the attention of none other than Donald Trump, who tweeted threats late Wednesday to “take back” Seattle, and was swiftly rebuked by Washington governor Jay Inslee as well as Mayor Jenny Durkan, who has faced calls to resign after the police used flash bangs and tear gas against protesters.

Not long after the president’s tweet, Oliver got on the phone to talk about not only Trump’s attempt to “incite violence,” but also the historical precedent for movements like this one, the beauty of a movement without a figurehead at the front of it, and how the protests have even bolstered the reputation of another controversial Seattle group: cyclists….

….
…In Seattle there is the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, local residents providing heavy security, medical stations on call. Given those, how is change playing out differently compared to other areas in the country?

You know, I’ll be transparent. I don’t know how it’s playing out differently compared to other areas, but what I can say is what I am in awe of. You know, protesters maintained a sort of occupation at the East Precinct. So essentially, the police left. The people have now actively started building an autonomous safe zone that has art, has music, has food, has community care, and all of that started during the barricade when medics were bringing supplies and community members were dropping off support, when people were donating money and building bail funds, when lawyers were volunteering their time, when people started to develop tactics like umbrellas and bringing gas masks, just a sense of mutual aid and care for each other.

When I look at the rallies happening across the city, there is also this incredible bike brigade that’s started. I think generally people think of cyclists in our city as irritating [laughs], unless you are a cyclist. And to see this bike brigade come up, I think for some folks, has really transformed the way we even think about cycling. They helped marshal the march; they’ve kept people safe. Honestly, today a car tried to run into a group of high school students protesting. And one of the bike brigade folks literally threw their bike under the car to slow it up. There is a real sense of care and support and love for people.

There is a medic squad that rotates and is around at every protest, every march in the autonomous safe zone. There are people providing food. There are stores in places in the autonomous safe zone that are letting people come in and use the restroom, wash their hands, and store things. It really is incredible to see the care and compassion people have for each other, even in the face of this very oppressive force. Governor Inslee sent the National Guard here. There are some very terrifying things happening here, and yet there is a lot of care and compassion for each other, which I think is going to be the marker of how we do or don’t come out of this well.

Why do you think people are angry now and poised to protest?

It is not just Black and indigenous and people of color experiencing the oppression of the system. I think you have middle-class and poor white people who are realizing that they were never safe under capitalism either. It’s creating this convergence, and in the midst of that, people saw the—all of the murders are horrific, but you saw the murder of George Floyd happen, where a police officer knew he was being filmed, could hear the man crying out for his mom, saying he could not breathe. Which then brings us back to Eric Garner, and we’re seeing these things come up over and over again. Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and you’re seeing all these things repeat themselves. I think people are awakening to the fact that the system has actually been set up to work for almost none of us.

Seattle’s peaceful protesters fought for eight days before the city police surrendered the East Precinct. The next night they took City Hall. Are you involved in how these movements are being mobilized and, if so, what might be next?

Yeah, there’s a lot of coordination. I wouldn’t say I’m, like, exclusively involved. I mean, the beauty of what is happening is people are just wanting to be involved. So they’re starting to organize their own actions. I think it’s significant and important because if you look at what has happened in similar movements, we’ve ended up with figureheads—and when the figurehead is gone, the movement dies. The beauty of what’s happening now is that it’s becoming diffuse and harder to tell who the figurehead is because there are so many leaders all over the city doing their own thing but aligning to the common values and goals, which is incredibly powerful.

Last night there was an impromptu showing of the Ava DuVernay documentary 13th in the middle of what used to be one of the city’s busiest intersections. And the East Precinct police station’s sign now says: “Seattle People Department.” When you see these symbols of change, what do you think?

Honestly, I start to immediately think about what’s the vision for this space? And how can it actually be a people’s station, and what are the things that the people need, and how can we organize to make that happen? It’s one thing to take a space, it’s another thing to turn a space into something functional that actually serves the community. You know, Seattle is the second city to have a Black Panther Party, and one of the hallmarks of the Black Panther Party was that they met the needs of the community. That’s why people responded to them: their breakfast program, in some places they had an extermination program, the Black Panther newspaper—all of these things met needs in the community.

So if you want to continue to galvanize people, at some point you have to start feeding the people, caring for the people, building with the people. That’s what builds people power; that’s what sustains people power; that’s what sustains commitment to a movement. So honestly, I see it and it’s incredible the way that the area is being turned into a safe zone. Then I immediately go into, Alright, what can we do in this space to take care of the people?

Protests are happening all over the world. But what would prevent the work from coming to fruition locally and nationally moving forward?

One thing would be if we give up. How many times have we seen uprisings start and then people get tired? One of the things that’s going to happen is people are going to go back to work at some point as things calm with COVID—though it also may eventually get worse again. People will go back to work. And the toll that capitalism takes on our ability to organize will once again be present. Right now people are at home. Maybe they work in the morning and work a little bit at night but are able to be out and have a presence at rallies.

I think another thing is just the overall government structure. The structure of the system we live in is inherently white supremacist. It’s inherently built on white supremacy. Policing is inherently racist. Those structures were not made to be transformed from the inside out. They have to be transformed by the pressure that we’re creating. In some ways we’re going to see the government get in the way, whether it’s our local government, where we have leaders that lack the political will to do what needs to be done, or it’s the president, who literally just tweeted today that our city has been taken over by domestic terrorists.

The socialist adolph, is swimming upstream on this one.
At about the five minute mark (if anyone can make it that far) he talks about the race/neoliberalism thing.

Cal wrote:

Before I read that Reed article I tried having a conversation with my wife, who is kind of a mainstream Dem, about my frustration and reluctance to accept BLM as a meaningful and important reaction to America’s racial problems.

Reed comes pretty close to voicing my own frustration:

“And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.”

My conversation went no where and my wife and I probably din’t move beyond the basic idea that America has serious racial problems and at least the 8:46, George Floyd, BLM protests draw attention to this.

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I just wish ole Adolph was a better…’communicator.’ Heck i agree with him, and i still get lost in the labyrinth of his paragraphs. I’ve never finished one of his articles in my life.

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