BF2S Forums Race relations thread

Those who always believe everything will ultimately simply 'return back to normal' will be hopelessly unprepared for the moment history smashes them in the face. Now I don't immediately see these particular riots as a prelude to something more, but this pandemic, its effects on the labour market and the existing political instability & frankly dormant rage in the United States are like a flame that is moving dangerously close to a powder keg. The roof is not about to cave in on the house yet, nor am I some oracle so I can't tell anything for certain, but unmistakeably the seeds for even greater social upheaval are present. And it doesn't seem like current leadership or structures are willing or even capable of addressing these issues - in the case of Trump aggravating them. 

And not just in the US. We in the west can consider ourselves lucky for our social nets of sorts, but as our markets collapse, worldwide close to a hundred million people will be pushed back into poverty. It would be foolish to expect all those people to let that happen quietly.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

We also still have a pandemic which is going to start dropping protestors, police, and their families in 2 weeks. This season of America didn't drop that storyline.

it's more like 3-4 weeks until max severity, 5-6 til death, but yeah. first serious symptoms in t-minus 10 days.

https://twitter.com/MVKDRE/status/1267563872321302531

white woman rolls down window of her lexus SUV and pepper sprays children protesting for BLM.

wonder who she votes for?

yeah, there's a second video in the related from a different angle/a few moments earlier. and you can see she wasn't even intimidated or anything, she was basically having road-rage. she leaned over to her passenger glovebox (i'm guessing) and just unleashed her rage on those kids. very bad decision. especially with a fucking custom license plate, of all things. a witness could just remember that.

https://twitter.com/jxyzn/status/1267684722341064704

another pretty shocking video. how is that even legal? what the fuck?

https://twitter.com/izaacmellow/status/ … 0600668161

look at this!

Last edited by uziq (2020-06-02 13:20:25)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Just go one of those emergency alerts on my phone letting me know there is an "Emergency Curfew" in NYC from 8 PM to 5 AM.

It started yesterday at 11 PM. Now it's 8 PM until Monday.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

If you don't have your own "libertarians" to talk to, you should consider Jay to be a pretty useful asset here. You read articles where Trump conflates antagonizers with peaceful protesters and would think "nah, there's no way someone's going to run with that." But here we are.

Yes it's unfortunate that some of the businesses still allowed to run have to close because of the protests. It's convenient that some of the roads are occupied by them. That the timing coincides with an ongoing pandemic, and that the coronavirus basically has free rein over those involved.

It's also unfortunate that other avenues to protest and express that don't lines of policemen in heavy riot gear get shut down time and time again. I'd hope Trump misses the days when all he had to deal with were a bunch of football players kneeling, but maybe he's getting a secret kick out of the whole thing.

I wouldn't put it past the president to daydream of himself somehow wedged partly down a tank hatch for a photo op of him smugly binocularing people who are frustrated at being shot and murdered, being shot and murdered. And then tweeting about how the police were too afraid to get a little rough with their perps after all.

"Great entertainment!"



It's amazing to me that some people who are pro-gun because it "checks and balances" tyranny, actually be so behind said tyranny.

I haven't paid attention to Trump at all. I give no fucks what his opinion is. I've been watching live feeds on TV. I see peaceful protesters during the day and then I see the assholes coming out at night and burning cop cars and throwing rocks and flaming devices. I then see a line of cops move towards the crowd, and the crowd runs away. It's a game to them. If they get caught they cry about it like they're a fucking victim. It was your choice to be up there on the front lines screaming at cops and telling them they're assholes and they deserve to die. No one put a gun to your head and made you do it. Sure, you might've personally had no violent intent, but the guy next to you did, and now you're getting your ass beat alongside him. Too bad. Instead of blaming the cop, how about you blame the guy next to you that threw a rock?

And no, the cops aren't 100% correct. How could they be? Do I want to see people pushed to the ground and beaten? No, of course not. I don't want to see anybody hurt. I'm not a sadist like macbeth. But when you're outnumbered 10:1 and you're scared and you're having expletives hurled at you for hours, and you don't know if someone in the crowd has a gun, it's human nature to eventually lash out.

And we're all fucking mad, man. I'm mad at the world right now. I'm a control freak/planner by nature and I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone being able to plan for six months from now. Do I have to worry about losing my job in a few months? Will my kids have school in the fall? If they don't, what do I do about day care? Why are assholes putting fake Peppa Pig videos on youtube with cursing and Peppa dying, and why is my wife crying to me about it while I'm at work? Why are there so many assholes in the world making other people miserable?

Frankly, I'm just tired of politics in general. I'm tired of people using politics as an excuse to go fuck shit up. We're very close to the point where the Red Team and the Blue Team are going to be in open warfare and it makes me sad, and it makes me want to move to Canada.

This post is meandering, but whatever, I'm sad today.

Like I said, it sucks that other avenues of discussion are cut off time and time again, and that people feel like all they have left is to go shout at grim battle formations of policemen. And then the policemen respond in the brutal fashion that has so many people upset in the first place. Shot in the face for carrying groceries. Pushed to the ground because you're too old to move fast. Pepper sprayed while eight years old. Then the president lumps you in the same category as a handful of violent anarchists.

(Not even getting into how many are violent anarchists and how many are pretending to be violent anarchists.)

The whole situation really is sickening. Doesn't feel like a game to me. Probably doesn't feel like a game to acting medics with red crosses electrical-taped to their baseball caps. Or to people who are genuinely and understandably irate at the ongoing issue of police brutality and abuses of authority.

You should probably consider yourself lucky to have the luxury of being tired of politics.

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

Still no criticism of the violence by police against black people.

Instead of blaming the individual cop, why not blame all the cops who stood by and did nothing?

Jay is mad as hell about not being able to plan his life.

I'm mad as hell that black people don't get to plan their lives too, because they keep getting their futures taken away by an oppressive system.

I'm more sad than anything. I'm sad that what I thought was decades of progress was nothing more than a greasy sheen covering the viewports into the American experience. I'm sad that I can't do more. I'm sad that I don't have the resources, contacts, and ability to make things better. Sadness is the emotion I've been feeling the most over the last week or so.

Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Do you think I want the cops to be militarized? Fuck no. I've written pages on that stuff here. I'm sad because we were starting to finally see progress on criminal justice reform and now it's going to evaporate. Qualified immunity is up for review at the Supreme Court right now. That's the single most important thing going on in this country right now, the ability to prosecute bad cops. It still requires District Attorney's offices across the country to actually make the effort. It means people like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Rudy Giuliani need to be held accountable for their past performances. Maybe the prosecution of bad conduct by police needs to be taken away from state and local government. Maybe it needs to be federalized. I think the threat needs to be made, anyway. There's too much conflict of interest when the DA's are wholly dependent on police cooperation to do their own job, and yet they're the ones that are supposed to keep the police in check. These are the root cause issues.

One of my friends today said that we screen pilots and don't let bad apples fly commercial jetliners, because when we do, they do stuff like crash into mountains on purpose. We shouldn't tolerate bad apples among cops either.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Jay, I hope you never has to lose one of your kids later in life because a cop felt nervous at a traffic stop while he was reaching for his driver's license. Or because a neighbor saw one of them cleaning a rifle while the garage door was open. Or any number of plausible scenarios involving trigger-happy police and excessive force.

It is promising that you're upset by this whole fiasco. It's a start.

When was I ever not upset? What happened to George Floyd was an outrage. What happened in Georgia was an outrage too, and in Ferguson, and in dozens of other cities. Black people get a bum deal in America. I can only imagine the rage I would feel if I was black, with my life story, and I had to deal with getting racially profiled all day just because of my skin color. I'd be livid. So, while there's no way I could ever fully comprehend it on a personal level, I do get it on a philosophical level. What's the solution though? I don't have any. They've tried integrating, and got pushed back. They've tried separating, and they get profiled and told to integrate. I can only control my own life, and my own actions, and I try to be a good person. And I will teach my own kids to be good people. That's the best I can do.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

I think I decided you were diminishing protesters' grievances by conflating them with violent rioters and criminals. An easy misread, wouldn't you say?

No, I wouldn't say you misread it. My focus is on the assholes, whether they're antifa, boogaloo, or just wannabes, they're the ones that are going to make things worse for everyone. They're the ones that are pushing it and they're the ones whose pushing is going to be met with a backlash from the law and order types. Action -> Reaction, and one side has a (near) monopoly on legitimate force. I get sick of videos where they edit out the hours of them being a complete asshole and only post the reaction where they get punched in the mouth, and then try to play the victim. The peaceful protests make me smile. The violent protests make me happy cops exist.

You can be for peaceful protests, be sad about the death of George Floyd and systemic racism, be pro property rights, be mad about the looting and the rioting, and be hopeful that Qualified Immunity might finally bite the dust. These are not mutually exclusive.

You also have to understand that I'm watching places I know burn. My cousins neighborhood in Minneapolis, that I've shopped in and hung out in, has been burned to the ground by outsiders. It wasn't people from his neighborhood burning down their own neighborhood, it was outside agitators that did it. We've got outside people co-opting peaceful protests where I live on Long Island and trying to turn them into looting sprees too. When people think that there are no consequences, when they're being encouraged by their peers rather than discouraged, we end up in fucked up situations like we are now in. I'm watching people turn their hatred of Trump, that they've been seething about for four years, into encouragement of looting and rioting and arson, because fuck Trump, right? It's righteous anger. Let's burn down the whole world because a guy I don't like is in power. How fucked is our society? How deep is the division? A guy that literally has almost no power over your daily life is so enraging that you are willing to burn everything down to spite him? This is why I say fuck politics.

A lot of heart-warming stuff you are posting but I am really not buying it. You can talk about how awful you feel about the blacks and all that but we all know that you will eventually just decide on "we can't do anything", "anything we do will make it worse", etc. That is your position for just about anything else when people suggest changes.

It reminds me of what Bill Clinton said about compassionate conservatism. Read this in his voice

Bill Clinton wrote:

"This 'compassionate conservatism' has a great ring to it, you know? It sounds so good. And I've really worked hard to try to figure out what it means... I made an honest effort, and near as I can tell, here's what it means: It means, 'I like you. I do. And I would like to be for the patients' bill of rights and I'd like to be for closing the gun show loophole, and I'd like not to squander the surplus and, you know, save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I'd like to raise the minimum wage. I'd like to do these things. But I just can't, and I feel terrible about it.'"

I don't think anyone on this website is rooting for the destruction of people's homes and the destruction of businesses, regardless of whether it's done by anarchists or police agents each hoping to instigate a race war.

I don't believe in conservative tears or sympathy for small time ownerships already barely hanging on, who end up losing everything.

Maybe in hindsight, it was a bad idea to strip voices by putting a negative spin on peaceful protesting that didn't involve horse cops, beatdowns, liberal deployments of less-lethal weaponry, blocking major roads, and enough chaos to cover looters and arsonists.

Post from a street medic:

Riverside police: unprovoked property destruction after they changed
https://imgur.com/gallery/oPMKSNs

*after they changed the curfew from 7pm to 6pm.
I'm a street medic who was on site in Downtown Riverside California when this all went down. This was a peaceful protest, there was no need for this property destruction. There were people who didn't even get the notification that curfew had changed.

Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House
https://religionnews.com/2020/06/02/ahe … ite-house/

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Early Monday evening (June 1), President Donald Trump stood before the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington and held aloft a Bible for cameras.

The photo opportunity had an eerie quality: Trump said relatively little, positioned stoically in front of the boarded-up church, which had been damaged the day before in a fire during protests sparked by the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis.

The church appeared to be completely abandoned.

It was, in fact, abandoned, but not by choice: Less than an hour before Trump’s arrival, armored police used tear gas to clear hundreds of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square park, which is across the street from the church.

Authorities also expelled at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian from the church’s patio.

Anarchist taping over his badge number: