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Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

capitolhillautonomous.zone

291–300 of 920 posts

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#291

I lived in Seattle Capitol Hill (Harvard Ave by SCCC) area for 10 years and left the state in 2010. I went back a few years ago for a visit and it looked like the homeless population had doubled in the time since. All of King and Pierce counties are completely overrun by homelessness and drug addiction. I remember it was a big deal when they would go sweep out "The Jungle" tent city under I-5 at Beacon Hill. Now they…

You are correct that Seattle has a tremendous amount of homelessness. The rest of your comment doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sweeps - which you seem to be advocating - do nothing to solve the problem; meanwhile you ironically criticize tent cities in residential neighborhoods without seeming to understand that a tent city is a residential neighborhood and it is precisely the periodic shutdowns and relocations of…

I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just offering an observation as someone that lived there for a decade and loves the area, but now has somewhat of an outsider perspective. Seattle has very deep, fundamental problems that it has no idea how to solve. Homeless tent cities scattered throughout the county are not normal in nearly any other American city. Especially not the ones as wealthy as Seattle. And maybe that is a source of the problem. But it also seems the political leanings of the voters are at odds with the lifestyle they enjoy in the area.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regular assholes you have the right to self-defense. With the police you don't.

Without police or “criminal justice apparatus” your rights are merely theoretical.

I have a gun and my right to defend myself is a practical, factual statement. American police have no duty to protect you and are free from legal punishment if they choose to idly wait while you are assaulted and raped.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia...

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you feel this insecure, you should purchase firearms and practice using them. Many of your neighbors are doing this.

Why not have the government hire people to do that for me? Call it "socialized defense" or something.

American police departments have no duty to protect you. They are law enforcement officers who choose at their own discretion to arrive at your home seven minutes after you dial 911.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you have it folks, eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe the rapper warlord Orwellian dystopia narrative won’t change their mind one bit.

Well I am a brown man who's lived in America my entire life, and I've never been harassed by police. So there you have it... eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe that America is a police-state dystopia won't change their mind one bit. It's almost like ... anecdata isn't trustworthy... EDIT: downvoted for pointing out the hypocrisy.

Thank you. I think people discount the power of speaking out. Don't worry about the negativity. Speak the truth, and it's all that can be asked of you.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#295
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are civilians and should be treated as such, it shouldn't be any more legal for them to do something any other civilian would face substantial legal penalties for without facing the same penalties.

So normal citizens should be able to put cuffs on other citizens? Put them into a car and drive off?

You know that's perfectly legal in California right? You can make a citizens arrest for a misdemeanor in progress or a felony you have knowledge of.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist. Yes, but not current american police. What is demonstrated here is that unchecked power is bad, which is pretty close to what the american police currently seems to have, leading to crimes like the one that started the whole protest.

> unchecked power is bad Are you pro individual gun ownership? The second amendment exists in the US Constitution, first and foremost to balance the power between a populous and would-be tyrants.

Funny though how the usual fervant supporters seem to instead cheering tyrant like action.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#297
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “neoliberal” mean in this context?

I think of neoliberalism and neoconservativism as offshoots of corporatism, which is the idea that government can most efficiently serve the people by protecting the interests of corporations above all else. This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”) It also leads to things like banning class action law suit…

The label neoconservative primarily concerns a niche political movement in foreign affairs and defense. It was largely a small group of highly influential Washington insiders who spent most of their careers at the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA. Ideologically they were realists, but mostly in the context of foreign affairs. In terms of domestic policy they were all over the board, though they were often typically described as socially liberal (i.e. no anti-abortion activists). Discussing their domestic policy preferences is a little non-sensical because they didn't really care about domestic policy. Most of them were Republican, many of their financial backers were Democratic, but the party affiliations were mostly irrelevant except that in terms of appointments their power flowed primarily through Republican administrations.

Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.

I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifest consequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.

Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.

It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent big government, and big government is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to big government? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.

Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.

[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't concern yourself much with where a policy sat on the big government/small government axis. Issues were contextualized differently. Conservatives took control of the narrative by recontextualizing the issues and changing the metrics by which people judged the appropriateness and viability of policies. They were so successful that most people today across the political spectrum have completely internalized that shift. Not just in the U.S., but globally. How did they do it globally? Because their recontextualization didn't happen in a vacuum. Few would call Deng Xiaoping a neoliberal (or Mahathir Mohamad, or many others Asian leaders through the succeeding decades), but clearly an appreciation for market-based policies was an emerging global phenomenon. But it was U.K. and U.S. conservatives in particular (though not necessarily exclusively) who built a political narrative around that shift and provided examples of how to leverage it in democratic societies so that popular support for, e.g., privatization gathered momentum independent of the actual benefits, promoting the disintegration of institutions that didn't benefit from a diminished governmental role.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#298
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I’ve been staying in Seattle with my girlfriend since quarantine began. We live about 9 blocks away up Madison and have been walking around the zone almost daily. Hard to believe how much fear-mongering, disinfo, and straight-up lying I see in every thread/post about the subject.

I'm up north about the same distance. Only bad days have been this Sun/Mon with all the gas/flash-bangs and the sheriff's plane flying loops over the city until the wee hours of the morning. Since the police cleared out, everything has been much MUCH nicer around here.

As someone who has never been to Seattle, I am shocked by how bad your police department appears to be. Even the LAPD behaved ... well, less bad from what I’d heard.

Flash bangs? Those are for assaulting buildings, not crowd control.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#299
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to that is not having an "empowered" caste, and leaving it to a community to police themselves. Everyone tends to get nervous about that though.

Something about witch hunts and lynching perhaps?

Both of these represent the same phenomenon as the modern police force, which is class oppression (in the first case anti-intellectual misogyny, in the second the same base racism underlying the current struggle). Communities can and will self-regulate, when let out from under the thumb of state-sanctioned violence.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that Seattle has a tremendous amount of homelessness. The rest of your comment doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sweeps - which you seem to be advocating - do nothing to solve the problem; meanwhile you ironically criticize tent cities in residential neighborhoods without seeming to understand that a tent city is a residential neighborhood and it is precisely the periodic shutdowns and relocations of…

I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just offering an observation as someone that lived there for a decade and loves the area, but now has somewhat of an outsider perspective. Seattle has very deep, fundamental problems that it has no idea how to solve. Homeless tent cities scattered throughout the county are not normal in nearly any other American city. Especially not the ones as wealthy as Seattle. And maybe that i…

Seattle also added a massive amount of people and housing went up 2.3x. those economic factors likely outweighed anything the government did by far.

When I moved here in 2010 the cola was 30% more than St Louis. It's now over 3x.

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