"A little firey, mostly peaceful."
'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
281–290 of 325 posts
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t live in Portland so obviously none of this worries me all that much. My city has had bad riots but they passed and actually things are much better now. I expect even a lot of people in Portland are upset by it, but aren’t in immediate near-term danger. I don’t believe that these riots are going to spread nationwide and result in a breakdown of society, even if sensationalist news stories tell you that’s going…
He even said he'd send armed personnel to watch the polls :(
Would you prefer he send the Black Panthers?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-panthers-georgia-pic...
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That doesn’t compute. An organization is ultimately inseparable from the real ideological positions and goals of its leadership. You're assuming the "real" ideological position of a black Marxist starting a black advocacy movement protesting police violence against black people is actually Marxism, whereas the actual evidence from her own mouth is that the "real" ideological position is the black advocacy. >Why shou…
> You're assuming the "real" ideological position of a black Marxist starting a black advocacy movement protesting police violence against black people is actually Marxism, whereas the actual evidence from her own mouth is that the "real" ideological position is the black advocacy. Actually, I’m suspecting that the “real” ideological position of the BLM organization is both an end to police-on-black violence and cert…
>Actually, I’m suspecting that the “real” ideological position of the BLM organization is both an end to police-on-black violence and certain extreme economic-socio-political goals, except that its leadership tries to keep the latter aims quiet.
You're talking about a hypothetical, as-yet unrealized (and possibly unfounded) form of BLM in the future. As mentioned earlier, BLM supporters protesting on the ground likely didn't join for a Marxist agenda and aren't supporting it, and if it's the case that "extreme economic-socio-political goals" are being kept quiet (IE, not part of the common dialogue,) then it isn't correct to consider BLM currently Marxist, and labeling it as such is only useful to distract people from its legitimate grievances.
>After all, even in its overt public platform the BLM organization makes certain demands (like for trans issues) that go beyond the matter of police violence against black people which has drawn the public to BLM-led events.
Support for trans rights, LGBT issues, feminism and the like isn't that radical and it isn't Marxist per se. Reading their "what we believe" page[0], posted elsewhere in this thread, it's clear that they're trying to include other marginalized groups in the movement, but also trying to stay on message, doing so in the explicit context of the black community. That's just good PR, and apart from the overt language not much different than progressive mission statements put out by many organizations.
>So, you cannot claim that the BLM organization is tightly focused just on antiracism.
Ok. I still don't see the radical Marxist agenda. When they stop talking about racism and start talking about seizing the means of production I'll believe it.
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
That logic isn't correct. Take for counter example Christians, a group of largely self identifying "members of an organisation". It doesn't logically follow that if a self-identifying Christian shoots a lot of people that "Christianity is responsible" either. That lacks nuance, of course groups of individuals that self-identify as part of a group can act as individuals and as a group, and it's often unclear externall…
If you want to draw a parallel to Christianity in this way then we can focus on what the organization does post-crisis. A self identifying Christian who kills people in the name of Christianity is vocally condemned by other self identifying Christians and many would rush to say that they were mentally ill. If BLM wants to not be lumped in with extremists then supporters of Black Lives Matter need to vocally and unequ…
>If BLM wants to not be lumped in with extremists then supporters of Black Lives Matter need to vocally and unequivocally condemn extremist and their acts that do not align with a supporter’s views of the group’s objectives. I have never seen a BLM supporter credibly call Micah Xavier Johnson mentally ill or an extremist.
I mean, isn't this literally because you didn't do a Google search? https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/dall...
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all commercial journalism is marketing. Journalism as an industry doesn't exist to inform you, it exists to make money.
Journalism's duty (implied by the press' constitutional protections) is to hold the powerful accountable.
Maybe, but that's not what actually drives their behaviour.
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "responsible" might be overstating it. But if BLM is not responsible, then it does poke holes in the ACAB and maybe even "Defund the Police" positions. If protestors can dissociate from rogue actors, can police? If not, what's the clear difference beyond political tribalism?
The trouble is the behaviors in the police seem to be fairly widespread, the perpetrators are protected, and reform is actively resisted. At that point it isn't a rouge actor. There has always been police violence, but what cell phones have done is reveal how widespread it may have always been, rejecting the rouge actor narrative.
And how is the rogue actor narrative intact vis a vis the riots?
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble is the behaviors in the police seem to be fairly widespread, the perpetrators are protected, and reform is actively resisted. At that point it isn't a rouge actor. There has always been police violence, but what cell phones have done is reveal how widespread it may have always been, rejecting the rouge actor narrative.
And how is the rogue actor narrative intact vis a vis the riots?
Leaders associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, including organizers of the protest rally, condemned the shooting -- Wikipedia
Have we seen anything in particular that strongly suggests the Dallas shooting was not a rogue agent?
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The mainstream news reporting on Portland (and other regional rioting) got to the point where they were bald-faced lying about peaceful protests standing in front of burning buildings. It’s a little bit cliche, but also true: to judge a protest by its most violent elements but to decline to do the same of the police is the language of the oppressor. Everyone I saw celebrating 100 days was celebrating 100 days of su…
> If the state wants people to respect the laws and remain peaceful, it needs to clean its own house of violent criminals first. No, the people demand that everyone respect the laws and remain peaceful. To that end, the people fund and enact a police force to protect life and property, and to apprehend suspected criminals. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “some of the protestors have turned violent.” There is…
> No, the people demand that everyone respect the laws and remain peaceful.
I don't think that's true in practice in America, at all. It's certainly the cover story, though.
Demonstrably, the people (as a collective group) have only ever demanded that from non-police. Police have a long, long history of deploying illegal violence against anyone even suspected of breaking the law, prior to trial, up to and frequently including executing them.
Historically, "the people" (again, as a group) do not seem bothered by this at all, simply because that's the way it's always been. It's expected and accepted that the police will deploy a significant amount of (not legally permitted) violence against anyone even suspected of breaking the law, hence the common shout of "STOP RESISTING" (usually deployed against those who aren't resisting at all) during police-initiated violence. It's a farce; the police are de facto exempt from the laws regarding battery by American social consensus. This is obvious to anyone paying attention. No effort is made to conceal this fact because there is no significant outrage or pressure to change anything about the situation. Violent police in the US are the widely-accepted and expected norm, and there isn't usually even a debate about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
Seriously, think about it: the police have no special legal exception from the laws for beating or otherwise battering people when dispersing riots, giving chase to a suspect, or effecting an arrest. Most people seem to have entirely lost track of that fact in the "police vs baddies" battle narrative, and assume that anyone suspected or accused by police must be deserving of at least a few whacks with a nightstick, or possibly even execution if the officer, at their sole discretion, deems it appropriate. That's about as far from "due process" or "presumption of innocence" as you can possibly get. The set of laws that applies to police is simply not the same set of laws that applies to you and I, and that gap is entirely a social contract one, not a legally-codified one.
It's reflected in the intense indignation of police and police unions when they are (very) occasionally charged with crimes of violence whilst doing their jobs. To them, they're doing what's expected of them: deploying expected (yet illegal) violence against suspected criminals.
https://news.wttw.com/2020/06/08/having-talk-how-families-pr...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003575589/a-conv...
> To that end, the people fund and enact a police force to protect life and property, and to apprehend suspected criminals.
The police in the US have only ever been really diligent about protecting the life and property of a small subset of the population, primarily large landowners. Meanwhile, they pose a significant danger to the life and property of a much larger segment, and always have. The reason the police were first created in America was to capture escaped slaves and to keep the poor from looting and torching the mansions of the white landowning class.
The tradition continues to date. You can see this gap in the amount of case-solving effort the police in the US put into crimes against the police force themselves or large buildings/retail, and the amount of case-solving effort they put into crimes against the property of non-HNWI individuals, or the amount of case-solving effort they put into violence against women. Their priorities are extremely clear, and to hold up police behavior as "law and order" is simply the motte in this argument, as their behavior is anything but a reasonable or fair application of the law. The police, for example, basically never enforce any laws against other police (or their families), even when violations are entirely obvious, and this is extremely well-documented.
It extends to the prosecutorial apparatus that supports the police, too. This is one of the primary reasons that minorities and poor people are incarcerated at an extremely out-of-proportion rate to the rest of the population.
Those calling for the abolition or defunding of the police would, funnily enough, actually be thrilled with more thoroughly consistent application of actual "law and order" and not the two-tiered system of police-initiated violence and authoritarian choke-holding and skull-cracking that passes for same by tradition in the US.
I wrote about one facet of this bizarre police-to-American-public apparently undocumented social contract in June:
https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What we do know is that if you are an organization looking for change, if you're not very careful, your well intended movement will be usurped by those who have ulterior motives It seems to me, as an outsider, that this has already happened given what started as good intentions from occupy Wall Street down to whatever we have now. I can’t imagine the goal was actually burning buildings, but is a subversion of the g…
It is on-record at this point that US federal and local agents infiltrate these organizations and run a divide-and-conquer playbook. When you fight against the monetized weight of these efforts, they write articles like this one, attempting to invoke the imaginary leftist authoritarian boogey-man. The best part of this article is that it linked the demands of the protestors, which I fully, 100% across-the-board suppo…
I think some of these demands are valuable for society and I support #2-6,9-10.
But I don’t think they should be a condition for allowing an individual or journalist to record or cover protests.
I’m not sure what you mean as “on-record,” but I think it’s naive to assume that all this violence is a result of US federal and local agents. In fact, I’d be surprised if any is as I don’t think agents aren’t allowed to commit crimes as part of their enforcement operations.
I also don’t think a law enforcement conspiracy could be conducted at such a large scale with such efficiency and without leaving tons of evidence that would be the best story of the year. In a year of great stories for the press.
If this is the case, then we need more reporting, not less. If every furniture that is burned down is the result of agent provocateur, then let’s get some investigative journalists on it.
Re: 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The end of protests and a society that works better for everybody, yes. You don't actually bring that society to the table. That's outside of your power. If anything, you promise that this society will somehow come about if only your demands are met. Kind of like the politicians that might promise almost anything, if only you elected them. > Progressive candidates, like members of the DSA and politicians they endor…
I'm confused, how did we get from "here are a few examples of specific demands" to "the only demand is dismantling the criminal justice system"? There are many demands; not meeting all of them this year is not the same as failure. FWIW the ballot amendment to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department had about 61% support, vs 32% opposed, among Minneapolis residents. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/survey…
> I'm confused, how did we get from "here are a few examples of specific demands" to "the only demand is dismantling the criminal justice system"?
I didn't say it was the only demand, it just cancels out all the other more reasonable demands. Suppose a political party promises to "strengthen national unity", "eliminate unemployment", "provide economic stimulus" and "start a war for more territory culminating in an unprecedented genocide". It then doesn't really matter that I think 75% of these goals sound alright.
> These proposals are not as outlandish as you might think, especially among the people who are impacted by them.
I think it really depends on how the question is phrased. Dismantling a particularly unpopular police force is one thing, ending all policing and imprisonment is another, and it's also not just a "local" thing.