zlacker

>>obilgi+(OP)
A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night:

> I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place

> The media coverage of it is WILD

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground

> There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of black guys last night and they were so proud of what was built because they felt like they fought for it, which in a sense, they did.

>>conroy+fz1
> The media coverage of it is WILD

I live 7 blocks away from "the zone" and can confirm, I have never in my life seen anything alike in this regard. The scale of the misinformation being spread in social networks and news media reached a level I couldn't believe possible before. Seriously, it's beyond absurd.

If anyone is interested, I have been taking some pictures of the ongoing protests (including a few of the zone): https://www.flickr.com/photos/peramides

>>pera+gF1
Seattle police chief said on TV [1] that "Rapes, robberies and all sorts of violent acts have been occurring in the area and we're not able to get to [them]."

Doesn’t sound very utopian

[1] https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1271291958296604675?s=2...

>>drevil+IP2
Wasn't it the police who abandoned this area in the first place?

The impression I'm getting from this and other events from the past weeks is that the police would like us to believe that without them, society turns to chaos, but in practice, US police turns out to be a major source of chaos, and without them things often turn much more peaceful.

I'm not saying there should be no police at all, but that police should work with the community, instead of trying to dominate it.

>>mcv+YZ2
The whole area is only a few blocks. A society on that scale can be peaceful even without any organized police presence, but we knew that already: just look at how any small town or village is run. The problem with larger neighborhoods and cities is that often there is no real sense of community to speak of, so nothing for police to "work with" in the first place.

>>zozbot+F93
Maybe there's a valuable lesson in that too: foster a sense of community, instead of trying to control people by force.

My impression is also that many cases of police abuse in the US happen in situations where most of the police officers policing a community are not themselves members of that community, but outsiders looking down on that community.

>>mcv+Ka3
> foster a sense of community, instead of trying to control people by force.

The institutions that are most effective at "fostering a sense of community" are voluntary ones like churches and cultural centres, not coercive ones like police. Social scientists have known for a long time about the critical importance of this sort of civic and community engagement, but it is often misunderstood and considered irrelevant at a political level, especially by more liberal or radical sorts of politics which often advocate for a mixture of extreme social individualism and a radical redefinition of social groups-- generally emphasizing a simplistic view of power relations over a broader sense of community.

>>zozbot+od3
which often advocate for a mixture of extreme social individualism and a radical redefinition of social groups

Additionally, they advocate mixing together people who have little in common, to obtain diversity. That's not conducive to sense of community either, as Robert Putnam's research showed[1].

[1] - https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....