Disinformation campaigns don't mean all such activity is by political shills.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/law-enfo...
Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.
It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.
And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.
Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.
Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]
So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!
This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.
Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-civilian-overs...
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/31/us/politics/ap-u...
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12671296442282475...
Quoting a few key sentences from Wikipedia:
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. [0]
America doesn't have a serious lobby that believes in those things. There isn't a lobby that is serious about autarchy, there isn't a lobby calling for complete mobilisation and there isn't a lobby calling for a one party state. Apart from maybe the anti-facists I don't know of a lobby promoting political violence. The war and imperialism stuff is possibly true, but that isn't a new thing in American politics - America has been at war my entire lifetime and mostly in the same set of middle eastern countries.
The only link between fascism and American politics is that Trump is popular in the Republican party and is happy to stand up and say that the globalism pendulum has swung too far. That is a tenuous link to fascist ideology.
The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066
Wrong.
> The Antifa movement in Germany is a political movement, composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. The use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.
People start with moral intuitions first and work backwards to find reasons. Fallacies, ignorance, and sloppy thinking is quasi-deliberate, to satisfy a priori values of what is sacred and what is profane, who are the good people and who are the bad people.
For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed.*
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
* For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed. (ducks ... and runs away)
Wikipedia points to many resources about Antifa movements, starting from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa
And you only care to pick one narrow definition.
There definitely are people making such arguments. The assertion is that property is the root cause of injustice so presumably destroying it is just. See for example https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1267402206220869632
What puzzles me is that some people supporting this argument are highly paid software engineers. How do they reconcile this with the fact that it is precisely the concept of private property (and yes, violent enforcement of it) that allows them to sit in front of the computer all day building some cool stuff and not worry that some violent thug will break into their house and take away their laptop?
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSpx9rb...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ7DOx5...
[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...
Edit: it seems exactly this happened after the Ferguson riots https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ferguson-anniversary-fina...
I have literally, a few months ago, responded to comments on this site where people claimed all police were bad because of the bad actions of some.
Tribalism is a real thing, and it results in dehumanization of the other "side", and opportunistic labelling.
In 2019, 259 black people were killed by police. In the same year, 189 Hispanic people were killed by police. 406 white people were killed as well. 17 Asians. Obviously, blacks are overrepresented.
Data here: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
When was the last time you saw a national news media report on a non-black person being unjustly killed by police? It happens, and the cops get let off, routinely. Daniel Shaver is a particularly egregious example, and the lack of national media coverage helps ensure that the cops aren't held accountable. The cop who murdered him was acquitted, and temporarily rehired to let him collect a 2400 a month pension.
The national media wants this framed as PURELY a racial issue, when the reality is that it's a mix of race, police militarization, and lack of police accountability due to cozy relationship with prosecutors.
This racial framing is unnecessarily tribal, and undermines the effectiveness of achieving a meaningful goal that helps reduce this behavior by police.
I've gotta say, the NRA has been getting closer to fitting this.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals?cycle=2012&id=d00000...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/us/nra-details-plan-for-a...
There are confirmed reports of agitators that have been stopped before violence occurred, thank God. [0]
Last evening, Denver's PD chief marched with protestors and mostly allowed them to walk and shout well past curfew. I've not yet seen looting reports (though that may change), and the injuries to protestors and PD seem to have been much less as of now. Compared to other nights, it was successful.
Each city is different. Lumping people together nationally is not helping anyone discover what is happening locally.
[0] https://twitter.com/KyleClark I suck at twitter, so I can't figure out how to link specific tweets here. But Kyle Clark is the head anchor for Denver's 9pm news broadcast. The tweets in his feed specify the facts much better than I can.
You got it backwards.
The only definition from that page that is not related to some extremist marxist/anarchist movement is this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism
And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
Today, "Antifa" is synonymous with "Antifaschistische Aktion".
"according to a Twitter spokesperson". Which spokesperson and where was this said? I don't see anything on https://blog.twitter.com. Nor could I find any primary recent references to Twitter and white nationalists or Identity Evropa except the editorials themselves.
Why is it important for you to filter some definitions out?
> And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
There are historical reasons that explain why Antifa caught up as a name, what logo activists use, etc. The abbreviation did not change, it still stands for "anti-fascim actions" today, or "Antifaschistische Aktion" in German.
But you are saying Antifa is synonymous, ie. equal to "Antifaschistische Aktion", not for what the words mean, but in a literal way, to restrict the definition. No matter how the name came to life, the spirit behind it is broader that the name; nowadays it is a perfectly fine shortcut for anti-fascism.
I mean, dictionaries tend to agree on this one:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/antifa
This guy had, according to the coroner's report, recently used meth, had fentanyl in his system and the police stated he resisted arrest. He also has a police report from 2007 where he pointed a gun at a pregnant lady's belly to restrain her while his partner ransacked her apartment for jewelry and drugs. Sounds peaceful to you?
https://www.theblaze.com/news/george-floyd-fentanyl-methamph... https://files.catbox.moe/f4ylk1.jpeg
(and BTW it was a forged $20 bill, not check forgery)
> jogging down a street
You use this as an example of police brutality in which the police weren't even involved. And then you immediately follow with "Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant"? Will you?
> sitting in one's own home
Breonna Taylor, a black woman, who's boyfriend shot first at the police when the executed a no-knock warrant. Does this sound racially motivated to you? If they were white, would the officers not shoot back?
--
Maybe you should stop skimming headlines of MSM and start actually trying to uncover the whole story before you help perpetuate a race war with lazy, anecdotal and misleading examples masquerading as actual talking points.
