Politics aside for a moment, this is the pinnacle of Cap Hill IMO. Good on them, as long as they stay safe and try not to get too culty.
If this isn’t shut down quickly, I predict we see a national movement like this by Juneteenth.
When I look at the list of demands I'm pretty quick to dismiss it. Then I remember how I dismissed the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle too, and how many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades. I might be too hopeful, but I really think the city leadership should talk to them and hear them out, instead of just trying to push them over.
Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...
Performance Art, I guess. Reads like a story of children building a treehouse/fort.
Here's hoping it sustains itself for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania
It's been a thing half a century now.
I'm not passing judgment yet since the days are young and the political bias on the ground is thick in both directions. But it is definitely not "by all accounts".
But my personal bias on the table is that yeah, trading police that were imperfectly constrained by the system for new police utterly and entirely unconstrained by the system is probably not going to go well. The real "fun" will start when Raz's faction pisses off enough people to form a violent counterfaction and you get a gang war, so give it a bit. It takes time for these things to develop. Let the honeymoon wear off and have this place showing a functioning system for, oh, say, at least a month before declaring victory. Not that you declared victory, I'm just saying, I recommend against getting too invested in this.
It's not as if "a place that has no police" is some shocking new experiment that has never been run before; you've got plenty of places you can look out in the world to see what happens next. It's not a difficult-to-predict progression.
>tl;dw: Man was tagging over someone else's art, Raz and group approach and separate him from crowd, chasing him for two blocks. He begins to film them with his phone, they take it from him. He tries to get it back and they attack him, kicking him in the head and breaking his glasses. At one point, Raz threatens to shoot the man. They then begin to gaslight him that it was all his fault. Audio only for most of the end, because woman in Raz' crew filming puts the phone in her pocket while the stream continues. [1]
So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...
Someonen transcribed those demands and then posted them.
I think it would be better to view those demands as the union of demands of each person willing to speak to a crowd. Which is why you see inconsistency in then, why it's such a long list, etc.
I just think that list of demands is better understood in that context.
I'm amazed by SF and close areas utter disregard for what is normal crime wise. Most people in most cities don't have a story about their car window being smashed in and rummaged through. Every thread I see here / on reddit about SF someone mentions that its completely normal and should be expected there.
This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime. What does that have to do with the police existing "too much"?
It would be nice if it could sustain itself, but it will likely creak under its own weight in a month or so.
Aside, intentionally or unintentionally, calling a group of predominantly black people "thugs" is a common dog whistle.
This feels very much overblown.
Seattle Times has an article that outlines similar "occupy" protests.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/welcome-to-the-cap...
EDIT: Replaced a term for a more neutral one.
Orwell would likely support CHAZ, he fight with the anarchists in Catalonia after all. People tend to not realize that Animal Farm was a criticism of the USSR from a socialist. It is not a criticism of all socialism or anarchism.
That blurb on the website "You are now leaving the USA" is tongue in cheek.
The actual demands make no such claim about independence, all US Federal, State, and Local laws still apply.
There will eventually be arrests, and the WORST thing Trump can do is attempt to use the military to squash relatively peaceful protests.
As someone living in Copenhagen, I would not consider that anything near an accurate description of the history of Christiania. What happened was that an old military area and barracks was left abandoned and disused, so a group of squatters moved in, fixed up the place and built a community.
It did not turn into a "serious drug venue". They had issues with hard drugs in the 1970s, but kicked all of that to the curb and there is a strict community-supported ban on all hard drugs. Over the years various sellers have popped up here and there, but they are generally shunned and chased out by the community.
It also did not "fall apart", although it has had its ups and downs. The political winds have varied from indifference to acceptance to attempts to abolish the entire things, raze the area and built apartments. The current state is that the area is owned by a foundation and is treated partly as a part of the city of Copenhagen and partly as an independent enclave. Danish law enforcement is grudgingly accepted in cases of actual crimes, but otherwise not exactly openly welcomed.
“ The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—
“(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
“(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
“In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”
I don’t know. Without sufficient intel as to what is happening on the ground I wouldn’t know if civil rights are being denied. If they are and the local authorities are cooperating with the rebellious group then there might be a way to utilize the act. It is just too soon to tell.
So the police aren't going to storm the barricades -- they figure they won't have to.
I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.
I'm just trying to give some additional context to how this list of (demands|wishes) came about.
If you view it as a single list of (demands|wishes) it doesn't make as much sense. If you view it as the (demands|wishes) from a wide variety of people, that were made on an open mic at a protest that was transcribed, then categorized, then posted to the internet, it's easier to understand what it is.
There are organized protest leaders that have curated their list of demands and put it out. This very much isn't that! This is basically the raw list of demands from a wide variety of different speakers. The only editing was in the transcription and the categorization of those demands.
Is there a list of these fears somewhere? Ideally as presented at the time.
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.
But 2 issues that stand out as prescient are the environmental impact of an ascendant China and the changes to the US middle class globalization would render.
When will they declare independence? That’s when the fun will really begin.
- One of the first things they did after seizing six city blocks is setting up a border and controlling who enters the CHAZ
- How would the media have reacted if right-wing groups had commandeered several city blocks of any American city?
This is super interesting to watch unfold.
How do explain all the people that have those things Raz didn’t and are still assholes?
> 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.
Every generation needs a Woodstock. Burning man is not real enough.
Whether or not the city planned on this, it's a nice clean way to quarantine the most radical protest elements in a playground that lets them live out their revolutionary fantasies in an environment where they can either be constructive, or hurt one-another away from everyone else.
In a month, they'll probably cut services and start pushing them out without making a huge deal of it.
Which is fun for a while until people start dying or fighting like they always do and suddenly you need a group of people who spend their time dealing with it. Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long.
The police let the anarchists do whatever they want, within certain constraints (no injuring people, constrained to certain neighborhoods), and the anarchists only do it on that day of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts between the police and the rioters, but it never escalates to huge conflicts any more.
It’s a display of mutual respect for authority, and it allows the radical groups to blow off some steam, while campaigning for progress.
I know this idea makes no sense to law and order -type people, but it’s an ancient human idea to ritualize and sanctify the behaviors you want to discourage or control.
a. having free snacks and b. not allowing through traffic, but
it really hasn't been stated enough how awful it had been when the police were there. Helicopters all night and if you were unlucky to be close enough: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/04/43840246/seattle...
Curious, since I can't trust news media to not sensationalize this:
What has been built, according to your friend? Have they set up infrastructure of some sort for housing people? Kitchens, latrines, etc?
That was just the beginning of the confrontation. If you watch the full video the group then followed and hassled the tagger for several minutes before the tagger was hit in the face and had their glasses broken (and their smartphone was stolen from them). Someone also threatened to blow the taggers brains out.
Note that rent control, even if the city doesn't have the power to establish it for private rentals, can effectively be achieved by the same means.
At the very least, you could easily make an argument that a rising tide does not lift all boats; i.e. many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area. On the other hand, if your stance is that our collective goal should be to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; then we want more people to move to the city have prosperous lives to fulfill the new roles available here. In that scenario it's hard to keep income inequality from expanding.
It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance; MHA (mandatory housing affordability) is a level-headed way to redistribute some of the gains that tech has brought to those who are less fortunate. However, our current city council is much more left-leaning and I'm worried that their stance towards growth is far more "progressive" and anti-business.
Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous. I'm not sure how I feel about the matter; but I certainly do not want us to dampen our potential future potential by encouraging businesses to set up shop elsewhere. We need more initiatives like MHA and fewer like the business head-tax.
If you do live in Seattle, you should head over and see it for yourself. It's a very unique thing and who knows how long it will be there. I assume at some point the police will drive a tank through it or something.
Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
I'd like to think, regardless of anyone's politics, we could all agree that the elected government should have authority over the police.
Are you sure that the dealers you saw were trading hard drugs, and not soft ones like cannabis, mushrooms, etc.?
It's a little hard to come up with historical examples because the utopia portion is often quite short and overshadowed by the negatives that follow. Generally, I would point to almost any historical 'revolution' as a warning that tearing down a system and rebuilding it from scratch does not mean improvement, even if it appears to be at the beginning. You could probably point to the August 1789 period of the French Revolution as an example of the 'utopic' phase, but I'm not certain. The fall of Saddam's government in Iraq would be another example. Kurdish Syria is probably another decent example.
eventually the idiots/assholes will become a problem that needs to be dealt with
Whether that's going to be a positive or a negative remains to be seen, but that's one of the key notions in these protests.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_commu...
Often these people need help and are self-medicating as anyone using traditional western medicine does (albeit with non-corporate drugs).
This type of stereotype further allows police to run wild and unchecked to "solve the drug problem" by beating and harassing than by actually solving any problem like a social worker is more likely to.
There's some niche a well-trained police force can fill, but it's a lot smaller than what the poorly-trained forces do now. Almost no one is actually calling for a complete and permanent abolition of police. Just a redefinition of their role.
Your last paragraph reminded me of Eric Gans’ “Originary Hypothesis” [1]:
> Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation," which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans#The_Originary_Hypo...
> The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police
Also, I would look at the Baltimore police/crime post-Freddie Grey to see how diminished police action leads to much increased crime. What the BPD did was horrifying but so was the rise in crime once they became less active.
At least one counterexample to this is Exarcheia[1] in Athens, which has been relatively unpoliced for the last 50 years.
I was there about a year ago and was struck by how both peaceful and lively it was. Nowhere in Athens felt nearly as alive.
Source on that? 75% of that link talks about:
- riots following police action
- attacks on police stations
- special policing tactics for that region
- evictions by the police
The Wikipedia page documents precisely what has happened each time the police have tried to establish a foothold in the neighborhood since the 1973 student uprising. They currently operate from patrols and bases outside of the neighborhood. Any effects they have on the neighborhood (like squat clearing) tend to be impermanent.
>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.
[1]https://twitter.com/databyler/status/1268555840098906115?ref...
I think I got it from a German Literature class. The professor had us read some formational texts, and one of them was a theory for the establishment of religion, written by some German 20th Century thinker. I can’t find the source now, but it was probably a pretty mainstream one, for all you internet sleuths out there.
He tried to put forward an evolutionary theory of religion. Basically, a tribe would come into conflict and children would kill their parents as a result. To try and prevent the same thing from happening to themselves, the children invented rituals that they taught to their children, so that they could control and direct their violence away from the parents. Instead of killing people, they would kill effigies made to look like people. Eventually, the children associate the effigies with their parents. But they like their parents, so they leave out the whole killing part when they teach it to their kids, who come to worship the effigies. They then kill animals instead of people. And so on. It was a really interesting exercise of rationalism!
If someone can find the source for me, I’ll give them my 2 internet points :)
Edit: I think it was Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard.
A massively failed capitalist project that leaves behind an enormous mess?
More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...
There’s so much unincorporated land in the USA. So many opportunities to prove things work or don’t work. Why move into a place somebody else built?
> locals and activists help with the cleaning and cooking and even take turns being a night watch after someone – reportedly far-right activists – set a squat on fire.
> “It’s hard to live in peace when teenagers come here just to get high or you need to run to your car because protesters are setting them on fire,” says Dioni Vougioukli, a journalist who has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years.
Mostly, probably, because starting a city has a process defined in state law (or, out of the US, law of some other higher level of government) which is different than “a bunch of people just buy up land and decide to declare it a city”, e.g., California’s LAFCO process.
What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police. Police should be as accountable for their actions and mistakes as every other citizen (equality under the law!), or at least that's the idea.
We can start by:
- getting rid of police unions that hide information and do stuff like have police be judged by three of their peers, one picked by the accused, and prevent police from getting fired.
- get rid of qualified immunity
And so on.
From your article:
>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”
So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.
Because you were a child.
I don't question the resolve or peaceful intentions of the people currently occupying CHAZ, but instead the patience of property managers, local residents, and local businesses (though closed due to COVID-19).
I'm not from the area, but the sheer amount of anger and enthusiasm that has fueled these protests suggests that the city council has not been striking an appropriate balance.
Happy middle class people don't tend to riot and try to start new societies.
Even with Obama in office, we ended up with even bigger banks and a spiraling debt crisis.
If city councils would defund the police and use the money for actual good things then we wouldn’t have this problem of police brutality and police being above the law. But no, the police need to buy tanks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There’d be a certain amount of deferred justice in doing that, but I’d rather the practice simply be banned.
I find it eerie that you're excluding from the equation the tens of thousands of homeless people in those cities. The right question is "to what lengths should we go to give people the ability to live with a roof over their heads?" The bay area has answered with "very little", where most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless.
I’d rather they force commercial developers to put in two bedrooms worth of housing for each full time employee worth of office space they add.
If the developers are short-sighted and only add high end McMansions and condos, that’s fine.
The housing market will eventually oversaturate, and those properties will end up selling at a loss to people that couldn’t afford them at the original price.
The Microsofts and Amazons of the world will end up paying eye watering premiums for open space floor plans, or luxury real estate developers will take a bath. Either way, not a tear will be shed.
Gosh how can you be so jealous of people you're willing to destroy their stuff. It's the same kind of xenophobia that fuels anti-immigrant rhetoric. People upset that those moving to 'their turf' happen to do better than them.
Wish I was in Seattle to go check it out. I love this kind of thing.
The coronavirus bit still isn’t good, but the city has learned for the hygiene bits.
It's almost like ... anecdata isn't trustworthy...
EDIT: downvoted for pointing out the hypocrisy.
I do believe that we should support the homeless populations of our cities; but if you're familiar with Seattle's homelessness problems in particular, you'll know that the city has essentially thrown literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem to little effect.
I don't believe Seattle should follow a path of growth-at-all-costs and ignore the social problems the city has; but the city council here is staunchly anti-business, and that carries a risk-too, like the original commenter said—take growth for granted and you can end up like Detroit. In that situation, no one prospers, and everyone suffers; which we definitely don't want. It's a fine line to walk. That's all I'm saying.
Yep. I live three blocks south of CHAZ and it's so overblown. Conservative family from the east-coast have told me they're very worried for me, and I check fox news and see images from "Seattle" of parking lots of cars on fire. Those images were from Minneapolis last month, not even from Seattle.
As another nearby commenter said, last week when the police were here gassing us, throwing loud bombs at protestors at 1am, and having 24/7 helicopters directly overhead, it was hard to sleep. We could feel the gas blocks away. Ever since the police vacated the precinct and "CHAZ" started, things have been so peaceful and safe in this community.
Certainly an interesting recursion problem.
It was not well received at the time, but sadly, it’s predictions have been proven correct over time.
Here’s a contemporary negative review of the book with a point by point refutation of its contents (it is painful to read with the benefit of hindsight): https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
Here’s a chronology of related protests, ending in Trump. You could read up on the individual events, I suppose:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta-timeline-idUS...
Also, that the Antifas are asking for protection money from businesses within the zone. Again, dubious.
But, if either of those things are happening, I'm pretty okay with putting an end to them, by whatever means necessary. Threatening Joe and Jane citizen with violence is not cool.
This seems like propaganda in its own right. With the exception of Fox and Sky, most news coverage I see on YouTube is neutral or positive:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=capitol+hill+au...
Most mainstream coverage of protests in general seems to be totally biased in favor of the protestors and against the police. The only big channels that show anything going in the other direction are, again, Fox and Sky.
The other interesting comparison here is the varied response to this and the Malheur National wildlife refuge occupation.
so if you squat long enough anything is possible.
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 suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.
Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.
Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:
Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).
Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).
(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)
Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.
If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.
One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.
Seattle and the Puget Sound is a beautiful place but horrible place to live. They have an absolutely useless government that has no idea how to solve any of their problems. So they end up with stuff like this.
Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been; but it's genuinely confusing and the party does not feel unified.
The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They ‘cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise the power they still lack.
The demonstrators’ view of the city surrounding their stage also changes. By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence – a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic – than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.
...
Either authority must abdicate and allow the crowd to do as it wishes: in which case the symbolic suddenly becomes real, and, even if the crowd’s lack of organisation and preparedness prevents it from consolidating its victory, the event demonstrates the weakness of authority. Or else authority must constrain and disperse the crowd with violence: in which case the undemocratic character of such authority is publicly displayed. The imposed dilemma is between displayed weakness and displayed authoritarianism.
..."
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1968/no03...
I've been a few times, quite lovely, would recommend.
BTW - love the church picture (I think it’s the one in Spain?)
Ha! This is a better jest now than it was ten weeks into his administration!
From the descriptions of Seattleites (sorry) in the thread, it seems there may be more to compare than contrast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love
Have we been here before?
Zona, Galaxy News Radio, Radio Free Europe... so many cultural touchstones for CHAZ to riff on. It must be a designer’s utopia!
It also reminds me of Daily Mail Island but at another end of the political hyperspectrum.
⬤ "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
⬤ "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
That's the problem with "defund the police". "We'd all love to see the plan", as John Lennon once put it.
Camden NJ did do this. They fired their entire police department and started over. Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you just need to fire the bottom 1-10%. Maybe give randomly-chosen civil grand juries the power to fire cops. Not just for criminal offenses, just for being subpar at being a cop.
By all honest, first person accounts then?
Two stories down in the link you sent, theres a picture of a bunch of people calmly watching a movie in a makeshift outdoor theater.
It sure doesn’t look like the tear-gassed, rubber bullet fests we’ve been seeing around the rest of the country.
The "Now Entering the EU" sign at the exit hints at the locals' view of its status.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/james-mattis-resigna...
This is not true. I am Danish and my apartment is in Copenhagen. It's in fact so successful it has turned into a tourist attraction. Lukas Graham[1] is a Danish musician who grew up there. I don't see how this community can be called a failure.
Many, myself included, would argue that they're basically out of control right now. Just look at the sequence of events that unfolds almost to the letter after every unjustified police killing. At best the outcome is the cop involved resigns and quietly goes to work for another police department a few months down the line or retires with full benefits.
Defund of course means a million things to a million people but a lot of what I'm hearing is about moving the armed police response to the minority of roles where it's needed. The amount of time you need an armed officer is a tiny fraction of the times they're there and they're not trained for the vast majority of the actual work they do. Under this defund is about taking the glut of resources allocated to cops and moving it to people better trained to deal with the kind of mental health, mediation, etc tasks that take up the bulk of police's actual time.
If you have a chance to visit Christiania, I recommend it. Copenhagen is one of my favorite towns. They have wonderful parks, museums, and even a really cool amusement park.
- It's called Antifastan
- Warlord Raz is prone to violent outbursts, and is an AirBnb Superhost.
- There are open carries with automatic rifles. They get the most respect.
- Laughing out loud at an attempt to create a vegetable garden. Didn't appear promising.
- Laughing harder at a cry for 'please send vegan meats and soy products, the homeless took all the food!'
My thinking is, the truth is much more clearly painted in this forum than on either side of the mainstream media. I do consider them the enemy of the people for dividing us, pitting us against each other, and creating an oppression of fear. So they can sell more clicks.
City population: 8.3M/750k -> one order of magnitude
City density: 28k/8400 -> less than one order of magnitude
This is not what one imagines when one encounters the sentence fragment "Like many orders of magnitude difference."
[EDIT:] Normally technical correctness is appreciated? If anyone here really thinks that New York has done a better job dealing with the pandemic than Washington State, I would love to see the reasoning. ISTM this argument from population proves too much; why can't it be invoked anytime New York's performance lags other states?
You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better served by more specialized roles.
Everyone tends to get nervous about that though.
Having said that, I'm sure these types of post create a lot of work for you. I appreciate the upkeep and please keep up the good work!
Beyond an order of magnitude in population, you have the cultural differences: Low usage of public transportation (compared to NYC), strict observation of social norms, comparatively high number of folks who can work from home, etc.
I would say, though, that our US police are more controlled than what's going on in the CHAZ, however slightly in some ways.
Since the police cleared out, everything has been much MUCH nicer around here.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/seattle-autonomous-zon...
For more info: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-54-local-crime-re...
I wouldn't call Seattle's government "useless", but their effectiveness is certainly diminished by reactionary voters whose moral/punitive emotions get weighed more than evidence-based science on homelessness.
I think this is about as useful as saying "homelessness is caused by loitering". We're confusing cause and effect. Try living on the streets for a few years where people treat you worse than shit without developing some mental illness or abusing drugs to deal with the stress and loneliness. If you think that the cause is mental illness and drugs and throwing money at it mostly does nothing, why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America?
> The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police. At an equal level of priority we also demand that the city disallow the operations of ICE in the city of Seattle.
https://capitolhillautonomous.zone/demands.html
This is a fascinating experiment that seems to channel a number of forces bubbling just below the surface for decades. The futile, never-ending war on drugs. Police violence. Lack of police accountability. Institutional racism.
What will be more fascinating is what new political parties develop. These demands are well outside the mainstream, but given recent events, not impossible to see being implemented to one degree or another.
But neither party has the alignment of interests for this kind of reform.
Without a political party, it's hard to imagine how anything changes after the banners and barricades come down.
It's basically a bunch of wannabe Marxists LARPing.
They call the area "self-governed" and "abandoned", but the city had workers mowing the grass at Cal Anderson Park, two days after it was "established". There are cops sitting like 10 blocks away in case things get out of hand.
CHAZ is basically a block party at this point that the cops letting exist while tensions cool down a bit. If anything started to get of hand, you can be certain the police would be on the scene any moment. It's autonomous in the same way my house is autonomous. The police will let me do my thing until they get wind that I'm doing something decently illegal.
If you want to see a real "Autonomous Zone" in Seattle, 3rd and Pike is your spot. The cops let pretty much anything go there and it's a crap hole.
Edit: I'd like to add, I'm not trying to take anything away from their message. I think these protests need to be happening. I just think it's stupid that people are acting like some outside of the government people first commune has been created when really, it's basically the same as when people set up a bunch of tents in the park during the Occupy movement.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia...
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.
Flash bangs? Those are for assaulting buildings, not crowd control.
When I moved here in 2010 the cola was 30% more than St Louis. It's now over 3x.
I mean look, whatever people in capitalist circles want to believe, China never really gave up on communism. They repurposed capitalism's weighing machine, and with that, there were people who got rich, which makes it look like Western-style capitalism. But the whole point of the "shadow banking system" and "state-owned enterprise" was to encapsulate a party-run state-driven "communist" system, to ensure reasonably ample work for the workers, and, to ensure a backstop to private enterprise. Maybe it's somewhat like the way Apple has baseline apps that are good enough, and then an app store for everything else. Or another analogy would be the U.S. Postal Service. Not efficient, but it works.
To be clear, globalization has been quite predatory towards weaker developing countries with less centralized authority – and hence – bargaining power. China "won" globalization by subverting it, and indeed, in hindsight, this was the only way for a developing country to win.
In all seriousness, because if you dropped these same people in the woods with construction tools and resources, they’d produce nothing of value; all eaten by bears within weeks.
IOW, your question answers itself.
I don't think all the McMansions and condos are good however. I'd rather you force people to add space for lots of people. Otherwise there'll be a period where you drive a lot of poorer folks away. Artists and retail workers and mechanics. People who don't work tech or finance or real estate. I don't know that cities can readily recover from it.
It's why I left San Jose. If it continues too long, it'll be why I leave Seattle. Give people reasonable rents, please. I want to live with artists and civil servants and retail workers and chefs and vets and all these people. It makes life so much more interesting
Of course, he doesn't exist, but, if he did, I'm taking a strong stance against him being taken down, by whatever means necessary. Threatening to serve dubious sundaes to kids is not cool.
The Occupy demand messaging never really worked cause it was never nailed down to a simple single talking point. That this current movement can be simplified and understood as one demand, “abolish the police” seems related to the success of the movement.
Too true
The study results show that there was probably another case (or multiple) introduced around February 13, meaning that there had only been about two weeks of community transmission instead of the six that officials thought. But because they thought it had been spreading undetected for six weeks, they reacted very strongly and put in strict measures quickly.
So it was probably technically an "overreaction", but that's what made it so effective and kept the situation from getting as bad there as NYC and other places.
Here's an Ars Technica article about it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/washingtons-covid-19...
And here's the actual study, which also includes a similar situation in early Europe cases: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.109322v1
I would come back here more regularly if I knew that actual huge news would be regularly discussed here, or if I thought interesting articles not about coding had much of a shot.
As good writing about CHAZ keeps happening or the situation evolves I’ll continue trying submissions.
There is little incentive to attempt tyranny when the result can be predicted so easily.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of 100 million people wielding guns. The world has yet to ever witness a force 1/10th as great and well-armed as the American populous.
Just like vocal anarchists make the left look bad, the freedom-loving libertarian side is marred by the vocal authoritarians; esp when they feel threatened.
I don't understand unincorporated land, but clearly someone "owns" it or the government wants it for some reason and the former era of free expansion and manifest destiny is over. Now we must reckon with the damage and reparations owed to Native Americans.
The ability for people to make a mess on occasion, for whatever reason, is an essential freedom to be cherished and fought for.
Every generation needs an act of rebellion. It's a sort of fundamental law of nature, as a right of passage in a way.
Except that's not really what happened. They fired the existing police force at the time but most were hired back (155 of the 220 that reapplied), and then they expanded to a complement of 401 officers (it was 370 before). Then they built a gigantic surveillance apparatus that tracks pretty much everything. So, more police, more surveillance.
Homicides have apparently declined 63% since they did this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Departmen...
is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of the police departments in this country will make the kinds of reforms you are talking about impossible.
Please do not spread lies. SF does not have the highest homelessness rate in America. Eugene Oregon has the most homeless: https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/ , followed by LA and NY.
The “mainstream media” has exactly one side: whatever generates the most money.
Thus: wall to wall coverage of a couple of peaceful blocks without police and almost no mention of the $500 Billion that their advertisers recently looted from the American public.
Most came together with utopian ideals but fell apart as tension arose between those that just wanted to drop out and take acid and those who actually worked hard and tried to build something. Only one remains AFAICT and that one is atypical, enforcing sharing of everything, down to having a communal wardrobe, and having work schedules etc.
If anything's weird about the Seattle PD, it could be they remember the 1999 WTO protests and want to crush them this time. But overall they all seem to be around the same -- very low -- standard
I think that has conservatives (and probably neoliberals) pretty freaked, so they want to hit it like Waco, to snuff out the idea.
So the solution for police not being regulated enough, is for the people to take up arms against them?
Rather than fixing the regulations?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyClgU4AEJnWf?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyCmMUEAEn_1o?format=jpg&name=...
I've not before seen a summer street festival where armed militias wearing bulletproof vests patrol the streets.
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/conte...
https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1271196018554494977...
The claims that these militias are extorting businesses doesn't come from "the right", it comes from claims by the local police chief.
Addressing the takeover of the area surrounding the Seattle Police Department’s abandoned East Precinct building, Chief Carmen Best said ... using air quotes, that police had heard reports of armed people “patrolling” the area, which she said was “very concerning.” “Especially because we don’t know who these people are,” she added. And she hinted that they may even be extorting local business owners and demanding local residents show identification.
Chief Carmen Best may be totally wrong or making that up. But knowing these sorts of things is part of her job, so to dismiss it would take something stronger than some mocking denial. Especially because this is exactly what always happens when police vacate an area. The result is not "no police", the result is that militias and mafias step in to do it themselves. But worse.
“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.
And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.
Good thing I never suggested that. Gentrification has a racial dimension because race correlates with economics, but it simply is the rich displacing the poor in a particular region; if you take housing units by eminent domain and establish a process for renting them out as public housing that doesn't distribute them to the highest bidder, you prevent gentrification. You neither have to acquire nor distribute based on race.
Exarcheia has a very long history of participation in the movement and a lot of anarchistic spaces but the organization is not at all as cohesive as portrayed here. Police presence has varied through the years. There is a police department very close to the heart of the region (the square) and 2 years you would have clashes between the police and anarchist groups ~bi-weekly. Due to the absence of police there is and was a problem of drug trafficking (something that a lot of comrades fight against). Now there is a way stronger police presence.
FC had a stronger system in place, because of circumstance, politics and culture. Regardless, police has swept through FC quite a few of times, on charges involving drugs as well. I have not been part of any organizational elements in FC, but my ignorance here should not be considered as a guide.
Nevertheless, my point here is that both communities do not have combative capabilities against the organized force of police.
If you'd like me to elaborate more on a specific subject regarding my experience, especially about Exercheia, please let me know.
Makes it easy to see how different outlets are doing their best to earn those ad dollars with different strategies (horizontal rows) and to see how their strategies are evolving over time (columns).
With a sparsely-armed populace, it's easy for the occupying force to roll through without much conflict or challenging decisions.
Winning occurs through attrition of the occupiers, which, unlike Vietnam, can't just "back out".
They do if you want the people who serve your $5 coffees and $20 meals to be able to live within a reasonable distance. I like to think the people gentrifying them out don't want to push them out, but I'm not sure most of them even realize they're responsible for the huge homeless population. They moved in for the well-paid jobs and pushed the people who lived there out. The pushed out don't always have somewhere to go or a way to get there.
What CHAZ shows us is that there is perhaps a middle ground between "asking" and "taking up arms," but if none of the demands are met, I don't know that there are many other steps left.
Chief Carmen Best may be totally wrong or making that up.
As it turns out she was, in fact, wrong or making it up.
Doesn’t sound very utopian
[1] https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1271291958296604675?s=2...
https://www.seattletimes.com/subscribe/signup-offers/?pw=red...
It would be cool to see your timeline with a site like https://freespoke.com/?q=Capitol%20Hill%20Autonomous%20Zone&...
However, the image I cannot stop smiling at is an elongated figure with an FBI cap, glowing green and using a stick to poke at a small ball with the 4chan logo, with the speech bubble "C'mon, do domestic terrorism."
Sorry if that seems pedantic, but the media uses the understandably easy confusion between the two to misrepresent issues around gun rights a lot.
Fox, like every other network CNN MSNBC etc most of the left, is simply looking for eyeballs. Thats not new.
What is new is this sort of thing starting.
While it is great to hear from people near, no one is really reporting the residents / property owners INSIDE the zone.
Are they safe? Are they been harrassed? Are business owners being able to freely go about their business? Are customers able to go to them if protesters are barricaded?
I am honestly stunned. I really expected Fox News to be as much of a dumpster fire as CNN or MSNBC. Certainly their video coverage, every time I have walked in front of a TV playing them, has been horrible. And I could swear that maybe six or seven months ago I walked by someone with a browser open to the Fox News site, and it was just execrable.
Maybe they are trying to turn over a new leaf?
That said, I still dream of truly fair news channel. Not opinion masquerading as news: actual, trying-to-be-objective news.
Especially the "free spech"-debates and their "diversity" of opinion. I just imagine how it must feel living there for years and not being 100%-OK with your neighbourhood becoming a "summer street fair".
That's true, under the existing system. And that makes it attractive to reform the system, to make it easier for third parties to grow.
For example, approval voting was passed in Fargo recently: https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval...
tl;dr -- third parties can't grow as long as "splitting the vote" is a thing. But some voting systems have that and others don't.
My point? Semi auto AR-15s are every bit as effective and deadly as their fully automatic military counterparts. Whether civilians should have such weapons is another discussion.
They also knew that crowd control was going to be a problem; instead of hiring police, they brought in people from a commune who were used to doing crowd control for large peaceful gatherings.
CHAZ is multiple city blocks. I doubt it's comparable in terms of hygiene.
With a 30 round mag and a cyclic rate of 700 rounds per minute (AR-15 mods run 700-1000 RPM), you get a little over 2 seconds of trigger time. That assumes you don't experience a jam, which is very likely with an AR-15 variant modified for automatic fire, and because of the weight distribution and recoil deflection, you won't hit anything you aim at after the second round leaves the chamber. So, if they are packing fully auto AR-15 mods, I'd be wayyyyy less concerned than if they were using semi automatic.
On the contrary, if it comes from Seattle PD it's better to just assume it's not true.
It's interesting how this is organized by largely college educated people, many of whom are not PoC, and I think the federal response to this will be tolerance because these people are ultimately vying for institutional power, and feds realize they will all be working for one another in 10 years.
It's less about right/left than how I'd posit if CHAZ were operated by non-college educated people or even was exclusively a movement by people of color, the federal authorities would have already found some pretext for lethal force. It's not like the CHAZ organizers are poor or relatively uneducated people without political recourse, like say, a niche religious sect, some ranchers, or even just a radicalized family - all examples of subjects of federal sieges in recent memory.
Communes and autonomous zones are romantic, but they exist because they are tolerated or explicitly used as a source of volatility by a movement already within the establishment.
If this seems provocative, I'd argue it gets to the crux of the issue of why certain movements are tolerated and others are not. CHAZ is a tactic in a conflict between movements that are far above it within the establishment. That it has not been subject to an ATF-style siege shows it necessarily is the expression of top level political backing.
There are numerous precedents for how this plays out, as it has throughout history in France, Russia, Germany, China, and Cambodia. Unfortunately, the advice I have for people everywhere is above all, you must find a way to resist the isolation, paralysis, and atomization that separates people from their communities, which will be used to cow people into tolerating horrible things that will themselves just build momentum. The only way for CHAZ and related movements to yield peace is for people to recognize that before their relationships to these movements (positive or negative), you are members of families, neighbourhoods, communities, trades, professions, regions, and not insignificant atoms subject to global forces of history and nature. Especially if ostensibly isolated acts of terror begin.
I think it is urgent to recognize that there are precedents for what's happening today that provide predictive power to how this could play out, and to equip people with a reminder to above all resist political atomization, especially when it becomes hard to do so, because it deprives us all of our humanity, which is the only thing standing between us and the darkest chapters of history.
It would be a little USA with a foreign currency, all the debt and no effective means to defend itself, should it work the miracle and become successful.
Besides, one of the long list of complaints is that police are often useless or worse at dealing with rapes; Minneapolis PD had a massive backlog of untested rape kits.
(edit: correctly gendered the police chief, hadn't bothered looking at the tweet)
I doubt many people are against the idea of a specialized government role that provides protection services.
What they are against is:
* Thinking we can get that role by reforming existing police systems, given how opposed police systems are to such reform
* That these systems need the absurd budgets of police departments
* That the role requires absurd levels of protection for violent actions
* That the role requires armaments in the majority of cases
Going form police to a role that fits those criteria is going to start with not having police.
Rubber coated bullets have explicit instructions to be aimed at shin height or below. This is because everything below the knees doesn't have large masses of non-muscular soft tissue, reducing the chances of permanent injury. These rounds are designed to hit the ground first, lose some velocity, and skip into crowds, causing pain but not debilitating injuries. I haven't seen a SINGLE video of police using them like this. It's absolutely insane.
In fact it looks like in some places the cries to defund the police are finally being heard and actioned. I hope there are more, as this is a radical act and not just a legislative tweak. It's clear that a fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between police and society is needed, starting with talking away their weapons, and total de-escalation of police violence and their effective immunity to the consequences of their racist actions.
I hope "CHAZ" isn't a last step before open, armed conflict, because if it does go that way the public mood is going to shift in a millisecond to enforcement. Just like I hope here in the UK we don't see people pull down statues of Churchill - he was a racist asshole, but he was also the leader that brought us through WWII, and the population of this country aren't ready to stop venerating the latter because of the former yet.
I'm also not sure what "winning" looks like for either side when that starts.
Not saying this is correct, but I thought it was an interesting analogy.
I lived in capitol hill for a decade, 3 blocks from CHAZ, and recently moved a mile away. The city is not even remotely overrun with homelessness.
Sure, there are people without homes. Do they seriously impact the lifestyle of others? Hardly at all.
This characterization of the Puget Sound feels way out of touch to me. It's a wonderful place to live.
But yea, legal fully automatic weapons are not cheap.
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.
That's maybe the good place to ask:
What are other places (maybe places more open to political discussions) the HN crowd would recommend for "intelligent discussions"? Twitter and Reddit are an awful mess at the moment.
And the media didn't post a non-biased account of what's going on?
It's become incredibly difficult to take what the PD says at face value anymore.
I dunno. She 'walked back' the statement. Maybe people were making that up to try to get the cops to retake the area? It could have also been absolutely true. Having lived in that area, I wouldn't put it past them.
Honestly, it's impossible to know at this point.
I suspect they'll all just get bored at some point.
All animals start off equal, but some animals will eventually grow to be more equal than others.
They're not really consistent at all but their messaging and party policing has been more strict
>What does the left stand for >for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.
it's funny watching americans sprinkling around left, liberal, etc as political terms whilst defining the weird mix that ends up under the wings of the two parties. Some (self-proclaimed) libertarians & conservatives, protectionists & free market hardliners standing under the same republicans umbrella with radically clashing beliefs. Free market liberals fighting with leftists who are laughing at social progressives under the umbrella of the democrats.
>Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been
I'd say with growing inequality and declining social mobility it's hard for the mainstream core of democrats to really push a broader platform that the party fully aligns with, differs from the republicans and rings well with their base. They don't really roll with protectionist stances a la bernie or trump, they don't really align with unions or workers anymore as they've dropped them for an upper middle-class educated focus whilst at the same time still keeping some actual more left wing remnants under their wing that they try to suppress and retain at the same time They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all. They don't really clash with conservatives on stock buybacks, markets, banking, what have you whilst at the same time still pushing cushioning programs like obamacare to give at least a sense of direction there. So when on a lot of those fronts you're not really united or notably different from the opposition what's left? Social issues. Social equality when it comes to sex, race or what have you. So pushing those makes sense.
“Black lives matter” art painting in the street.
Splendid!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
It's an interesting read..
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...
That's one of the most hilarious and absurd things I've ever heard. All of my antifa friends are the most wonderful, gentle nerds. They're gardeners, organizers, history buffs, parents, writers, table-top gamers. It's so bizarre (and shitty) that the public conception of "antifa" became twisted into this nonsensical cartoon of looters and pillagers (and mafiosi now, apparently).
fox's highest rated show is 4.8 million viewers.
ABC and NBC each get 10 million viewers for nightly news, cbs gets 6 million viewers. CNN and MSNBC have lower ratings, but there are a alot of mainstream-to-liberal sources of news to choose from. Liberals tend to like John Oliver and the Daily Show over fox news.
And the 11 O'clock local news still tends to get a lot of views, I think more than all of those others put together.
If you want to learn about a real breakaway province, look up Transnistria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria
I've only been to the border. I was staying with Peace Corps volunteers and they risked getting fired if they crossed the boarder (I was told there have been kidnapping situations, but not sure if that's true).
US embassy officials have gone, but they are required to turn around if asked for passports since the US doesn't recognize them as a State. Members of the Peace Corps told me the Russians have supported the region with troops which they've brought in via Ukraine with Moldovan escorts, so there's all types of corruption leading up to that. I was visiting around the time the head of state of Moldova was arrested for embezzling several billion euros.
It's one dude, every single post about the militias shows this exact dude in these exact clothes. One dude is not a militia. There are a bunch of stories about this guy apparently he's guarding all the entrances and still has time to extort local businesses. No wonder he doesn't have time to change clothes, he's one busy dude.
> But knowing these sorts of things is part of her job
Knowing that she has a massive vested interest in demonstrating that police are needed in the zone, I take everything she says with a massive grain of salt.
1. Abolish police.
2. << A miracle happens. >>
3. Prosper.
The media treats cops according to what's best for the story. Lately, that involves being extremely critical of them. In other times when we aren't in the midst of a pandemic, mass unemployment and then nationwide protests, and the story is that the cops shot a criminal suspect, they use euphemisms like "officer-involved shooting." The media narrative today is extremely hostile to police.
So when I see "only a handful of incidents," I feel there might be a bit of an agenda behind that. Knocking down the World Trade Center twin towers and a side of the Pentagon were only a "handful of incidents," too. Not to mention the number of unarmed black people shot by police last year (nine total). All of those are a disgrace, but the sheer number of atrocities that happen are irrelevant to how unjust or outrageous the atrocities might be.
I don't know, it's like a massive catch-22. People are sick of police abuses, but society needs police to some extent. I agree with much of what the protests are about, but struggle with their solutions.
Sure it's not "overrun," but there are a lot of them, and not enough jobs or affordable housing.
People complained about homeless people coming into the city for the benefits and I thought that was just a myth the Amazon employees would spew, but I talked to a social worker who told me that's true and that her office dealt with a lot of people who came to Seattle because of their programs and benefits.
But explicitly the parent is saying that the taco joint is more popular than all of the burger joints _combined_. Which is not what I would have guessed.
It's pretty clear this disease wasn't anywhere near as bad as everyone was predicting, and I expect the 100k US fatality number to drop once a year has past and we can put some real data analysis on it. A lot of people have died due to not being able to get medical care too, and those 2nd order effects of these lockdowns will also be significant.
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=70%25+fatalities+senior+centers+co...
The media already tried this tactic once and failed: with the release of the "Joker" film. Remember all the hysteria about angry white incels? It was as if the mainstream media WANTED a theater to become a bloodbath. But in a lot of the YT comment sections I read the atmosphere was "We're on to these scumbags, everybody just be chill, don't prove them correct."
That sounds like a phrase from a novelty D&D campaign or some form of parody. What an odd year it's been.
Camden made all members apply for jobs as if coming from another police department, but they had the files of the old department and could look directly at an applicant's job history and see how many complaints of excessive force were present, etc. They purged the worst 25% in starting over and that seemed to make a very large difference.
I occasionally saw a homeless person, but that was about the worst of it. And I was out on the town a lot. Oh my car got broken into once as well. Once in 11 years.
> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards
There were also rumours of proud boys and other far-right groups attacking CHAZ. It's understandable that people would be more comfortable with vocally anti-fascist gun clubs defending them than the police, who often treat the far-right as friends.
Police have all these weapons, and they want to use them, instead of first trying more constructive, peaceful methods.
I wonder if it shows different things to folks without ad blockers, JavaScript blocking &c.?
Agreed, though: 'Clueless in Seattle' has no place on a news site.
- Humans will bring their implicit biases to any reporting they do; I feel like it's better for the reader to make implicit biases explicit, and call out where the writer feels uncomfortable.
- If you try to cut humans out of the loop and replace them with algorithms, you're creating two problems: algorithms will have implicit biases from their creators, and there will be attempts to game and dupe the algorithms.
'Cause despite what it looks like online, the US is about equally split between liberal and conservative.
I don't know you, nor do I know your views on capital punishment. That said, I suspect you don't intend to promote that these crimes justify summary executions.
Consider the realistic logical endpoint of the statement. It ultimately means that it's acceptable for the police to storm the space, guns blazing, shooting (and reasonable probability of killing) anyone who doesn't immediately surrender.
From the webpage:
> Fundamentally, CHAZ is an occupation of Capitol Hill, not an official declaration of independence.
They are fairly clear that their ultimate goal is neither secession or independence. The area was abandoned by the police in a political move, and CHAZ is occupying it as a statement of how they would like to see the city as a whole run instead.
If you watch YouTube channels like Donut Operator where people do police breakdowns, a lot of people .. really do deserve to get shot. Body cameras also make it way easier to get rid of police who are psychos who shouldn't be on the force, and can help push back against police unions.
Body cams are great solutions, and we're already seeing departments firing people who turned them off in bad faith (mostly due to these protests). Maybe more money should be diverted to training and wages, and less to equipment and vehicles?
I think there were already a lot of positive changes, and this whole set of protests may give us more. By disbanding or defunding the police is an absolutely crazy idea, that I think the vast majority of Americans do not support.
I get it. I hated cops in my 20s. I hated speeding tickets and saw friends get busted for pot and minorities get pulled over a lot. But a lot of that changed via policy. Pot is less of an issue in many places, and legal in several states. As far as people calling the cops on people (one of my good friends, black, had a neighbour call the cops on him, while he was jogging in his own neighbourhood, where he was a home owner)... yes that's racism, but not from the police; from a person in his community. That said, I have seen neighbours pulled over and searched in Cincinnati and it seemed like it was totally because they were black in a cheap car. shrug
I no longer hate cops. I've seen some do really amazing things for people they didn't need to. Yes there are probably 8%~10% that are psychos and I think most officers wish they could get rid of those people from their ranks too, but hating police just for hating police is childish. All these people calling for disbanding feel like they're just children.
Also I don’t know how are festivals in the US, but I’ve never seen armed cops at one, and would be really uncomfortable if there would be some.
History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.
Secondly, “fixing the regulations” is not necessary; what is necessary is enforcing the already existing regulations.
I never had any bad interactions with them I guess, but I broke my heart to see that many of them, especially in the downtown areas and further out towards the Interstate and underpasses.
I dunno, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it broke my heart. It's one of the many reasons I left Seattle.
I think the real issue here is: the police want to show that without them, things turn to chaos. Instead, they show that with them, things turn to chaos. Meanwhile, the protesters want to show that without the police, things are peaceful, and they seem to be succeeding.
That's not a great story for people who believe in police brutality, of course.
And yes, if the entire police department believes that they need to use force to dominate the American people, they refuse to stop when ordered to by the civilian government, and resist change, then disbanding the police and starting over with a better organised police force might not be such a bad idea at all.
It's not easy, and it's important to quickly have some alternative to fall back on, but when it's the police itself that's part of the problem, something needs to be done about that.
And the people who confuse the two often talk about banning semi-automatic firearms (which ends up being just about all of them).
Orwell almost certainly did support anarchist revolution and utopia, given his role in the Spanish Civil War - and his concern about the suppression of anarchism through a totalitarian control of information is exactly what 1984 is about. He never would have felt that "Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long."
The police in my town make more than I do. NYPD officers make way more than I do and get sweet benefits I will never enjoy. In return they act petulant and ignore their duties whenever someone forces them to apply less than brutal tactics to non-threatening people.
They need comprehensive retraining and removal of the problem cases.
This protest is quite the opposite in nearly every possible way.
This makes no sense.
My friends that have walked through the area can confirm.
Why predict defeat?
Why not appreciate the experiment as an alternative to our broken system?
Yeah, it'll eventually go away.
But maybe change will be secured, and there are some ideas that do make sense and will spread or stick around.
Is the worst that could happen worse than the status quo?
You sound like one of the commenters on Drew Houston's Ask HN telling him no-one will pay for rsync.
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.
You misspelled white supremacist. All of the confederate monuments I know of were built during _CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS_ as an expression of power by white supremacist governments and political traditions.
Personally, I'm not afraid of the police, of protesters, of armed militias, etc. I'm afraid of people with guns. Why does anyone carry a gun, unless they intend to use it, once some set of conditions obtain? I don't want to be around people like that, and I really don't want to live in places where they go around on public streets like this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People%27s_Association_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Mun...
"Black Lives Matter protestors say Seattle's autonomous zone has hijacked message" https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-protesters-sea...
This seems like a straightforward and believable article. There's infighting at the Zone because a bunch of anarchists have diverted from the core message about police brutality targeting blacks and other minorities, and now the BLM camp is pissed off. Right?
But wait, even though the title unambiguously states that BLM protestors are blaming the autonomous zone for hijacking the core BLM message, the article instead explains that the quote about "hijacking the message" actually comes from a woman who is speaking on behalf of the African American Community Advisory Council, and she's the one being booed and heckled by protestors.
So what's the African American Community Advisory Council? Probably some BLM-related thing, right? After all, if the title of the article states that "Black Lives Matter protestors" are accusing the CHAZ of "hijacking the message" while the actual quote came out of the mouth of someone from the African American Community Advisory Council, then surely Black Lives Matter == African American Community Advisory Council.
Right?
I mean sure, technically they must be two separate things because they have two separate names, but surely they're closely connected. Just to be positive, let's find out. Type that name into a search engine and click on the first result:
https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/demographi...
Wait, the African American Community Advisory Council is actually a department of the Seattle city government. And they "work collaboratively with the police."
So Fox News saw a story about a city government employee scolding protestors. This employee works in a department that is closely aligned with the police and sides with the police, but because the department has a name that evokes blackness, that was enough leeway for them to write a false headline that intentionally confuses the reader into thinking that this is a story about internal conflict and infighting among the protestors.
Sure enough, the bovine reader comments at the bottom of the page confirm the success of this tactic:
"Even the idiots can't agree. What will they do now??"
"I guess nobody told BLM that you can't negotiate with terrorists."
"Leftists arguing over whose riot it is???"
"Eating their own"
Fox News knows that they can trust Fox News readers to glance at the headline, skip the article, feel confirmation of their biases and preconceptions, and tuck another false anecdote in their pocket to use as ammunition in case they get in an argument with a family member, coworker, or person online.
Here's a reminder that we should never be passive consumers of of a biased narrative!
The theory is that tasers are a (edit: partial) replacement for firearms for cops. The reality is that approximately 0% of cops are willing to draw a taser if they suspect that someone else has a firearm; they go for their firearm too.
Instead tasers have replaced other methods of de-escalation and containment, which is very bad if you're not a cop. Combine this with cops being called out for people experiencing mental health crises, and this is a recipe for disaster.
People keep brining up Camden, but in that instance, didn't the State Troopers still maintain control of the area during the transition?
From a political perspective, "disbanding" will most likely mean just making existing cops re-apply for their current roles (like how TVA did mass layoffs and rehires in the 90s).
I'm still convinced actual disbanding, without a security force in the interim, will be straight up disastrous.
That's my prediction: they'll succeed in diverting tax funds from the police into social programs... and then three months later, the police budgets will be back where they started, but we'll be paying for the additional social programs, too. In a year, our taxes will go up, again, to pay for all of this.
For other people it feels dangerous and scary because rhetoric about "abandoned by the authorities" and "siezed by anarchists" alongside an unofficial militia sounds like the state's monopoly on violence being usurped.
Shootings aren't the only abuse. When a cop shoots their weapon, there is a bunch of paperwork, body cameras get reviewed, lies have to be created to cover it up, etc etc.
Lesser forms of violence get little or no scrutiny. The officer who killed George Floyd didn't have didn't have any problem with sitting on his neck for nearly 10 minutes and his partner didn't see fit to stop him even though the 2 rookies with them and multiple witnesses tried (verbally) to get him to stop. It's pretty clear the Floyd arrest was not that unusual for this guy.
The other big problem is "Discretion". Cops are encouraged to pull people over for random things and what happens after people get pulled over varies greatly based on who you are. If you are black, a broken tail-light pull over can quickly turn into a vehicle search and escalate from there. This hasn't improved either.
> Yes there are probably 8%~10% that are psychos and I think most officers wish they could get rid of those people from their ranks too,
The problem with the "Bad Apple" theory you espouse is that in so many cases the other officers at the incident, the police department, and the union are perfectly willing to circle their wagons and cover up for the Bad Apples. Cops refusing to stop bad cops and lying to protect them is super common. It's become clear that so long as cops are policing cops, the bad apples will remain.
> but hating police just for hating police is childish. All these people calling for disbanding feel like they're just children.
I suspect the people who hate cops, hate them for a good reason. Likewise, I suspect the people who call for disbanding cops honestly feel like it's the best solution to a difficult problem. Yes, some cops do amazing things for people... but for a lot of people an encounter with the police is literally the most dangerous experience of their lives. In order to address this problem, you need to fix that last bit or we're going to see this problem over-and-over again.
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.
A strict contrarian viewpoint is just as conformist as a strict mainstream opinion, it allows someone else to define your opinion.
So I don't think it's as fractal as you imagine. I think what you might be seeing are those with general principles rejecting the contrarian view because the contrarian view is counter to their principles.
Let's say I like chocolate. But the mainstream opinion is chocolate sucks. Currently, I'm a contrarian. I'm against the mainstream opinion. I get on certain boards and rail against how chocolate is disliked by the masses and how they're missing out. Then, the tide shifts and chocolate becomes popular. A portion of my compatriots who claimed to like chocolate, now say it sucks. Because that's the contrarian opinion now. And I say they're missing out because I still like chocolate. Because I like it for reasons other than mainstream opinion of it. So, while not changing my stance at all, I've gone from contrarian, to mainstream, to complaining about the contrarian stance.
Do you have a source for this? I haven't been able to find a list of people involved in organizing this.
I took a class on active shooter scenarios where they focused on that "be careful how you train" aspect with the illustration that a police officer ( no idea where ) once responded to a call where an armed man pointed a pistol right at the cop close range. The cop quickly disarmed the man, but then returned the firearm to the man, whereupon the man shot him dead.
In drilling the technique he used to disarm the man, police would practice in pairs, taking turns disarming each other from the draw. This meant that two officers would stand facing each other, pistols in holsters. One officer would draw, the other would disarm, hold the weapon pointed at the first officer for a beat, then return it to the first officer in order to draw his or her own weapon.
Then when you start to hear about corrections departments sending officers for crowd control... the animal instincts and things these guys are trained for is so volatile.
I personally don't think it's even close to that high. We never see a denominator; how many millions of police interactions are happening that we just don't hear about because nothing went badly?
Trump has started the fewest invasions of any president thus far. We've had no regime changes, and no extended battles or fights. Obama (Syria and Libya) and Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, others) and Clinton (Iraq, Kuwait) all engaged in new wars. Trump hasn't, and has in fact withdrawn America troops.
You could buy the pieces and build it yourself, but you'd need some tooling.
Cops respond to a wide variety of calls all the time because over time (particularly between the 1960s to 1990s with concerns driven by crime statistics, though the trend has continued even as the original impetus reversed) resources were pumped into police departments, often diverted from other local services organizations.
When all you have is a paramilitary force trained for the application of force, every local problem looks like a target for the application of paramilitary violence.
The police benefit from chaos during these protests, I'm sure the temptation to foster chaos and destruction is quite high for them right now. It puts the protesters in a bad light and reinforces the idea that police are needed.
There are multiple cases where police have been observed contributing to the chaos or just idling around while it happened nearby. Definitely not universal, but some departments are doing the opposite of their job.
It's not sustainable in any way and there wasn't exactly a democratic process by which the residents of Seattle agreed to having a section of their city turned into an autonomous zone. Though it could be an interesting experiment to do this somewhere, I think it'd have to go through a vote.
I was being a being a bit sarcastic about his gear being brand new and forgot about the relatively new laws as part of my joke. :)
In general, yes. To play devil's advocate though, accuracy/controllability is not really needed if your goal is just to spray as much lead as possible into a densely crowded area from, say, a hotel room above.
Such domestic terrorist events are extremely rare, but I would guess in these specific cases where the goal is to spray as many bullets per second as possible into a crowd, full auto + large magazine is going to kill more people than semi auto.
You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.
Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause for a discussion, especially the section under “tiered scrutiny” and “disparate impact”.
I am all for their cause, but I feel like the methodology of 'camping in a park' is not the right way to enact civic change at a policy level.
If they choose to use these weapons and tactics, they are responsible for how they use them. In a situation where the officers are in danger of physical harm, they are fully within their rights to go against usage policies to protect themselves. But in the vast majority I've seen, these officers have been shooting at unarmed protesters, not rioting mobs. It's simply illegal, a violation of the Constitution, and a chargeable offense.
The problem in the US is that news outlets are expected to be biased and so they take full advantage of that to make their news more entertaining.
These news channels are driven by add revenue. And divisive, incendiary reporting is the best way to get people to keep watching.
This assumes that generalists are equally effective at all tasks as specialists. Well, as a generality; in the specific case of all-purpose use of police vs appropriate use of other community services, it actually involves the assumption that specialists in the application of violence to achieve compliance are as effective in specialists in tasks unrelated to application of violence in those non-violent tasks.
In technology, if senior IT management decided they could reduce staff by having network installation specialists, with little to no additional training, cover application development, QA, requirements analysis, SRE, DBA, desktop support, and project management tasks instead of having specialists in each of those domains, they'd rightly be viewed as insane. But that's, broadly, what local governments have done with city services, with cops in the role of the network installers.
- Reinstate Glass-Steagall to separate commercial and investment banking
- Require all votes to be made on paper to prevent malicious manipulation
- Overturn Citizens United v. FEC to prevent corporations from buying politicians and elections
- Implement the "Warren Buffet Rule" and restore historical tax rates for the wealthiest 1% of Americans
Any time the police are pushed to the point where they use force on the protestors, mass media is then awash with out of context clips of the event, claiming police brutality, drumming up more support for the protestors and their cause. The more chaos, the better it is for the protester's message.
There's lots of peaceful protests every year that don't end in the police using force. In fact, the vast majority of them, before this. These protestors benefit politically if the police use force. So what's the difference here, why do these "protests" result in use of force? It's blatantly obvious to me ..
I think that's an understandable point of view but, frankly, one of the key points of training (military experience only, but I know police do similar) is to force people to learn how to think and act correctly in high stress situations. If you're in direct engagement with someone trying to hurt you, you do let the training take over. But if you're just scared, or nervous, or some kind of emotional, the point of high stress training is to teach how to remain calm, controlled, and analyze the situation. Civilians may not get that, having not gone through it, but that really is the point.
> I took a class on active shooter scenarios where they focused on that "be careful how you train" aspect with the illustration that a police officer ( no idea where ) once responded to a call where an armed man pointed a pistol right at the cop close range. The cop quickly disarmed the man, but then returned the firearm to the man, whereupon the man shot him dead.
To me, this screams of a notional anecdote to reinforce the idea to train properly, not of an actual occurrence.
The people with masks and weapons on the street report to no-one we know, it's either a loose anarchic group or some sort or they report to a warlord. Can you petition the warlord? Occupy their office? Vote them out? This is a regression to the medieval model of governance.
It's all fun and games when no one really disagrees about anything important, but things change for the worse when disagreements start happening. This is how communes fall - either they fail to disagree constructively or they get subjugated by a dictator who forces an agreement.
This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The alternative is the violence we cannot influence and that spiral out of control when the going gets tough.
This is an appalling misunderstanding of what really happened in Camden. Take a trip there, know what you'll find? Police cars, policemen and police stations. THEY STILL HAVE POLICE! What they REALLY did was a police reboot, essentially fired everyone and rebuilt from the ground up. People who point to Camden to try and support their narrative are dangerously misinformed.
Are we just talking about the guys who actually murder people in custody, or do the ones who beat the crap out of them or rape them count also?
Also, do we count the cops who lie and cover up for the abusive cops as bad apples or are they just like neutral apples? If these complicit cops count as bad-apples, then we're talking something like 60-70% of the force.
And it's that last category is the one that concerns me because ultimately so long as the whole "Brothers in Blue"/ "Snitches get Stitches " attitude is pervasive in police culture, it's going to be impossible to root out the actual psychos. "Good cops" are willing to cover up for bad cops, the DA won't prosecute cops, judges take cops word at face value... so long as that exists, this problem exists.
Oh you mean like police officers?
I don't see how your point is relevant here.
Protestors aren't paid with tax dollars.
Cops are getting paid massive amounts of overtime to prevent looting and damage during this crisis and instead they are contributing to it.
The irony is that if these AZs were permitted it could give said segregationists exactly what they had been after for decades.
- "Incendiary devices" being thrown at officers: it was a candle - as can be seen by the sticker visible in SPD's own tweets
- Businesses being 'extorted': appears SPD leadership got a false report of this from a local alt-right personality and spread it in their press briefing.
- People checking IDs for entry: streamers have been trying to find anyone on the ground who can substantiate this claim and have been unable to. A small handful of people have been kicked out by being swarmed by a crowd and told to leave (and some more colorful language) without violence. These few instances have all either been counter-protestors or people trying to be senselessly destructive, as far as I've seen.
I'm skeptical of these most recent claims
China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.
I agree. But most people who have been claiming that "CHAZ is being ruled by warlords" (or some similar permutation) are the same people who were totally fine with armed anti–lockdown protests at government buildings a month or so ago. They're the same people who have sided with the police as they attack peaceful protestors in the name of "law and order".
My presumption was that the OP basically shares these views. So I'm simply trying to understand why this one guise of "person with a weapon" is especially scary but others are not.
My point being that from what it looks like, there probably isn't a list of people organizing the CHAZ because it's mostly a spontaneous reaction to the current circumstances. They're explicitly non-hierarchical, and if they look anything like the circles of activism I've worked with in Seattle they're probably made up of more working class activists than this idea of liberal business owners.
But that is just my assumption based on my own anecdotal experience, I don't live in Seattle anymore and haven't been to the CHAZ myself.
The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries. It has persisted across the country, under both progressive and conservative politicians, despite many, many attempts to eliminate it.
If the violent system we have has successfully resisted change and accountability for hundreds of years, how is this a regression?
In terms of declaring themselves "autonomous", I'm thinking (and I imagine others in power are thinking as well) that this is simply done as a statement of protest, rather than an actual serious attempt to form a sovereign government. So crushing this without mercy is politically infeasable, especially given that the whole protest is about police and justice reform. I don't think this sets any kind of legal precedent. Better let them make the statement and let it run its course on its own.
Why couldn't it be positive? I think it's fair to say that these are early days and there is a general lack of data about what's going on, but most of what I've seen has been pretty positive.
Here's a video I watched from inside: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=610393902995230
How much power does the right need before they're considered "in power"? They controlled both branches of congress and the presidency until 2018, and have a majority on the supreme court. Fox news is the most popular media platform, and have tremendous (but not full) control over the mainstream narrative.
This as "in control" as a single party gets in the US.
If you mean to ask what would happen if white people took it over? Having been through chaz a few times, the population is overwhelming white (Seattle itself is only ~7% black). Capitol Hill is itself a white, gentrified area.
Or do you mean actual white supremacists? Charleston went down fine without a hitch. I seem to recall our President call them some, “very fine people.” [1] I also don’t recall any police response to the recent armed Michigan courthouse takeover.
I did, however, see multiple beatings and tear gas used against protestors for no reason at peaceful, unarmed protest events.
Maybe you can explain why you out “white supremacists” in quotes? Maybe you could list some recent examples of protestors being “crushed without mercy”? (I can list plenty, but none that are white movements. Please inform me!)
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/tru...
If people are taking the SPC's word as truth because they have priors that cops are truthful, that's an invalid prior based on how much general lying recent events have demonstrated cops do.
If people are taking SPC's word as truth because they have no priors, that's bias to authority and people should probably employ more skepticism.
Do we have any evidence that the Seattle police chief is generally truthful?
However, by Sunday (or maybe early, early Monday morning), the police were using CS gas again at the order of the police chief, Carmen Best.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...
This is not the first time Chief Best and the SPD made things up during these events, and in fact they have a long history of misbehavior:
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2011/...
Note that in your video Best is not being too explicit on where exactly those crime reports happened, she just says "in the area" while talking about their response times (CHAZ is a relatively important intersection of Capitol Hill and it is causing some traffic). Note also that this video was filmed in the East Precinct itself (i.e. inside CHAZ).
After everything that happened over the last few weeks it is now my belief that they are being dishonest, which is why two days ago I submitted my first FOIA request to learn more about some events connected to the Seattle Police Department.
By the way, I don't think many people here in Seattle believes this is an "utopia" nor anything close to that, in fact I think that CHAZ may be moving away attention from BLM.
I'm sorry, I simply disagree as to the role of public space in a free society -- them occupying the park is the LEAST objectionable thing about this.
Now I'd say your statement about "extremely biased and partisan" is accurate, but the implication was that it's exclusively in a pro-protestor sense, and that's really not the case.
I say this as someone who lives on the political fringes and generally disagrees with both sides of the partisanship.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw [2] https://mynorthwest.com/category/jason-rantz/?
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....
Like this scenario in 2016 that ended when the last far-right occupiers of a national wildlife refugee left after 6 weeks?.
I thought the meetings with the mayor were excellent, but via this avenue, all they are doing is changing the park.
There's a whole city out there where cops still operate under the same laws they have for many years. Protesters should try and change _that_, imho.
> Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine?
and explaining why replacing police with warlords is not progress.
Are some classes of people unable to influence the system? I readily agree with that. Are we making our society better by replacing police with warlords or anarchists? I argue not.
Chief Best has made multiple false statements of fact just this week, so, no.
My question was, does there exist a sufficient productivity in the population in the CHAZ to provide those services to their population?
From Wikipedia: Lifestyle is the interests, opinions, behaviours, and behavioural orientations of an individual, group, or culture.
The demand for access to healthcare and education does seem to be the interest, opinion and behavior of this group.
Clarification: to acquire legally. It is not nearly that expensive black market.
It's pretty obvious that they do not want to go into detail on anything that would paint the actions of the past two weeks in any negative light. There's no positive way to spin losing control of multiple city blocks, including a police station.
Bias does not have to be a slant in an articles content or writing style, though that happens as well, e.g. including phrases like "mostly peaceful protests" in articles describing looting. It can also be as simple as not reporting things you do not want to publicize.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...
(Plus, tear gas would seep into the nearby residential buildings)
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/06/after-mayors-spee...
From my peer group (around forty), rather than liberal vs. conservative breakdown, I'd say those who reluctantly subscribe to cable are sports fans.
[1]https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/heres-the-median-age-of-the-...
So the simplest answer is actually: protesters benefit from police using force. (because they'll get more protesters, more media coverage etc.)
The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.
So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large.
It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.
Apart from that, you are perhaps asking for data devoid of biased analysis. You can keep up with current events like this on your own. There is plenty of public data on anything that you can analyze yourself and draw your own conclusions. Instead of reading business news, read SEC filings. Instead of reading about coronavirus, graph the raw data and make your own models. Skip the sensationalist science and health articles, and go right for the peer reviewed article. Open that layer on GIS yourself. Ignore medium blogs and read the actual documentation. Become your own data scientist.
This all takes a lot of mental effort and time, which few people have, so most people actually prefer to read summary articles from biased sources that reinforce their existing world view.
> The Seattle Police Department walked back its claim, widely repeated in the news media, that denizens of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone are extorting businesses.
> "That has not happened affirmatively," Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the police department had based earlier claims on anecdotal reports, including in the news and on social media. "We haven't had any formal reports of this occurring."
> That contradicts earlier statements from the police.
For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them?
> The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.
That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.)
> So, empirically,
You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”.
That’s...not what that word means.
I'm struggling to see the equivalency here. In one case you have cops, getting paid to protect people and property and ignoring that responsibility (or actually participating in mayhem) at no cost to themselves. Lots of incentive to act poorly, little personal consequence.
On the other hand you have protestors who might collectively benefit from police using force at the cost of taking a club to the head or pepper spray to the face.
Not seeing how the two are comparable.
This sounds like at least an implicit threat of imminent violence, without disputing the rest of your description.
The complaint from police, especially with tasers too, boils down to that this needs to be strong enough to stop someone on meth with hulk strength. Police already have much more effective tools for this: Horse cop and lasso.
Interesting. The city might not, but feds might try, as they probably don't have much to lose.
It seems like the really good discussion places wouldn't have to carry this caveat. It's too bad those are even harder to find.
But that is the thing I don't see being recognize. While the current institute that is the police could pass away, society will still have rules and will still want enforcers of those rules (though not all rules are equally enforced). And you see this in any supposedly anarchic community, they still have social standards they enforce, they just do not rely the nearby government for enforcement of smaller issues (though there is still a reliance for larger issues, such as stopping annexation by an entity with a larger force). In turn this makes me think all such communities are actually minarchist instead of anarchist, which is a drastic difference in base assumptions.
My response, if you look, was to a post that posed the question:
> How, after all the events of the last two weeks, is anyone still willing to take a police-person’s word as truth?
That is not speaking of an individual, but of a group, and then asserting claims regarding all members of that group.
>siezed!! by anarchists, BLM supporters and other protestors who have since transformed it into a unverisal!!
I think parent mostly meant mad max wasteland and utopian are both two extremes.
Contrast this to armed anarchists, anti-fascists, whatever, occupying city blocks as part of an organization that's connected to street violence and looting. The CHAZ guard, hasn't been trained and vetted and you don't know what his goals are and you haven't experienced it before.
As others have noted, it's a bit of a false premise to ask "Why are we scared of these people but not those other recent protests?" Because, of course, you assume people weren't scared by the other protests, which is not necessarily the case. Imagine someone who worked in one of the government buildings that the end-lockdown people occupied, there are now a hundred guys with masks and rifles occupying the building - is that imaginary worker scared or disturbed, and can you see why "But you aren't scared of the armed courthouse guards" isn't exactly equivalent?
Right, so lifted out of poverty. Just because you think their new job is a "horrible sweatshop", doesn't mean their lives haven't actually improved.
Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites.
I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.
Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is.
That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.
Here, a multi-racial family was menaced by residents of Forks, WA. Residents actually cut down trees to block the road.
https://q13fox.com/2020/06/05/spokane-family-harassed-strand...
Here, a police offier's relative drove into the protests, shot a protestor, and ran to the police station.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/08/seattle-sho...
While these instances are not widespread, they are incredibly troubling.
Consider: if you don’t see homeless people, it might not be because there’s less homelessness. It might just be that they were driven out.
I'd strongly argue against this point. Most hunting rifles have 5 round mags (legal limit for hunting in a lot of places). They won't accept 30 round mags. They're also chambered in more powerful calibers which have much more recoil.
An active shooter with his dad's hunting rifle is much less dangerous than the same shooter with an AR-15 with 30 round mags.
Tear gas is not benign, it is nasty stuff that has already killed people. Some preliminary research points to it potentially damaging the lungs of people who are exposed to it for a long time, possibly permanently.
In other words:
> An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
> -- Huey P Newton
it is still a protest, right? this is why peaceful protest is so hard, because as soon as it stops being violent people find some way to dismiss it. when stuff is being set on fire, the argument is "why can't they protest peacefully", but when the protest is actually peaceful we get critiques like this one.
I feel like these statements need to be qualified to be useful.
Has the level of police violence over the years gotten worse, gotten better, or stayed roughly the same?
How does the overall levels of violence compare to places without an organized police force?
Does the presence of overwhelmingly peaceful footage of average people going by their average days make Seattle at large an Utopia with no crime? Is that footage in itself sufficient evidence to abolish the police and the court system, because, look, there are 17,520,000 hours of peaceful footage before something terrible happens to someone?
It is incredibly difficult to build an accurate image of a large scale group of people judging by a few hours of direct experience. 1000 harder if through footage selected by people with their own agendas. Media coverage, especially audio-visual coverage, is wild because media coverage is simply an inappropriate way to depict such phenomena.
On tear gas, CDC has https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/riotcontrol/factsheet.asp :
People exposed to riot control agents may experience some or all of the following symptoms
immediately after exposure:
* Eyes: excessive tearing, burning, blurred vision, redness
* Nose: runny nose, burning, swelling
* Mouth: burning, irritation, difficulty swallowing, drooling
* Lungs: chest tightness, coughing, choking sensation, noisy breathing (wheezing),
shortness of breath
* Skin: burns, rash
* Other: nausea and vomiting
Long-lasting exposure or exposure to a large dose of riot control agent, especially
in a closed setting, may cause severe effects such as the following:
* Blindness
* Glaucoma (a serious eye condition that can lead to blindness)
* Immediate death due to severe chemical burns to the throat and lungs
* Respiratory failure possibly resulting in death
And who knows, they could have bought the parts and assembled it, if they can find things in stock somewhere.
I don't know what state troopers in Minnesota or Washington are like, but having them step in during the transition while those cities rebuild healthier police forces, sounds like a reasonable idea.
Though I'm not convinced it will actually be disastrous to do without police, or with dramatically reduced police, for a short period.
"[Fox News] has been celebrating a 44-month consecutive streak as the most-watched network on basic cable and a 218-month streak as the most-watched cable news network, averaging 3.5 million primetime viewers and 2 million total-day viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research."
For terrestrial broadcast television in the US, the pro-Trump Sinclair-owned stations possesses 294 stations for around 75% penetration of total US households.
Also, news-talk stations are right-wing with the exception of NPR and sports.
Therefore, one can conclude the right-controlled media is mainstream media.
I did say liberals tend to watch less cable because they tend to be younger, it doesn’t mean that liberals in general have a propensity for cutting the cord.
However, as Antifa is decidedly Anti-Fascist and without the paramilitary aspect of the brownshirts, perhaps they would be more closely identified with the Rotfrontkämpferbund.
https://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1271224115576180737
As such, it's totally right to take and redistribute things that doesn't belong to rich people only.
EDIT: Sorry. I should have stated that this is for liability issues more than any other reason, not out of any "goodness of the heart". Though, given the opportunity, most people will do the good thing rather than the out right psychotic thing, clinical testing has shown.
Of course technically that's a logical fallacy but in practice I don't think most people are used to questioning the truthfulness of official positions by the police.
In fact if we were to start questioning police truthfulness more, there'd be pretty big changes to how police testimony is treated in legal cases.
Aside from the LPFM repeater stations, largely used for religious broadcasting, I would say that the radio market has been completely captured by the left.
When it comes to the right, they have Fox for television networks and that's all.
I didn't see where this person up thread was fine with the anti-lockdown armed protesters or claimed to side with the police attacking peaceful protesters. Can't those things be wrong and having local warlords in charge also be wrong?
Why not? Seems like as long as the magazine can protrude from the bottom, you can have any capacity magazine you want.
Interesting how divergent the actual residents feel vs everyone else
Clearly this is a "fantastic idea" and "summer carnival feel" until they do it right on your back yard
How about these occupiers propise taking it to the area or zone they actually live in?
https://nypost.com/2020/06/12/raz-simone-accused-of-acting-l...
It'll be a decent experiment to see if they can come up with non-violent policing alternatives to keep order, or if they resort to the same tactics as before.
This has been my political problem my whole life. Agree with old white boomers on tax policy and with young radicals on immigration policy. Far too often my brain says “keep your mouth shut” - “save it for other Econ nerds” - and I’m beginning to think I’m no longer OK with that conclusion. Support to Seattle!
Sure, you can make an unreliable automatic from a semi-auto easily. But it's a far cry from a commercial/military product.
And if they thought brutal reprisals were a good plan to keep their jobs ... oh boy. They did not plan that out well. The level of sudden radicalization against the police has been breath taking.
I did not know that. Do you have a reference to back this up?
That's true for the lower half of the FM dial (aka the public good section that naturally aligns with left leaning ideals), but not the top half or AM.
Wonkery can be debated; humanity can't.
What is possible to know is that she knew damned well that any statement like that would be repeated 10 times more than any later, retraction of those statements.
> Police chief Carmen Best walked back prior statements made by her own department, which have since circulated widely and attracted condemnation from conservative critics of the protesters.
Those same critics have almost certainly not retracted their comments based on her statements. She clearly understands how to effectively feed her biggest fans.
I'm a large man. It's worse for people who are not physically imposing. A woman I knew worked an early shift job (leave at 3:45am to open up). She was regularly followed and harassed while walking to work sometimes by gangs of men, she left the city in less than a year.
These problems are getting worse because there's literally hundreds of thousands of citizens (you can see them in this comment chain) who will rush to disagree with anyone who raises these problems. I'm well-equipped to buy a house here, but we decided several days ago to stop looking for one. We decided we're going to leave the Puget Sound area to get away from this.
That's exactly what caused all of these protests.
> At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?
It's constantly of interest to me how much "free will" actually exists. The more research comes out about environmental factors, the more we realize that people who suffer {home, food, employment, physical} insecurity exhibit symptoms as if they had a lower IQ and stress which is correlated with increased mental illness, stress, blood pressure, and other health problems.
It also strikes me that the current legal corrections system really only works if we, as individuals, have significant ability to decide not to commit a crime as opposed to it being the most likely destiny based on our current {personal, environmental} state.
If the US police have this problem and other (wealthy democratic) countries don't – or even if comparable countries have the problem too, just not quite as bad as the US has it – what makes US police different?
Racism and racial inequality. Yes, that's very real, but don't think for a moment other countries don't have that problem too – they do. But yes, historically speaking, the US was very much an outlier of extreme racism – few other countries ever had anything comparable to "Jim Crow laws", and the most obvious comparators (apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany) are not what the US really wants to be compared to. On the other hand, my personal impression is that contemporary Americans are (on average) actually much more highly committed to anti-racism than people in most other countries are.
Could there be other relevant factors causing problems unique to US police? I think, everyone is (quite rightly) focused on the racial inequality issue, but could there be other causes which might be less deeply entrenched and quicker to fix? Easy short-term wins?
(My thought: US has more independent law enforcement agencies than any other country on earth – force all the smaller ones to merge – bigger police forces tend to have a more professional culture, and a smaller number of big police forces is easier for the media/NGOs/etc to hold to account than a larger number of small ones.)
This post has been killed and unkilled, downweighted by flagging and then unweighted by mods, then after a front page surge now downweighted because it has more comments than points.
In big European cities it’s pretty normal to see cops wearing body armor and carrying rifles around such events.
My guess is the mayor and/or the forces that pull her strings.
I have not noticed this. They seem like a hateful mob to me. Or worse. I'll be happy enough if the Feds just roll them up.
18:22: Reporter: "So, Chief Best, you stood here on Friday and you said it was going to be your decision and your decision alone to use tear gas. Tear gas was deployed on Sunday. You released a video today to say that it was not your decision to close the East Precinct. So who is making tactical decisions right now, for the Seattle Police Department?"
18:51: Best: "So for the tear gas, it was my decision. ... We suspended the use for 30 days unless it was a 'life safety situation.' And that was the exemption. ... The officers felt like it was a 'life safety situation' ... and I concurred."
19:27: Best: "I own that decision. I made that decision."
Here's a press conference transcript from June 7 where they claimed they would stop using CS gas[2].
Here's a secondary source reporting on the June 11 press conference[3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rE4VMjClqI
[2]: https://durkan.seattle.gov/2020/06/transcript-mayor-durkans-...
[3]: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43893335/durkan-...
I don't think that's remotely clear. No one in SPD's chain of command feels that way and they definitely don't take orders from outsiders.
> My guess is the mayor and/or the forces that pull her strings.
Certainly Durkan doesn't feel that SPD are a "malign force" — she's a former prosecutor and has only been supportive of SPD. Including and especially during the last few weeks. She also doesn't have the authority to direct SPD, aside from appointing a police chief. So she has some sway over Chief Best, but she and Best are buddy-buddy. And Best has consistently claimed she (Best) did not order the withdrawal.
My best guess is it was a political / tactical retreat by a lower-level leader to end the violence and save face. That or union action by East Precinct officers — they just didn't want to be there anymore.
Police believe in collective punishment. So deliver it to them.
I understand why some people’s initial instinct is to believe this is a new problem, but groups have been desperately trying to get people’s attention about police violence for decades.
Rodney King was nearly 30 years ago. And people were crying for help long before that.
I knew there was a problem before, but seeing things unfold the last week made it clear, this is a much more widespread and a significantly deeper issue than most people realized.
Even with all of that said, I think we would be silly to imply that abuse has to happen for a significant amount of time before it’s justifiable for someone to demand it stop.
The Seattle Times [1]: This is a rather long mega thread kind of post, but if you do a ‘Find’ for the headline, it’ll take you there:
Headline to search: Police walk back report that Capitol Hill protesters extorted businesses
For the too lazy to click, here are some quotes:
> That has not happened affirmatively,” Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the police department had based earlier claims on anecdotal reports, including in the news and on social media. “We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring.”
> In a news conference Wednesday, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette said police have heard from Capitol Hill community members that some protesters have asked business owners to pay a fee to operate in a roughly six-block area around the precinct. Best repeated the claim in a video address to officers Thursday morning.”
> The police narrative rang false to many in the Capitol Hill business community. Restaurant owners said they hadn’t heard any reports of extortion in the Autonomous Zone. On the contrary: Sales are strong and the increase in walk-up business is cutting down on delivery costs.
> “This protest has not hurt us at all,” said Bok a Bok Chicken co-owner Brian O’Connor...
> ” Apart from those sources, Christina Arrington, who heads the Capitol Hill branch of the Greater Seattle Business Association, said she has had “no other indications that this is taking place.” The GSBA “found no evidence of this occurring,” the group tweeted, based on conversations with area business.”
The Greater Seattle Business Association tweeted [2]:
> ” GSBA and Capitol Hill Business Alliance have also reached out to businesses in the area, and we have found no evidence of this occurring.”
Relevant Seattle area Reddit threads [3][4][5], at least one of which points out how the sinclair owned stations are still running with proven untruths. (For those who don’t remember, Sinclair is company who owns TV and newspapers all over the country and were forcing newscasters to read the same scripted pro-trump news in stations across the country.)
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...
[2] https://www.twitter.com/GSBA/status/1271132476329431040
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h7ecp2/seattle_p...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h7uf4l/komo_news...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h78xn0/police_wa...
Ideally, yes, but if the political views you are hoping to find are ones that overtly limit any dissent or respect for any other view (extreme absolute authoritarianism for example) then the views themselves subvert the ability to have meaningful discourse about them.
[0] https://twitter.com/spekulation/status/1271631384025554944
Your experience of music festivals and heavily armed people going hand in hand is not universal.
It's right by where the Capitol Hill block party is run, legally and with the city's blessing, every year. That's a major corporate event with _significantly_ more powerful sound systems.
>Thomson announced that officers would no longer be judged on how many tickets they wrote or arrests they made but on relationships they developed in the community and whether citizens felt safe enough to sit on their front steps or allow their children to ride their bikes in the street. Thomson told the New York Times in 2017 that "aggressive ticket writing" was a sign that officers weren't understanding the new department, saying "handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year can be life altering." On new recruits' first day, they knock on doors in the neighborhood they're assigned to and introduce themselves.
The reports of BLM leader avoiding answering any public questions about where funds are going [1] was already concerning. Having stories on top of it that some of these funds may also be coerced from non-protestors would be a bad look and I'm happy that isn't the case so far (assuming business owners aren't just staying quiet as the physical threats of speaking out still exists as long as the occupation continues).
I really hope focus goes back on positive police reform and avoids these internal distractions like the merits of a burning-man style street parties and silly attempts at building temporary urban gardens or bringing in dairy cows which take real care/time/investment vs focusing on tangible action and strong pressure towards police reform.
Unlike occupy this (the wider movement, not so much CHAZ) has the potential to result in real wins for once and already has a few. This deserves far more support from the supposedly libertarian-leaning right who despise many of these same police policies.
The vegan hippie utopia stuffs seems to be mostly a distraction from that and easy fodder for dismissal by the mainstream media.
[1] from BLM AMA on Reddit: https://preview.redd.it/3ebhf4rrei451.jpg?width=750&auto=web...
Why is it so hard for americans to imagine that it's possible to have atleast a semifunctional police apparatus?
Which is why the UK gets invaded every other week?
Seems an overly reductive viewpoint.
Yes, I carry a gun because I intend to use it. In self-defense, if ever necessary.
What is wrong with wanting to protect my own life?
Suppose the world agrees to dismantle its nuclear arsenal but a single nation, the great atomic nation of Nuclearia, decides that it will keep its weapons and it will destroy the world unless every other nation obeys its rule. And assume Nuclearia has magickal weapons that do not affect Nuclearia lands, or its citizens. The world refuses to obey and Nuclearia unleashes the nuclear holocaust.
Now what? What did Nuclearia achieve by destroying the rest of the world with nuclear weapons? What will Nuclearia do in a world of its own? Note that the rest of the world is now a radioactive waste where nothing lives and nothing grows. Other nations' lands cannot be annexed and used for farming, because there is no fertile soil left anywhere. While some intrepid souls no doubt long to visit the great glass fields of New York, spending any time outside Nuclearia is deadly and most of the world is a depressing burned desert so travel is pointless and tourism is a joke. International commerce of course is out of the question because there is no other nation than Nuclearia. Any resources, such as metals, gases, fossil fuels etc are limited to what Nuclearia has in its own territory. Any scientific progress is limited to what Nuclearian scientists can achieve on their own, without any input from the outside, given that there is nothing on the outside.
How does destroying everyone else increased Nuclearia's chances of survival?
How do you protect yourself by destroying everyone else?
M&P 15 is a complete knockoff of US military M4/M4A1 carbine, except barrel is longer and has no full auto function to comply with regulations.
Way too boring configuration to build from parts or build out of an 80% blank, and also probably not an airsoft.
Disclaimer: I’m an airsofter outside US at best in the context
Seattle is a special snowflake because their PD is actively white supremacist and they regularly have out of town white supremacists harassing the local populace.
I'm happy their doing their thing when government fails so hard at its job.
but the fundamental nature of these people are live and let live. So i'm not surprised at all that the area is doing fine and is perfectly safe.
notice how they are peacefully escorting him from the area? its fine.
a police force doesn't prevent you from being attacked, they only dispense justice after the fact and only sometimes.
welfare, courts and legal systems have a far larger impact than police as a means to prevent violence by having a peaceful way to resolve issues between individuals and ensuring basic needs are met. they also happen to be cheaper.
most violence happens at the edge of society where people cannot avail themselves of the court system. (drugs/prostitution)
police force -> used to arrest dangerous criminals only
police wardens -> used to review, charge, change police policy, and arrest police officers who violate the law.
social officer -> used for all non-violent community enforcement. fines, ticketing, homelessness, mental health issues, etc. have no power to arrest anyone.
not as bad as everyone was predicting...... are you fucking kidding me? and this number is after the major cities impacted literally fucking shut themselves down to help prevent the spread.
'hiring more police' well that can be argued as exactly what the activists want. if you define police as individuals who help the community with their issues without violence. making sure homeless people get food/shelter, mental health issues are resolved non violently etc.
I'd be all for hiring more of those 'police'.
As for surveillance, depends on the kind. I'd be all for surveillance used for detecting gunshots throughout a region. less okay for audio/video surveillance on every street corner.
this is hardly spontaneous, seems more like they just told the police to fuck off.
It’s not like WWII rifles had wooden furnitures as luxury items.
I was referring to the "block party" feeling of European "autonomous zones", i.e. in variaous European cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Kopenhagen, Barcelona, …, where Antifa/Anarchists/Far-Left "took over" an area/building, with city-officials telling the police to back-off, which created "never ending block-parties".
Growing up there, seeing that it was always the same no matter which city or country, was the best vaccine against their school of thought.
i guess i might be in a minority but the large scale protests led to these outcomes.
most politicians don’t give a flying forest for an isolated protest that happens all the way across the country. now if this happens in your backyard you pay attention.
so i would say that the protests in Seattle and the emergence of CHAZ did contribute to some of the outcomes (present and future ones). it’s really easy to be cynic and write off the efforts of people that are, in a sense, helping to write history.
[0]: https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-nyc#:~:t....
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-...
One could make [1] their own in 2020 illegally with the hand tools you find at an Ace Hardware Store.
Look at how flagrantly the police lied to cover up what they did to Breonna Taylor, or Freddie Gray. This is their standard MO: Lie and cover-up.
If given the option to run away, you should absolutely do so -- but that shouldn't stop you from learning self-defense in case the 'flight' option isn't available.
We shouldn't have guns, but I don't think that we should disarm ourselves unless everyone else agrees to disarm themselves as well.
Nothing interests everybody. If one story doesn't interest you, there are plenty of others to read here, and if you run out, the 'past' link in the top bar will take you to many threads you missed. Some of those will surely be interesting.
On the contrary, I think if a government claims to be democratic, then they are accountable for aligning their policies and outcomes with what the public wants. A democratic government should be actually accountable to the public.
However, the US’s withdrawal from Syria is a continuing humanitarian disaster that has spread into neighboring countries.
Have you actually gone out and talked to these people?
And I’m not suggesting the US should have one police force for whole country, or that EU should take over policing for its member states. In a federal system like the US, local policing is a state government responsibility. So I wouldn’t advocate going any further than merging local police into state police. And in bigger states, like California and Texas, even that is probably going too far-but one could at least merge city police forces into the county level.
Theres relatively little reason to think that the law will change that. Other stuff might, but in isolation, officers could continue to ignore the law.
Those unwritten rules that govern social behavior can induce real internal change too. People's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what they perceive to be customary and deviant in their culture.
I can confirm that the media isn't accurately representing what's there. It was a little crazy up until last Sunday (before the formation of CHAZ, right before the police left). It's totally peaceful now. People are bringing their families down there. I've even been there in the middle of the night and it's fine.
You don't glass everybody immediately. Nuclearia basically does a protection racket. Do what we want, or we progressively make an example of you. Each "round" is 1) issue demand 2) if no compliance, respond with N units of force 3) N++ 4) repeat until results. Rebels get the Alderaan treatment. Rule by fear. Either every country decides to let themselves get scorched to prevent Nuclearia taking resources as a last FU, bend the knee, or re-arm. But one well-placed rebel ICBM ought to dissuade Nuclearia from their racket.
Having some subpopulation (police or even military) with guns but not the populace is a similar power dynamic. It doesn't take many "rebels" to make the hegemony think twice about a takeover. But a complete monopoly on power means a "clean sweep" military coup with minimal bloodshed is possible. My finding of the world is that most people just want to live their life and do their thing. So in such a takeover, I believe most people would just fold. But a small rebel % can turn that bloodless takeover into an indefinite boondoggle.
So there's 3 agents:
1. Government. Trustworthy, until it isnt.
2. "Union" - Trusts govt. Ok with "gun grabbing" because civians with guns make them feel safe.
3. "Rebels". doesn't trust government. Ok with guns - armed society is polite society.
So it's a very unstable dynamic. It's stable at the extreme ends - everybody has guns, or only government has guns - but the transitions are high activation energy states.
If police "reform" amounts to a prohibition on juicing the stats a la The Wire, increasing the size of the force by 25-30%, and adding a measured and deeply considered surveillance regime then great.
Haven't seen any of the activists ask for that though.
600k die every year from hearth disease. 700k died globally from mosquito transmitted illness[2]. There are tons of secondary effects. People in America have died of Malaria. Many have committed suicide (Including my best friend's flatmate). Many were told not to come to hospitals. Many hearth attacks were wrongly attributed to COVID if a patient tested positive for it.
We've seen massive amounts of people at beaches in Florida, Texas and other places, as well as these protests and riots, and there are no massive spikes in fatalities 2~4 weeks after those events. The WHO said asymptomatic spread was rare, then waked it back (probably because of political pressure from Dr Fauchi), even though it was known asymptomatic spread was probably not a major transmission in February[3]!
This entire thing has been one massive media manipulation, and in less than two days, the entire thing flipped from one global narrative to another, like a switch!
[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/#incen...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg
[2]: https://www.isglobal.org/en_GB/-/mosquito-el-animal-mas-leta...
[3]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...
From https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43892640/busines...: "And get this—the police are still in the neighborhood, doing routine police stuff. Last night I watched two cops deal with a person who had passed out on Broadway. They prodded her and asked “you wanna go to detox?” until medical professionals arrived. (Obviously, we should be funding social workers to take care of these kinds of problems instead of cops!)"
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/ha...
I would have believed it plausible had they gone outside the city to some secluded area to create their utopia, but it's being done on existing buildings they did not build, and property that is not theirs but I guess their "revolution" is to not give two shits about anything.
I give them at most one more week.
Enough with patronizing. They are not children or robots with no freewill. They have made decisions in their own lives and they need to own up to them. Not holding people accountable makes them more like children, and they are more likely to stay where they are FOREVER. They will all stay on the streets until old age and die there if you think it's not their own fault.
If you can't a afford a city, then MOVE. Guess what though, in cities like SF, they didn't.
They stayed, destroyed SF for decades, and now it is very clear... SF has made its choice... to become the home for the homeless, as a mass exodus occurs.
People are tired of shit and used needles on the sidewalk, dangerous insane people roaming everywhere, extremely expensive food and living, all while the leadership pats itself on the back for being woke. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic shitty.
I can answer this, I lived there since 2005 until this month.
The problem is once you stop enforcing the law it creates incentives for all kinds of people to try it out. This created a diverse population of people who are living outside, from mentally ill, to seemingly normal young people fixing bikes in their tents, to dangerous drug addicts that won't hesitate to stab you.
The problem is there is a law and it is not being enforced. People take advantage of this. Thinking everybody is a poor soul that would buy housing if it existed is an extremely naive view. The homeless population is very diverse in terms of reasons they are out there. SF leadership treats all of them as if it had one solution, so of course that will not work. Some people out there want to be there. You can see they are young and don't mind sleeping in a tent. Others are just out of their minds and need intervention ASAP.
RIP SF
If you really want to feel sick read-up on the Highway of Tears and the systematic brutalization of indigenous women by Canadian society.
That's funny, because the majority of the clips I've seen have unprovoked or inappropriate responses from the police. Seattle alone [0] has had numerous incidents. It's trivially easy to see this, to the point that one would have to ignore many incidents to say "every instance" was started by protestors.
I believe that you are not arguing in good faith.
[0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...
Anyone who mocks Fox news and then turns around and watches cnn, msnbc, etc, is a fool.
On that topic, how do US law enforcement treat Native Americans? In the present debate there seems to be very little attention to that question.
The first one is what we should want to happen — a misplaced knee was moved by a colleague. There’s no context to decide if police inappropriately started an altercation. There’s no extended period of a knee on someone’s neck.
The second is police responding to someone on the ground fighting them and physically resisting arrest.
The third is pepper spraying a crowd that was refusing to move and let the police form a line, after someone lunged at the police.
The fourth is completely context free, and while unfortunate that a child was there, it doesn’t give us context to judge.
Your source also is using selective clips, that remove context to focus on emotionally triggering scenes.
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/07/max-blumenthal-on-baghdad...
[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-ch...
Clearing out the area is fundamentally a political issue, so I think you need to focus less on who would clear out CHAZ and more on how they would justify their actions. The area is in a dense area and is easily accessible by transit so tons of people have gone there in person. Plus, the local establishment news has been visiting the area and taking pictures.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/dubbed-a-lawless-s...
Whoever clears it would need to create "probable cause" as you mentioned initially. Our police chief has been trying to justify clearing the area by saying: 1) business are getting extorted (no evidence) 2) assaults and rapes have increased (the crime blotter doesn't support this) 3) there are armed guards doing ID checks at the barricades (people can just walk in to the area and tons of people have visited. There have been a few people with long guns hanging out, but my understanding is that they leave shortly because other people tell them it's not a good look). So far, none of those accusations have stuck:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...
Seems the problem is approximately 90 times worse (!) than the UK for example. The UK is somewhat less diverse, but what has a diverse population got to do with it? That might explain some of the killing, but it doesn't justify it.
and the process for renting them as public housing will be fairer how? You're just switching out one filtering system (price) for another based on arbitrary rules proposed by petty bureaucrats and politicians. At the end of the day you're still discriminating. The only difference that in your system, you're hoping that you or someone with your sensibilities has the power to do the discriminating.
It's kind of an ill-defined term, and doesn't really mean that it was purchased whole. It could easily be a stripped lower + lpk + complete upper, or complete lower + complete upper. Either of those sidesteps the 10 day waiting period, and it's about the same price - you can get a lower+lpk with buffer tube and halfway-decent buttstock for something like $120, or you can buy a complete lower for about that same price.
Assuming you just buy a stripped lower and not an 80% lower, assembling requires minimal tooling - a couple roll pin punches, a hammer, some pliers, a hex wrench, and maybe another wrench. A vise grip makes it easier but isn't strictly speaking required. Takes like an hour or two even if you have no idea wtf you're doing.
That said, I agree it's probably more likely they bought it whole, or bought a lower+upper and just slapped it together (which takes 5 seconds and zero tools).
Blindly chanting "there's no context" to every single video is problematic at best; it's a dog-whistle for cop apologists at worst.
We have videos of cops shooting projectiles at people on their own private property; cops approaching people who are walking away and just shoving them or beating them up for no reason; cops driving vehicles (or horses) into crowds or towards pedestrians; et cetera. One needs to be adamantly ignorant in order to believe that every single instance has been instigated by protestors.
Saying "protestors started every instance of violence" and now going "wait, we need the context to judge these videos" makes me believe you have zero intent of approaching this from a viewpoint other than one that vilifies protestors and glorifies cops.
How is this going to happen? We haven't controlled the disease even by shutting lots of stuff down, and the political will does not exist to keep that stuff shut down. After everything reopens the disease will certainly kill more people. There won't be an effective vaccine until a great deal more research is done; that's a decade away at least. Effective treatments such as antibodies will not be scalable for many months. We'll be lucky if we hold USA covid deaths this year to 200k.
> i guess i might be in a minority but the large scale protests led to these outcomes.
> most politicians don’t give a flying forest for an isolated protest that happens all the way across the country. now if this happens in your backyard you pay attention.
Could you clear that up?
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I'm not saying protests in other cities didn't contribute to governments in different cities taking action. I do think the nation-wide aspect of the protests helped move things along in Minneapolis/Lousiville/etc. I do think it's mostly indirect, though: I think protests across the country _indirectly_ increased the confidence and voices of protestors in other cities.
You seem to be conflating CHAZ–a very unique form of protest–with all protests. I think without CHAZ, the outcomes in the cities mentioned above would be the same.
Can you cite anyone in a position of power, or even a prominent voice leading the protests, in KY, MN, etc. that directly cite CHAZ?
With a large magazine it would be a different story though, you are right about that. This is why I think that it's good to have fully auto by design weapons be illegal (think the SAW, or the M240), along with magazines above 30 rounds.
