Perhaps we can agree on "there was a breakdown of order due to high emotions resulting from a local incident, and this breakdown was thereafter exploited by those seeking to profit, many of whom were not originally involved." After all, the disorder clearly followed the incident. It's not like there are random outbreaks of disorder on th…
Perhaps we can agree on "there was a breakdown of order due to high emotions resulting from a local incident, and this breakdown was thereafter exploited by those seeking to profit, many of whom were not originally involved." After all, the disorder clearly followed the incident. It's not like there are random outbreaks of disorder on this scale, they require a trigger. Without a trigger the baseline level of "desire to steal" results in individual burglaries & robberies rather than as a mass incident.
Something unique to the post-Floyd disorder was the speed at which it spread through so many cities large & small which did not have particular local incidents to provide a local trigger. However, I think we can chalk this up to increasing interconnectedness due to the internet. Before, riots would spread block by block as people witnessed the disorder and joined in, but now people can see disorder happening online - and when the McDonald's in their town looks just like the one that's burning in Ferguson, it's easy to see how people get inspired. The trend of having your whole friend group walk into a store and then all suddenly grab as much as you can and charge out as a pack, that we saw a lot in malls before they tightened security, also had online viral inspiration.
And more than inspiration, lots of out-of-towners get news of the party right away and head down in person. As we saw with the Rittenhouse incident, lots of people from lots of places end up involved. How did a riot about police racism turn into twenty white kids and adult losers chasing another white kid around and trying to hit him with skateboards, leading to two deaths? The internet is how, it's the reason all of those people were there. They weren't politically involved or even really stealing stuff in any organized way, they were just attracted to the summer's biggest party like stupid, stupid moths.
> Perhaps we can agree on "there was a breakdown of order due to high emotions resulting from a local incident, and this breakdown was thereafter exploited by those seeking to profit, many of whom were not originally involved."
Bureaucratic doublespeak. Note the use of passive voice and indirection to avoid naming those responsible.
I'm making an important distinction, which is that most of the rioters had nothing to do with the original protestors - obviously, the almost-entirely-Caucasian rioters in Portland had no proximate exposure to racial discrimination by police or anyone else.
They may have had "BLM" signs and they may have had the support of some newborn "activist organization" calling themselves "the official BLM" or whatever - but neither Portland Caucasians nor "official BLM" have any right to speak on behalf of the average African-American citizen of Ferguson, and that average citizen can't be blamed for what these outside activist organizations do.
Worse still, evidence is pretty clear that a heck of a lot of disorder was initiated by out-of-towners attracted to the crowd cover of vigils & marches. This will probably become more & more the norm in the internet age - any excitement anywhere will be instantly telegraphed to the entire nation as soon as it starts, lighting a giant candle for the stupid, stupid moths I mentioned earlier. Every dumbass from five hundred miles around who wants to loot something will be there, every loser from five hundred miles around who wants to break windows & burn cars will be there, every idiot who wants to get famous for recording or starting the next Rittenhouse incident - or being the next Rittenhouse - they'll all be there.
This is what we get when most in our young generations live and breathe in a hive of constant digital contact & constant competition - it's like Survivor meets Lord of the Flies. It's fortunate for us that they're so sedentary in habit - were that not the case, our cities would be suffering much worse things...
> They may have had "BLM" signs and they may have had the support of some newborn "activist organization" calling themselves "the official BLM" or whatever - but neither Portland Caucasians nor "official BLM" have any right to speak on behalf of the average African-American citizen of Ferguson, and that average citizen can't be blamed for what these outside activist organizations do.
In other words, they were outside left wingers. But in your initial comment you claimed the rioters were not "left-wing". In your continued effort to shift the blame for the riots onto no one in particular, you've managed to contradict yourself.
> every idiot who wants to get famous for recording or starting the next Rittenhouse incident - or being the next Rittenhouse - they'll all be there.
And now you've even descended to victim blaming the people whose businesses were burned and the friends they called in to help defend their businesses.
It's completely ridiculous to put locals holding a vigil or a march for the deceased in the same category as people looting stores and burning cars for the heck of it. "BLM" claimed to represent the vigil holders & the peaceful marchers, but then defended every incident opportunist violence. They are the reason people conflate vigil-holders with violent looters. it's a terrible thing they've done.
It's certainly true that the blame for the disorder lies squarely on the shoulders of those who threw the bricks. Yet at the same time, it's ridiculous to assert that these people had broader political motivations outside of perceiving injustice in local policing. The African-American rioters in Ferguson stole & burnt, but they did not take over a federal courthouse, nor did they attempt to establish an anarchist microstate. Caucasians in Portland did those things "in the name of all black people."
Vigil holders & peaceful marchers did not defend rioters, "BLM" did, again "in the name of all black people." I remind you again that "BLM" is not an organization whose members are elected by anyone but themselves. It's not even an organization like the NAACP responsible to members and local branches. "BLM Inc" is literally just a ring of educated "progressives" who declared themselves representative of all black people in America, and who were then accepted & promoted as such by the same demographic of educated "progressives."
You should take this all as good news. African-Americans do not broadly support burning their own communities down, nor do they broadly support "defunding the police" or anything of that nature. The vast majority of African-Americans want safe streets and good schools. The people you should be blaming are the educated & wealthy "progressives" who anoint themselves unelected official spokespeople of the oppressed, plus the people in the media who help them get away with this silent coup.
(No one should be calling in teens and giving them guns to help protect a stupid strip mall storefront whether it's under attack by rioters or Red China. If you really think that's commendable behavior, you are literally blinded by partisanship. Rittenhouse bears zero blame compared to the gobsmackingly dumb adults who thought it was a good idea to get him involved in the first place. He could've easily been shot by rioters or mistaken for a rioter & shot by police. The way things ended up going was far from a worst case scenario. Have you forgotten that vigilanteeism isn't legal? You need to be a sheriff to round up a posse. We do, in fact, live in a society, and violence for violence is the rule of beasts.)
> It's completely ridiculous to put locals holding a vigil or a march for the deceased in the same category as people looting stores and burning cars for the heck of it.
Funny how most causes manage to have peaceful marches all the time without them evolving into riots.
> It's certainly true that the blame for the disorder lies squarely on the shoulders of those who threw the bricks. Yet at the same time, it's ridiculous to assert that these people had broader political motivations outside of perceiving injustice in local policing. The African-American rioters in Ferguson stole & burnt, but they did not take over a federal courthouse, nor did they attempt to establish an anarchist microstate. Caucasians in Portland did those things "in the name of all black people."
So you concede that the rioters were left wing?
> No one should be calling in teens and giving them guns to help protect a stupid strip mall storefront whether it's under attack by rioters or Red China.
True, that should be the police's job. Unfortunately, the police weren't doing it, probably because the BLM-affiliated prosecutors had established that police to arrest Blacks behaving badly were liable to be labeled "racist" and prosecuted. Thus, the locals had to provide for their own defences.
> Have you forgotten that vigilanteeism isn't legal?
Have you forgotten the self-defense is? Or as seems more likely you don't care about truth at all or who you smear as long as you deflect blame from the BLM-radicals.
Self-defense doesn't apply to defending someone else's stupid strip mall storefront in another state. That's vigilanteeism, plain and simple. Again, I'm not saying Rittenhouse did anything unusual for the situation he was put in - were it me, a teenager stuck there with a serious weapon being chased by a mob, I would probably have thought I had to shoot all of them dead. That he actually tried to retreat, and only two people ended up dead, actually speaks fairly well of him...nonetheless, whoever put him in that situation is a pure idiot.
Furthermore, there is no "the rioters." Caucasians engaging in political violence in Portland and African-Americans looting stores in Ferguson are two entirely different groups of people that have almost nothing to do with one another. The only connection is that the Caucasians used unrest in African-American communities as an excuse to start violence of their own.
You - and conservatives more broadly - should NOT paint vigil-holders and looters as the same breed of "left winger" regardless of whether they voted for Biden or not. Vigil holders - by which I mean the average African American community members who gave the nomination to Biden over Bernie - do NOT support defunding the police, they do NOT support letting violent criminals out of jail early, and they do NOT support gender extremism.
Average African-American community members want good schools & clean streets. They don't like the Caucasian-American race & gender extremists who claim to represent them as the new Democratic elite. As a result Republicans are gaining ground with average African-Americans every year. But when you tar vigil-holders as "basically the same as rioters and looters", you drive them back into the arms of the Democrats.
> Self-defense doesn't apply to defending someone else's stupid strip mall storefront in another state.
This sentence is rather telling about your bias. Just admit you don't care about the small business owners who own stores in a "stupid strip mall", your attempt to disguise your classism is not convincing in the slightest.
> Furthermore, there is no "the rioters."
You can't even keep the BS semantic games you're trying to play strait.
>You - and conservatives more broadly - should NOT paint vigil-holders and looters as the same breed of "left winger" regardless of whether they voted for Biden or not. Vigil holders - by which I mean the average African American community members who gave the nomination to Biden over Bernie - do NOT support defunding the police, they do NOT support letting violent criminals out of jail early
Then what do you call the Blacks looting stores? Or are you going to go back to pretending that didn't happen in your next comment?
"Then what do you call the Blacks looting stores? Or are you going to go back to pretending that didn't happen in your next comment?"
They're criminals. Just like the uh, people of European ancestry who were looting and burning alongside them. Few--if any--of them driven by any impulse other than supermarket-sweep opportunism. (Which is not a politics. Setting aside both the sophistries of the faux-mo Left and the absurdly hyperbolic insinuations of the Right. Setting both of them aside in the wastebasket, where they belong.)
What really gives me a problem with your comment is your tacit inference: that the fact that some of the looters in the 2020 riots were black somehow discredits the claim made by the poster to whom you're replying: that most black Americans do NOT support defunding the police or leniency for violent criminals.
Perhaps we can agree on "there was a breakdown of order due to high emotions resulting from a local incident, and this breakdown was thereafter exploited by those seeking to profit, many of whom were not originally involved." After all, the disorder clearly followed the incident. It's not like there are random outbreaks of disorder on this scale, they require a trigger. Without a trigger the baseline level of "desire to steal" results in individual burglaries & robberies rather than as a mass incident.
Something unique to the post-Floyd disorder was the speed at which it spread through so many cities large & small which did not have particular local incidents to provide a local trigger. However, I think we can chalk this up to increasing interconnectedness due to the internet. Before, riots would spread block by block as people witnessed the disorder and joined in, but now people can see disorder happening online - and when the McDonald's in their town looks just like the one that's burning in Ferguson, it's easy to see how people get inspired. The trend of having your whole friend group walk into a store and then all suddenly grab as much as you can and charge out as a pack, that we saw a lot in malls before they tightened security, also had online viral inspiration.
And more than inspiration, lots of out-of-towners get news of the party right away and head down in person. As we saw with the Rittenhouse incident, lots of people from lots of places end up involved. How did a riot about police racism turn into twenty white kids and adult losers chasing another white kid around and trying to hit him with skateboards, leading to two deaths? The internet is how, it's the reason all of those people were there. They weren't politically involved or even really stealing stuff in any organized way, they were just attracted to the summer's biggest party like stupid, stupid moths.
> Perhaps we can agree on "there was a breakdown of order due to high emotions resulting from a local incident, and this breakdown was thereafter exploited by those seeking to profit, many of whom were not originally involved."
Bureaucratic doublespeak. Note the use of passive voice and indirection to avoid naming those responsible.
I'm making an important distinction, which is that most of the rioters had nothing to do with the original protestors - obviously, the almost-entirely-Caucasian rioters in Portland had no proximate exposure to racial discrimination by police or anyone else.
They may have had "BLM" signs and they may have had the support of some newborn "activist organization" calling themselves "the official BLM" or whatever - but neither Portland Caucasians nor "official BLM" have any right to speak on behalf of the average African-American citizen of Ferguson, and that average citizen can't be blamed for what these outside activist organizations do.
Worse still, evidence is pretty clear that a heck of a lot of disorder was initiated by out-of-towners attracted to the crowd cover of vigils & marches. This will probably become more & more the norm in the internet age - any excitement anywhere will be instantly telegraphed to the entire nation as soon as it starts, lighting a giant candle for the stupid, stupid moths I mentioned earlier. Every dumbass from five hundred miles around who wants to loot something will be there, every loser from five hundred miles around who wants to break windows & burn cars will be there, every idiot who wants to get famous for recording or starting the next Rittenhouse incident - or being the next Rittenhouse - they'll all be there.
This is what we get when most in our young generations live and breathe in a hive of constant digital contact & constant competition - it's like Survivor meets Lord of the Flies. It's fortunate for us that they're so sedentary in habit - were that not the case, our cities would be suffering much worse things...
> They may have had "BLM" signs and they may have had the support of some newborn "activist organization" calling themselves "the official BLM" or whatever - but neither Portland Caucasians nor "official BLM" have any right to speak on behalf of the average African-American citizen of Ferguson, and that average citizen can't be blamed for what these outside activist organizations do.
In other words, they were outside left wingers. But in your initial comment you claimed the rioters were not "left-wing". In your continued effort to shift the blame for the riots onto no one in particular, you've managed to contradict yourself.
> every idiot who wants to get famous for recording or starting the next Rittenhouse incident - or being the next Rittenhouse - they'll all be there.
And now you've even descended to victim blaming the people whose businesses were burned and the friends they called in to help defend their businesses.
Have you tried not being a total sleazebag?
It's completely ridiculous to put locals holding a vigil or a march for the deceased in the same category as people looting stores and burning cars for the heck of it. "BLM" claimed to represent the vigil holders & the peaceful marchers, but then defended every incident opportunist violence. They are the reason people conflate vigil-holders with violent looters. it's a terrible thing they've done.
It's certainly true that the blame for the disorder lies squarely on the shoulders of those who threw the bricks. Yet at the same time, it's ridiculous to assert that these people had broader political motivations outside of perceiving injustice in local policing. The African-American rioters in Ferguson stole & burnt, but they did not take over a federal courthouse, nor did they attempt to establish an anarchist microstate. Caucasians in Portland did those things "in the name of all black people."
Vigil holders & peaceful marchers did not defend rioters, "BLM" did, again "in the name of all black people." I remind you again that "BLM" is not an organization whose members are elected by anyone but themselves. It's not even an organization like the NAACP responsible to members and local branches. "BLM Inc" is literally just a ring of educated "progressives" who declared themselves representative of all black people in America, and who were then accepted & promoted as such by the same demographic of educated "progressives."
You should take this all as good news. African-Americans do not broadly support burning their own communities down, nor do they broadly support "defunding the police" or anything of that nature. The vast majority of African-Americans want safe streets and good schools. The people you should be blaming are the educated & wealthy "progressives" who anoint themselves unelected official spokespeople of the oppressed, plus the people in the media who help them get away with this silent coup.
(No one should be calling in teens and giving them guns to help protect a stupid strip mall storefront whether it's under attack by rioters or Red China. If you really think that's commendable behavior, you are literally blinded by partisanship. Rittenhouse bears zero blame compared to the gobsmackingly dumb adults who thought it was a good idea to get him involved in the first place. He could've easily been shot by rioters or mistaken for a rioter & shot by police. The way things ended up going was far from a worst case scenario. Have you forgotten that vigilanteeism isn't legal? You need to be a sheriff to round up a posse. We do, in fact, live in a society, and violence for violence is the rule of beasts.)
> It's completely ridiculous to put locals holding a vigil or a march for the deceased in the same category as people looting stores and burning cars for the heck of it.
Funny how most causes manage to have peaceful marches all the time without them evolving into riots.
> It's certainly true that the blame for the disorder lies squarely on the shoulders of those who threw the bricks. Yet at the same time, it's ridiculous to assert that these people had broader political motivations outside of perceiving injustice in local policing. The African-American rioters in Ferguson stole & burnt, but they did not take over a federal courthouse, nor did they attempt to establish an anarchist microstate. Caucasians in Portland did those things "in the name of all black people."
So you concede that the rioters were left wing?
> No one should be calling in teens and giving them guns to help protect a stupid strip mall storefront whether it's under attack by rioters or Red China.
True, that should be the police's job. Unfortunately, the police weren't doing it, probably because the BLM-affiliated prosecutors had established that police to arrest Blacks behaving badly were liable to be labeled "racist" and prosecuted. Thus, the locals had to provide for their own defences.
> Have you forgotten that vigilanteeism isn't legal?
Have you forgotten the self-defense is? Or as seems more likely you don't care about truth at all or who you smear as long as you deflect blame from the BLM-radicals.
Self-defense doesn't apply to defending someone else's stupid strip mall storefront in another state. That's vigilanteeism, plain and simple. Again, I'm not saying Rittenhouse did anything unusual for the situation he was put in - were it me, a teenager stuck there with a serious weapon being chased by a mob, I would probably have thought I had to shoot all of them dead. That he actually tried to retreat, and only two people ended up dead, actually speaks fairly well of him...nonetheless, whoever put him in that situation is a pure idiot.
Furthermore, there is no "the rioters." Caucasians engaging in political violence in Portland and African-Americans looting stores in Ferguson are two entirely different groups of people that have almost nothing to do with one another. The only connection is that the Caucasians used unrest in African-American communities as an excuse to start violence of their own.
You - and conservatives more broadly - should NOT paint vigil-holders and looters as the same breed of "left winger" regardless of whether they voted for Biden or not. Vigil holders - by which I mean the average African American community members who gave the nomination to Biden over Bernie - do NOT support defunding the police, they do NOT support letting violent criminals out of jail early, and they do NOT support gender extremism.
Average African-American community members want good schools & clean streets. They don't like the Caucasian-American race & gender extremists who claim to represent them as the new Democratic elite. As a result Republicans are gaining ground with average African-Americans every year. But when you tar vigil-holders as "basically the same as rioters and looters", you drive them back into the arms of the Democrats.
> Self-defense doesn't apply to defending someone else's stupid strip mall storefront in another state.
This sentence is rather telling about your bias. Just admit you don't care about the small business owners who own stores in a "stupid strip mall", your attempt to disguise your classism is not convincing in the slightest.
> Furthermore, there is no "the rioters."
You can't even keep the BS semantic games you're trying to play strait.
>You - and conservatives more broadly - should NOT paint vigil-holders and looters as the same breed of "left winger" regardless of whether they voted for Biden or not. Vigil holders - by which I mean the average African American community members who gave the nomination to Biden over Bernie - do NOT support defunding the police, they do NOT support letting violent criminals out of jail early
Then what do you call the Blacks looting stores? Or are you going to go back to pretending that didn't happen in your next comment?
"Then what do you call the Blacks looting stores? Or are you going to go back to pretending that didn't happen in your next comment?"
They're criminals. Just like the uh, people of European ancestry who were looting and burning alongside them. Few--if any--of them driven by any impulse other than supermarket-sweep opportunism. (Which is not a politics. Setting aside both the sophistries of the faux-mo Left and the absurdly hyperbolic insinuations of the Right. Setting both of them aside in the wastebasket, where they belong.)
What really gives me a problem with your comment is your tacit inference: that the fact that some of the looters in the 2020 riots were black somehow discredits the claim made by the poster to whom you're replying: that most black Americans do NOT support defunding the police or leniency for violent criminals.