US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2358

On June 01 2020 07:26 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Yeah it's pizzagate level of stupid. But think about it: modern antisemitism was based for decades on the Protocole of the Elder of Zion which is, frankly, several orders of magnitude dumber and more grotesque as a conspiracy theory as the whole Soros crap. It was enough in the long run to get millions of people gazed and burnt in ovens.

On June 01 2020 07:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Holy fuck are we really diving into the "genetics of race" bullshit now?

Is this seriously allowed on TL still?

On June 01 2020 09:18 mikedebo wrote:


I mean, I believe the source is a mod, so... Yes?

On June 01 2020 09:47 Danglars wrote:
Santa Monica is being looted. It's just surreal seeing my local news choppers filming people just walking out with boxes.

LA County has a curfew starting in 15 minutes. Simply unreal.

Broke into an amazon van and looted it. Dragged a guy out of his vehicle and beat him up. (Source: Live Video ABC-7 LA)

On June 01 2020 07:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Holy fuck are we really diving into the "genetics of race" bullshit now?

Is this seriously allowed on TL still?

On June 01 2020 09:46 Gahlo wrote:
A very cinematic trip through downtown Philly during looting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gu4l6l/my_ride_through_downtown_philly_during_looting/

On June 01 2020 08:22 Danglars wrote:
Nothing will come of the terrorism declaration tweet, like nothing will come of the section 230 tweet, because there is no basis in statute.

On June 01 2020 10:13 Wombat_NI wrote:

Nothing tangible in terms of legislation, plenty of stuff does come from such Tweets that is still extremely impactful if difficult to quantify.

Shame Twitter don’t just call his bluff and outright ban him, the shitshow would be tremendous.

Being serious again though at the absolute most generous some of Trump’s Tweets could maybe have no possible negative effect, at the most generous. At the least generous end of that particular scale he’s throwing more fuel into an already raging fire of pissed off people.

He is only a singular man of course, but his rhetoric does embolden a certain segment of society and really antagonises another sector of society.

A Trump plea for calm and addressing these issues may have well fell on deaf ears and had no effect in calming the situation, but at least one could say he tried his best in utilising the status of his office to defuse things.

He can’t even do the pretense of caring properly. To a fair chunk of America his recent behaviour, as well as being informed by his track record reads ‘one thoughts and prayers statement, shoot people protesting inaction and designate an amorphous ill-defined group as terrorists’

On June 01 2020 10:31 Danglars wrote:

He would like nothing better than to be banned. His supporters already think they're being discriminated against on (what they think should be) neutral platforms for their social media. Ban the president from twitter after courts said Trump can't block people because his account is a “public forum" and Trump "utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes." That would be a political godsend for whatever victim narratives he makes in his 2020 plea.

And just in case it has to be said, his tweets on looting-shooting were the wrong move and worsened things. I think that was mostly apparent, and I've posted about that earlier about the reaction.

For the broader topic, he can be seen as caring about business owners and citizens impacted by looting. Everybody that acts tough against lawlessness, no matter how justly you can say it's counterproductive or whatever, can be said to care about those affected by arson, looting, violence, and property destruction. Try listening to someone saying LAW & ORDER when you just saw video of two people wearing hoodies dragging a man out of his vehicle and beating him up in the middle of the street. Maybe then you'll see how "caring" might resonate with people.

On June 01 2020 11:40 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
Interested to see what happens with the coronavirus figures now that you've got hundreds of thousands protesting/rioting in cities across the US.Good luck social distancing them.

You shut down your economy for two months and asked people to stay home.Could have all been for nothing? New wave could start due to these huge crowds.

On June 01 2020 11:01 Wombat_NI wrote:

I mean I do agree 100% on the optics, although I do think social media should be much more harshly regulated, although that’s a tangential point. As a hypothetical I would enjoy it for Trump’s reaction though.

You can stride these two worlds if you actually want to, it’s not insane.

By and large, although more extreme views exist, those who repost, or protest or get involved in anything under the Black Lives Matter banner are themselves law and order protestors.

The police are ostensibly meant to have the monopoly on legitimate violence within the state, but apply it within certain limits and be accountable.

That they are not, or perceived as lacking accountability and lacking proportionality is a law and order matter too, but raising this point is somehow framed as being seditious or what have you.

You can do attempt to both credibly respond to the law and order grievance that catalysed these events while also condemning unnecessary violence and looting.

Trump chose not to do this in this instance, allied to innumerable other precious utterances like ‘good people on both sides’

I’m not a huge fan as I’m considerably left of him but what does Obama do here? A cracking, well-considered and well-delivered speech. May not defuse things sure, may not fix things well sure as fuck he didn’t decide to dog whistle to an ever-dwindling portion of the population.

There was at least a facile attempt at unifying the country, as superficial as it often was.

Trump does not do this, indeed he takes every shot he can at further polarising it. As you correctly say he has no legal recourse to do what he’s saying here but these actions absolutely have serious negative consequences.

I don’t know enough to speak on a lot of this, but I know angsty suburban white boys. If you want to break shit to live out your teenage anarchist fantasy, do it on your own time. If you think you’re doing that shit to show how MUCH u care about black lives, ur deluding yourself. - Anna Kendrick

Looking back, the results of Cincinnati’s reform efforts are startling. Between 1999 and 2014, Cincinnati saw a 69 percent reduction in police use-of-force incidents, a 42 percent reduction in citizen complaints and a 56 percent reduction in citizen injuries during encounters with police, according to a report by Robin S. Engel and M. Murat Ozer of the Institute of Crime Science at the University of Cincinnati. Violent crimes dropped from a high of 4,137 in the year after the riots, to 2,352 last year. Misdemeanor arrests dropped from 41,708 in 2000 to 17,913 last year.

Yet it might not be so simple to adopt Cincinnati’s changes in other cities. It took a long time—five to ten years, by some counts—to get police to actually buy into the reforms. Nobody likes it when somebody comes into their workplace and tells them how to do their job. The changes Cincinnati adopted were nothing short of a complete turnaround in how the city approached incarceration, crime and its relationship with its residents. And to make sure they were adopted, the federal government had to apply constant pressure, reminding all parties involved about the need to stay vigilant about reform.

“In the early 2000s and late 90s, Cincinnati was just a hotbed of problems, and we got the city and the police department to agree to certain reforms,” said Mike Brickner, senior policy director with the ACLU of Ohio, which sued the city shortly before the riots over discriminatory policing practices. “It’s gratifying for me to see that people are coming back several years later and recognizing how successful it was.”

Some of the changes were small: The police department vowed to hold a press conference within 12 hours of any officer-involved shooting and to provide information as well as camera footage from the event. It agreed to track officers who received an inordinate number of complaints or who violated policies, and take disciplinary action if needed. It established a Citizen Complaint Authority with investigative and subpoena powers over police. It adopted new use-of-force policies, changed guidelines on when to use chemical spray, and established a mental-health response team to deal with incidents in which a suspect may have mental-health problems.

But those changes were tiny in contrast to what Herold and others say completely altered the department over the course of a decade: the adoption of a new strategy for how to police. The settlement agreement for the ACLU lawsuit, dubbed the Collaborative, required Cincinnati police to adopt community problem-oriented policing, or CPOP. The strategy required them to do fewer out-and-out arrests, and instead focus on solving the problems that cause people to commit crimes in the first place.