We're aware.
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I can confirm this. When I was over in Asia I walked by Chinese kids on the playground calling each other "Japanese dog", listened to my Korean friends talk about how much he hated the Japanese, and read news articles about how the Japanese were snubbing their Korean immigrants.
Three closely related people groups who all look very similar, but they've been fighting each other for hundreds of years. Throw the Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotians, Filipinos, etc into the mix and it becomes pretty obvious the concept of "race" as it's taught in the media is a gross over-simplification of what's actually going on.
But it's very useful politically, and that's why it's always the first argument.
I agree completely, which is why I was careful to call out Yngvi's sources and not Yngvi him or herself. This distinction, as important (or not) as it is, doesn't alter the substance of my argument at all.
Not sure what part of that you read as justify anything. The argument I made is simply that looting is a consequence of unemployment--in this case unemployment caused by irresponsible and reckless government actions. I shouldn't have to point out that just because the actions of the masses are predictable doesn't mean they're justifiable. For the record, I defend my businesses with a rifle, not a sword.
I don't disagree with your critique and, honestly, I don't think you and the author of the article disagree about the problem of cop shit either. You also both appear to agree that the solutions that have thus far been proposed to address the problem of cop shit have been woefully inadequate. If I'm reading everyone correctly, where you disagree is on the question of the role that race plays in the propagation of cop shit. On this issue, I agree with you insofar as Europeans and Brits, generally speaking, are entirely clueless about the complexities of race relations in the United States (Full disclosure, for the record: I've [white male with an income and a PhD] been on the receiving end of cop shit more than once, in more than one state, and can confirm that black people aren't the only ones who get "the treatment" from shitty police officers and their bureaucratic superiors). Fascinating, then, that the same author (a sociology professor in Brooklyn) reissued the same exact argument a few hours later in The Nation, this time largely shorn of the racial element. In the later article, the author even goes so far as to call out prominent black leaders for doing nothing to curtail police violence in their representative districts.
Killer Mike's comments on the culpability of CNN in this regard were inspiring.
You are either dead wrong or woefully ignorant if you can't see that what's happening right now in cities across the country isn't a 'factor that should have been considered' when those in power decided COVID was reason enough to cancel the economy for three months.
But looting occurs in a wide variety of economic circumstances. The social frustration and, more importantly, the lack of respect for government created entirely by the government over the past 3 months set us up for this, and was entirely predictable, true. But looting appears to be a crime of opportunity, not unemployment. It has been going on for millennia, and there is one way to stop it: your rifle.
I remember talking with my dad a few days after the lockdowns started. We both quickly came to the conclusion that if the economy didn't open back up in a hurry people would start rioting. If a couple simpletons like my dad and I could figure that out, Cuomo and Friends knew exactly what they were getting into. They weren't wrong or ignorant, they're just evil.
In other news, our entire town centre is now festooned with thousands of 12” circular stickers on every piece of pavement warning everybody to stay 2m apart. Fuck this shit. I hate shopping, but might as well have put land mines on the pavement as far as I’m concerned.
It struck me today that essentially the state has requisitioned private property in a Britain as it now controls numbers of customers and the opening times. Welcome to IngSoc. Atlas must shrug.
Indeed. Fair point. I should have clarified by saying looting on this massive of a scale (they're looting from San Diego to San Francisco in California, don't know how the rest of the country is fairing). The points you make about social frustration and lack of trust in government are paramount: one can never accurately predict what the outcome of such conditions will be.
^This. Thank you. I forgot to include that latter component of intentional and malicious economic destruction for the purpose of perceived political gain.
Consider:
-1A is limited by Big Tech in through its subjective censorship, despite being a platform (that behaves like a publisher)
-1A is limited by arrests of peaceful protestors violating curfew ordinances
-1A is unequally enforced as violent protestors breaking many other laws concurrently are NOT arrested until after the violent law-breaking is completed.
-2A is severely restricted, in that you really only have this right ON PAPER (consider Zimmerman and countless others who tried to express this right)
-1A is severely restricted by employers discriminating on the basis of political beliefs (has anyone EVER heard of a coinciding rural employer whose Left-Leaning employees missed out on promotions or had to keep quiet due to their political beliefs?)
-unlawful search and seizure rights are essentially suspended thanks to the Patriot Act and its clones
- my friends on the ground in the States (people's republic of Maryland) tell me they don't violate the unlawful mask rules out of fear of arrest (they've seen YouTube videos), losing their jobs, and all the consequences that come along with that.
Multiply that by the millions across our great country who "showed their bellies" over this crisis and maybe it's over-leverage on credit and hyper-reliance on the income from one's job just to barely make ends meet that causes us to act like farm animals?
My big question, which arises when my friends chortle that I've chosen to live in Russia for now, is:
Which freedoms do we really have remaining that our once great country still allows us to exercise in a mostly limitless (within the confines of our Constitution) way?
You're justifying the looting in the "logic" sense that <<if B then C>>, where C is looting and B is unemployment, then the unemployment justifies (or causes, or, fine, your word, "is consequential to") the looting.
And that's ludicrous, or disingenuous at best, because your equation omits other factors that have always been leading to rioting. Or do you have examples of most communities responding to their chronically high unemployment with rioting?
Quite likely the case.
Depends on where you live. Texas is more free than Maryland. I assure you that Texas is more free than Russia.Quote:
My big question, which arises when my friends chortle that I've chosen to live in Russia for now, is:
Which freedoms do we really have remaining that our once great country still allows us to exercise in a mostly limitless (within the confines of our Constitution) way?