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Berkeley [Protests]
PROX
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello, in light of recent events I want to start a thread on protests.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/
One of my coworker's cousins had their car torched and saw people being beaten. This was streamed live on facebook. I also watched this live and there were many things about the event I thought didn't fit the tone of it.
Out of 1500 peaceful protesters, 150 agitators were found by police to be instigating violence. I believe this group calls themselves Black Bloc. They uniformly wear black and mask themselves. Red spray paint is their hallmark.
This is going to be a regular thing so I wanted to consolidate nonspecific protest discussion into a single thread. Please be safe out there if you are planning to march or protest. Report any potential violent instigators. We mush shut out violent agitators and hold ourselves to higher standards if we are to get our messages across.
edit: another thought occurred to me. it is the perception of strength and what it means when a movement has power.
Burning Police Cars and shattered storefronts are not images of power. They are images of weakness and of anger overcoming reason.
Women's March posters in the windows of local Gamestops and employees wearing pink hats are not superficial platitudes. They are images of hearts and minds, once apathetic, being stirred to a cause. That is power.
Power is to convince the people that don't have any skin in this game to step forward for those that do. Power is not bullying people into submission on threat of bloodied faces and broken glass; it is not destroying your own community because you are angry.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/
One of my coworker's cousins had their car torched and saw people being beaten. This was streamed live on facebook. I also watched this live and there were many things about the event I thought didn't fit the tone of it.
Out of 1500 peaceful protesters, 150 agitators were found by police to be instigating violence. I believe this group calls themselves Black Bloc. They uniformly wear black and mask themselves. Red spray paint is their hallmark.
This is going to be a regular thing so I wanted to consolidate nonspecific protest discussion into a single thread. Please be safe out there if you are planning to march or protest. Report any potential violent instigators. We mush shut out violent agitators and hold ourselves to higher standards if we are to get our messages across.
edit: another thought occurred to me. it is the perception of strength and what it means when a movement has power.
Burning Police Cars and shattered storefronts are not images of power. They are images of weakness and of anger overcoming reason.
Women's March posters in the windows of local Gamestops and employees wearing pink hats are not superficial platitudes. They are images of hearts and minds, once apathetic, being stirred to a cause. That is power.
Power is to convince the people that don't have any skin in this game to step forward for those that do. Power is not bullying people into submission on threat of bloodied faces and broken glass; it is not destroying your own community because you are angry.
artistjeffc.tumblr.com http://www.etsy.com/shop/artistjeffc
MagicToaster wrote:Uterus, do your thing!
PROX on
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at the protest?
Whoa, source? How does a false flag work?
artistjeffc.tumblr.com http://www.etsy.com/shop/artistjeffc
This is not to say I feel that ONLY non-violent protests are legitimate, or that violence de facto delegitimizes a protest, but Black Bloc shitheads are just interested in hurting people, causing mayhem, and destroying property for their own selfish reasons.
They latch on to legitimate causes (like trying to deny hate-speech agitator and White Nationalist darling Milo Y a place to spew inciteful speech) so they can burn cars and spray paint anarchist symbols everywhere.
Fuck those people.
Fascists selectively disavow any fascist who jumps the gun, then immediately begin interacting with said fascist again at the earliest political convenience.
Another important fact is that the ghost skins in the police department let the shooter go without prints because he was a fellow nazi.
This is the main reason I want to call attention to this. Organizing protests from now on should include instructions to report instigators and prevent violence.
artistjeffc.tumblr.com http://www.etsy.com/shop/artistjeffc
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I strongly urge people not to snitch on their fellow protesters. Respect a diversity of tactics and let others protest the way they feel is best. Do not under any circumstances encourage the police to intervene in a protest. The police are not our friends. If you feel that a protest has taken a direction that you are uncomfortable with, leave or relocate to a different part of the protest.
Yeah. No.
As soon as people start looting, beating and burning at a peaceful gathering they're not protesting. They're being a dangerous and damaging presence and giving legitimacy to the crack downs and police brutality.
If you want to go throw bricks through windows and steal shit or tip over ambulances have the balls to do it without the shield of anonymity.
If people are looting and burning, the protest has turned into a riot. If a riot is not something you want to participate in, leave. Do not switch sides and start aiding the police, they don't need your help.
No. When we protect these geese, we undermine our credibility.
http://thetab.com/us/uc-berkeley/2017/02/02/exclusive-footage-anarchist-group-smashes-windows-sets-fire-sproul-riots-uc-berkeley-milo-yiannopouloss-talk-cancelled-3244
Was the credibility of Black Lives Matter undermined just because the Ferguson and Baltimore protests turned into riots? I don't think it was. I would even hazard an argument for the opposite.
Yes
Or a handful of chuckle fuck anarchists who get Heath Ledger boners and think they're being edgy start inciting a riot because that's what gets them off. It only takes a few people to put an entire gathering of women and children at risk of being hit with teargas and trampled. Fuck that.
Edit: Berkeley / Oakland has a special population of anti-authority shitheads always looking to hurt someone too. It's a shame because the campus really is an impressive place.
Yes, it absolutely was.
That's why the police like to incite riots. It justifies their own use of force and undermines the credibility of the protesters.
That said, when liberals and moderates spend too much energy finger-wagging at rioters, it has the same effect. We'd be better off refocusing such discussions back to the matter at hand - the conditions that lead to the unrest in the first place.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes they were. It made it a lot easier for people to ignore them rather than looking at the problem they were trying to bring attention to.
Personally, I disagree
The thesis statement of those protests was, "Black lives are undervalued." If property damage is enough to convince somebody that that message is invalid, no amount of peaceful messaging would convince them. "I was going to think that black lives had value, but then I saw those windows get broken, and now I don't" is rhetoric to justify already-held bigotry, not to express a genuine emotional journey.
As chicken said above, "Black Bloc" is a tactic, not a group.
But Oakland* does have an anarchist contingent who love to turn up at protests and agitate things. On top of that there has been a lot of unrest between citizens and the police in Oakland for decades, with plenty of blame to share on both sides of the blue line.
* Oakland and Berkeley don't share a clear boundary, either culturally or geographically, regardless of what a map might say.
So you have 1) people who just want to fuck shit up because they're assholes and 2) people who are really mad at the police for past transgressions, and a whole lot of overlap and blending between the two groups. There was shit like this during Occupy Oakland, and during the Oscar Grant protests, and during some BLM protests.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Crackdowns and police brutality don't NEED legitimacy.
I want to clarify that a big reason for this is that outing protesters is a really easy way for far-right organizations to target people. Snitching doesn't lead to arrests, it leads to them and their families being killed by neo-Nazis.
Steam: pazython
Ghost Skins? You mean white people? That's a very racist thing to say about white people. Also, I can't seem to find anything talking about this. Do you have a link or something?
It's not just property damage, but also violence against bystanders. This validates people who believe stereotypes of the African American community. This is NOT what you want and only fuels hatred and ignorance.
artistjeffc.tumblr.com http://www.etsy.com/shop/artistjeffc
"Ghost Skin" is a term for a stealthed racist skinhead, usually in uniform.
From http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/fbi_right_wing_terror_is_real/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I want to make it clear that I don't personally support the actions of these clowns. I am not a fan of violence and destruction. I have known quite a few anarchist/anticap folks in my day, and it's true that very many of them are just angry rich white kids who want to break shit and spread chaos. By and large they are not cool people.
However, "I don't personally support these tactics" =/= "I'm going to alert the police"
To me, police intervention is a greater violence than property destruction, vandalism, or even a fistfight. You could be ruining someone's life over a broken Starbucks window. It's not worth it.
Ghost Skin is a tactic of white supremacists to infiltrate law enforcement and provide cover and support to "the cause".
OK, that was a new term I never heard of before.
EDIT: Oh god, SO beat'ed.
Yeah, they do. It comes back to the point made here:
And he's right, but the other point of that is we need to deny those people the excuse to justify their bigotry. One of the reasons the images of Bull Connor turning the firehoses on protestors was so powerful is because the protesters were peaceful, they hadn't done anything to make the violence warranted.
Really? Because polling shows otherwise.
Steam: pazython
Hard to get another link that isn't Breitbart. Shooter claims "self-defence" and that he thought the protestor was a white supremacist (...); has been released by police. I think I read elsewhere he turned himself in, but even then, he just shot a guy.
If you break stuff that isn't yours, that's illegal.
Or would you be OK with someone smashing and looting your business because protesting and freedom of speech?
I protest by not allowing mindless rioting under the guise of protest undermine the rule of law and legitimacy of protest. Please respect that
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I'm not convinced that peaceful protests are as effective as some people make them out to be. UC Berkley saw Milo paint a target on the back of a trans student at UW Milwaukee. They saw one of Milo's fans shoot a protester at UW Seattle. They didn't care. Why would a bunch of people standing around holding signs change that?
The problem is that non-violent protesting only works when the people in power have a moral compass. I'm not convinced they do.
Edit: When people hold a candle light vigil for a burned-down CVS, but not a man who had his spine severed by the police, can appeals to human life really work?
Steam: pazython
I am again of the opinion that if you hold those stereotypes closely enough that a night or two of violence are enough for you to write off an entire race, no amount of peaceful protest would be enough to change your mind. To use the events as "evidence" is, again, a narrative to justify pre-existing bigotry. The absence of that evidence would not do anything to change their minds; ergo, the cause isn't "hurt" because of what the predisposed already thought.
The bolded phrase describes only one segment of the backlash. There's a second segment. Granted, these two segments overlap.
The BLM thesis:
Black lives are undervalued
as evidenced by
Police using excessive force on black bodies
when
Black people are innocent or have been caught committing petty crimes
The counterargument "all lives matter" says
Black lives are not undervalued
because
All of the examples of police using force on black bodies are justified
because
those specific black people were committing serious crimes or antagonizing police.
In the moderate All Lives Matter worldview, most people are peaceful, but there's a group of hooligans in every population who want to break shit, whether it's over a football game or at a protest, regardless of their race. They're partly right... but they also are unaware of, or ignore, just how deep the history of black disenfranchisement in the US runs.
Overlapping with that, there's also the racist worldview, which I do believe is depressingly common:
Black lives are not undervalued
because
All of the examples of police using force on black bodies are justified
because
black people are just more violent.
We're not going to swing group #2 no matter how polite and reasonable we are. White nationalism is largely impervious to facts.
Group #1 though are going to keep seeing rioting. It doesn't matter how polite we are, because somebody will keep pushing - whether it's a member of the alt-right dressed up in black bloc gear, or the police, or one of the aforementioned folks who are just angry at everybody and thinks that Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange were documentaries, or somebody who is just having a bad fucking day.
The idea that protesters are supposed to maintain superhuman levels of zen even as they're tear-gassed, herded into free speech zones, given contradictory orders by police is itself biased. Moreover, the history of concentrated poverty in the US - generations of segregation, redlining, blockbusting, deliberate dispersal, and outright discrimination - is mind-boggling once you've grasped the true gravity of it. (That is to say: once you're "woke.") When you're trapped in an economic prison, it's natural you're going to see the buildings and streets around you as part of that prison.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.