They were probably trying to make the point that the government should control the means of bong production.
The problem, as I see it, is two-fold. Protesters are:
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Significantly underestimating how many people will contract COVID from these protests. There’s a difference between changing your facebook pic to a raised black fist and then writing your Congresspersons online, and standing shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people, yelling and chanting. You’re going to kill people. It’s not an “if,” it’s not a “risk,” it WILL happen. The epidemiological math guarantees it.
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Significantly overestimating how effective these protests will be at causing change. Cops kill black people without cause, you protest, and then…cops will keep killing black people without cause. This won’t change in a week or two. It’ll take years.
If you want to protest, protest. Just do it 6 feet apart, preferably 10, in small groups, wearing masks. Talk to your legislators. Go to city council meetings (virtually, if that’s a thing near you). Vote, vote VOTE! But don’t go downtown. We don’t need 2 months of progress turned on its ear because you think your voice being heard requires your literal voice to be heard.
I saw two pictures in my Detroit Free Press today. One was that of the protest. The other was of a “trump road rally”. In one picture it was exceedingly difficult to find a face that didn’t have some sort of covering on it. In the other, it was impossible to find one that did. Guess which was which.
Yes, there might be spread from both events. But as to which one is worse, I know where my money is.
My city of Bellevue got targeted by criminals that looted at least 3 shopping malls in a 1 mile area. You won’t find a marxist or antifa anywhere in the group of out of town bad boys that just wanted to grab free shit and trash the place.
And methinks anyone calling out the antifa boogey man doesn’t understand jack shit about them. Most of the radical antifa like to have a good dust up, and wear the white hat of self righteousness by beating up bad guys. They aren’t anarchists, they aren’t marxists, they aren’t far left, but they do get off on taking on scumbags that take advantage of free speech to promote hate speech. Usually it’s just the right wing racist biker nutbags that do the violence against peaceful protesters. Antifa are there to level the playing field. A good example was the 2016 Sacramento riot. At least one group of racist bikers that showed up were sicced upon by a pack of rabid wolves the minute they showed up. Of course, it wasn’t the first gang attack the bikers had been in, and they pulled knives and started stabbing.
Who is defunding police departments again? (Well, they probably will be if the Senate doesn’t pass a bill giving money to the states and cities to make up for the shortfall from the shutdown.)
So far I’ve seen:
The blue wall cracking, as the three other cops in this incident seem ready to testify against the perp.
Police chiefs and other cops kneeling with the protesters. That’s a great sign.
The NFL deciding that kneeling during games isn’t so horrible after all.
The DA in Buffalo is charging the cops who pushed over the old guy. Their fellows are not improved, but it is a good sign.
And let’s not conflate looting and protests. That’s pure racist territory. I’ve seen some stuff on arrested looters - many have long arrest records. Opportunists, not people fighting for social justice or antifa.
Yeah, I’m guessing that these guys weren’t antifa:
Same for these guys:
And they hope that useful idiots like Sam Stone won’t notice their domestic-terror ambitions because they’re too busy worrying about the boogeyman of alleged “far left, cultural and economic Marxism”. :rolleyes:
Not only that, but many of the people who get sick will be people who didn’t go to the protests in the first place and didn’t consent to take the risk.
It’s worse in Britain. Here, tens of thousands of people are taking to the streets daily to protest police brutality. British police kill, on average, between two and three people a year. So far, over 40,000 people have died of COVID in the last three months. These people’s priorities are completely fucked. Unfortunately, they won’t realise this for another five to seven days when we get hit with the inevitable spike in cases, many of whom will be their parents and grandparents who weren’t even there.
I see this line of argument fundamentally as concern trolling.
You see this a lot with, say, fashion models. While things are changing, for a while, you had people saying they weren’t biased or perpetuating negative body image - they were concerned about models’ “health”. Of course they were saying this about women who were size 2s or 6s or anybody not a size 0. It was bullshit, of course, though I’m sure some of the ones saying it believed it.
I’m not going to comment on the UK. That’s a different nation and I’m not sufficiently familiar with the social dynamic to really contribute.
But the US? Are there potential health consequences here? Nobody is going to deny it. But people want to somehow equate some entitled jackass who wants a haircut with decades (centuries, really) of oppressive behavior and a social model designed to legitimize it.
And lest we forget, in the US, COVID-19 currently affects the Black community more than the general US population, in large part because of the very factors they are protesting - many already feel screwed and they’re not entirely wrong.
Are some people against the protests actually concerned about public health? Sure, I’ll grant that. But I’m probably not far wrong when I say a large part of it is concern trolling and the real point is to stifle protest and dissent through any half-way legitimate arguments possible.
I’m genuinely sad that the USA, those on both Right and Left wing, have apparently given up on suppressing the virus. I can only pray that the warm weather plus widespread use of masks will keep things from getting too out of hand.
No, you just don’t get how protests work. Protests are not about being heard. They’re about forcing action. They exist to cause enough inconvenience, to be the squeaky wheel, that causes people to have to listen in order for them to stop.
COVID-19 is a concern, but it’s not one they are ignoring. The people in charge being afraid of COVID-19 spreading is not a bug, but a feature. That’s all the more reason for them to try to do what is necessary to stop the protests. That means either they’ll resort to large violence, which makes them look horrible–the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr method–or they’ll actually try to fix things.
People are not going conveniently switch to a less effective version of protesting to mollify the very people who they are trying to scare into action.
Oh, and protests against police violence has worked many, many times historically. It just hasn’t stuck. We got a 14th Amendment over it. It is what ended the Civil Unrest of the 1960s. It’s just that, every once in a while, cops seem to forget their place is to serve us, not to attack the most vulnerable.
And, frankly, it’s not clear from your post or past posts that you actually care about this situation. That’s a large part of the problem when we see those of you who lecture people about COVID-19. Your post seems to say that stopping police brutality is not even possible, and you conveniently ignore that the issue is with that brutality being worse on people of color.
My mostly white town is on board here. Organizations that used to be against BLM are now all standing for them. The cops ACTUALLY GOT CHARGED this time. It remains to see if they’ll get him off on a technicality, or overcharge to make sure that he can’t be convicted, but we’re still seeing more than is typical.
So if you care, stop acting like it’s impossible for anything to happen.
Nice try, but this bullshit is what I was talking about with concern trolling.
This false equivalency is nauseating and insulting.
If the protesters had genuinely ‘given up’ on suppressing the virus, they wouldn’t be wearing masks at all or doing what they can, however little, to distance.
They haven’t given up. As I mentioned a while back there is a legitimate disease concern, but, as I also said, using the disease risk as a blanket tool to suppress any/all protests is totally bogus.
Maybe for you, centuries of oppression of millions of people don’t count much, but they do count for some people, even to the extent they would risk their own lives - what you think older people and immunocompromised people aren’t part of the protests?
Whereas I’m not at all wrong to say you completely made up this bullshit. And you’re making it up so you can justify your “Stay at home, just kidding!” hypocrisy. If anyone is concern trolling, it was you.
Unfortunately, what complicates this issue is the fact that this is a protest against police and the state. What would the likely apparatus of enforcing the ban on large gatherings be? Wouldn’t that, to the protestors, sort of prove their point and raise questions in their minds about motives?
That was what got me thinking: obviously, conservatives who think that systemic racism isn’t an issue will be more than happy to see the police and state break up large scale protests. But I wonder what those left of center, who do think systemic racism is an issue but also think that large gatherings are a public health risk, think should be done? Do they necessarily support the breakup of large scale protests? Do they see how that might be problematic?
I think breaking up the protests would do more harm than good. People are out protesting police brutality, and, realistically, it’s pretty much impossible for cops to break up a large scale protest without tear gassing some folks, or busting at least a couple of heads. And because the protesters are filming everything they do, each time the cops break up a big protest they’ll inevitably create plenty of fuel for the next one. Best to just let people protest.
I’m a leftie who absolutely and unequivocally supports the central issues being raised by BLM, and in the protests more generally. At the same time, I recognize that these protests are, in fact, likely to exacerbate the spread of COVID-19 even in cases where the protesters themselves take all possible precautions. I don’t think, as a couple of people above have suggested, that raising this issue is simply “concern trolling,” although a few posts in this thread do seem to head in that direction.
I certainly don’t think having the police break up the protests is a good idea at all. Firstly, the fact that people are protesting against excessive use of force by police most likely means that these crowds are unlikely to simply obey police orders to disperse, because they will see those orders as part of the pattern of police abuse of authority. That leaves the use of force, which I’m generally against even in times of regular protests, and even in times where we’re not worried about a pandemic.
Using force now would be even worse than normal, because it’s likely to enrage people (including me) even more, and because it often involves getting in close proximity to the demonstrators, and also often involves pushing demonstrators into smaller spaces. There have been cases, over the past week, of police essentially forming nets around demonstrations and pushing the crowds closer together, which is completely counterproductive if you want to prevent the spread of coronavirus. And the more physical conflicts there are, the more people come into close contact with one another, and the more likely they are to get arrested, which also exacerbates the spread of the virus. Jails have been significant locations of infection in many parts of the country.
I should add that, for me, many of these principles applied even before the protests. For example, there was a woman in Texas who violated the state’s closure order and opened her hair salon. She was fined and put in jail for a week, which I thought was stupid and counterproductive. While I understand why the lockdown orders have been put in place, and I agree with many of them, I also have great sympathy for people who are so desperate to feed their kids and pay their rent that they violate the orders to open their business. Fining and jailing these people doesn’t solve anything, because it makes them even more financially insecure, and it makes them even more likely to be exposed to the virus while sitting in a jail cell.
To be honest, I think that the government response (at the local and state level) to the protests should be to express support for the right to protest, and should also encourage protesters to do everything possible to maintain social distance and other precautions during their marches. Police should be deployed at a distance and told to monitor the protests, but not to interfere with the protests at all, except under a very limited set of circumstances, such as violence or looting.
The vast majority of these protests have been (or at least started out) peaceful, and if they’re allowed to protest peacefully, then people can and probably will make a good effort to take precautions against coronavirus transmission.
If I had a sewing machine, I would make masks and try to get them to a nearby protest, to give out to people who didn’t bring their own. try to at least help mitigate the spread.
The protests aren’t stopping. People are angry and scared, and the response from The Authorities has been to pour gasoline on the fire. The health tactics have to be mitigation, not suppression.
The public response should have been to reiterate that public gatherings are dangerous, and to keep saying that the protests had a valid cause but should be done in a way that doesn’t violate the guidelines everyone else has to live under, but to stop short of actually breaking them up.
Public health officials should have just reiterated what the science says, then kept their damned mouths shut.
Instead, they decided to send a message that some things are more important than the pandemic, thereby enraging people who lost their jobs and businesses, buried their loved ones ftom a distance, etc.
They have ensured that if we need their advice sgain, no one will listen to it. I have not seen a profession so quick to marginalize itself before. But that they did.
“Ensured”? “No one”? Where on earth did you pull that notion out of? As we continue to need the advice of public health officials, a WHOLE LOT of people will continue to listen to it. Because a whole lot of people take public health risks pretty damn seriously and recognize that public health authorities tend to understand them better than the average koodacky pontificating on a messageboard.
Sure, some other people might arrogantly think they don’t need to pay any attention to public health warnings, but then a lot of people were arrogantly thinking they didn’t need to pay any attention to public health warnings right from the get-go of this crisis.
You mean like the protestors, and all the governors, Mayors and public health officials that made an exception for protesting? Those arrogant people? Because the sight of a hundred thousand people marching shoulder to shoulder chanting and yelling, with the enthusiastic support of the very people who told us that opening a select few businesses was tantamount to mass murder, is pretty hard to take when your business has been shuttered or your life savings eliminated.
again. AFAIK nobody at all “made an exception for protesting” in the sense of pretending that protesting didn’t entail an increased public health risk.
Protesting is exceptional in the sense that a few thousand people marching down a street is very different, in terms of its disease transmission impact, from tens and hundreds of thousands of people in a city going about their ordinary business breathing on each other in close quarters for many hours a day for weeks and months on end. There’s nothing “hypocritical” about regulating the latter even if you’re not cracking down on the former (especially if cracking-down measures would only tend to put more people in closer contact for longer periods).
Just because spontaneous mass protests due to widespread public outrage can’t be effectively managed via legally mandated shutdowns and phased reopenings in large-scale public-health protection plans doesn’t mean that the large-scale plans don’t have value, or are somehow discredited due to “hypocrisy”. The attitude that nobody will or should trust public health officials any more on that account is kind of like refusing to take your insulin treatments because you stubbed your toe on a chair in your doctor’s office.