Let’s go with this as a start:
Left wing coups are picnics, doncha know?
Right wing coups baaaaad.
That’s the entire point of this protest.
Yes, it matters. The details matter when police officers use force on the residents of this country.
You ask if the police have every right to use force to get their job accomplished. The answer is… are they beating the shit out of a protester to save someone’s life or health, or are they sending him to the hospital because he “interfered” with their duties?
So… NO. You don’t get a blanket “Oh yes, the police can fuck up anyone they want if they think they need to” answer out of me.
Response time? Stop killing people. Stop being racist. Then we can discuss your response time issues.
What an absurd comparison. American democracy today is like the rule of the George the Third ?
Is there any evidence that the vast majority of citizens in the area support the autonomous zone? And it has already caused harm; it has increased police response times to emergency calls in surrounding areas.
Response time can mean the difference between life and death in a violent crime. There are 16000 murders in the US every year and countless other violent crimes. The victims of those crimes have every right to have the police reach them as quickly as possible and a random group of thugs don’t have a right to take over government buildings and harm public safety.
shrug so you say. You seem to be very invested in the police being able to go where they’re not wanted and do things that aren’t wanted.
First: what “left-wing group” created this autonomous zone? It looks to me like a community of residents decided the police were no longer welcome there.
If a community of right-wing people occupying their own property and neighborhood decided they didn’t want the police there anymore, and nobody was using that as a cover for committing crime or interfering with business, I would have no problem with it. Only within those strict parameters. You mentioned what if they shut down an abortion clinic… that’s a lawful business, doesn’t matter if it’s a Wal-Mart or something else, that’s where their autonomy is forfeit.
This is the wrong question, because as I see it, the police are servants. They have no rights, only duties.
If someone in the zone called 911 and reported a violent crime in progres, the police would have a duty to enter the zone, and the people serving as zone security have a duty to allow them access. If it ends up that someone is obstructing the police from responding to a violent crime in progress, then the police have a duty to subdue those people by force and carry out their own duties.
So yes, the police still have a duty to respond to violent crime, and the community has a responsibility to allow them. But the police do not have a “right” to stroll around acting tough and stirring up trouble.
This may be tested at some point; I hope it is not. I think this is ultimately all a performance art piece that will eventually dissipate when people get bored, but I hope it does result in the people being able to set limits on the police who are supposedly protecting them.
And you know this how? Did someone take a vote ?
In any case even if this were true the police precinct does not belong to the citizens of this area. It serves the surrounding areas of the city as well. Whoever has created this zone has no right to endanger the lives of those citizens which is what they are doing.
Let’s look at the scorecard:
How many good laws have been passed by the House of Representatives, but have been blocked by the tag-team of Moscow Mitch and Trump?
This sounds an awful lot like Trump’s handling of the COVID pandemic. Refusing to let the governors do things, and then screwing it up himself.
Sound an awful lot like the Republican strategy for limiting access to polling booths: too few voting locations, in inconvenient places, adding undue burden to the process of voting, in hopes that enough people won’t bother to vote.
How many Muslim Bans did they try to pass?
Moscow Mitch, with the full consent and approval of Trump, has endeavored to load the courts with their own unqualified cronies, so as to maintain control of the courts far beyond the next election.
How many times has Trump threatened to send in the army these past two weeks?
Again, the whole point of these protests is that police officers are de facto above the law in far too many instances.
Trump literally brags about being “Tariff Man”.
Okay, he’s supporting “very fine” neo-nazis and white supremacists instead of Native Americans, but the analogy is pretty clear.
And no matter how often we point out his bad behaviors, and ask him to relent, he just denies responsibility, deflects blame, and doubles down on being an asshole.
And that pretty much sums up every discussion anyone has ever had with any of Trump’s supporters.
So, yeah, I think American “democracy” today has an awful lot in common with the rule of the George the Third.
I am obviously not going to bother with your full delusional rant but let me just take this one. You do know how legislation is passed under the US constitution right? It requires votes in both the House and Senate and the President’s signature. Just because the House has passed laws which you personally like and the Senate blocks them doesn’t justify a revolution. That is just how the US constitution works.
That is ok, the result in reality should be to vote the rascals out, and as for Mitch: Thanks to the tone deafness his polls numbers were statistically even with the Democratic opponent in the race to the senate for months. And the latest poll showed McGrath with a slight advantage.
I like Ted Cruz’s tweet on the matter (which I posted in the quickly killed Pit thread.)
Racism and overt police violence is life and death too, only the police turn a blind eye to it, actively protect that violence. You can measure THAT response time with a calendar.
So a good way to protest police racism is to illegally take over a police precinct which will further endanger public safety?
I think a lot of of this discussion is oblivious to the relative magnitude of different kinds of deaths. Maybe 250-300 blacks are killed by the police every year out of which 30-40 are unarmed. Meanwhile around 7000 blacks are murdered every year. Every decent person wants to reduce the number of police deaths especially of unarmed people but if you do it in a clumsy way it could absolutely increase the vast amounts of violent crime in the US which kills far more people especially blacks. And there is nothing clumsier than taking over a police precinct and slowing down response times to emergency calls.
Ted Cruz must be mad that Trump is not giving him the disrespect he is used to.
As for more recent reports that make Ted Cruz sound unhinged:
Actually I did not appreciate when, as reports came back later, that the police was the source of a lot of what was fake regarding CHAZ.
Having said that I do think that the protesters and authorities need to deescalate this with no intervention from Agent Orange
I assume you realize you’re utterly failing to refute his point. The complaint about King George is that he was blocking good laws. The Trump team blocks good laws. Yes, they do it in accordance with the powers granted them by their position. So did King George.
So yeah utter failure to dispute his point. Well, aside from that cute little ad-homenem “delusional rant”, which I choose to read as your admission that you really can’t refute anything in it.
It’s been tried a lot of other ways, and we still have police cold bloodedly murdering restrained black men while actively being filmed and watched over by their fellow officers.
The police have been openly murdering black men (and white men, frankly) for decades and the only reason we’re talking about it now is because 99% of people carry portable television studios with them everywhere they go.
Protesting the police nicely just gets you shit on.
With the huge difference that King George was an unelected monarch and Trump and the Republican senate are elected. Also not everyone agrees as to what is a good law or not which is kind of the point of democracy.
How Trump and his cronies got there is beside the point, and there were people who approved of George’s rule too.
But never fear, I don’t think that people who approve of Trump’s government should be forced to rebel against it. But to those who do feel oppressed and disenfranchised, Trump hasn’t exactly made it hard to draw a comparison. The only thing listed that he definitely hasn’t done is raise taxes. (Give or take the people who fared negatively under his wealth-redistributing tax policies, anyway.)
How Trump and the Senate got there is entirely the point. They were elected and the American people will soon have a chance to un-elect them which is why the comparison with George the Third is utterly absurd. Oh and you might want to learn how to spell ad hominem and also what it means.