Author Topic: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington  (Read 386892 times)

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Offline dpareja

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3390 on: June 02, 2020, 01:03:18 am »
1. This is a breaking point. You think this has nothing to do with, say, Tamir Rice or Eric Garner? Or Trayvon Martin? You think this has nothing to do with every other dead black man whose uniformed (or non-uniformed) murderer got off scot-free in the courts? Who immediately had his past looked into to see if he ever used marijuana rather than having unending shame and scorn heaped on his killer?

2. You can't ease the lockdowns with a pandemic raging; that's just a recipe for more people dying. What you need to do is realize that what is essentially happening is that everybody is being ordered to work for the government: their job is to stay home so that medical personnel aren't overwhelmed with sick people. Consequently, they deserve some form of remuneration for this, which can take the form of rent relief, interest-free mortgage and car-loan deferrals, utility bill relief, and direct cash payments (and similarly for businesses ordered to close). People aren't going to work for $1,200, once, for an indefinite period of time. You need to keep businesses open (commercial rent relief and mortgage deferral) and people in their jobs (wage subsidy) so that everyone knows they'll have something to go back to when things do reopen and you don't have a massive reshuffling of the workforce that will leave many people unemployed for months after the economy starts up again. And anyone who has to be in the line of fire (medical personnel, grocery store workers, and such) should get a gigantic raise.
Quote from: Jordan Duram
It doesn't concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

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Offline Vanto

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3391 on: June 02, 2020, 02:39:10 am »
1. This is a breaking point. You think this has nothing to do with, say, Tamir Rice or Eric Garner? Or Trayvon Martin? You think this has nothing to do with every other dead black man whose uniformed (or non-uniformed) murderer got off scot-free in the courts? Who immediately had his past looked into to see if he ever used marijuana rather than having unending shame and scorn heaped on his killer?

2. You can't ease the lockdowns with a pandemic raging; that's just a recipe for more people dying. What you need to do is realize that what is essentially happening is that everybody is being ordered to work for the government: their job is to stay home so that medical personnel aren't overwhelmed with sick people. Consequently, they deserve some form of remuneration for this, which can take the form of rent relief, interest-free mortgage and car-loan deferrals, utility bill relief, and direct cash payments (and similarly for businesses ordered to close). People aren't going to work for $1,200, once, for an indefinite period of time. You need to keep businesses open (commercial rent relief and mortgage deferral) and people in their jobs (wage subsidy) so that everyone knows they'll have something to go back to when things do reopen and you don't have a massive reshuffling of the workforce that will leave many people unemployed for months after the economy starts up again. And anyone who has to be in the line of fire (medical personnel, grocery store workers, and such) should get a gigantic raise.

1. Yes, I know this isn't just about Floyd's death. But if all four officers being fired and one being hit with criminal charges wasn't enough to prevent/stop the riots, what makes you think reopening old cases will necessarily help?

To be clear, I'm not dismissing your overall idea out of hand, and I think it's something worth exploring regardless. I'm just saying it may not get the results you think it will, especially since there are reports of people deliberately inciting riots.

2. You make some excellent points about remuneration. However, I'm not sure you're addressing the possibility that restlessness from being cooped up was also a contributing factor.
« Last Edit: June 02, 2020, 03:02:49 am by Vanto »
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Offline dpareja

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3392 on: June 02, 2020, 03:43:24 am »
1. This is a breaking point. You think this has nothing to do with, say, Tamir Rice or Eric Garner? Or Trayvon Martin? You think this has nothing to do with every other dead black man whose uniformed (or non-uniformed) murderer got off scot-free in the courts? Who immediately had his past looked into to see if he ever used marijuana rather than having unending shame and scorn heaped on his killer?

2. You can't ease the lockdowns with a pandemic raging; that's just a recipe for more people dying. What you need to do is realize that what is essentially happening is that everybody is being ordered to work for the government: their job is to stay home so that medical personnel aren't overwhelmed with sick people. Consequently, they deserve some form of remuneration for this, which can take the form of rent relief, interest-free mortgage and car-loan deferrals, utility bill relief, and direct cash payments (and similarly for businesses ordered to close). People aren't going to work for $1,200, once, for an indefinite period of time. You need to keep businesses open (commercial rent relief and mortgage deferral) and people in their jobs (wage subsidy) so that everyone knows they'll have something to go back to when things do reopen and you don't have a massive reshuffling of the workforce that will leave many people unemployed for months after the economy starts up again. And anyone who has to be in the line of fire (medical personnel, grocery store workers, and such) should get a gigantic raise.

1. Yes, I know this isn't just about Floyd's death. But if all four officers being fired and one being hit with criminal charges wasn't enough to prevent/stop the riots, what makes you think reopening old cases will necessarily help?

To be clear, I'm not dismissing your overall idea out of hand, and I think it's something worth exploring regardless. I'm just saying it may not get the results you think it will, especially since there are reports of people deliberately inciting riots.

2. You make some excellent points about remuneration. However, I'm not sure you're addressing the possibility that restlessness from being cooped up was also a contributing factor.

1. Because it isn't just about those four officers, and it isn't just about Floyd. (And we've seen plenty of other officers get rehired elsewhere, such as Tamir Rice's killer, who did turn down the job... but the police union in Cleveland is still trying to say he was wrongly dismissed.) Punishing the people who killed Floyd wasn't going to stop people from finally having had enough. No punishment inflicted on them will bring back George Floyd; the only thing that's going to prevent this sort of thing from happening again is better training for the police and actual enforcement of the law against them when they do screw up. (For instance, overturning Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor might be a start. And then move on to cases like Warren v. District of Columbia, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, Castle Rock v. Gonzalez... and keep in mind that even though the police don't have to assist you if you request it, it's a crime for you not to assist them if they request it.) And starting with actually punishing all the other uniformed murderers would at least be a step in that direction.

2. Restlessness alone doesn't induce people to mass protest and violent riot. That's indicative of much deeper problems with society. Easing people's economic anxieties is a necessary measure when you're literally denying them the ability to earn a living.
Quote from: Jordan Duram
It doesn't concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

Quote from: Supreme Court of Canada
Being required by someone else’s religious beliefs to behave contrary to one’s sexual identity is degrading and disrespectful.

Offline RavynousHunter

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3393 on: June 02, 2020, 11:09:00 am »
This shit has been building up for generations.  Since long before Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were even born.  I'll be blunt: for the past century and a half, it has essentially been a crime, in America, to be black.  Its a crime to be Hispanic.  Its a crime to be poor.  Its a crime to be gay or transgender.  Why?  Because the law does not behave the same for us as it does for the well-off, straight, white man.  Fuck, I'll tell ya a little fuckin' story.  Cozy up motherfuckers.

When I was a kid, around middle school age or so, my uncle visited us to help fix our AC.  The details have gotten a little faded with time, but while my uncle was standing not two meters off our driveway, he got into an argument with a man from our neighbourhood.  The man in question decided to stab my uncle.  In broad daylight.  In front of myself and the rest of my family.  Our family lived within easy walking distance of both the local police station and the biggest hospital in the state.  Now, you might be thinking that the cops and EMS rushed to the scene and all was well.

It would've been, if we didn't live in a poor, predominantly black neighbourhood.

Prolly the only thing that kept my uncle from bleeding out was his Army training.  It took police and EMS over 20 minutes to get to our house.  Let me remind you that I could've walked to either location and back in that time.  The police took our reports and proceeded to halfheartedly search the area.  The only reason they caught the guy was because the Mensa candidate decided the best place to hide would be the alleyway behind our house.  My uncle survived, thankfully, and the guy that stabbed him did jail time, but the lackadaisical response we got to, again, my uncle literally being stabbed in the stomach in broad daylight, just goes to show how high a priority for them we weren't.

And that's not the only time people in our neighbourhood got fucked over by the cops just deciding it wasn't a priority to respond to calls from a specific area.  Gunshots were a common enough occurrence that I could sleep through them before I'd hit double digits.  I lived right across the street from an actual, factual crack dealer that never got so much as a stern talking-to from the 5-0.

All this is far from isolated; its all over this damned country and has been going on for generations.  This is why gangs exist.  This is why riots happen and vigilantism starts cropping up.  When people feel that the justice system society has built no longer works in their best interest, they will start enacting their own justice, even if that justice is violent and scattershot in its implementation.

Fix the justice system and this shit wouldn't happen.  Punish officers that murder innocent people.  Investigate all uses of lethal force thoroughly.  Murder is murder no matter who does it.  No one is above the law, especially not the men and women who enforce it.
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Offline Askold

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3394 on: June 02, 2020, 12:26:44 pm »
One thing that appears to be missing from USA is proportional reaction.

A man gets choked to death after it is mistakenly believed that he faked a check and people go "he shouldn't have committed a crime."

Even if he had been guilty of that, is death really a reasonable punishment? And if so, wouldn't he deserve to go to court at least? And just how much violence can the police use against him when he wasn't actually resisting them?

Police have assaulted politicians, have taken down USA's flags and replaced them with their own, opened fire on unarmed people (now and previously over the decades numerous times) and assaulted members of media who hadn't violated any laws.
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Offline dpareja

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3395 on: June 02, 2020, 03:40:29 pm »
Because, in America, there's one crime that's on no law book, for which there is no punishment at statutory law or common-law, but which is enforced regularly and especially against anyone who's not "respectable" (ie not white, Christian, cis, straight, and well-off), and for which the sentence is all too often death: making a police officer think you might disrespect them.

EDIT: Also, keep in mind that all the cases that we're all seeing now (Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, George Floyd...) are because of advances in technology--dashcams, bodycams, smartphones, and such. Do you really think that this sort of thing hasn't been happening to black people for a long time and only now that there's a critical mass of people with cameras in their pockets is it being exposed as the ugly, harsh reality it is?

Remember that in the antebellum South, "police" were mostly just slave-catching patrols. And it was those groups, not the police from the North, who formed the core of a lot of police departments after the Civil War.
« Last Edit: June 02, 2020, 03:51:24 pm by dpareja »
Quote from: Jordan Duram
It doesn't concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

Quote from: Supreme Court of Canada
Being required by someone else’s religious beliefs to behave contrary to one’s sexual identity is degrading and disrespectful.

Offline DarkPhoenix

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3396 on: June 02, 2020, 06:48:18 pm »
It's also probably worth mentioning that it's not really a surprise that Minneapolis ended up being the start point, considering the head of the Police Union in this area and his general thought process:

Quote
In December, a couple of months after Lt. Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union, stood onstage with President Donald Trump at a campaign rally and praised the “wonderful president” for “everything he’s done for law enforcement,” he received a short Facebook message from a disgruntled city resident: “Nazi piece of shit,” the man wrote to him.

Kroll fired off a reply, pointing out his family’s record as defenders of the Allied forces during both World Wars, and then launching into a series of insults: “Keep spewing uniformed [sic] shit from your computer in your moms [sic] basement, loser,” he wrote to the man, according to a report by the Minneapolis City Pages, a local newspaper. “If you hate me so much, why don’t you stop by and beat the shit out of me?…My bet is it won’t happen, because you are a cowardly cunt.”

It might not have been the response you’d expect from a public official who represents 800-plus rank-and-file police officers. But Kroll, who has led the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis for five years, has a reputation for inflammatory remarks. Now, his brash leadership and influence over the police department’s culture are in the spotlight amid protests over police violence in the city after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white officer on Monday.

“Now is not the time to rush to judgment and immediately condemn our officers,” Kroll said about Floyd’s death.
As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls for reform and the district attorney files criminal charges against the officer, Derek Chauvin, activists are demanding changes to a department they say has long been plagued by racism and misconduct. Kroll, who has been accused of using excessive force and making racist remarks in the past, is standing behind his colleague as the public backlash mounts. “Now is not the time to rush to judgment and immediately condemn our officers,” he said on Tuesday, before the department fired Chauvin and three other officers who did not intervene in Floyd’s death.

The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis union became powerful in the 1970s, after one of its former leaders, Charles Stenvig, was elected mayor. Kroll became president of the union in 2015. Today, protesters and other activists in the city say the union, not the police chief, holds the most sway over officers and their behavior on patrol. “The only authority they respect is Police Federation President Bob Kroll,” Tana Hargest, a Minneapolis-based artist and activist, tweeted a day after Floyd’s death. “[T]here’s nothing our elected representatives can or will do to bring them to heel.”

 - https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/minneapolis-police-union-president-kroll-george-floyd-racism/

Trump fan?  Check.  White supremacist?  Check.  Advocates for the police being as violent as possible, and specifically pushes training emphasizing permanent damage and/or death to "perps"?  Check.  Willing to defend ANYTHING, including murder?  Check.  Offered to pay to allow cops to train in violent techniques to apprehend suspects after the Mayor passed a bill banning them?  Check.

And as the article mentions, the cops in Minneapolis are loyal to Bob Kroll, not to the city.  And now he's out there insisting that Floyd was a horrible perpetrator and Chavin isn't guilty of anything.

Offline RavynousHunter

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3397 on: June 02, 2020, 06:49:05 pm »
Because, in America, there's one crime that's on no law book, for which there is no punishment at statutory law or common-law, but which is enforced regularly and especially against anyone who's not "respectable" (ie not white, Christian, cis, straight, and well-off), and for which the sentence is all too often death: making a police officer think you might disrespect them.

Or just, ya know, living while black.
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Offline dpareja

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3398 on: June 02, 2020, 10:01:08 pm »
Because, in America, there's one crime that's on no law book, for which there is no punishment at statutory law or common-law, but which is enforced regularly and especially against anyone who's not "respectable" (ie not white, Christian, cis, straight, and well-off), and for which the sentence is all too often death: making a police officer think you might disrespect them.

Or just, ya know, living while black.

All black people are automatically under suspicion of being disrespectful toward police. I was just trying to be more inclusive.

Also the state of Minnesota has filed a human rights complaint against the Minneapolis police department.

EDIT: https://www.cbc.ca/news/iowa-steve-king-1.5596173

In a bit of good news today, Steve King lost his primary.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2020, 03:14:10 am by dpareja »
Quote from: Jordan Duram
It doesn't concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

Quote from: Supreme Court of Canada
Being required by someone else’s religious beliefs to behave contrary to one’s sexual identity is degrading and disrespectful.

Offline niam2023

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3399 on: June 03, 2020, 03:09:51 pm »
Anonymous, or just really anyone sufficiently good at net stuff, should figure out who each and every single person following Trump's orders at the Lafayette Square incident were. All of the police and National Guard and military police. Doxx all of them, and publicize who they are, what they did, and deny them their riot helmets' secrecy.
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Offline davedan

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3400 on: June 03, 2020, 07:03:22 pm »
How much evidence is there that the looting and vandalism is connected to the protests over George Floyd's death? As opposed to opportunism created by the COVID shutdowns and the protests. Certainly most of the violence coming through appears to be by police shooting people with rubber/wooden bullets. Much of this violence appears directed at the press.

Offline Id82

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3401 on: June 04, 2020, 01:42:53 am »
And now the bugaloo boys are joining the riots fully armed and ready to start the second civil war.
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Offline SCarpelan

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3402 on: June 04, 2020, 02:27:54 am »
To be clear, I'm not dismissing your overall idea out of hand, and I think it's something worth exploring regardless. I'm just saying it may not get the results you think it will, especially since there are reports of people deliberately inciting riots.

Many of those are in uniform, wearing riot gear. Get those thugs under control and you will see an immediate decrease in violent conflict.

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Offline Askold

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3403 on: June 04, 2020, 03:04:03 am »
Consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56j06plUgs

This guy is a lawyer from DC describing the attack on the peaceful protestors that occurred recently.
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline niam2023

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Re: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington
« Reply #3404 on: June 04, 2020, 03:10:18 am »
Again, we need to expose the names and identities of the men who participated in the charge to clear the way for Trump. Fascists do not have privacy.
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