Covid Support Thread
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Sure he does, and yet the overwhelming majority of protests are peaceful, day after day, EVEN AFTER he tear gassed peaceful protesters.
What that lady and I am saying is you have to at least get why some few people would be looting and rioting. But I guess you don’t? From what I’ve heard from you, you’re perfectly able to “understand” why white people voted for Trump. They just wanted jobs!
And now almost 4 years later, you’re saying what? That HE’s the problem? That he can just be voted out and everything’s ok? That it was understandable for these racist pieces of shit to vote him into office to do exactly what he’s doing right now, that their anger was justified, but it’s not justified for people to riot against it? Fuck. That. Shit.
And no, voting him out doesn’t stop this. It just makes it less permissible for a while. You’re smarter than that.
If only they voted out all the Republicans running things, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York would have good police.
I don’t agree that the riots help Trump either. Running on law and order doesn’t do any good for an incumbent who can’t actually deliver it.
Ron, please explain me how staying cool and voting for Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton, tried that) is going to eradicate the white male fragility that’s behind all this. Or the hundreds of years of institutionalized racism and sexism. I always at least skim your posts, and sometimes there’s a word of truth in them.
To Fyodor’s point, it does shine a light on what a useless little scared bitch boy Trump is when he’s unable to do anything to stop the protests, peaceful or otherwise.
No, just voting out Trump and his enablers won’t automatically fix the police. The police unions are going to need to be weakened so that bad cops can be fired. Most of the cities that Fyodor mentions have reformist police chiefs, but they are hamstrung. To a very large extent the police/police unions run themselves. I still believe that their are many more good police than bad police.
Getting rid of Trump will help more than you care to admit. Nobody has done more to foment racial hatred than him, and he does so on an industrial scale amplified by dominating the media.
What is your solution? Violence and looting aren’t going to help.
And, Kate, I did not say I didn’t understand why looters and rioters do what they do. The woman in your clip said that looters see things all around them in society that others can afford and they can’t, so they see the demonstrations as their chance to take what they want. I just don’t find that to be a justification. They are using peaceful protesters as shields, and putting them in greater danger, in order to loot.
I also understand the frustration, and the sense that some have that change comes through violence and ‘revolution’. That was the talk on the far left when I was a teen/early twenties. The Weathermen, SDS, Black Panthers did not solve our social problems, they gave those who wanted to cling to power the cover to do what they felt they needed to do to cling to power.
Nonviolence has a long history of success.
Certainly many whites voted for Trump out of racism and conservative religious beliefs (anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-women in charge of men), but only that last item gives any explanation why an electorate which gave an absolute majority to Obama twice switched to Trump. The election hinged at the margins. The white bigots had almost always voted Republican and certainly didn’t vote for Obama. In the old industrial heartland, including here in PA, the economy did play a factor.
There is a reason that Bernie has so much support on the left, and economics and income inequality are the reason.
“ Getting rid of Trump will help more than you care to admit. Nobody has done more to foment racial hatred than him, and he does so on an industrial scale amplified by dominating the media.”
So what happens to the 35% of Americans who not only voted for Trump but remained cultishly loyal to him? Why did they vote for him? Hint: it wasn’t about jobs. Where do they go while Biden is president? Do they just go, oh, ok, we see the light? They’re the problem, Trump is just a symptom. We saw what happened when Obama was President, with these guys.
It’s ok to be angry. It’s ok to show we’re angry. You should read that Salon article I linked to if you haven’t already. Sitting around hoping for an election to fix this deep seated contagion is ridiculous. Yes, we need to vote him out. But action and demonstration and being willing to actually die bring change.
I skimmed the rest.
Kate —
If you are asking for something that will fix everything or quickly make things hugely better, I’m afraid that doesn’t exist. Do you think you know something that will achieve that?Yes, I also voted Clinton, flaws and all. We lost that election. If you can honestly say things wouldn’t be significantly better today had she won, then i don’t know what I can say to you. That would make you like some of my more radicals peers back in the day who professed not to see an ounce of difference between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. Most had the good grace to admit later that they had been wrong and acted out of pique that Gene McCarthy lost the nomination. Some of Bernie’s most fervent supporters took the same approach and gave us Trump.
Yes, there is a white male fragility, which sees their demotion from a position of extreme privilege to one of lesser privilege as discrimination against themselves. Those white males have been with us forever. They may even be a majority of white males (I fear they are. I know they were a majority of the engineers I worked with), but they are not a majority of the electorate. Some of the votes that changed from Obama to Trump were in this group, but I don’t think that’s where the tale of the election lies.
One place the election result lies is in Hillary’s failure to get 50% of the votes of white women and to not come that close to 50% among married white women.
The other change is the diminution of the private sector union vote. A lot of union members are extremely conservative, but the unions kept its members largely focused upon their own economic interests in preference to the culture wars.
Change does not come all at once, but I have seen a lot of positive change in my lifetime. Today we have gay marriage. We have a significant number of inter-racial marriages. When I was young, we still had anti-sodomy laws enforced, as well as anti-miscegenation laws. Most engineering schools did not admit women. When we bought our first house and I needed to present a pay stub as proof of income, the bank refused to even look at the pay stub my wife brought — her income couldn’t be counted. There are more women and minority professionals and a lot higher percentage of college grads. This will bring change, although the older generation still runs things. My generation will die.
Biden isn’t the ultimate solution, but Trump to Biden will be a big change and will bring improvement. I guess I don’t expect better than gradual improvement with steps back like we see today. We are in dark days, and the virus makes it worse and that leads to frustration, but I choose to have hope.
The 35% will always be there, Kate. They don’t need to be in power. I hope the number will go down in time, and it likely will, but the new generations will also produce their share of those people. Peaceful demonstration will show we’re angry. It doesn’t require violence. How can violence be our solution when the other side has almost all of the weapons? The video of the Minneapolis policeman murdering a black man in handcuffs was chilling. I want that, not TV pictures of riots and looting to be what stays in peoples minds. Do you honestly believe that our anger is not recognized? Do you think it takes burning buildings for that to be seen? Watts burned. It didn’t help.
