As protests against police brutality are met with an unceasing barrage of police brutality, the obsequious bootlicking copologia in online discussion forums has been cranked up to eleven.
I’ve written a couple of articles touching on the police assault and hospitalization of 75 year-old lifelong peace activist Martin Gugino, and the bat shit insane arguments I’ve been encountering to justify this self-evidently unjustifiable occurrence have been absolutely jaw-dropping. People have been using some of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever seen on the internet to claim Gugino staged his injury. They’ve been spamming a bogus article by the odious disinfo blog The Conservative Treehouse which claims, citing literally no evidence whatsoever, that “Gugino was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers”, assuming on no basis whatsoever that the septuagenarian would need to be within touching distance of the police in order to do such a thing.
Mostly, though, they’ve been saying that Gugino deserved to be shoved by the officers.
“He shouldn’t have gotten in their path!” they object.
No, bootlicker, it’s not okay to assault someone just because they’re in your way and you’re wearing a badge. Don’t shove people, much less senior citizens who could be injured and die. You should have learned not to shove people in preschool.
“Well obviously if you get too close to the police moving around like that they’re going to give you a shove,” they argue.
Yes, yes police do often physically assault people for inexcusable reasons. Thank you for confirming the problem the grownups are trying to solve here. Stop interrupting adult conversations designed to accomplish that.
Why do people do this? Why whenever there’s a video of police brutality, no matter how clearly and obviously wrong it is, are there always people falling all over themselves to try and justify or spin it as something acceptable or illusory? Literally always, without a single, solitary exception?
Well, here are five reasons.
1. The Just World Fallacy
One reason is because of a glitch in human cognition known as the just world hypothesis or just world fallacy, which causes us to assume that if bad things are happening to someone, it’s because that person deserves it. Blaming the victim is more psychologically comfortable than seeing that we live in an unjust world where we could very easily become victim ourselves someday, and we select for that comfort over rational analysis. It allows us to feel as though we’re in control of our fate.
In the early 1960s a social psychologist named Melvin Lerner discovered that test subjects had a curious tendency to assign blame for an unfortunate event to the victims–even when said event couldn’t logically have been their fault–and to assign positive attributes to people who received good fortune–even if their fortune was due solely to random chance. Lerner theorized that people have an unconscious need to organize their perceptions under the fallacious premise that the world is basically just, where good things tend to happen to good people and bad things tend to happen to bad people. Nothing in a rational analysis of our world tells us that this assumption is in any way true, but tests by Lerner and subsequent social psychologists have backed up his theory that most of us tend to interpret events through the lens of this irrational assumption anyway.
People are more comfortable believing they live in a controllable and just world, so when a cop brutalizes someone they need to start blaming the victim to maintain that psychologically comfortable perspective. Acknowledging reality is less comfortable. This is also why people often start babbling about how a rape victim shouldn’t have been wearing that or should have known better than to get so drunk, should have used self-defense techniques X, Y and Z. It’s why people justify the brutalization of Julian Assange, it’s why people excuse the abusive things the US government does to nations which dare to disobey its dictates, and it’s why any time video footage of a controversial police killing goes viral the comments are always flooded with people saying the victim should have known better than to get down on the ground so slowly or reach for his wallet so quickly.
The alternative is being real with yourself and accepting the uncomfortable reality that we live in an unpredictable and out-of-control world where bad things can happen to good people. Many people don’t know how to live life that courageously.
2. Copaganda
Because journalists often rely on statements by police departments in order to report on news events, there’s a much closer relationship between the news media and the police than there is between the news media and activists or the rank-and-file civilian population. This puts the police responsible for public relations in a prime position to advance narratives that put a much friendlier face on the cops than they have earned. This, combined with the dynamic of access journalism and fact that the news media are owned by billionaires with a vested interest in keeping their fortunes and assets protected by a militarized police force, enables police to control the dominant narrative about them.
Most westerners have also been indoctrinated throughout their entire lives by movies and TV shows about heroic cops saving the day from villainous bad guys. The wealthy class which makes these movies and shows have built their kingdoms upon the status quo whose existence depends upon a violent force controlling the world internationally and a violent force controlling the nation domestically, so mainstream consciousness is constantly saturated in stories about the military and police being awesome and virtuous.
So it’s no wonder we constantly see this same mainstream consciousness scrambling to defend depraved acts by people they’ve been trained by copaganda to regard as beneficent heroes.
3. White Privilege
The following is my husband Tim's account of witnessing the police shooting of Oscar Grant on 1/1/2009. #BlackLivesMatter
The weirdest thing about it was how unsurprising the actual shooting was when it happened. That's how far the police had already escalated things by then. /1
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 4, 2020
We’d be lying to ourselves if we pretended there isn’t also a major racial component to a lot of this. I recently shared my husband Tim’s account of witnessing the police shooting of a black man named Oscar Grant in 2009, and watching white people rush to excuse something he knew for a fact to be completely inexcusable while black people (who are statistically much more likely to be victimized by police violence) were unable to maintain any illusions about what happened.
Let’s not kid ourselves about the major reason conservatives have been frantically trying to manage the narrative about Martin Gugino more than other victims in these protests. They understand that footage of a frail old white man being assaulted and injured by police is having a much bigger impact on a large chunk of the population than seeing people of color assaulted. For many Americans, black people being brutalized by police is seen–consciously or unconsciously–as normal. Consciously or unconsciously, it’s seen by many as just the thing that you do with black people. Bootlickers with any awareness of perception management would understand that their cop-defending agenda is jeopardized far more by the footage of Gugino than the countless other police brutality victims at these protests.
People of color are trying to change this underlying inequality of perception, and a lot of the pushback they’re receiving is due to a reflexive defensiveness around maintaining that inequality.
If you’d been parking your car on your neighbor’s front lawn for a very long time–so long you forget that it wasn’t your parking space to begin with–it would feel like a major imposition for the neighbor to tell you it’s time to find somewhere else to park. You’d feel like you were the victim. That’s how attempts to address racial inequality are experienced by many white people. People of color haven’t been permitted to occupy a human-sized amount of space in our society, so when they start moving in to their whole property it feels to many white people like a cruel eviction.
That’s how a completely innocuous phrase like “black lives matter” gets interpreted as something threatening like “black lives matter more than white lives”; when all you’ve known is the up-power position, elevating those in down-power positions can feel like something is being taken away from you. So you get defensive.
4. Fear of Others
Many people are just generally terrified of other people, and find authoritarianism a soothing protection from the scary hordes of humans their ideology has had them othering. We have respect for authority drilled into us from early childhood, and if we don’t really grow up we’ll perceive a disrespect of authority figures as existentially threatening.
5. Fear of Change
Lastly, people are just afraid of change. The police play a crucial role in gluing this oppressive status quo together, and radically changing their role in society will necessarily mean an end to the status quo. Add in the fact that we are obviously plunging into a time of great change for better or for worse, and people will instinctively scramble to hold the old order together out of fear.
Change is always stressful, whether it’s good or bad. People experience stress when they lose a job or a loved one, but they also experience it when getting married or starting their dream job. Yes, things are changing, and yes, we have a cognitive bias which favors stability over change. But we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them; our species is behaving too insanely and if we don’t change very soon we’re going to destroy our ecosystem if we don’t nuke ourselves first.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s okay. There’s no sense stressing ourselves out trying to paste a doomed status quo back together. Let’s plunge into the unknown with alertness and enthusiasm.
___________________
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91 responses to “Five Reasons Why People Defend Police Brutality”
I found this point interesing:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2020/06/the-sociology-of-police-violence.html
Racializing of issues is used to divide us.
The blacks are employed to perform the heavy lifting in someone elses scheme.
in Denmark cops have to get a degree in police work. i wonder if they call it police FORCE…
it seems every “force” in aMerdRica is copose of alcoholic high school dropouts. whowould rather be Nazis…
ooops they are.
storm troopers SWAT teams. needed to break in and kill a sleeping female EMT shot in her bed. nice work.
and we have to pay taxes for this.
talkd about stealing. isn’t that a crime. what about slashing tires in backof the K-mart.
who thinks up this stuff. the poops are tooo stupid …
what some soert of. Kushner clones all over the nation…..?
You forgot #6 – most human beings have feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Consequently, they are afraid of damn near everything. So, their response is to respond aggressively – either physically or mentally. Inadequacy drives the same sort of behavior, because illogically convincing yourself that someone else is inferior to you, is often the only way that one can bury those feelings of inadequacy.
Describes the ‘social mechanism’ of the Left perfectly, thank you. If you are on the left having the support of that social group is like landing in Vegas. Here you can say anything, think anything no matter how detached from reality it may be. Because reality is what you make it and it’s all about what that big mirror says, that big so societal mirror. You’re so Hip, so chillin, so happen’n. Just look in that mirror, be a star. Express than hate and anger for the common enemy we hate so much, that archetypal demon out there, beyond the bound of our lovely, our perfect social scene. feel the connection to your brothers and sisters, It’s just almost religious.
I know there are those out there you will read my post above or below and say you insensitive, evil person. I would just like to point out that in New York I believe I read there were more than a dozen officers in the hospital, three hundred or so injured, perhaps a few deceased. All this from ‘peaceful’ protesters, wanting ‘progress’. Are these officers to be viewed as stormtroopers, those cloned robots of the empire, raised for only one thing. Or are they to be viewed as ‘people’ individuals, does anyone personally know of the hundreds injured which were the ‘good’ gjuys and which were the bad’, who they were, why were they there, what did they think. They are an extension of your society and the laws and procedures you enable with the people you influence and put into positions of authority. That maybe up until the day you decided to get up run outside and burn the town down you hadn’t done a too good of job making the public arm of law enforcement conform to your values because you were too busy in Starbucks looking at instagram. Oh, but it’s institutional racism, white people, No it’s your lazy ass, in an imperfect world where you like to stereotype to your hearts delight as long as you can demonize and put the blame on someone else.
“No it’s your lazy ass, in an imperfect world where you like to stereotype to your hearts delight as long as you can demonize and put the blame on someone else.”
Pot meet kettle…
Caitlin this article about crime statistics might interest you:
https://www.unz.com/runz/race-and-crime-in-america/
Argument by stereotype is a very poor method of propaganda.
You got into it towards the end when you started using racist phrases like “black” and “white.” You are lumping everyone together. You are lumping people who’s ancestory varies from the Caucasus mountains to Italy to the German baltic regions to Scandnavian into one big category. Your argument hinges on the belief that everyone is just the same and by describing them as “white” you can capture their essence and their soul.
——
But of course, any real, thinking, feeling person realizes as a young adult that everyone is an individual. You can not group them all together in any category with any accuracy. Not once you get past things like “Needs oxygen to breathe”.
For instance, when you are ranting on about “white people”, you are including some 80 year olds who marched with Dr. King. Does that fit all of your stereotype nonsense about White Privileged and White Supremacy? No, of course not. All such arguments fall flat on their face when faced by the real diversity of human souls, no matter what package they are in.
Anyone who starts picking terms like “White” and “Black” and then ranting on them is arguing by pure stereotype. Any argument based on such a premise is certain to be faulty. People are individuals. They all live their own lives. They all have their own souls. You can’t lump them all together in such groups and be saying anything that isn’t bullshit.
Maybe we can’t lump them all together, but the slave ships sure could.
Who exactly was providing ‘them’ for the slave ships. Was this all good will like a charter service run by Nigerians to allow Somalis to see the world. Who was bringing the individuals to port side for the ships to lump together?
Deflect, deny, minimize. Not exactly an impressive argument. One of my ancestors was brought to America in chains on one of those ships, so fuck you and fuck anybody else who says it’s no big deal.
First, I did not say, “It’s no big deal” I was just flying wingman for Charmane who had a very valid point. Which you ignored. For some reason you seem to believe that because at that point in time those persons who were white (and Jewish) from what I understand. Failed to see the value of the individual, the humanity of the individuals they were carting over the oceans like cattle, you seem to believe that emulating them is the best course of action here today. See my post to Newton Finn. You are essentially destroying the idea of spirituality and the value of the individual as a person aside from skin color. Where will that ever end. How do you know that 120 years ago I would not be the one helping your ancestors escape slavery? I think I would be. How many people do you know who were ‘saved’ at 17 lived in the church for 25 years and then walked away. Why? Because it all seemed to be about ‘comfort’ if I could sum it up in one word. I consider myself an anti-war activist. I see the church at least in my town as completely useless. The more money you give them the bigger the church they build, 14 different denominations spending the same money for 14 different churches. I used to dream if they could all just pool and build one big place for the community, but no never. The 60’s, Martin luther King didn’t need to protest. If all the white ‘Christian’ churches has just let out on Sun and marched it would have been over in two weeks. What you need to consider are the sociological pressures and how they bring out the worst in people and shut good people down, black and white, conservative and liberal. I am here because Caitlin said, “We need to change our relationship with thought” which is the mantra of my life. Unfortunately she believes drugs will somehow be a part of that. Here is a link to my beliefs. We all as humans need to step through the door. We need to change the playing field, What and how we have worked things out up this point will no longer suffice . Otherwise none of us will survive our modern technology, In the meantime it would be good if we could judge each other not by skin color but for the person, the unique individual each of us are. Please read my links. To me it is our only real answer. It may at least give you something to think about.
https://medium.com/@whmilk/what-is-a-real-solution-696608f98b78
https://medium.com/@whmilk/here-is-a-book-i-have-placed-on-amazon-and-smashwords-e864cc0e2c60
So now you’re backing off and playing the victim. That makes you a racist AND a coward. Your mom must be really proud.
The only ‘racist’ here is you, but I won’t hold it against you. You live in an age where anger and hate are rewarded and approved of. Listening and attempting to understand what other ‘people’ ‘unique individual’ regardless of the color of their skin are putting forth, their thoughts, feeling, ideas and perceptions are of no value. This is all just about hate. Someday you may get some time alone to really open your eyes to what it means to be human. I hope you do.
You’re a typical bigot, you show up acting like a tough guy and calling everyone out, then you get checked one time and start crying that everybody’s picking on you. Save it.
People can pick on me all they want. If you have something to say that makes sense then I say , Thank you. Calling me names, demonizing, stereotyping – just another day. I’m just attempting to make people think a little. Not having much luck though.
Go cry somewhere else, you’re just another bigot who got caught.
Generalizations, categories, and such, as overly broad as they often tend to be, are absolutely necessary to think clearly and comprehensively, to get a handle as best we can on the bigger issues. Otherwise we could never see the forest for the trees. The old saying that “the exception proves the rule” speaks directly to this point. Yes, of course, there are exceptions to many rules, but the fact that you have to search to find them does not undermine the rule but rather establishes its general validity.
The ‘bigger issue’ is that you have killed the idea of ‘spirituality”. The idea that a person is who is they are on the ‘inside’. That this inside is something perhaps we don’t understand. Is there a spirit? Is there soul? Are we reincarnated? Is a black soul always a black soul or a white soul always a white soul in reincarnation. If you transported a white person, a specific individual back in time can you definitively say they would not be for abolition or organize an underground railroad? What is important about seeing an individual as a “person’ that is attempting to see the unique individual not the color of their skin. For me that is the basis of why I ‘am not a racist’. You can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Some of my favorite people are black and it has nothing to do with skin color. Skin color may mean they have certain characteristics or mannerism. In the truly wonderful people this only makes them more attractive. What if there is no reincarnation? Then if there is a spirit and a soul and a person is unique an individual, how can you judge them by what some other unique individual soul or spirit did 100 years ago simply because they have the same skin color. Yes skin color may signal certain cultural or societal characteristics. Then again societal norms are for some a prison where pushing against them is hazardous. Who is to judge a person’s soul and spirit, You? Would you follow your true feelings and push back against your liberal social surrounding, perhaps like the ‘Walk away’ guy. No because your ‘friends’ would then eat you alive. You are destroying the very things you say you stand for and promoting the very things you say you stand against and you can’t even see that.
What I think is that the left more than any other group of people on Earth or motivated by ‘what they want’ and they are always willing to take the shortest intellectual and moral route from point A to point B that holds the prize they desire.
Remember this, bullies and abusers rarely stop torturing their victims voluntarily. They often promise to do so when trying to make up after a nasty incident, but they almost always keep on bullying and torturing. Having the victim ask very nicely for them to please stop, please stop also almost never works.
Axis of Evil, 2020 edition ….
Johnson – Trump – Bolsonaro
I wouldn’t call it white privilege so much as Privileged White Supremacy because the bottom line is White Supremacy and it is the Privilege Conferred by White Supremacy which constitutes the essential identity of bootlicking copolgistas.
They have NOTHING else *left* to base an identity on, No Self Esteem Whatsoever, except perhaps American Patriotism, which is the same thing: Patriotic White Supremacy.
I don’t know, I was born white, All I see is that you wake up eat breakfast go to school, eat lunch go to school come home study, play, do sports, eat dinner and go to bed. The next day and the next are variations of this, sometimes we may go on trip a wedding or a vacation. You shop for food, you buy a car. |Then one day you go to college or a trade school or find a job you believe has a future. If you go to college you may have slightly more income of maybe not some business owners do very well. If I was black I would have an easier time getting accepted into college and when I was looking for that job I would have more success because they want minorities, Is this Black privilege? I know that whites have more generational wealth and a better foothold. I also know that if anyone was to just do what the paragraph above states they could have a lot. I also know there are many ‘white’ who do not have that generational wealth or advantage. So where in the above para do you see me telling anyone else when to get up, what to wear, when to eat, play, study, where to go to school or if they can. Where am I saying you can only do this or that. As for ‘Identity’ my identity has mostly to do with where we work, who our friends are, our children and our relationship with them, our hobbies and our home. Those are not things only we are allowed to have. Patriotism, I am glad I live in a country where brave men risked and gave up all to throw of a “King’ I hate Kings. Authoritative a-holes. I’m glad I can say that. I am glad these me where wise enough to give us the Bill or Rights because those sorry sops in Europe don’t have it and they don’t got it.
Well said Caitlin! What a pity we live in an unjust world and nearly everyone tolerates this as normal. Peaceful legitimate protesters have been infiltrated by agents of the Deep State to cause riots and give an excuse for greater military control. What a pity you and your readers do not offer a solution to correct this unacceptable situation. I am convinced that people who work for change must share the Great Liberator’s Vision and Mission and this must become a grass-roots, social, spiritual, tactical movement, networking around the world. The revolutionary Liberator I refer to is Yeshua, a Hebrew name which means LIBERATOR. Unfortunately, His revolutionary strategy and tactics are so brilliant, exceptional and powerful that this is way above the mental abilities even for highly intelligent and well-educated people who fail to grasp what Yeshua said and meant. Read more of this here: http://www.wisdompage.com/2013%20Articles/Molyneaux%20essay.pdf Can
The police are working for an elite that do not want ANY middle class to thrive anywhere. Not only have they destroyed healthy black communities like in Tulsa, OK, Rosewood, FL, Seneca Village NYC and others, but they’ve also systematically dismantled the white middle class over the past 40 years. Capital is a rogue, nationless entity. It looks for regions to exploit cheap labor, a middle class builds up, then capital flight moves elsewhere. The latest exploitation is private prisons, the perfect corporate state.
The banking industry hates that China doesn’t allow the banks to run their government like we do here in the US. They’re licking their chops at China’s middle class, ready to devour it like they did ours.
Healthy middle classes begin to feel their political power and start to make demands for a better quality of life… labor rights, food safety, environmental protections, etc., and capitalists just view that as cutting into their profits. But it can’t be economic freedom for the few at the expense of social freedom for the many.
Is Having a Healthy Middle Class Dangerous To Elites
“Why whenever there’s a video of police brutality, no matter how clearly and obviously wrong it is, are there always people falling all over themselves to try and justify or spin it as something acceptable or illusory?”
…
When someone denies what’s right in front of their face, it’s because they cannot tolerate or handle what an alternative point of view implies. When one has merged him or herself to a narrative so tightly that the person’s own identity is at stake, they will reject all attempts to accept a differing point of view. There was an old saying in the USA…”My Country – right or wrong – My Country!”. Today, the rallying cry for people is “My Narrative! Right or Wrong! My Narrative!” They will not change their minds because if they did, their identity would go away with it. So they double-down instead.
…
“There’s no sense stressing ourselves out trying to paste a doomed status quo back together. Let’s plunge into the unknown with alertness and enthusiasm.”
…
The overwhelming majority of people on this earth had absolutely no say over “the status quo” about anything. Whatever its manifestation, this whole pile of status-quo (stuff) was just handed to us at birth and then further shoved down our throats by endless propaganda and various levels of conformity pressure. There is so much of this (junk) on our backs that we can barely stand without falling over. Some will say, sure, but you can change things any way you want now. In theory that is true. But in reality, there are so many powerful forces and players propping up this house-of-cards every moment that change is usually foreclosed upon before it has a chance to survive. Most will just give up trying.
…
P.S. I recently made a prediction here that many police officers will be leaving their current force because their ways are being scrutinized and challenged and they won’t like it at all. Check the headlines. It’s now starting to happen.
Ms Johnstone, your great “bootlicker bingo” chart missed; Time To Move On” as expressed in an article I read today.
-The George Floyd fiasco has distracted the country from the most severe economic crisis of the century, so far. Do you understand how much thought and effort it will take to reorganize America’s economic life? We are not going back to the way things were before the year 2020. A lot of familiar arrangements will not continue. Comforts and conveniences are phasing out. We don’t have time for histrionics. Can we please just respectfully bury this troubled man and get on with the tasks at hand?
What are the tasks at hand?
Opposing upcoming illegal Annexations of occupied territories …
Good 5 points Kaitlynne, (I allways spell your name wronge. L) But you missed the magor point. Police are trianed with winks in the police accademy to believe that the dam lawyers and courts and laws contrict them from bringing evil people to justice, and to a large degree that is true. But then they taught them to profile certain unfair ways of pre-judging people STATEisticly of what criminals wear and how they talk and act. Then they give them police cars with computers with profile codes on all of us by our numbers that tell them a mixture of fasle and and true information and susspictions (that they may not disclosed to us or anyone ) So to a degree, some of them are fool enought to believe those lies, and so they may feel that they are doing a service to God and country by secretly kicking the shit out of people who they can’t rightfully convict due to unfiar legal restrictions on them. So they feel justified in protecting the good old boys for doing police harrassment crimes and call it street justtice. THAT IS NOT AN EXCUSE. It’s rather a false rationel. But that is only the sociopathic aspect. The worst is the rarer still psychopathic aspect where they do knowingly murder the innocent ones who they feel are a threat to exposing their crimes and the crimes of the puppet-masters. And in my opinion and experience, those wicked ones are very rare but not as rare as they were. And those are the wicked ones the police would like to be empowered to destroy. But the system is designed elabortely sophisticated to protect the most guilty. By law, police are never to talk publicly about police buisness, and police techknowlogies, and all licenced media are very limited to what they can publish about interior police politics wars.
Good 5 points Kaitlynne, (I allways spell your name wronge. L) But you missed the magor point. Police are trianed with winks in the police accademy to believe that the dam lawyers and courts and laws contrict them from bringing evil people to justice, and to a large degree that is true. But then they taught them to profile certain unfair ways of pre-judging people STATEisticly of what criminals wear and how they talk and act. Then they give them police cars with computers with profile codes on all of us by our numbers that tell them a mixture of fasle and and true information and susspictions (that they may not disclosed to us or anyone ) So to a degree, some of them are fool enought to believe those lies, and so they may feel that they are doing a service to God and country by secretly kicking the shit out of people who they can’t rightfully convict due to unfiar legal restrictions on them. So they feel justified in protecting the good old boys for doing police harrassment crimes and call it street justtice. THAT IS NOT AN EXCUSE. It’s rather a false rationel. But that is only the sociopathic aspect. The worst is the rarer still psychopathic aspect where they do knowingly murder the innocent ones who they feel are a threat to exposing their crimes and the crimes of the puppet-masters. And in my opinion and experience, those wicked ones are very rare but not as rare as they were. And those are the wicked ones the police would like to be empowered to destroy. But the system is designed elabortely sophisticated to protect the most guilty. By law, police are never to talk publicly about police buisness, and police techknowlogies, and all licenced media are very limited to what they can publish about interior police politics wars.
This is a a Canadian British Columbia perspective .I don’t know much about how it is in other countries. If this I write here applies in your country, comment so.
not to be tinfoily, but somehow I can’t access this site using duck duck go–no results foundi can use google, but i hate them. fwiw i get the same message for a sports site i go to regularly , so maybe it isn’t political
Sorry to hear that. DDG is my primary searcher and I’ve no pbm.
I switched to BRAVE.COM free brouser and free protonmail.com So far, so good. Seems faster. The downside is, there is no search history recorded. But you can save links. And it’s so easy to import your past bookmarks links from other brousers I could rant against.
I think their site glitched earlier today. I also had a problem using the Duck this morning. It appears to be working again now.
Repost:
In a country that killed the residing inhabitants with impunity… The revolution of 1775, here in the land of the “FREE”, let us consider all imperialism unjust! Red men killed in the name of religious and non-religious institutionalized mind sets, the right of might! It makes no difference that the Machiavellians that run the world order will stay in power at any cost, imperialism breeds greed, as the red men were controlled with treaties the imperialist never kept for long ,when it meant gold was to be had in their territory, or some other valuable commodity wanted by the parasitical religious order of the money changers… They were run of or killed if they resisted.
How is it, as the story goes, long ago, a myth of a temple and a particular sect of people exchanging goods and such, were thrown out in the name of spiritual unclean mental practices of spiritual carnal worship. Using the worship house as a mall of capitalism. These same people are with us today… Yet many are so brainwashed with imperialistic dogmas, their minds conditioned from birth, in a non-critical educational format… We have a society of human zombies that cannot find the golden rule in the maze of distorted fictions we all believe, because our blindness is formatted from birth. You can tell me, not all people, do not follow the conditioned state of materialistic formats in a competitive game of winner takes all… but for the slave that works under the lords of futility, change is impossible, because the educated are all suffering from the same mental distortions of psychological disorders in a cognitive process of inhuman spiritual contexts. History is validated through the Pharisee-Sadducee mythology of good and evil… what is evil for some is good for others, and killing those that do not agree is written as a good thing to do in such a spiritual context…
Author, Michael Hoffman’s works of such unhuman nature, is bound in the work and study of the Babylonian Talmud… called “Judaism Discovered” This mentality has been thought to Jew and non-Jew alike… It is the works of years of human interaction with false spiritual practices that pit humans against humans on a spiritual and cognitive level… The mind is a terrible thing to see in a wasteland of deceptive precepts that have been affecting us for millennia … Those that use the magic it teaches, controls the imperialistic state of greed and competitive take without recompense, and destroys the land and environment that kills with impunity as we see in the middle east… Walls to protect the violent killers that use the very choke hold thought to USA police.
When will we wake up from the sleep of sheep that follow the duality of deception taught to us from birth?
A-G
I heard Scott Ritter talking on ‘Renegade’s’ podcast about how the phrase ‘law and order’ has been translated into ‘restrain and oppress.’ He’s an interesting guy, more importantly, a retired soldier who emphasizes police are not soldiers. Like firemen, they are not heroic for doing their jobs; a fireman is paid to run into a burning building, a policeman is a CIVILIAN whose job is basically to maintain community standards. This militarization of police is not an extension of the military; it is more like applauding the militia for acting. Guys with guns pretending to be important; they are not. I think it is a great idea for policemen also to be trained as social workers, that is more along their responsibility. But, what does scare me, especially for Americans, is that requiring a more in-depth training for police officers, like a degree, is not going to go over well with a bunch of people, poorly paid, probably not smart enough, who probably couldn’t get in the military. Incel guys are white fellows with a chip on their shoulder, changing things is going to make it bigger.
If I have said anything that could be misinterpreted, please listen or watch ‘Renegade,’ it’s a show out of England but plays on RT. Scott Ritter is extremely articulate. And, I stand with ‘Black Lives Matter.’
Thank you Caitlin Johnstone for another very informed and deeply perceptive article. I offer the following additions:
Comfort versus justice
I have been very fortunate to learn from a great thinker that if we have gotten to be comfortable through a way of seeing the world that falsely flatters us, and if we most desire to preserve and increase that false comfort, we will defend those lies.
1.Just world fallacy: This is a fallacy because the world is always both just and unjust. The only honest comfort comes from wanting to know and keep knowing the relation between these two opposites and how they can make for liking our world on an honest basis.
2. Copagnada: The idea that anything or anyone is just good is an immense ego-comforting lie. If we feel the police favor and protect us we want to believe they are just good. e.g. my wife has great judgment and I know this because she married me. Also, if the cops disfavor us we may want to see them as just evil.
3. White privilege: How comforting it is to feel we are rightly part of a favored group even if it is a lie. So why look closely at it.
4. Fear of others: If we’ve created a picture of the world that falsely flatters us and want to keep it that way, we will be afraid of the facts, and that can include the facts about other people. We will also be afraid because we quietly feel we are liars and others will get even with us and we deserve it.
5. Fear of change: Some changes are to be rightly feared, like climate change, but change often means disturbing a cherished false picture of the world that flatters us and our egos fear it.
Politicians are great criminals, so great that you accept them as your heroes, so great that they create history.
But politicians have done great harm to humanity.
And they go on doing harm, because they have all the powers of the police, of the armies, of the bureaucracy.
And they do it not out of innocence.
Their actions, howsoever ugly, are pre-considered, well planned.
Something is very profoundly wrong with the whole system.
How could small groups of criminal elites come to rule over entire countries?
Certainly there must have been a slave inside everybody’s being.
The real question is not to fight the people who have become your rulers.
The real question is to fight within you, and free the one who has become a slave.
Otherwise this seems to be absolutely. impossible.
All legal systems are nothing but the revenge of society.
Revenge against those who don’t fit in with the system.
Law is not for protection of the just, it is for protection of the status quo.
Whether it is just or unjust does not matter.
All punishment is crime.
Society has committed so much cruelty behind such beautiful names as order, law, justice.
But the whole structure is fully corrupted.
We have never thought about how to remove the causes of injustice.
On the contrary, in the name of justice, we have been taking revenge on the individuals who were not obedient to the social order, to the establishment, to the vested interests.
They were condemned as criminals, punished, and it was thought that justice had been restored.
In fact, the people who had been punished were really the victims.
Justice was not restored.
In fact, the people who were the root causes of injustice in the world had taken their revenge.
Their revenge was fulfilled, and people were made afraid to dare go against the social order in any way.
But revenge cannot create anything else except revenge.
Hate creates more hate, revenge creates more revenge.
Nobody bothers about the causes, everybody looks only at the symptoms.
Just because we have not been able to find the causes, or perhaps we were not willing to find the causes, because to find the causes would mean changing the whole social structure, and we were not ready for that great revolution?
Law is against the individual and exists only for the social order, the establishment, the vested interests
It is an effort to reduce the individual and their freedom, and their possibility of being themselves.
That’s why laws go on growing, new laws are being made, new courts, new judges, more police, more armies.
And you have not been able to reduce the number of crimes.
They are growing simultaneously, there must be some deep relationship between the two.
The growth of your legal systems and the growth of the so-called criminals is equal.
It is a strange coincidence?
That shows that no law is ultimately true, no constitution is forever.
We have just never thought about how to remove the causes?
Remember, the whole justice establishment is there to protect the many injustices that are in existence, and the people who are in power want those injustices to continue.
No established order will allow rebellion easily.
If in a society there is some trouble and somebody tries to go against the rules and the rigged game.
The police and the judges, and the law and the courts, and imprisonment, are all there to prevent it.
The status quo becomes afraid, this cannot be allowed.
So society will punish the offenders hard to stop them breaking their rules.
That is their way to create obedience.
That’s how it is created in the army, that’s how it is created by the police, that’s how it is created through education.
That’s how it is imposed on the whole society.
Why do people want power?
It is because they feel whatever they are doing with their life is not respected by others.
They feel respect will only be given to them through power.
Power they think will cover their inferiority complex, and hide it from others.
Psychopaths!
This unjust society exists only because the individual is not allowed to evolve.
If the individual evolves, society dissolves.
All these criminal elites have for centuries been controlling the individual, and enjoying their power, their prestige.
They are not ready to let humanity evolve, to let the individual grow to a point where they, the power freaks become useless.
Politics is a deadly disease.
And humanity has suffered from many diseases, but they are not aware that politicians are the deadliest of all diseases.
The world will be far better if politicians are eradicated from the world!
We guarantee that if you read this from beginning to end their bullshit lies will no longer work on you. That’s what we’re offering: a vaccine (we promise it won’t make you autistic). Like all shortcuts—and yes, despite it’s heft, it IS a shortcut—it’s not perfect, but sometimes good enough has to be enough.
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What you do once you’re immune is up to you. We’re not brainwashing you. We’re not looking for a cult following—then we’d just be immensely vulnerable to our own ignorance. Hell, odds are more than one of you could cook up something far better once you’ve seen what’s possible. We were just the fools crazy enough to try first.
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So, we ask you to take a journey with us. We promise we’ll leave you right back where you started, but, you will never be the same.
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https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2020/05/30/18833392.php
http://www.mediafire.com/file/k1omyaf0r73shvk/Twenty-Twenty-four.pdf/file
I think the George Floyd incident is much worse then this one. If the police defenders want to make a Last Stand, this is probably a better hill to defend then the George Floyd hill, or the other police murder hills. I think the article makes a good point that this affair is singled out because it involves a white victim. The police protest against the assault charges probably reflects their guilty consciences; these officers have all probably done the same or worse, many times over.
Being old doesn’t seem to save you from the cops. There was an incident some years ago where Ray McGovern was injured by the police for trying to ask Hillary Clinton a question at one of her talks. An elderly activist I know I think was left with a dislocated shoulder from an arrest.
“3. White Privilege”
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Speaking of which… funny thing. We now have “Karens” and we have plenty of examples of Karens exercising what is often being referred to “white privilege,” but their seems to be an extreme reluctance to call it “female privilege.”
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After all, we know poor white men and indeed white men who are not rich are routinely victimized by the state. If anyone disagrees, I can only encourage you to speak with poor white men and find out everything you need to know about how… thin, white privilege is among poor whites. Or look at the U.S. history of war, where poor whites were primary cannon fodder for the three centuries prior to the all-volunteer army. Poor white men are assaulted by police less often than black men, doubtless, but far more often than white women are, certainly.
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So.. isn’t it the case that a lot of what we refer to as white privilege, is in fact female privilege?
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women don’t get shot by cops? i’m sure i could come up with some examples..
Justine Damond, white Australian woman killed by a black officer in Minneapolis, 2017, after phoning to retort a possible assault…
You make an interesting point, Blair. I think we can all agree that something that could be called “wealth privilege” exists, but I find it unsettling to think that not being killed by police for little or no reason is defined these days as any sort of “privilege.”
i miss the lollipop cartoon. bootlicker bingo is pretty good.
Beware power vacuums. If the state police are eliminated, what will fill the void that they will leave behind? Do people really not understand that even more violent and authoritarian people are lined up, ready to take their place? I’ve seen a lot of people, especially on the far left, who are eager to welcome an entire abolition of the status quo in an effort to create an imaginary Utopia that has never existed in any place or in any time in human history.
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As another posted noted in another thread, it’s the people on the left who have been advocating for instituting a system where only one way of thinking or acting or speaking or living is allowed. I’ve been on the left for decades (esp. economically), but the speed with which the authoritarianism has swept into the movements of the left in just a few short years has been breathtaking. These are the people who think that anyone with a different opinion should be banned from all social media, or fired from their jobs, or attacked by violent mobs. I’ve been debating various issues with people on blogs, forums, and message boards for decades, and have never seen conservatives act with such self-righteous assuredness and intolerance as I’ve been seeing on the left, especially over the past few years.
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Violent, authoritarian tyranny comes in many forms. It can manifest itself under capitalism, socialism, communism, or any other economic model. It can be globalist or nationalist in nature, with globalism being far more dangerous because there would be no other options. Be careful what you wish for, because it may turn out to be far more violent, far more intolerant, and far more dangerous than what you’re trying to replace. I’m seeing many red flags surrounding the movement to usher in the New World Order. People bettter start paying attention to the motivations and actions of those behind this movement. They are not benevolent.
Think about the people who are now demanding that people kneel and prostrate themselves before them. They are not right-wingers.
Is it a “conspiracy theory” to believe that the coronavirus pandemic and the riots are part and parcel of some larger plan? See for yourself — from their own mouths…
https://www.weforum.org/great-reset
the people demanding kneeling are the cops, and they are right wingers. if people don’t kneel they get maced or assaulted or run over or choked or have their skull bounced off concrete.
Only if you’re a criminal. While I’ve had some issues with cops in the past at protests and rallies, after talking to their supervisors in a fact-based, logical, and respectful way (sometimes a day later), they’ve always accommodated us and worked with us in a very cooperative way. Not saying that’s how it goes every time, but they are usually pretty reasonable about things.
what?? only if you’re a criminal?? bs. you’re white, right, look middle class? this only if you’re a criminal propaganda doesn’t even work on a lot of white people, because they see what is happening with cops. the 75 year old isn’t a criminal, the young woman who was thrown violently on the ground wasn’t a criminal, and even if they were criminals who had just commited a minor crime, like floyd alllegedly had, his execution had nothing to do with floyd’s being a criminal, but everything to do with the thugs who ultimately killed him.
Throuout history tyranny always comes from the left.
let me add a little known fact. In many cases the fire dept and ems will not come into an area until it has been secured by the police. Also too many people think everyone is as civilized and reasonable as they are which is not true. America is a violent country with many violent people. The police dont make it violent. The police dont make people get drunk ir high on drugs and break societies laws. Nor do the police marching down a street make old men jump in front of them. I guess you expect them to stop like some guy standing in frony of a tank. Stop blaming all the police for others stupidity and bad behavior. Finally yes mistakes and accidents happen and yes some police are cruel just like all people. Stop complaining about police when you would be the first to call them if being threatened.
You’re not supposed to deep throat the whole boot, mate.
Love to see you hang your bat shit right out the window. “We need cops, so anything that they do is ok”.
Serial fool.
Fine example of the very bootlicking behavior CJ just wrote about. You cop-defending clowns are everywhere.
Some people will never get it, Khatiks. It’s like when Chris Palmer was encouraging the looting, arson, and rioting until it hit his own neighborhood. Hypocrisy is abundant among those with certain ideals.
https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/espn-nba-reporter-tweets-george-floyd-protests/1eefhr1gpdx791oxlllizoun9i
There are genuinely evil people out there, and some join the police force or military — usually (though not always), they are held to account and terminated or jailed if they act out. How do the anarchists plan to manage the evil people in the world? Sing songs to them in the delusional hope that they will become benign people?
you write this knowing that chauvin had something like 17 complaints against him. you write like somebody that works pr for the cops.
and you talk like an idealist who has no idea how the real world operates.
Yes to all your points Caitlin.
But I remember at time when people and police were less violent.
I don’t know what happened.
I should know, because it happened during my lifetime, but I don’t
Just one day, they had way too much authority, and their word was law.
The courts were just an afterthought, instead of the main player.
You hit the point. People and police are more violent. Police escalate behavior based on public behavior but no one wants to address that.
That’s purely your allegation and it ignores many many incidents of violent police behavior against non-violent victims.
You would have been an amazing Nazi.
And not to place blame on both sides is just being blind.
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Among the things that happened was the Powell Memorandum, the elite’s rallying document, formulated in 1971 by soon-to-be SC Justice Lewis Powell. It’s readily available online.
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It was the blueprint for how the oligarchy could retake control of society from the New Deal coalition. And, more or less, the rich have followed this blueprint. When people resist its ultimate aim of immiseration, which takes myriad forms, they’re beaten, jailed, killed.
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The War on Drugs, too, explains a lot of the violence. As Michelle Alexander writes in her extraordinary book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, generations of black men have had ordinary behavior and thus themselves criminalized through pointed legislation and selective, intense, racist policing.
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These men are forced into a cycle of violence, as once they are initially arrested, convicted, and jailed, they have little recourse upon release but to turn to criminalized (not “criminal”) behavior.
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But that violence is largely instigated by police. Crime itself is way, way down. Violent crime has plummeted over the last 40 years, but that’s not what sells you to advertisers, which is the function of corporate news.
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There wasn’t a mass explosion of bad behavior starting in the early 1970s that commensurately exploded the U.S. prison population. That was by design, in large part through Nixon’s War on Drugs, explicitly begun according to one of its architects, John Ehrlichman, to criminalize black and Left activism. The “Rockefeller drug laws” that treated addiction and drugs criminally rather than rehabilitatively did much of the rest.
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There are a great many other elements involved, of course, but those are among the main ones.
we train our cops in isreal now. almost all of them.
one class is how to kill an Arab bare-handed.
My two cents, if you will.
If “systemic racism” is the problem, you can hope with all of your heart to eradicate:
a) racism; or
b) the system.
Since all of the supposed efforts to eradicate racism have failed alarmingly, (they were doomed from the get-go,) the answer is to eradicate the system. The whole darn thing.
As an anarcho-capitalist, AKA voluntaryist, there is nothing I would like more.
Defund the police? Yes.
Defund public everything? Yes. (All laws are scams, anyway, and most words and manipulations of them are as well.)
This would have the bonus effect of coming as close as possible to eradicating racism, although not immediately.
If you aren’t aware, attempting to eradicate racism through laws which discriminate based on race has had and will continue to have the opposite effect.
This is so obvious that one just has to question the intentions, or at very least intelligence, of the legislators.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: “You are offensive and you are not persuasive.”
And what I am thinking is: “You being offended is not my problem. You not being persuadable is.”
(Side note. I can’t believe it hasn’t come out yet, but this story almost has to be that this reprehensible murderer cop held a grudge against his co-worker George Floyd, possibly for the pettiest of reasons such as jealousy. For example, George was popular with the ladies but reprehensible murderer cop wasn’t, or they were vying for the same girl’s affections. Just my unsourced opinion. )
Important correction to above: “You choosing to be offended is not my problem. You choosing to no be persuadable is.”
Ah Ms Johnstone’s ” truthful reality ” is once again in conflict with ” accepted societal traditions “. Titles or uniforms or professions always have myths and perceptions surrounding them that say nothing about the person inside. Reverence for titles, uniforms, or professions eventually declines as people get older and wiser. As a youngster I had idols; at 76 I just have fewer human beings worthy of my admiration. Some people get disgusted at ” police brutality” some people do not. Brutality is not the only thing that brings ” shame ” to the ” badge “; prostitution, drug dealing, etc. and other ” lucrative crimes engulf them also.
Something I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older, now 66, is that the older I get, the less willing I am to put up with other people’s bull shit, and bull shit abounds. There is no more abundant source than those who assume they deserve the authority to put a gun to our heads and force us to do this or not do that. As if somehow by acquiring such authority, often by being the very best of liars, they have become a fountain of wisdom and morality.
The sun will still rise and set like it always has. The Earth will continue spinning. However, what is going to change is the way our species, and all of the other living beings on this planet, live our lives. As we progress into this new decade, most everything we consider normal will change. One year ago we couldn’t have imagined the virus and lockdown. A year from now our lives may be unrecognizable.
No. 2 is especially on-point. White people are quite willing to entertain criticisms of the cops, up to a point, but then they go home, read a Michael Connolly novel (or an old Joseph Wambaugh), watch a nice police procedural, and forget all about it.
Do they all go home to one big house, too?
I guess white people, even those who marched in the 60s, or later (did that a lot), or who have always been anti-racism, now get to see what the ‘all or nothing’ language blacks have endured and been so upset about for forever feels like, i.e. all blacks like fried chicken & watermelon. On sites everywhere these days, it’s whites think this or that, or, Americans believe this or that (whites & blacks now united, but whatever). Seems we never really change, we just move things around a lot. But, then, I still like King’s content of character better than judging any human by their skin color, so I’ll have work on that.
I enjoyed your take on the, ‘just world fallacy’, it reminded me of what must go on in the minds of the herbivores that graze on the plants of the Serengeti, constantly on the lookout for the predators and when, unfortunately, one of the herbivores does fall prey to a predator the herd seems to go back to whatever it was it was doing before the interruption rather quickly. So, as a cop once said to me on a Facebook page as to the justification for killing kids, “survival of the fittest”, well, we see this all the time on nature shows were a weaker predator with attack and kill the young offspring of an alpha predator just to limit that predator’s numbers. We even see this strategy expoused in religious texts. It is basically who and what we are all about, the only true difference between us and the apes and other such animals are our fingerprints. Loved your essay.
Some of these protesters are more brutal than the police at the protests. They have looted and burned many Black owned businesses, all the while pontificating that ‘Black Lives Matter’. These are businesses that their Black owners sometimes have worked their entire lives to start and operate. Now their entire livelihood and source of income for themselves and their families has been destroyed. If their business is insured, their insurance will not cover the loss because it was due to a riot. Because of all of the destruction, their neighborhoods have been trashed. Caitlin, how do you explain this hypocrisy, and this cruel, and violent behavior which serves no useful purpose and has hurt so many innocent Black people?
how could they be more brutal than the cops which blew away a black business owner in louisville kentucky, or the chavin who continued to choke a corpse for minutes after death, just to be sure? you are just repeating copologies.
Some of these protesters seem to be much more brutal than the police officers at the riots. They are even burning and looting Black-owned businesses while shouting ‘Black Lives Matter’, thus destroying the livelihoods, life savings, and their contributions to their community of Blacks who have worked their entire lives to build those businesses. How do you explain this hypocritical, violent, and cruel behavior, Caitlin?
SOP: Agent provocateurs are always sent in to stir up trouble that will discredit a movement. I assume this is the case unless proven otherwise.
Caitlin has, I believe, already posted video recording of provacateurs breaking windows near a protest. These provacateurs are police or friends of same. Anything to distract from the basis of the protest and defame the protesters. Probably all paid for by Rupert Murdoch, Satan’s agent running Fox News.
I agree with nearly all of this article and I know from experience about police brutality from my days as a political activist in the 1960s when I was teargassed and trampled by cops and national guard troops in Berkeley, California. I also worked for the law firm that investigated the BART police who killed Oscar Grant in Oakland, California and actually transcribed the deposition of the ER doctor who treated Oscar and could not save him. It was sickening beyond belief, let me tell you.
Still, with all that, I cannot agree with the “white privilege” argument . The police serve the ruling class against the working class of all colors, nationalities, immigrant status and gender. It is a class issue, not a specifically race issue. I find the insistence of certain social levels that poor whites are “privileged” to be spurious. I am a senior white woman who has the “privilege” of being too poor to own a home, too poor to retire, too poor to obtain the best healthcare, and on and on. I know plenty of white people worse off than I am ans they are treated with the same contempt as any black person. The Irish under English colonization were whiter than white and were treated with contempt and even used as slaves. This is not to deny that racism exists, but to go on to claim that being white is some kind of “privilege” is ahistorical and diverts attention from the main war going on here: THE CLASS WAR. It also to my mind reflects the intellectual damage of identity politics and particularly the noxious “1619 Project” foisted on the world by the New York Times.
Yes, Ma’am!
You nail it.
Of course it’s a class issue, class struggle is the struggle. There’s no need to get defensive about it’s racial components. I think bigotry is a huge obstacle to human progress, and it’s good that people are mad about it.
Of course this is a class issue. When i hear ppl say it is a race issue i know they have fallen for the propoganda. We cant talk about class because it would point to the real culprits. Instead it is race which pits us against onr another.
the truth is ALL peoples of this Earth had slaves. the firstones wre qas Femmes. grrrls were bot and sold.
maybe because they were smaller weaker and died in childbirth too many. extra wives were worth a laarge price. AND they could hardly resist….unless they were olde tougher and not scared. 12-14 was the most valued.
In AFrica today the Ibo hate the Hausa, i Nigeria, Lagos, and nearby Benin, Cameroon, Senegal…they fought.
not unlike the Irogouis nation fought the Hurons. Or up Mtn to Ruanda the Tutsi controlld the more numerous Hutu, until the massacres began a few years ago. today in the South Side of Chicago is pratically a shooting gallery…with some advanced weapons beig used. Black on Black for the Drug zones. dThey all would take slaves after victories…and so war creaated slavery. sexism also. xenophobia and different languages. cities were crushed in ancient times and religions were begun by slave ownere. Solomon had 1500 concubines. David beat that with 3,000, and those poor angels were not volunteers were they?
our guilt trip should be over. Amerdricans changed our style as capital made slaves of everyone except the
overseers and the Duke and barons robber or not of the plantation factories.
but now: now we are a democracy. if we can keep it. and we have laws. those laws are being broken even wiped out. murder is murder and thou shalt not kill. we hardly kill even serial killers convicted and put in jails for life. the idea is to NOT KILL. but fascism obliterates those fine ideas for a right to kill because the overseers are woking for the elites who pay them and arm them and give them permission..because a nation living in fer and doubt and under stress will stay the fucking stupid staus quo and persist in semi-slavery and indentered servitude to a brain deqad ideal which became useless long ago.
eliminate racism. ALl lives matter. and then look again at the system with your own eyes. yo will see it looks more like a class war but then it is not really: it is a war of hanging on to power perpetrated by the Undead Past upon the Unborn Future. strands of monarchy along with bullying and Chauvinism (touse a current name in vogue) aare protecting a system that will kill human existence on this planet probably, even as they might be wishing to eliminate 90% of the rest of us…since they have managed to claim buy or take title to the entirety of land and ideas and what they call property.
we need to change everything. methane is escaping and if it does it will heat us up so much we won’t want to live here anyway. plant plankton of the oceans produces o70% of all oxygen….forget about the Amazon,,,and if that goes under due to acidification by CO2 falling into the seas. if methane melts fron under the seas where it has been built up for eons in an icy gel or if it escapes from the Tundra together that will drive up temperatures to over 100 F. as the new normal.
listen to the kids: they know it. Great Greta. and millions more of us who know….must overcome this eternal plot of human selfishness. what we need now is common knowledge and common action for a common wealth of homme et femme. as free as a benign Nature will allow us.
beware the cops until we can begin to disarm and retrain them as EMT’s and public servants. it is a high calling and some force of empire has turned it from live to evil.
Absolutely agree with this. I gave up my US citizenship years ago because, among other things, I was ashamed of the hypocrisy and didn’t want my children growing up in that environment. Two years ago, also in Minneapolis, another unarmed person was killed by the police. But in this case it was a white Australian woman who had called to report a possible assault. She was shot by a black (Somali-American) police officer. No one needs to remind me that race is an enormous issue in the US; I was marching in Selma in 1965. But nearly every place I have lived, which is five continents and in a dozen countries, has racism in various degrees. In my opinion the problem in the US is the obvious militarization of the police forces and their distance from the communities they are supposed to serve. In the UK 4-5 people are killed by police every year; in the US it is 1000. In Japan, small police boxes are all over and the officers are part of the community. In Vietnam, where I now live, you rarely encounter any police other than traffic cops, who tend to want a small amount of “coffee money” to look the other way, but are not normally abusive. Perhaps because Americans don’t travel much and they are constantly fed the narratives which Caitlin refers to, they don’t realize how abnormally violent their policing is and the extent to which it is class, rather than racially based.
Yes, Carolyn. Racism/black oppression is a HUGE issue, an undeniable reality in American society, always has been. But “white privilege” is the wrong term to use to discuss it and causes unnecessary friction between well-meaning people. These days, neoliberal capitalism oppresses everyone who is not a member of the elite. Every non-elite person is now struggling to some extent, with his or her neck under the boot or at least in close proximity. Black people in general continue to get the short end of an increasingly short stick, often the most direct and lethal pressure from the boot, but should ANY human being be treated in such an oppressive manner? Of course not. Yet to call being less oppressed “privileged” is to fall unwittingly into a neoliberal trap, that of tacitly accepting, by the implications and connotations of language, that the default human position, the common experience of non-elite existence–the average, the norm, the mien, whatever you want to call what the run-of-the-mill human being can expect from life–is precisely what Hobbs described: a nasty, brutal, frantic, precarious scramble to survive, usually at the expense of others if not directly on their backs. To this perverted worldview, this sick, cruel, and cynical take on human nature UPON WHICH NEOLIBERALISM IS PREDICATED, we must all say, in unison, “HELL NO! The default position of humanity is and must be, at a minimum, a viably secure and decent quality of life without any goddamn boot even close to any of our necks.” Let me make my somewhat subtle point in clearer, cruder terms. Imagine a pimp with two prostitutes. He requires the first to service twenty customers a day in order to avoid being beaten; the second he allows to avoid a beating if she or he services fifteen. How in God’s name could we refer to the second prostitute, in any meaningful way, in any way that affirms and elevates the general human condition, as being lucky, fortunate, or, worse yet, PRIVILEGED?
Should be “Hobbes.” Getting old and my proof-reading sucks.
Christ, and it should be “mean.” Maybe it’s time to put down the keyboard.
Great post, Newton.
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Neoliberals love to categorize people by very specific traits that they cannot escape from, then they tell us that the “other” is after us or oppressing us. When we are at each other’s throats, then they can continue raping the world and its people without any resistance. Whenever we start to become united, they foment another race, LGBT, gender, etc. war to get us all riled up and back at each other’s throats again. It never fails.
As history shows the rich can pay their servants to fight their wars against the poor who have no chance of winning when fighting back with traditional means and weapons.
last para. was the key. containing police power will not! save the planet…but if we succeed in that we well find our coming police state somewhat less menacing as we boil into dust piles and die off.
it might even be a kind of pleasant burial of humanity.
One should seek to understand why the enforcers of ownership, who serve our owners, are paid to be brutal.
(Couldn’t be the owners, could it?)