Surely, you aren't comparing mass murder, likely an international crime, to spray painting a building or stealing a TV?
Property != people. People > property. Period. Nothing else to consider.
Additionally, it's fairly common for security forces to instigate criminal behavior during protests in order to justify the extreme measures they use to suppress those protests.
I am from the area and I agree wholeheartedly that people > property.
But let's be real, we saw a 182 unit multi story low income housing unit burn down to ash (the blaze was enormous). We also saw a police department building burn to ash. Countless local businesses have been completely destroyed by fire. That's a little more than spray paint and tv looting.
I find it funny that we expect black Americans to peacefully protest.
"Please use this system of peaceful protest that hasn't worked for you since forever." LA was 92, we're almost 30 years to the year. Has anything changed?
Do you tell HK protestors to write a letter to the CCP instead? It's such a double-standard.
Honestly I've been watching the protests and it's not black people rioting. It's a diverse group of black, Caucasian, and other minorities.
In fact, I saw the arsonist that set the police department on fire and it was a Caucasian male. This is not a group of African Americans rioting in protest. It's a diverse bunch of a bad actors ruining a community.
I'd argue the situation has gotten significantly worse since '92.
Post-9/11, especially in the early to mid '00s, there was this fetishization of the military and military aesthetic in American culture that had changed the public's appetite towards militarized police.
It is important to consider that a significant portion of the public thinks "the troops" aren't going far enough to end the protests in Minneapolis.
It's hardly fair to ask a minority to simply vote out their oppressors, they're a minority...
For political parties it's a real stretch to blame the Democrats. There's a reason the black vote is heavily Democratic, because their programs actually do help minority communities. But it's difficult to do with a majority Republican Congress for most of two decades and a majority "conservative" SCOTUS.
Now Democrats are far from perfect. But they are at least better than the alternatives.
Let's look at demographics and voting districts in Minneapolis. I'm willing to bet there's at least a little gerrymandering to suppress the black vote. It's hard to stand together and make your voice heard when the system is being designed to do exactly the opposite.
LA has a white majority. Felony prisoners aren’t allowed to vote, and are disproportionately black relative to the demographics and especially to the population affected by police brutality.
I'm not going to step into what is clearly an emotional argument for you, but I will say that downplaying what's going on in Minneapolis does not lend you any credibility. Social housing units, and hundreds of locally owned businesses have been rubbled and torched; and retailers have watched basically all of their inventory walk out the door (last time they bother setting up shop in this powder keg, seems Target was prettymuch expecting this to happen eventually).
One prominent case of this is Scores Sports Bar; there's video of the owner standing there powerless and crying, watching common crooks walk out with his life savings, all he earned working as a firefighter. You can see it set in on him when they come in right in front of him and start busting open the safe. After all this, he went to work the next day, at his day job as a firefighter, where he got a call that the bar had been torched to the ground. Now there's a GoFundMe, but he's never getting that time back.
So don't downplay what the rioters have done there, there are active warzones which are less rubbled and arsoned than this.
If you want to play the anecdote game: There's also a local Indian Restaurant whose owner was on the phone with the police while watching it burn on the local news, and he basically said "Let it burn. If that's what it takes to get justice."
Insurance will replace the buildings and stuff. Insurance can't bring George back, nor can it undo a bad system.
Glad to know you think of my intelligence so uncharitably that you have to explain a tautological definition.
I know that insurance only covers the insured. I charitably assumed the reading audience of HN knows that, too. Is there something more insightful you wanted to share? For example: have a conversation on the general risks of taking insurance versus not, or whether in these particular anecdotes the owners in fact did/didn't have insurance and their reasons for it? Or was it really just to try to make me look like a dumbass to the crowd?
I was responding to your assumption that he was insured, which was seemingly a defense of people looting and arsoning the business he worked his whole life to start, before it ever had a chance to open.
If you don't want to feel criticized when people point out basic facts to you, don't use things you don't know as the basis for an argument why people should feel justified in committing crimes against innocent people.
It's not about you, it's about the boneheaded idea that these riot traps are some sort of component of a movement for social justice.
There is zero justice in looting and arsoning this sports bar, stop trying to say that there is, and you won't feel like a fool when presented with the facts.
It's true that insurance can't bring George Floyd back; it can't bring back the dozen or so people killed so far in the riots either.
> If you don't want to feel criticized when people point out basic facts to you
Dude! As I said, you could treat me as a full fledged adult and we could have an actual intelligent conversation. Rather than you try to not-very-wittily say a one-liner "pwned a lib" stand-in for an actual conversation.
> don't use things you don't know as the basis for an argument why people should feel justified in committing crimes against innocent people.
Is the "thing I don't know" about "whether the guys is insured"? How does this tie into your goalpost-shift into moralizing me about the riots? Could you really not have taken a second to construct an argument so we can have a conversation? 'Cause now it seems like you are really hell-bent on merely trying to make me look like an idiot in a "got'em" zinger.
> There is zero justice in looting and arsoning this sports bar, stop trying to say that there is, and you won't feel like a fool when presented with the facts.
Are you trying to censor me? I can say what I damn please, thank you. You may not like it, but my arguments are here to stay.
My original point highlights there's going to be a wide spectrum of anecdotes coming from the riots. Using a sports bar example is stupid because I see a distinction between life and property. I wanted to challenge that anecdote directly with a counter-anecdote. I even said insurance "can't undo a bad system" which I intended to also be a point in favor of the very anecdote I was providing a counter-example for: the system has obviously failed the guy as he's at a total loss of his business. I showed the absurdity of loss of things versus loss of life. You don't see me straw-manning you by imagining you're OK with genociding people to protect "stuff".
On the other hand, you then assumed a lot and constructed a strawman of me, imagining me as, as far as I can tell, some drooling idiot that doesn't know "only insured parties are covered by insurance" and thinks that "the dozen or so people killed so far in the riots is OK" and that "the riots are a part of the movement for social justice". I highly recommend taking a step back and really look at yourself and ask what kind of conversation you're looking to have here. So far, it feels like you just want to insult me.
Let me tell you what I think straight up so we can clear this air and you can see me for what I actually believe. If you want to keep insulting me, that's fine. I, quite frankly, don't care about your opinion. I'm stepping away from your toxic bullshit after this. I'm frustrated that ideological-incest of Reddit and /pol/ is leaking to HN.
I believe these riots are a part of the wider movement to draw attention to police brutality (but not associated with the BLM organizers necessarily) due in part to the way the police over the last 20 years has shifted their training to be less community-focused and become much more military in training and
viewing confrontations in a militaristic rather than civic light. This affects every citizen, not just black people.
Do I want riots in general? No. Do I want these riots in particular? No. Do I applaud the loss of life in the riots? Hell no! Do I think the damage to property is OK? Fuck no. Do I think comparing total loss of a man's business to the loss of George Floyd is OK? No. But as uncomfortable as the riots are, they're here. In reality. I've got to accept that and figure out what the hell to make of it.
But fuck my beliefs, if people are so frustrated that they are rioting and the National Guard can't even restore order, that is a very strong signal that the civic system used to govern the people is broken. That should start a productive dialogue to those of us outside and able to look in. Is it only the police force no longer connecting with the local community and becoming more of a State Police? Is it local elected officials who've been ignoring their constituents? What are all the straws that broke the camels back?
There are additionally conversations about how movements against injustice should be conducted. We could be having similar conversations to the original debates around Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr's differing approaches to changing civil rights.
Finally, a word of warning: it's too easy to paint all the rioters as bad guys, their cause as obviously flawed, and therefore their movement as immoral. Liberties and injustices cuts both ways: when it's your pet protestors rioting, I sincerely hope you don't have to face your anti-clone.
For the record, I'm not feeling like a fool here, despite your operating assumption as such (there were no facts presented in your non-argument).
I am not downplaying anything and your points don't dispute my major argument of people are more important property.
The sports bar, inventory, etc can be replaced. Why should locals care about those things when there's a real, non-zero chance their family and friends might be killed arbitrarily?
Personally, I'd rather have my kids and wife than a Target.
You literally just characterized the largest mass arson in at least several decades as "spray painting a building or stealing a TV".
> ...your points don't dispute my major argument of people are more important property.
I guess the ten or more people who have already died in the riots don't matter though; nor the numerous women who have been raped under the cover of chaos, nor the victims of the kidnappings.
Effectively nobody is happy about the murder of George Floyd, but why cover for the killing of several more people and the destruction of countless lives? Is it over some bizarre sense of justice? What justice are you enabling, making cover for looters who were happy to bust the sports bar owner's safe right in front of him, and take what they please?
This is incoherent. If the riots were out of a regard for human life, they would not callously destroy so many such lives.
Violence is often normalized so long as those who are perpetuating it are politically aligned. For example, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his government genocided millions of Greeks and Armenians. Most nationalistic Turks found nothing wrong with that. In fact, Hitler admired Ataturk a lot, and used his actions as a template for his own programs.
"The minority problem in Anatolia was solved in a very simple fashion... “Only through the annihilation of the Greek and the Armenian tribes in Anatolia was the creation of a Turkish national state and the formation of an unflawed Turkish body of society within one state possible.”
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly by using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop. It's off topic here.
Yes that is true, and one of the major failures of the Ottoman Empire. They couldn’t instill any sort of nationalism in Greeks and other minority subjects. The cultures were too different. Hence why the empire fell and Balkanized.
I assume the business owner had insurance? Bottles and buildings can be replaced.
It’s not exactly like the bar was going to be profitable in the next 6 months anyways considering the pandemic, it’s probably a blessing in disguise that may save him from bankruptcy, who knows?
He has a job still, he’s luckier than a lot of people.
Property != people. People > property. Period. Nothing else to consider.
Additionally, it's fairly common for security forces to instigate criminal behavior during protests in order to justify the extreme measures they use to suppress those protests.