DJL

I'm coming in at a side junction of this conversation but I think it's important to remember that the numbers often just show that there are more minorities living in low income areas and those areas are targeted with over policing and more aggressive policing. The reason is doesn't matter in the defense of any point of view is that it still means minorities find them selves being targeted and treated more harshly.

George Will is very much a Conservative writing for the WaPo audience. The people who need to understand his message won't even understand the vocabulary of his articles.

Enough for one high level resignation. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/james-miller-resigns-from-pentagon-slams-esper-for-role-in-trump-photo.html

Put it this way, it could be a very large gamble to say that even if you successfully defended your business - meaning that after shooting someone the crowd didn't fire bomb the place and smoke you out or kill you - you could still be in no better position to conduct business because of the fallout. What you're describing is exactly what a friend of mine did in Richmond and he hoped that all it would take is popping off a few rounds to get them to move on. The real world fact is that once these things have started it's more like trying to protect your property from a natural disaster.

Ah. I pasted it into here, mostly so I could copy and feed it to a group of friends over the course of the day paragraph by paragraph.

I'm sorry to say but a CNN recap of a Washington Post writer's article isn't going to reach the necessary audience. But full text: This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron. Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed. Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement. What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct. Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm. The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting. In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body. A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated: We are the hollow men . . . Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass . . . Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

I was picturing something more like this:

I meant dogpiling on the cop. Again, to me it's laughable that this is the automatic reaction to someone giving the OK sign unless it's clear that the context is about racism. I did find an article about another cop who was using it to that effect and played stupid but then they found alt-right crap all over his own FB page to include use of the OK sign.

By the way, I'm also not happy about the "Don't Tread on Me" Flag being appropriated.

I acknowledge my backtrack, I just wish we did better on this one than concede that White Nationalist trolls can so easily manipulate people.

You could argue that. I think it's FUCKING STUPID that people have allowed a bunch of internet trolls to successfully make a joke of how easy it is to get them to lose their shit over a symbol that had no racial association until they decided to troll people into thinking it had racial associations. So, in an Obi Wan Kenobi way I'll say that "in a manner of speaking" it did not because it should not. My black friend agrees with me.

Fair Trade Che Guevara hemp hoodies dyed black with organic walnut don't come cheap. It can only be Soros.

I can't believe I actually engaged this bullshit.

Me? I'm saying you can't definitively say what the cop was thinking or attempting. You have to do better than dogpiling on someone for every perceived insult. You become the mob.

It's a real question as to whether a business could survive the publicity of having shot a bunch of people who tried to break into their store (EDIT) even during a riot. A friend of mine stayed in his business armed overnight on Sunday and I would like to think he knew that popping a couple of rounds off should be enough to make them think twice. The idea of calling the police because there are armed people inside the store you're trying to rob is amazing.

I certainly now have more insight about the fact that people have come to automatically think the OK sign is associated with the white power movement. This entire conversation proves they were successful in that effort. AND I agree, the cop certainly threw a signal that some have come to associate with white nationalism. That's all that can be said about it with the information provided in the video.

There's nothing about t-shirts, bricks, crossing imaginary lines or a day supply of Kale Chips and Avocados that requires an operation to be funded by one of the most wealthy people on the planet. Local groups are perfectly capable of providing their own organization.

But it can be racist and I'm not saying it cannot. I'm saying you can't take 4 seconds of someone who looks mad and makes the OK signal and say that therefore it's racist any more than you can say you have a black friend and therefore you cannot be racist. This shouldn't be confusing. You really cannot make that automatic assumption with no context or knowledge of the situation.

What's your statement about "having a black friend"? What does that have to do with the picture? And also, get over yourself.

Are you really trying to give me some kind of litmus test on racism? Sure. Keep sending examples. You're barking up the wrong tree. One location is cops sending an armed white guy away from a protest location after sticking a gun in people's face, the other is cops pepper spraying and apprehending a black guy mouthing off to them at a protest location. It's indicative of the exact things they're protesting. There are even better examples of that out there in which white people are breaking windows while the black people are the ones getting arrested. Next?

What, you think I'm saying that Trump isn't racist because he's sitting next to Obama? He is racist because his demonstrably is but it can't be said that his OK signals are meant as nods to white nationalists. And by the way that was intended as a point of humor.

Hold your horses. Trump is doing it. RACIST. (Well, that's still true just not in the context of the point I've been trying to make.)

So what, he was sarcastically saying "OK" to someone being an ass to him. I'm waiting for these guys to start using "thumb guns" as their next signal they convince everyone is about white power.

Yeah, pretty hard to confuse that one. BUT we've all seen tons of pictures made to look like someone is making a Nazi salute when they're just in the middle of a wave. That's fair. To move my own goalposts I'm saying that it cannot be said, simply from a slice of video that this guy was attempting to make a symbol regarding white power.

FOUR. SECOND. CLIP. Looks like he was pissed at someone, that doesn't he decided to flash a white supremacy symbol.