TY for good point. I've admitted I'm not EXACTLY up-to-date on what's been going on in the recent past. But I would-a thought I'd-a heard about a right wing group getting together who got as many people killed as the left-wing has managed. Of course, I DID hear about Jan. 6 and Charlottesville (is that it?). Dunno WHAT when on at Charlottesville, to be honest.
I'm just interested in anecdotal evidence of relative number of murders committed by each side, is all.
Boy, it's a good thing the party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, whose President got coronated to an audience of twenty thousand armed troops and precisely zero civilians, whose partisans control the overwhelming majority of conventional and social media, and whose policy is that people who refuse government-mandated medical treatments of dubious effectiveness and safety should be forbidden from being employed or purchasing food /isn't/ an ascendant fascist regime. We'd be in /real/ trouble. :D
Nope. I have no visibility to that process and probably never will. But it was extremely sudden, during the primaries, that a whole lot of much more qualified people who were trouncing him in the primaries suddenly found something else to do.
This doesn't really follow from your initial coronation comment, but I'll follow along.
The party machine did not want Bernie Sanders to be president, so they consolidated behind a candidate that had relatively broad support who was antagonistic to the Sanders agenda.
“ I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types - most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.”
Exactly. So many white kids from the burbs wearing black skinny jeans and black anarchistic hoodies they got at Hot Topic cosplaying a Bolshevik.
I find that somewhat believable, but it's not an evidence-backed assertion. If anyone has a link to a demographic breakdown/profile of Antifa membership, it would be interesting to see, especially along vocational/income lines. My guess is there are some actual working-class white people, along with some angry societal drop-outs whose M.O. is to kick ass and take names, same as some of the Proud Boys. Of course, the success of both sides in gaining visibility is a result of social media's Law Of The Excluded Middle Ground.
I do agree that Antifa are not accomplishing anything. Like it or not, the only way to work toward change is conventional political organizing, and I think 2020 caused some normies to drift away from that belief, because of the emotional impact of participating in mass non-riot protesting.
OTOH, one could understand a certain cynicism toward the process when the conventional "left" foists operators like Krysten Sinema on the rest of us.
I think Freddie wrote that the modus operandi of antifa was to cast about looking for people whose wrists were actually thinner than theirs to assault so maybe "kick ass and take names" should be in quotation marks.
I feel the need to point out that the last dude he shot also had an illegal firearm and was chasing a dude (Rittenhouse) while pointing said illegal firearm at him. Trying Rittenhouse for wreckless endangerment and a weapons possession charge in such circumstances would still be charging based on politics and not a sense of law or justice IMO.
Oh, Grosskreutz is a charmer. A rap sheet going back ten years that includes smacking his grandmother, burglary, DUI, intoxicated while carrying a weapon, and felon in possession of a weapon.
The servants of capital have the pragmatic ability to bring consequences to bear that would admit certainly outweigh whatever positive value of that violence, though.
I really don't get this line. The majority of the work that cops do are things people basically all agree on. Preventing/policing theft, murder, assault, rape, etc. And DUI's and speeding. Then there's the war on drugs, which I disagree with but ending it wouldn't exactly hurt big capital. Like yes, if you're a big union organizer in the early 20th century and cops keep beating up striking workers what you're saying makes sense. What does it mean now?
I mean yeah no one looks at George Floyd and think police reform isn't needed. Even fox news didn't try to defend that. But there are millions of incidents across America all the time where police are doing their mundane stuff in good ways. People are caught speeding and drunk driving. An investigation catches a murderer. Armed suspects get arrested and go to jail, not killed on the spot.
Sure. I really don't know what the solution to this is. Most murders are basically lower class young men killing each other usually for drug related reasons. There's a strong culture of no snitching which makes investigation difficult. Obviously actually investigating all of these properly would require way more resources, reform, and better trained and higher paid cops. (higher paid to attract better people). And for police to be able to really investigate things like bike theft they'd require way more resources.
On a personal level anyone that high up will have private security anyway. Besides the idea that there are armies of people out there waiting go out on the streets and overthrow the system if not for cops keeping them down is just a total fantasy. It's obviously true in some places, like Egypt. But definitely not in America.
Also if every single Fortune 500 CEO died tomorrow, they would hire new ones and the system wouldn't changed. We need labor power. These guillotine fantasies might be fun but they don't amount to much.
While the day to day may not include that (unless their job that day is, for example, hassling homeless people), it is a fundamentally true aspect of their jobs.
In the five years my husband was a beat cop, the only remotely large scale exertion of politically related force he engaged in was maintaining the route for a presidential motorcade.
Yeah, it can and does happen *sometimes* but sensationalizing what the vast majority of police do for the vast majority of their time and careers is not helpful or rational. This country isn’t Selma in the 60s anymore.
Sure, that's absolutely true. But the police are government employees. When they enact violence on the citizens, it should be sensationalized.
When a teacher hits a student, it's a big deal for a number of reasons. One of them is that it sure is unpleasant to have a government employee enact violence on a child.
They’re also citizens themselves. They don’t become not-citizens when they go to work (although I certainly grant the sense of authority given by the uniform and duty belt). Police, as you may agree?, have a pretty significant amount of leeway in using their judgment. Therefore when one of them uses poor judgment, they ought to face the consequences. The problem is when reasonable people disagree about what constitutes poor judgment.
I remember a video that went viral last year of a black female cop stepping in and diffusing a situation in which another white cop was in the middle of an escalating confrontation with a protester. She was praised (“queen!”) and rightly so. But that shit happens all the time. Cops aren’t automatons of the state. They’re humans, citizens often of the districts they police, and equating them to, I dunno, an invading military force of jackbooted storm troopers or whatever just isn’t accurate.
As to the government employees hitting a child, I mean, is that something that happens regularly? I know we’ve all seen the ugly videos of campus cops taking down teenagers. In fact, one of those happened just last week at my son’s middle school. But I think there’s a lot of willful ignorance about what teens and even preteens are physically capable of in terms of violence. They have kidsbrains often in adult or nearly adult bodies.
The problem isn't that reasonable people disagree about what constitutes poor judgment. The problem is that the police are almost never held accountable when they do break the law.
Yes, undoubtedly there are good police doing good things every day across the country. But it is significant when police behave like jackbooted stormtroopers. It's even more significant when those police face no consequences and when the rest of the police stand behind them.
The good cops aren't so good if they're allowing the bad cops to be bad cops without consequences.
Another great piece, Freddie. I'm still not used to watching blatant selective dehumanization. There has never been any proof he was a white supremacist. Yes he went to a Trump rally and was clearly of that mindset, but that doesn't mean people know what was in his head. They needed it to be true and so they pretended it was true. Just as you point out the mundane work of knocking on doors and having conversations is hard, well so too is having humanity and reserving judgment. It is only: how can I win this today. Due process? Nope. Doesn't matter. Guilt or innocence will be decided by Twitter and the media that feeds off of it. I guess I still find it shocking that there are so few people in media who have the courage to defy the mob. I guess it comes down to that. This isn't to defend what Rittenhouse did. But I still have enough humanity left to understand he was in over his head and he should not have been out there trying to protect anyone.
That he thought it was his job is astonishing. To this day most of my friends on the left do not seem to realize just how bad things were that night and how little protection there was for small business owners who didn't have insurance to rebuild, for instance. I'll never forget one video I saw of a woman with a 100-year-old mattress store. An old man picked up a fire extinguisher to protect her store from being burned down. He was beaten up and sent to the hospital. Not only was this not news but you were told you were a racist if you showed concern. https://youtu.be/mfMbRwV1uoU
I’m not following this case and I didn’t know about that last bit, which is heartbreaking. I guess in my mind Rittenhouse was staked out somewhere trying to pick people off a la the gas station sniper a dozen years ago.
That's not even the worst of it. The riots killed a few dozen people, none of whom got significant media coverage. The lone exception would probably be David Dorn, perhaps because a) the circumstances of his death were so horrific and b) there was a social media angle.
Getting an accurate count is almost impossible due to the fuzzy nature of what qualifies as a riot death. My standard is that if there is widespread looting and vandalism and somebody is killed in proximity to that then chances are better than not that the riot was related.
In terms of the George Floyd protests specifically:
Note that these reports are incomplete because a) they only cover early June while the riots raged on throughout the summer and b) the Floyd riots were not the only riots of the year. The Rittenhouse case is the perfect example: Kenosha burned in August and the riot there was kicked off by the shooting of another black man.
Good job Freddie, on a total cluster-fuck of an issue. The lack of black victims doesn't seem to faze the mob at all - the real irony here is the flip-flop of historical allegiances -
The mob-left is full-throat supporting the shady prosecutors that over-charged a murder case for political reasons and assumed a slam-dunk guilty verdict and are trying to pull some hijinks (marsha clark anyone)
The wing-nut right is full-throat supporting defense lawyers and are anti-prosecutor.
the testimony I saw yesterday, I watched over 5 hours, Rittenhouse just straight-up plain ole kicked the prosecutors ass! If I was the DA, I'd have that dudes ass in my office ripping him a new one.
He got showed up by a teenager! the classic answer to the question of why he shot someone with a gun if that person with the gun hasn't shot him first?
Answer: "because he was pointing the gun at me and had just hit me in the head with a skateboard two times"
The judge seems furious that he's having to deal with this. I haven't watched that many court cases, but it can't be normal for a judge to just be completely done with one side's shit, can it? The judge looked like he was going to pop a blood vessel.
I wouldn't say "normal", but it's not uncommon for judges to behave poorly. The system is set up (for very sensible reasons) such that judges have an enormous degree of freedom, and some abuse that freedom to go off on tangents, rant at lawyers, engage in length digressions about etymology of words, make terrible jokes... Judges are humans, but they're humans in a high stakes environment where they get to make all the rules and can't really be questioned.
If there's something surprising here, it's that the judge is getting upset with the prosecution (they often get a ton of leeway, party due to general "law and order" stuff, but also because any given judge tends to see a given prosecutor much more frequently than they do any given defence council, and so ends up with a better working relationship), and that he has an arguably good reason for blowing up (because again, that's not needed!)
> Oh, really? The judge used his power as the only one in the room who can talk whenever he wants to go off on a bizarre self-indulgent tangent? OF COURSE HE DID HE’S A JUDGE HAVE YOU NEVER MET A JUDGE
Freddie, I'm organizing a conference in NY on anti-fascism in the twenty-first century (to coincide with the centennial of the March on Rome). I hope you will come and share your ideas.
"in a just world, Rittenhouse would be convicted both for a weapons possession charge..."
I used to be an in-a-perfect world there would be no guns type. Then I got interested in hunting waterfowl and took some gun safety classes.
Is the less perfect world the one in which only the forces of government are armed, or one where citizenry are also armed? Are we at all still concerned about democratically elected government unjustly targeting groups of its own constituents? Or in the West are we on the cusp of inculcating that level of indefinite trust in authority? Maybe it's a faith-based belief then?
"Or in the West are we on the cusp of inculcating that level of indefinite trust in authority?" That ship has sailed. If I'm the gubmint and I don't like you, I'm not coming after you with police or soldiers with guns, I'm blowing up your house (and all the guns you've got stockpiled in it) with a missile fired from a drone hovering a few miles away.
Yeah but when you can fight back with small arms and create a standoff long enough for media coverage to get you a certain amount of public support, even though in that event you'll ultimately be tattered and smashed, you can ignite or rekindle that common spiritual civic pushback against government force - thus keeping further government encroachment at bay.
If you just give up and give in, you get no love, no fanfare, no martyrdom and the democratically elected aggression will just metastasize quicker.
No standoff, no media coverage. One night, when you're fast asleep at 3 AM, an unseen (by you and by anybody you might have standing guard) missle blows up your house, you, your guard, your guns, etc. That's how it's done by the US gubmint in the Middle East, in case you haven't noticed.
Oh, and then the gubmint gives a press conference explaining how they've heorically snuffed out a nest of terrorists, and your neighbors think, "wow, I had no idea those folks were terrorists, good thing they've been snuffed out". Really, you should watch the news more.
I'm not sure I would trust any coverage of what goes on in that part of the world, at least in English-speaking media.
I'm not familiar with any drone strikes or missiles launched domestically, here, and so I guess you can call it a provincial outlook, but the rights civilians in the US are what I'm trying to maintain.
This article is missing a substantial acknowledgement of the main underlying issue, which is that if a "left rioter" had done the same to Rittenhouse under the same circumstances they'd easily be behind bars for life. Rittenhouse, on the other hand, gets a sympathetic judge who's done everything in his power to stymie the prosecution (if only all criminal proceedings were so blessed!)
Hand-wringing about antifa violence tourists seems pointless when there are exponentially more right-wing militia types with the capacity to do this and the legal leeway to get away with it. Nonviolence is the means in no small part because it's all we've got.
What difference does that make, as a practical matter? It's a juvenile lie to say that right wing violence doesn't result in prosecution, the kind of thing lefties like to say to feel oppressed - there hundreds and hundreds of active 1/6 cases ongoing. But suppose that was the case; it would merely make it more foolish to romanticize street violence. Wouldn't it?
Sure, and I don't think anyone in this particular comment chain is trying to romanticize street violence or even argue for its efficacy.
But I didn't say that right wing violence doesn't result in prosecution, which would be an absurd and obviously untrue statement. My argument is that right-wing perpetuators of violence often receive less scrutiny, the better end of discretion from cops, judges, and prosecutors, and ultimately less consequences than left-wing perpetuators of violence. I thought this was pretty uncontroversial - we live in a country dominated by right-wing institutions in all the places where it matters - but here's a fairly analogous situation that we can consider:
Here we have a man in a situation almost identical to Rittenhouse's, except he was unarmed and gunned down on the spot - days after the initial incident! The main difference, of course, is that he was on the wrong side of the ideological divide.
Finally, if we're going to consider this in the narrow context of 1/6 then we should also realize that those particular right-wingers made some of the most powerful people in this country feel as though their lives might be in danger, while also plastering some of the most slam-dunk prosecutor bait imaginable on social media. There's leeway, and then there's getting away with that. Does their particular experience represent the average of right-wing extremists? Of course not.
I mean that that the most salient factor involved in this shooting would seem to be not the individual's ideological position but the fact that he was shot not by a private citizens but rather by agents of the state: to wit the police. How is this not a completely apples to oranges comparison?
You seem confused - Kyle Rittenhouse did not get shot by a member of law enforcement for his crimes, and is in fact getting a very, very generous trial. The man in the Washington Post article got gunned down for his crime by cops before he could even get a trial. We can thus see that there has been a difference in treatment by authority in these two instances where the primary cleavage is one of ideology. Hope this clears things up.
What do you call the mainstream Democratic party reaction to the January 6 violence, then? Massive Congressional investigations, millions invested in beefing up Capitol law enforcement, vigilante tweeters scrutinizing CCTV footage to dox the participants, prosecutors pouring out of the woodwork promising life sentences... it sure seems like these right wing mitia dudes aren't getting light treatment for their serious crimes.
Like I wrote in my other comment, it sure seems as though driving into DC, making the most powerful people in this country fear for their lives, and then pasting comical amounts of evidence on social media is not the average experience, and we shouldn't pretend as though it is.
And a situation where the police are the wrong-doers, and not a fellow citizen, that's representative of the point you were trying to make? If you're going to complain about someone else's poor example, could you perhaps bring a better example of your own?
The treatment of the January 6 protestors [and Kyle Rittenhouse, and the unvaccinated, for that matter] are what you get when the mainstream Democratic leaders are frightened. Not merely concerned, not merely disagreeing about policy, but genuinely pants-wettingly scared to death of something. It has a distinctly different, much more vicious edge than what you see when they're merely concerned, or in policy disagreement. Once you see the distinction in the responses it's almost impossible to unsee it, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to see what these existential threats all have in common.
It's hilarious to me how certain lefty types are that a left-wing rioter would have been rotting in jail, while the right are positive charges wouldn't even have been brought if it was a left-wing rioter.
(Given how slam-dunk the self-defense case is here, as well as the "catch and release" seen in eg Portland, I'm forced to side more with the righty types)
"lefty types" lol, ok. Can you give me a convincing explanation for why the self-defense case is "slam-dunk" (it's not, he crossed state lines to show up with an illegal rifle) and the legal bonafides that would enable you to make such a sweeping claim? Thanks.
lol no bonafides here, just someone half-watching the trial at work because I'm bored. To my understanding, you're allowed to defend yourself from imminent bodily harm even if you were a complete dipshit up to the point (that's how the Zimmerman trial went--it doesn't matter that Zimmerman technically "started it" because Zimmerman isn't the one who escalated things to deadly violence). How is "dude I shot admitted to pointing a gun at me" not slam-dunk?
Even for someone half-watching the trial, it's pretty surprising that you don't seem aware that Rittenhouse shot multiple people in his capacity as a violence tourist that showed up with a gun. Including one guy that had his hands up.
His victims had a pretty compelling case for self-defense, too. Should the law allow two people who feel mutually threatened by one another to duel?
Why is it impossible that both groups could not have legitimately feared for their life and reacted in ways that made the *other* group ratchet up fear? They could indeed both be excused under self-defense law, at least in theory.
For instance, the "crossed state lines" thing is misleading, I think. Technically correct, but he apparently his home was ~20mi from Kenosha. That's a half-hour by car at most. Also, I'm aware you didn't say it precisely, but he didn't cross state lines with a rifle, at least not on the way in -- he received the gun in WI.
Also he didn't show up to the riot precisely; supposedly he was in Kenosha earlier cleaning up graffiti. Add to that the footage of him running away, of being threatened with a gun by the last person he shot (check his own testimony -- he didn't merely have his hands up, he was pointing a gun at Rittenhouse and advancing), it makes self-defense very credible.
So I haven't been following it because I don't care. But I did have one question: Who TF gave this seventeen-year-old kid a rifle? What was wrong with that person? Can we jail HIM?
There is a good legal argument to be made that it was perfectly legal for Rittenhouse to own a rifle apparently. If that's true then the question of potential jail time is out the window.
1. Do you agree or disagree that, at least according to what we know of Minnesota law, Rittenhouse probably has a decent case for self-defense?
2. Because, according to you, the "left rioter" would have received a much less just trial / verdict / legal prognosis (or whichever specific issue it is we're arguing about here), do you think one appropriate solution is to perpetrate the same injustice on Rittenhouse?
I assume your answers are Yes and No, respectively, which makes the subject irrelevant to this case.
Ugh, I have no idea why, but I was somehow thinking "oh Minneapolis is in Minnesota" even though Minneapolis has nothing to do with Kenosha. Mea culpa. :(
"The threat of investment banks is vastly larger to the average poor person of color than the threat of Boogaloo Boys"
This! I'm a Jew, and I don't give half a shit about basement dwelling losers calling themselves Nazis, yelling "Jews will not replace us", or posting allegedly offensive memes on 4chan. Finance, the military industrial complex, landlords, the oil industry, etc are much larger enemies to the average person than these "fascists" will ever be. Guys in suits who talk about "synergy" and "circling back" cause way more harm than to the average person than these Nazi larpers ever will.
"The researchers studied patients who stayed at a skilled nursing facility after an acute episode at a hospital, looking at deaths that fell within the 90-day period after they left the nursing home. They found that going to a private equity-owned nursing home increased mortality for patients by 10 percent against the overall average.
Or to put it another way: “This estimate implies about 20,150 Medicare lives lost due to [private equity] ownership of nursing homes during our sample period” of 12 years, the authors — Atul Gupta, Sabrina Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta — wrote. That’s more than 1,000 deaths every year, on average."
They make stuff worse and make a ton of money doing it
What does this have to do with investment banking? Private equity is an entirely different issue. Solution is the Social Democracy solution: better regulation, better transparency (already pretty darn good in nursing-home world, as I know from experience), better and stronger unions (very strong in Germany, the world's best Social Democracy) and trust-busting.
IB is the training grounds for PE. Every single part of the businesses are deeply intertwined. Most of what PE does is funded by IB. The acquisitions are facilitated by them.
But I get your point. It's way too simple to just say Goldman bad.
Last summer, I made a Facebook post defending riots. It was the old "Well, a burned down building is not as bad as a lost life" kind of line. I realized months later that my post didn't make sense. So why did I write it in the first place?
Because I was scared. Scared of being labelled a bad person and losing friends. Social media was so chaotic at that time, and liberal folks were on the hunt for wrongthink so they could mob and shame people. They would shame people just for being silent! So I felt that if I wrote a post to signal to liberals "okay he's cool, we don't have to worry about him," they'd move on to other targets.
This dynamic is not the least bit surprising to most of us, I'm sure.
I was also pro-riot. I agree with your point about social media, but we need to remember some additional context: social media was all we had! At that stage in the pandemic, many of us were stuck at home and didn't have our in-person social bonds.
I used to make social media posts just like that for the same reason. But last summer, rioters burned a house down my block (in Philly). The residents were hospitalized, and almost died. I don't make those kinds of posts anymore. A home is more than just property. A family business is more than just property.
I feel it's important to note that 47 people died as a result of the summer 2020 riots. One in Minneapolis was a father of five who was trapped in a burning building and burned to death. It's never just "buildings".
Your honesty is refreshing. I once posted about being a “white person in recovery.” Although I stand by the kernel at the center of that (race isn’t a Real Thing, and in a sense I think we should all be in recovery from the race-based dogmas about ourselves), the way I phrased it and the overall post was certainly virtue signaling.
I generally stay away from social media, and definitely stayed away during the pandemic. My loved ones tended to see any BLM protest, no matter how peaceful and socially-distant, as enabling antifa and therefore sinister.
It could be a bunch of pro-life Catholics showing up at a park to wave handmade "Black Lives Matter" signs in a tepid, socially-distanced fashion, all while wearing masks, not to obscure identity, but out of consideration (yes, arguably excessive in a non-dense outdoor setting) for others' health, and that was still uncomfortably close to black bloc tactics for most of my loved ones.
When people are worried enough about rioting and looting, even the most innocuous protest imaginable under the circumstances gets reframed as "enabling" rioting and looting. Much of this reframing is done in bad faith, of course — but it's not like more rioting and looting makes the bad faith harder.
TY for good point. I've admitted I'm not EXACTLY up-to-date on what's been going on in the recent past. But I would-a thought I'd-a heard about a right wing group getting together who got as many people killed as the left-wing has managed. Of course, I DID hear about Jan. 6 and Charlottesville (is that it?). Dunno WHAT when on at Charlottesville, to be honest.
I'm just interested in anecdotal evidence of relative number of murders committed by each side, is all.
I mean, there are thousands of things that could be done to avoid fascism. Like, literally thousands. Many of them even include not hunting people!
Boy, it's a good thing the party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, whose President got coronated to an audience of twenty thousand armed troops and precisely zero civilians, whose partisans control the overwhelming majority of conventional and social media, and whose policy is that people who refuse government-mandated medical treatments of dubious effectiveness and safety should be forbidden from being employed or purchasing food /isn't/ an ascendant fascist regime. We'd be in /real/ trouble. :D
Is this that thing when people say the antifascists are the real fascists?
No, this is the thing people say when they have no idea what you actually mean by "fascist", besides "people I feel good when I punch."
Can you explain how a democratically elected president got coronated?
Nope. I have no visibility to that process and probably never will. But it was extremely sudden, during the primaries, that a whole lot of much more qualified people who were trouncing him in the primaries suddenly found something else to do.
This doesn't really follow from your initial coronation comment, but I'll follow along.
The party machine did not want Bernie Sanders to be president, so they consolidated behind a candidate that had relatively broad support who was antagonistic to the Sanders agenda.
First sentence is fine. Second got should be for.
OK thanks. For some reason I had to read the first sentence multiple times to understand it. Must be me! I'll delete my comments now.
“ I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types - most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.”
Exactly. So many white kids from the burbs wearing black skinny jeans and black anarchistic hoodies they got at Hot Topic cosplaying a Bolshevik.
I find that somewhat believable, but it's not an evidence-backed assertion. If anyone has a link to a demographic breakdown/profile of Antifa membership, it would be interesting to see, especially along vocational/income lines. My guess is there are some actual working-class white people, along with some angry societal drop-outs whose M.O. is to kick ass and take names, same as some of the Proud Boys. Of course, the success of both sides in gaining visibility is a result of social media's Law Of The Excluded Middle Ground.
I do agree that Antifa are not accomplishing anything. Like it or not, the only way to work toward change is conventional political organizing, and I think 2020 caused some normies to drift away from that belief, because of the emotional impact of participating in mass non-riot protesting.
OTOH, one could understand a certain cynicism toward the process when the conventional "left" foists operators like Krysten Sinema on the rest of us.
I think Freddie wrote that the modus operandi of antifa was to cast about looking for people whose wrists were actually thinner than theirs to assault so maybe "kick ass and take names" should be in quotation marks.
Stay safe, slaw.
Thankfully I can take care of myself.
The Antifa in Oakland most certainly did not meet that demographic profile. I am unfamiliar personally with any other group.
I feel the need to point out that the last dude he shot also had an illegal firearm and was chasing a dude (Rittenhouse) while pointing said illegal firearm at him. Trying Rittenhouse for wreckless endangerment and a weapons possession charge in such circumstances would still be charging based on politics and not a sense of law or justice IMO.
Oh, Grosskreutz is a charmer. A rap sheet going back ten years that includes smacking his grandmother, burglary, DUI, intoxicated while carrying a weapon, and felon in possession of a weapon.
Weapons possession seems like a slam dunk to me and all he should have been charged with. What am I missing?
That he shouldn't be charged because his breaking the law had something good come of it?
No sense limiting political violence to the cops who are servants of capital
The servants of capital have the pragmatic ability to bring consequences to bear that would admit certainly outweigh whatever positive value of that violence, though.
I really don't get this line. The majority of the work that cops do are things people basically all agree on. Preventing/policing theft, murder, assault, rape, etc. And DUI's and speeding. Then there's the war on drugs, which I disagree with but ending it wouldn't exactly hurt big capital. Like yes, if you're a big union organizer in the early 20th century and cops keep beating up striking workers what you're saying makes sense. What does it mean now?
I mean yeah no one looks at George Floyd and think police reform isn't needed. Even fox news didn't try to defend that. But there are millions of incidents across America all the time where police are doing their mundane stuff in good ways. People are caught speeding and drunk driving. An investigation catches a murderer. Armed suspects get arrested and go to jail, not killed on the spot.
I think the more data collected about the efficacy of the police tends to demonstrate that they are bad at doing what we want police to do.
Sure. I really don't know what the solution to this is. Most murders are basically lower class young men killing each other usually for drug related reasons. There's a strong culture of no snitching which makes investigation difficult. Obviously actually investigating all of these properly would require way more resources, reform, and better trained and higher paid cops. (higher paid to attract better people). And for police to be able to really investigate things like bike theft they'd require way more resources.
I remember Adolph Reed discussing this. He was like "yes, police serve the interests of capitol, but they do other things too"
On a personal level anyone that high up will have private security anyway. Besides the idea that there are armies of people out there waiting go out on the streets and overthrow the system if not for cops keeping them down is just a total fantasy. It's obviously true in some places, like Egypt. But definitely not in America.
Also if every single Fortune 500 CEO died tomorrow, they would hire new ones and the system wouldn't changed. We need labor power. These guillotine fantasies might be fun but they don't amount to much.
Indeed. And, astoundingly to some, the interests of capital and the interests of the working class are sometimes aligned.
Do you know many cops? The day to day is very much not enacting political violence as a servant of capital.
While the day to day may not include that (unless their job that day is, for example, hassling homeless people), it is a fundamentally true aspect of their jobs.
In the five years my husband was a beat cop, the only remotely large scale exertion of politically related force he engaged in was maintaining the route for a presidential motorcade.
Yeah, it can and does happen *sometimes* but sensationalizing what the vast majority of police do for the vast majority of their time and careers is not helpful or rational. This country isn’t Selma in the 60s anymore.
Sure, that's absolutely true. But the police are government employees. When they enact violence on the citizens, it should be sensationalized.
When a teacher hits a student, it's a big deal for a number of reasons. One of them is that it sure is unpleasant to have a government employee enact violence on a child.
They’re also citizens themselves. They don’t become not-citizens when they go to work (although I certainly grant the sense of authority given by the uniform and duty belt). Police, as you may agree?, have a pretty significant amount of leeway in using their judgment. Therefore when one of them uses poor judgment, they ought to face the consequences. The problem is when reasonable people disagree about what constitutes poor judgment.
I remember a video that went viral last year of a black female cop stepping in and diffusing a situation in which another white cop was in the middle of an escalating confrontation with a protester. She was praised (“queen!”) and rightly so. But that shit happens all the time. Cops aren’t automatons of the state. They’re humans, citizens often of the districts they police, and equating them to, I dunno, an invading military force of jackbooted storm troopers or whatever just isn’t accurate.
As to the government employees hitting a child, I mean, is that something that happens regularly? I know we’ve all seen the ugly videos of campus cops taking down teenagers. In fact, one of those happened just last week at my son’s middle school. But I think there’s a lot of willful ignorance about what teens and even preteens are physically capable of in terms of violence. They have kidsbrains often in adult or nearly adult bodies.
The problem isn't that reasonable people disagree about what constitutes poor judgment. The problem is that the police are almost never held accountable when they do break the law.
Yes, undoubtedly there are good police doing good things every day across the country. But it is significant when police behave like jackbooted stormtroopers. It's even more significant when those police face no consequences and when the rest of the police stand behind them.
The good cops aren't so good if they're allowing the bad cops to be bad cops without consequences.
Another great piece, Freddie. I'm still not used to watching blatant selective dehumanization. There has never been any proof he was a white supremacist. Yes he went to a Trump rally and was clearly of that mindset, but that doesn't mean people know what was in his head. They needed it to be true and so they pretended it was true. Just as you point out the mundane work of knocking on doors and having conversations is hard, well so too is having humanity and reserving judgment. It is only: how can I win this today. Due process? Nope. Doesn't matter. Guilt or innocence will be decided by Twitter and the media that feeds off of it. I guess I still find it shocking that there are so few people in media who have the courage to defy the mob. I guess it comes down to that. This isn't to defend what Rittenhouse did. But I still have enough humanity left to understand he was in over his head and he should not have been out there trying to protect anyone.
That he thought it was his job is astonishing. To this day most of my friends on the left do not seem to realize just how bad things were that night and how little protection there was for small business owners who didn't have insurance to rebuild, for instance. I'll never forget one video I saw of a woman with a 100-year-old mattress store. An old man picked up a fire extinguisher to protect her store from being burned down. He was beaten up and sent to the hospital. Not only was this not news but you were told you were a racist if you showed concern. https://youtu.be/mfMbRwV1uoU
I’m not following this case and I didn’t know about that last bit, which is heartbreaking. I guess in my mind Rittenhouse was staked out somewhere trying to pick people off a la the gas station sniper a dozen years ago.
That's not even the worst of it. The riots killed a few dozen people, none of whom got significant media coverage. The lone exception would probably be David Dorn, perhaps because a) the circumstances of his death were so horrific and b) there was a social media angle.
I am curious where you get your few dozen figure from and if that includes victims of state violence. I am not disputing it, I am just curious.
Getting an accurate count is almost impossible due to the fuzzy nature of what qualifies as a riot death. My standard is that if there is widespread looting and vandalism and somebody is killed in proximity to that then chances are better than not that the riot was related.
In terms of the George Floyd protests specifically:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/08/14-days-of-protests-19-dead/?sh=644f56c04de4
https://www.fox6now.com/news/deadly-unrest-here-are-the-people-who-have-died-amid-george-floyd-protests-across-us
Note that these reports are incomplete because a) they only cover early June while the riots raged on throughout the summer and b) the Floyd riots were not the only riots of the year. The Rittenhouse case is the perfect example: Kenosha burned in August and the riot there was kicked off by the shooting of another black man.
Good job Freddie, on a total cluster-fuck of an issue. The lack of black victims doesn't seem to faze the mob at all - the real irony here is the flip-flop of historical allegiances -
The mob-left is full-throat supporting the shady prosecutors that over-charged a murder case for political reasons and assumed a slam-dunk guilty verdict and are trying to pull some hijinks (marsha clark anyone)
The wing-nut right is full-throat supporting defense lawyers and are anti-prosecutor.
the testimony I saw yesterday, I watched over 5 hours, Rittenhouse just straight-up plain ole kicked the prosecutors ass! If I was the DA, I'd have that dudes ass in my office ripping him a new one.
He got showed up by a teenager! the classic answer to the question of why he shot someone with a gun if that person with the gun hasn't shot him first?
Answer: "because he was pointing the gun at me and had just hit me in the head with a skateboard two times"
Prosecutor: So you shot him?
Rittenhouse: Yes
The judge seems furious that he's having to deal with this. I haven't watched that many court cases, but it can't be normal for a judge to just be completely done with one side's shit, can it? The judge looked like he was going to pop a blood vessel.
There are supposed to be tools in place to weed out cases from the docket that are VERY CLEARLY not going to end in conviction.
I wouldn't say "normal", but it's not uncommon for judges to behave poorly. The system is set up (for very sensible reasons) such that judges have an enormous degree of freedom, and some abuse that freedom to go off on tangents, rant at lawyers, engage in length digressions about etymology of words, make terrible jokes... Judges are humans, but they're humans in a high stakes environment where they get to make all the rules and can't really be questioned.
If there's something surprising here, it's that the judge is getting upset with the prosecution (they often get a ton of leeway, party due to general "law and order" stuff, but also because any given judge tends to see a given prosecutor much more frequently than they do any given defence council, and so ends up with a better working relationship), and that he has an arguably good reason for blowing up (because again, that's not needed!)
Popehat/Ken White has a good twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1458493792349089792
> Oh, really? The judge used his power as the only one in the room who can talk whenever he wants to go off on a bizarre self-indulgent tangent? OF COURSE HE DID HE’S A JUDGE HAVE YOU NEVER MET A JUDGE
Thank you Freddie. When I read something like this I feel like sanity is out there ready to be imposed.
We wanted massive social unrest, but not like this, not by him.
Ah shit, turns out everyone can speak the ~*~language of the oppressed~*~
One of my friends called me up on Jan 6 and said "that's supposed to be us in there, not them!" :D :D :D
Meanwhile, the trial of Ahmed Arbery’s killers seems to be going WAY better for the prosecution, in part because that incident did not occur in the midst of massive unrest and disorder. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trace-thc-ahmaud-arberys-blood-will-not-be-disclosed-jury-us-judge-rules-2021-11-04/
Freddie, I'm organizing a conference in NY on anti-fascism in the twenty-first century (to coincide with the centennial of the March on Rome). I hope you will come and share your ideas.
"in a just world, Rittenhouse would be convicted both for a weapons possession charge..."
I used to be an in-a-perfect world there would be no guns type. Then I got interested in hunting waterfowl and took some gun safety classes.
Is the less perfect world the one in which only the forces of government are armed, or one where citizenry are also armed? Are we at all still concerned about democratically elected government unjustly targeting groups of its own constituents? Or in the West are we on the cusp of inculcating that level of indefinite trust in authority? Maybe it's a faith-based belief then?
"Or in the West are we on the cusp of inculcating that level of indefinite trust in authority?" That ship has sailed. If I'm the gubmint and I don't like you, I'm not coming after you with police or soldiers with guns, I'm blowing up your house (and all the guns you've got stockpiled in it) with a missile fired from a drone hovering a few miles away.
Yeah but when you can fight back with small arms and create a standoff long enough for media coverage to get you a certain amount of public support, even though in that event you'll ultimately be tattered and smashed, you can ignite or rekindle that common spiritual civic pushback against government force - thus keeping further government encroachment at bay.
If you just give up and give in, you get no love, no fanfare, no martyrdom and the democratically elected aggression will just metastasize quicker.
No standoff, no media coverage. One night, when you're fast asleep at 3 AM, an unseen (by you and by anybody you might have standing guard) missle blows up your house, you, your guard, your guns, etc. That's how it's done by the US gubmint in the Middle East, in case you haven't noticed.
Oh, and then the gubmint gives a press conference explaining how they've heorically snuffed out a nest of terrorists, and your neighbors think, "wow, I had no idea those folks were terrorists, good thing they've been snuffed out". Really, you should watch the news more.
I'm not sure I would trust any coverage of what goes on in that part of the world, at least in English-speaking media.
I'm not familiar with any drone strikes or missiles launched domestically, here, and so I guess you can call it a provincial outlook, but the rights civilians in the US are what I'm trying to maintain.
This article is missing a substantial acknowledgement of the main underlying issue, which is that if a "left rioter" had done the same to Rittenhouse under the same circumstances they'd easily be behind bars for life. Rittenhouse, on the other hand, gets a sympathetic judge who's done everything in his power to stymie the prosecution (if only all criminal proceedings were so blessed!)
Hand-wringing about antifa violence tourists seems pointless when there are exponentially more right-wing militia types with the capacity to do this and the legal leeway to get away with it. Nonviolence is the means in no small part because it's all we've got.
What difference does that make, as a practical matter? It's a juvenile lie to say that right wing violence doesn't result in prosecution, the kind of thing lefties like to say to feel oppressed - there hundreds and hundreds of active 1/6 cases ongoing. But suppose that was the case; it would merely make it more foolish to romanticize street violence. Wouldn't it?
Sure, and I don't think anyone in this particular comment chain is trying to romanticize street violence or even argue for its efficacy.
But I didn't say that right wing violence doesn't result in prosecution, which would be an absurd and obviously untrue statement. My argument is that right-wing perpetuators of violence often receive less scrutiny, the better end of discretion from cops, judges, and prosecutors, and ultimately less consequences than left-wing perpetuators of violence. I thought this was pretty uncontroversial - we live in a country dominated by right-wing institutions in all the places where it matters - but here's a fairly analogous situation that we can consider:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/10/reinoehl-portland-antifa-killing-police/
Here we have a man in a situation almost identical to Rittenhouse's, except he was unarmed and gunned down on the spot - days after the initial incident! The main difference, of course, is that he was on the wrong side of the ideological divide.
Finally, if we're going to consider this in the narrow context of 1/6 then we should also realize that those particular right-wingers made some of the most powerful people in this country feel as though their lives might be in danger, while also plastering some of the most slam-dunk prosecutor bait imaginable on social media. There's leeway, and then there's getting away with that. Does their particular experience represent the average of right-wing extremists? Of course not.
Seriously? That guy was shot by the actual police.
I don't know what you're trying to say
I mean that that the most salient factor involved in this shooting would seem to be not the individual's ideological position but the fact that he was shot not by a private citizens but rather by agents of the state: to wit the police. How is this not a completely apples to oranges comparison?
You seem confused - Kyle Rittenhouse did not get shot by a member of law enforcement for his crimes, and is in fact getting a very, very generous trial. The man in the Washington Post article got gunned down for his crime by cops before he could even get a trial. We can thus see that there has been a difference in treatment by authority in these two instances where the primary cleavage is one of ideology. Hope this clears things up.
What do you call the mainstream Democratic party reaction to the January 6 violence, then? Massive Congressional investigations, millions invested in beefing up Capitol law enforcement, vigilante tweeters scrutinizing CCTV footage to dox the participants, prosecutors pouring out of the woodwork promising life sentences... it sure seems like these right wing mitia dudes aren't getting light treatment for their serious crimes.
Like I wrote in my other comment, it sure seems as though driving into DC, making the most powerful people in this country fear for their lives, and then pasting comical amounts of evidence on social media is not the average experience, and we shouldn't pretend as though it is.
And a situation where the police are the wrong-doers, and not a fellow citizen, that's representative of the point you were trying to make? If you're going to complain about someone else's poor example, could you perhaps bring a better example of your own?
The treatment of the January 6 protestors [and Kyle Rittenhouse, and the unvaccinated, for that matter] are what you get when the mainstream Democratic leaders are frightened. Not merely concerned, not merely disagreeing about policy, but genuinely pants-wettingly scared to death of something. It has a distinctly different, much more vicious edge than what you see when they're merely concerned, or in policy disagreement. Once you see the distinction in the responses it's almost impossible to unsee it, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to see what these existential threats all have in common.
It's hilarious to me how certain lefty types are that a left-wing rioter would have been rotting in jail, while the right are positive charges wouldn't even have been brought if it was a left-wing rioter.
(Given how slam-dunk the self-defense case is here, as well as the "catch and release" seen in eg Portland, I'm forced to side more with the righty types)
"lefty types" lol, ok. Can you give me a convincing explanation for why the self-defense case is "slam-dunk" (it's not, he crossed state lines to show up with an illegal rifle) and the legal bonafides that would enable you to make such a sweeping claim? Thanks.
lol no bonafides here, just someone half-watching the trial at work because I'm bored. To my understanding, you're allowed to defend yourself from imminent bodily harm even if you were a complete dipshit up to the point (that's how the Zimmerman trial went--it doesn't matter that Zimmerman technically "started it" because Zimmerman isn't the one who escalated things to deadly violence). How is "dude I shot admitted to pointing a gun at me" not slam-dunk?
Even for someone half-watching the trial, it's pretty surprising that you don't seem aware that Rittenhouse shot multiple people in his capacity as a violence tourist that showed up with a gun. Including one guy that had his hands up.
His victims had a pretty compelling case for self-defense, too. Should the law allow two people who feel mutually threatened by one another to duel?
Why is it impossible that both groups could not have legitimately feared for their life and reacted in ways that made the *other* group ratchet up fear? They could indeed both be excused under self-defense law, at least in theory.
Who was shot while his hands were up?
For instance, the "crossed state lines" thing is misleading, I think. Technically correct, but he apparently his home was ~20mi from Kenosha. That's a half-hour by car at most. Also, I'm aware you didn't say it precisely, but he didn't cross state lines with a rifle, at least not on the way in -- he received the gun in WI.
Also he didn't show up to the riot precisely; supposedly he was in Kenosha earlier cleaning up graffiti. Add to that the footage of him running away, of being threatened with a gun by the last person he shot (check his own testimony -- he didn't merely have his hands up, he was pointing a gun at Rittenhouse and advancing), it makes self-defense very credible.
So I haven't been following it because I don't care. But I did have one question: Who TF gave this seventeen-year-old kid a rifle? What was wrong with that person? Can we jail HIM?
I feel like this isn't being discussed enough.
There is a good legal argument to be made that it was perfectly legal for Rittenhouse to own a rifle apparently. If that's true then the question of potential jail time is out the window.
1. Do you agree or disagree that, at least according to what we know of Minnesota law, Rittenhouse probably has a decent case for self-defense?
2. Because, according to you, the "left rioter" would have received a much less just trial / verdict / legal prognosis (or whichever specific issue it is we're arguing about here), do you think one appropriate solution is to perpetrate the same injustice on Rittenhouse?
I assume your answers are Yes and No, respectively, which makes the subject irrelevant to this case.
Under Minnesota law, he would go scot-free since the homicide occurred in Wisconsin.
Ugh, I have no idea why, but I was somehow thinking "oh Minneapolis is in Minnesota" even though Minneapolis has nothing to do with Kenosha. Mea culpa. :(
"The threat of investment banks is vastly larger to the average poor person of color than the threat of Boogaloo Boys"
This! I'm a Jew, and I don't give half a shit about basement dwelling losers calling themselves Nazis, yelling "Jews will not replace us", or posting allegedly offensive memes on 4chan. Finance, the military industrial complex, landlords, the oil industry, etc are much larger enemies to the average person than these "fascists" will ever be. Guys in suits who talk about "synergy" and "circling back" cause way more harm than to the average person than these Nazi larpers ever will.
This is an honest question: What is the threat of investment banks to poor people? Follow-up question: what should be done about this threat?
I see this is being discussed below.
See here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/meritocracy-is-bad
"The researchers studied patients who stayed at a skilled nursing facility after an acute episode at a hospital, looking at deaths that fell within the 90-day period after they left the nursing home. They found that going to a private equity-owned nursing home increased mortality for patients by 10 percent against the overall average.
Or to put it another way: “This estimate implies about 20,150 Medicare lives lost due to [private equity] ownership of nursing homes during our sample period” of 12 years, the authors — Atul Gupta, Sabrina Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta — wrote. That’s more than 1,000 deaths every year, on average."
They make stuff worse and make a ton of money doing it
What does this have to do with investment banking? Private equity is an entirely different issue. Solution is the Social Democracy solution: better regulation, better transparency (already pretty darn good in nursing-home world, as I know from experience), better and stronger unions (very strong in Germany, the world's best Social Democracy) and trust-busting.
IB is the training grounds for PE. Every single part of the businesses are deeply intertwined. Most of what PE does is funded by IB. The acquisitions are facilitated by them.
But I get your point. It's way too simple to just say Goldman bad.
I tried to get the people protesting with me to start burning down banks but the POC leadership didn't want to and I respected their decision.
Last summer, I made a Facebook post defending riots. It was the old "Well, a burned down building is not as bad as a lost life" kind of line. I realized months later that my post didn't make sense. So why did I write it in the first place?
Because I was scared. Scared of being labelled a bad person and losing friends. Social media was so chaotic at that time, and liberal folks were on the hunt for wrongthink so they could mob and shame people. They would shame people just for being silent! So I felt that if I wrote a post to signal to liberals "okay he's cool, we don't have to worry about him," they'd move on to other targets.
This dynamic is not the least bit surprising to most of us, I'm sure.
I was also pro-riot. I agree with your point about social media, but we need to remember some additional context: social media was all we had! At that stage in the pandemic, many of us were stuck at home and didn't have our in-person social bonds.
I used to make social media posts just like that for the same reason. But last summer, rioters burned a house down my block (in Philly). The residents were hospitalized, and almost died. I don't make those kinds of posts anymore. A home is more than just property. A family business is more than just property.
I feel it's important to note that 47 people died as a result of the summer 2020 riots. One in Minneapolis was a father of five who was trapped in a burning building and burned to death. It's never just "buildings".
Where are you getting that figure of 47?
Wikipedia, months ago, but wiki now says 25 so fuck if I know
Your honesty is refreshing. I once posted about being a “white person in recovery.” Although I stand by the kernel at the center of that (race isn’t a Real Thing, and in a sense I think we should all be in recovery from the race-based dogmas about ourselves), the way I phrased it and the overall post was certainly virtue signaling.
It's good and mentally healthy to stop using social media entirely, you know.
I'll give that some thought.
Seconded. I’ve never been on any social media and I’ve never felt I’ve missed out on anything because of it
I generally stay away from social media, and definitely stayed away during the pandemic. My loved ones tended to see any BLM protest, no matter how peaceful and socially-distant, as enabling antifa and therefore sinister.
It could be a bunch of pro-life Catholics showing up at a park to wave handmade "Black Lives Matter" signs in a tepid, socially-distanced fashion, all while wearing masks, not to obscure identity, but out of consideration (yes, arguably excessive in a non-dense outdoor setting) for others' health, and that was still uncomfortably close to black bloc tactics for most of my loved ones.
When people are worried enough about rioting and looting, even the most innocuous protest imaginable under the circumstances gets reframed as "enabling" rioting and looting. Much of this reframing is done in bad faith, of course — but it's not like more rioting and looting makes the bad faith harder.