Uhhh, yes, he did say that.... While addressing black americans living in the slums of Chicago, pleading with them not to "strike out with revenge against white people for the many wrongs perpetrated against you and yours".
I don't really think there's any comparison between the Watts riots and the nature of the LA protests, not even close.
And which one do you take me for?
Neither, you're the one attributing protestors with the optics of their demonstration. I'm saying that even a perfectly peaceful protest can be implicated with a violent one down the street or later in the day.
If you all actually agreed, then he wouldn’t be in power in the first place, ffs. You feel like everyone agreed, because everyone you interact with seems to agree
A strange semantic injection to what was clearly a reference to 'we', the people protesting against him. Am I wrong in assuming you agree?
You can tie up police resources without being violent or breaking the law
Two things: -you can also not break the law and still be implicated in other people breaking the law -we have a "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws"
If you don’t give it, he will probably try manufacturing it anyway, but why the fuck would you want to make his life easier by giving it to him?
Because knowing you could be killed or deported to a prison in El Salvador and demonstrating against a fascist anyway sends a far more potent message than obediently staying out of the street or dispersing your demonstration when the police give the order for you to. I'm not advocating people throw shit at the police or light cars on fire, I'm saying that even those small acts of rebellion pale in comparison to a tyrant illegally deploying the US military on US soil against civilians. And complaining about minor vandalism when the US is slipping into an actual dictatorship is a little lopsided, if not entirely suspect. Would it be preferable for there not to be disorder? Certainly. Does the presence of disorder invalidate the urgency or cause for protest? Absolutely not. And expecting perfect order when the community that's protesting has been under actual assault from ICE agents abducting their friends and family is twofaced.
The problem isn't protestors being disorderly, the problem is the tyrant in power who is actively eroding what little democratic checks on his power are left. And now I'll remind you that Trump has already granted himself immunity from constitutional limitations by making spurious claims of 'invasion' at no fault to any of these people who are now being forcibly removed and sent to known torture prisons. He will take whatever power he wants regardless of how much people kick and scream in response. The fact that you'd rather chastise those people fighting against it than amplify the opposition to the tyrant they're responding to says all I need to know about you.
It splits the whole thing.
It absolutely does not. Anything that happens in LA is being attributed to protestors, and it's been that way for every protest in the US since before the 1950's. Any protest with more than a couple hundred people either doesn't get covered by US news or it gets implicated with every act of violence and vandalism for the entire city. That's not even me being hyperbolic, US media will even uncritically report on completely unrelated events as if they are a part of a large protest. It's not as if black bloc is a uniform that makes them invisible to protest coverage.
What I think is the actual issue here is an American incapability to actually organise.
I don't actually disagree, but I think our hyper-connected social media makes it practically impossible to avoid the kind of cross-contamination that soils the optics of even a well-organized protest here. Maybe it's different overseas, but from what I've seen written about it in our media you have the same problem.
Me saying “Telling everyone to just throw stones is a stupid idea” is not an opinion, it’s observed history.
Nobody has said they should.
I've grown bored with this disagreement. I think I'll just leave you with a MLK quote I think is relevant.
Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. ... But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
There’s no need to be concerned about “optics” when you’re protesting non-violently.
Begging the question.
It’s much easier to influence people through news when the news actually has credibility, than when you’re knowingly watching shitty deepfakes.
I'm not going to litigate this with you when your chosen example of misleading reporting is deepfakes. I can't say anything that hasn't been articulated far better than Noam Chomsky, so I'll just leave this here. Go argue on behalf of your favorite media choice with him.
You need to stop pretending that the media, corporations and the state are some all powerful entities mind-controlling everyone, and you’re the only independent mind.
They're not, and I don't. But it's an open secret that corporate media seek out examples and footage that evokes the greatest amount of emotion, and cities like LA are huge, with millions of people and dozens of protests happening at any given time. Where one protest, in one location, during one part of the day may be 100% peaceful, another across the city, with different people, at a different time may be violent and unruly. Even if they give both protests an equal amount of air time the next day, which one do you think will leave the larger impression? And which one will be used as justification for escalating police violence?
Nevermind that they absolutely have been known to shown footage from unrelated events before.
But you don’t see that as a contradiction?
Uhhh, no, because protestors aren't the ones being asked to comment on the protests, political commentators are. Very rarely do protestors get to publicly defend their demonstrations and messaging, and even when they are, they don't get to pick the footage or framing that gets communicated on network reporting. Protestors can't control public perception
You’re saying people should stop imagining they can influence anything
Lmao, no, what I said was "Liberals need to stop pretending as if ‘public perception’ is something protestors have any control over." Protestors don't get to chose how other people characterize their demonstrations or their messaging, nor do they have any control over what other people do at large, city-wide and nationally covered protests. Acknowledging that idiots like you will accept any footage or example of unlawful activity as indicative of the character of the whole demonstration is like saying water is wet.
Especially when we all agree that Trump is a fascist who is actively dissolving democratic checks on his power, the level of urgency should - you would think - drown out any piddling examples of rambunctious demonstrators. If liberals were serious about their stated fears about the end of democracy as they said they were, they wouldn't be spending so much time complaining about the optics of anti-fascist demonstrations.
using those same tactics on a violent group of people tearing up storefronts?
Even if they don't show watercannons being used on people actively breaking glass, they'll show separate footage of the violent and unruly side-by-side in order to implicate the peaceful.
Liberals need to stop pretending as if 'public perception' is something protestors have any control over. Yea, by all means, make a point to call for 'peaceful' protests. But even when a protest is completely peaceful, corporatized media will find sometimes even completely unrelated footage from a different time with different people, and place it next to images of police violence.
Liberals should be placing every bit of emphasis on the reasons those protestors are demonstrating, not the way they are demonstrating. Conservative media will paint whatever picture they want no matter what, but democrats have to keep on message.
Stop concern trolling about optics.
See if you can spot the difference between Bernie's statement and MLK's:
Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. ... But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
I don't think it's at all unreasonable to criticize Bernie for leaving that second part unsaid. Not to mention the point Hasan was making, which was picking this moment to talk about nonviolence - at a time when Trump is preemptively painting the protests as violent and insurrectionist - affirms Trump's framing and justifies police escalation.
I'm with Hasan here, this was tone-deaf of Bernie, if not completely hypocritical.
Bonus MLK quote:
These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
No offense, but what is even the point of your politics if it can be boiled down to, "sure, this guy has terrible policies and I hate the guy personally, but he can win so I'll support him anyway"?
Democrats will never win if all they campaign on is 'we just want the most charismatic person'. People already don't have any faith in our democratic system, and now we're just flat out telling them 'the only thing we care about is aesthetics'.
Big yikes.
Which looks worse? A country blatantly attacking its own citizens flying its own flag? Or a country attacking illegal immigrants flying a flag of a foreign country we’ve kinda’ had a war with in the past?
Those people are legal nonresidents you dipshit. They are protesting against the deportation of legally present foreign nationals. That's the entire fucking point of the protest. What you're calling 'bad-optics' is just flat out racist jingoism. There's nothing wrong or illegal about flying another country's flag, except through the racist logic of mass deportation. There isn't anything wrong with protesting as a legal non-resident against your own targeted deportation.
Libs are afraid of Trump taking power under the delusion of some foreign invasion, and their genius strategy to stop him is to hide away anyone who gives latin-american vibes? Put away all the cultural and national symbolism so that we can say 'look, there's no invasion, there aren't any latin-american immigrants here'? This is like people advocating for trans rights by arguing that it's extremely rare to be trans. Ok, yea maybe that's true, but it's not a problem to be trans anyway, why does it matter at all if there are a lot of them or not? And if someone was running around scaremongering about marxists transing the youth, wouldn't it then suddenly be a problem for libs if trans people were loudly and proudly displaying their identities?
Jesus christ, we are so fucking cooked. If this many liberals are totally bought in to this 'bad protest optics' shit, they will 100% be collaborating with the fascists.
I'm not even going to get into it with you about the specifics of black bloc and it's uses, because the point i'm making is the same either way.
Let's pretend there's black bloc present at the LA protests, exactly like you're saying. LAPD and NG are there, and being advertised as an 'anti-insurrectionist' force by the fed, and if protestors do nothing but stand their ground, jackboots start shooting nonlethals, teargassing and zip-tying groups of 'normie' protestors.
What is black bloc doing to mitigate this?
I'm just trying to imagine what you think black bloc is, even by your own definition, that somehow doesn't involve even just optically violent engagement with police. If they're supposed to be a lightning rod to take the heat off normie protestors, how does that not still get used as justification for militarized escalation by police? Even if they're just standing there acting as shields and not actually engaging, it still sure sounds like something that can be used to justify more violent enforcement. A video of a mysterious group of protestors in all black and motorcycle helmates and makeshift shields disobeying police orders for dispersal and lobbing teargas canisters back at law enforcement? Sounds like a riot, better send in the marines. A group of black bloc breaking off from the main protest to break shop windows and lure police away from demonstrators? Sounds like looters and opportunists trying to fuck shit up, better send in the water cannons. If there's a house fire a mile away, media is going to implicate the protest with it. In what world does black bloc somehow not contribute to that media fodder?
I think you're just a shitlib who enjoys larping as an anarchist. An anarchist would not be blowing smoke for local governments trying to stop fascism with bullshit legal threats and bureaucratic legalese, and they sure as fuck wouldn't be running around complaining about the "bad optics" of clashing with police during an anti-police protest. We're literally protesting against unprovoked police violence and oppression, the police were already escalating before the protests started.
Again - just fuck off
It used to be that nonviolent protest was intended to provoke a violent suppressive reaction from the state. It might be uncomfortable to some but I think the white moderate that MLK agitated against are the same people concern trolling over the optics of various forms of nonviolent protest now.
Agitation is the point. Provoking violence from the state is the point.
This seems a little begging the question.
Even if it wasn't, it's a little damning to liberals who now seem to only like a candidate if they think they are "charismatic", which seems suspiciously ill-defined.
Except your reasoning for this revolves around optics
I've been saying this whole time that it doesn't matter if you are sitting around singing kumbayaa, the tanks are still gonna roll in and you'll still be lumped together with the other protestors who aren't.
No. I'm saying that protests almost always involve breaking the law, and that will be used as justification for police violence. Trump planned to send in the National Guard before anyone had lit a match Being peaceful will not avoid this.
The civil rights movement organized sit ins and nonviolent demonstrations knowing full well that they'd be subject to assault and arrest. Them doing those things knowing what it meant made their point for them. You asked "why give them a reason to punish you?", and this is why.
I've repeatedly said I don't advocate for violence. But as with many of the protests in MLK's time, well organized protests sometimes devolved into outright conflict. That doesn't invalidate the nonviolent parts of that protest.
Lmao, now who is the one using definitive language? Why does that window have any moral significance? Better send in the national guard to protect that poor window.
Jesus christ you're dense. I'm advocating against complacency you dumbass.
Nah, that's what you think you're doing, but you're coming off as a nag.