@mimi

Thank you. Agree.

They are holding hearings in New York with the protesters. There is a good article in the nyt which you can probably access via google.

'Where are the good cops?': New York protesters unload in state AG's hearing on police misconduct

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/where-are-good-cops-new-y...

Protesters, lawmakers and others testified to abusive treatment by the police at recent New York City protests during a public hearing Wednesday as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' fast-moving probe into police conduct at demonstrations following George Floyd's death.

And there is also this...

A female protester who was shoved to the street by a police officer testified at the New York attorney general's hearing: 'Where are the good cops I keep hearing of?'

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/a-female-protester-who...

James is set to hold a second day of hearings on Thursday because of the "outpouring of submissions" regarding interactions between police and protesters.

Here is the NYT article...

‘It Felt Like Warfare’: Protesters Say the Police Attacked Them

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/nyregion/nypd-leticia-james-hearing-p...

Kali Gerber, the nurse, took part in a protest march in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, that same week, winding up outside the 88th Precinct station house in Clinton Hill. There, she said, she and about 200 other demonstrators faced off with a line of officers in riot gear.

Ms. Gerber said that after some teenagers jumped on a police van, the police told the crowd to leave. Before anyone could do so, however, the police mounted a charge with shields, batons, pepper spray and flash-bang explosives, she said.

One officer shoved Ms. Gerber with his shield, she said, and she lost one of her shoes and cut her leg on the chain of her bicycle. A man was thrown into an iron fence, she said, and a woman near her was slammed into the door of a police car. Hours later, the federal authorities arrested two people and charged them with damaging a police vehicle at the station house with a Molotov cocktail.

Ms. Gerber found herself caring for a “traumatized” young man who had a head injury. But the police, she said, would not permit an ambulance to pass through the crowd to pick him up. The ambulance, she said, had to take another route and it finally reached the man 20 minutes later.

Take good care and have a good one

especially former East European countries vs.the rest of Europe. He wants his wars. Strangely enough only the Corona pandemic will help us.

I want a White House gate and a Congress gate and then some folks in the bunker for good.

Many folks here want the American troops to leave and take their nukes with them. We don't want war in Europe, but I am pretty sure that's exactly what Trump wants to see.

@randtntx

Baldwin had a way with words. The more I listen the more I comprehend. I thought this passage was salient. Another bit that kept scratching at my brain.

I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. This is being done, after all, not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity, a word we won’t examine too closely; with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, and which espouses the notion of the freedom of the world.

From the debate transcript

https://www.rimaregas.com/2015/06/07/transcript-james-baldwin-debates-wi...
Take good care and have a good one

of multiple converging disasters but this has been our course for a long time. We all know this. The only difference is that now, the comfortable classes can't ignore these disasters any longer. I wish we could all behave with care, try to see the big picture, try to avoid being divided, and as we choose our course of action, try to value each other and life itself.

I was listening to a James Baldwin speech last night and among his many insights this struck me when he said; "I refuse to believe that we are going to let ourselves to be manipulated into oblivion by some of the most illiterate people in the history of the world". In his speech he indicates that the word 'illiterate' doesn't mean 'uneducated' but rather lack of heart, or lack of art, or lack of feeling, or the corruption that occurs when we embrace the craven capitalistic values of 'get and spend' and 'conquer and dominate'. It truly would be a shame to let this grand experiment be so bungled by the worst among us.

@jbob
Things have changed in 40 years. There is now the school-to-prison pipeline. Need to keep those prison beds filled or the states have to pick up the tabs. There’s money to be made from prison labor. The system is more streamlined now and as corrupt as always.

Thanks for the video and your comment. Awesome. Take good care and have a good one.

Sick and tired of this bullshit game! My old boss Peter Tosh was always down on the Blacks in the US for not standing up to the oppression here. He could not understand why they continued to put up with the bullshit! That was 40 years ago and look where it is now. What will it take? In New York State the so called progressive legislators recently walked back bail reforms due to police and prosecutors whining about non-existent problems with them. They won't even legalize recreational cannabis! the so called "decriminalization" they did is a joke. If some kid in Queens get busted for weed and receives an appearance ticket. When they fail to show up in court, bingo a bench warrant is issued and they are "in the system". Video below is of his band line up from back when I first started working for him.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
You know this is all your fault. Your last essay just sparked so many thoughts about the Bernie campaign. You so nailed Bernie's MO so early on. Me, not so much. Boy howdy, did you ever get me thinking.

What was it that Bernie did? Heh. Thanks. Good food for thought.

And what a comment. Lol.

You've now split the movement, given everybody not in it the idea that the movement is a bad place to be, or at least hopelessly disorganized and divided, and, as a bonus, encouraged a lot of well-meaning people to become more authoritarian and less rational. Do this often enough, for long enough, and many of them will forget how to be rational, and will no longer be able to recognize that they're being authoritarian. In fact, do it often enough, for long enough, and most of the culture will no longer recognize what authoritarianism is. In fact, good and bad will be defined primarily in partisan, authoritarian terms (you're good because you endorse the goals of this tribe and not that one; you're bad because you criticized my tribe's leader). There will be no sense of any independent moral principle or consistent ideology to which one is accountable.

Yes and no. Surely they will try. But blacks have seen this in spades for way too long. Their eyes are wide open. So that, I think, I hope, is going to be the thing that keeps the movement going forward. And they are taking leadership roles and people are following. We are united, finally, across race. This is really exciting to me. Scaring the shit out of the ptb, no doubt. heh.

The thing I know about movements is that in the beginning it's pretty loose. The capable people bubble up and take control and everyone works together. This happens in wars, it happened in the early Bernie movement, it happens in startups. But give it a couple of years and bureaucracy sets in. So there's that. Things are moving fast right now.

There is also the fact that there are many different organizations involved and many people who have no affiliation. I think that is a good thing to keep the momentum going. Because there is no one thing that anyone can pin down.

I have read (do not have the link) that the fbi is going to people's houses and questioning them, people who have started protests. The article was about some young girl in the south organizing a protest. They were trying to see if she was part of antifa.

Antifa, by the way, is not an organization. It is a set of tactics that was developed in Germany and used to fight the fascists in the streets before Hitler had complete control. By Jews, iirc.

Thanks for your great comment. I will have to read it again. A lot there.

Take good care and have a good one.

Like they did with Obama.

It's all about getting people to focus on personalities.

1)Have famous people friendly to the establishment step up as leaders of the movement, or have the establishment seed leaders into the movement and subsequently make them famous via the establishment's media machine.

2)If the movement produces leaders on its own, organically, as it were, get them under control if you can and destroy their reputations if you can't.

3)Next, have several of the most prominent of these leaders take policy positions that either oppose the movements they supposedly lead, or else endorse such weak-tea versions of the movement's goals that accomplishing them would actually set the movement back. While they are actually taking positions against the movement, they should continue to make very emotional speeches about how important the movement is and how bad its opposition is. They can also make vague blanket statements supporting abstract virtues, and express sympathy for those whose pain created the movement in the first place. Sympathy, like good manners, costs nothing.

You have now created a situation where supporting the movement's goals would require abandoning its leaders, or at least criticizing them. You can expect that some of the movement's adherents will do this, probably the ones who are more interested in facts than personalities, and more dedicated, at the end of the day, to truth than loyalty. This is where your strategy really starts to snowball.

4)When rank-and-file movement adherents start criticizing movement leadership, deploy a)saboteurs on the ground, and, most importantly, b)your army of online trolls, some of which are human but most of which are sockpuppets. Each human working for you can deploy at least 20 socks. These human and digital saboteurs should angrily and ardently defend the leaders against criticism, and accuse the critics of being saboteurs themselves, or apostates, or even just useful idiots. At any rate, make sure that your forces destroy the credibility of the critics.

5)Since it's always a good idea to control both sides of any argument, you will want to keep this conflict going any time you see that it's flagging (often, such a conflict will flag because too many of the original critics have left the movement, or fallen in line. These are good results, but you don't want the intra-movement conflict to end on that account). So, if necessary, deploy some saboteurs (both human and digital) to defend the critics as well as to attack them. But make sure the critics always end up looking worse than their attackers. I call this the "Hannity and Colmes" tactic.

6)By this time, the main bulk of conversation will be about which of the movement's leaders and adherents are trustworthy. You want the greatest focus to be on whether or not movement critics are bad people.

You've now split the movement, given everybody not in it the idea that the movement is a bad place to be, or at least hopelessly disorganized and divided, and, as a bonus, encouraged a lot of well-meaning people to become more authoritarian and less rational. Do this often enough, for long enough, and many of them will forget how to be rational, and will no longer be able to recognize that they're being authoritarian. In fact, do it often enough, for long enough, and most of the culture will no longer recognize what authoritarianism is. In fact, good and bad will be defined primarily in partisan, authoritarian terms (you're good because you endorse the goals of this tribe and not that one; you're bad because you criticized my tribe's leader). There will be no sense of any independent moral principle or consistent ideology to which one is accountable.

There are problems, of course, with being accountable to an ideology as well, because neither humans nor their ideologies are perfect. But it's better to have a concept of an ideology or a set of moral principles that exists independently than it is to engage in Orwellian groupthink, in which actions and beliefs are right simply because the group or its leaders say so--and can become wrong in a heartbeat, because the group or its leaders say so.

In this profoundly anti-democratic culture, most of the time there is no daylight between what the group says and what the leaders say (that's one more benefit of having a corrupt press). So what you're left with is a mindless adherence to whatever leaders say at any given moment. At least, those leaders who belong to you. Hopefully, you've already nullified any independent leadership.

That's how you shift a narrative. And that's why they hated Occupy's refusal to name leaders.

After writing this, it occurs to me that I probably misinterpreted your question, and that you were wondering what the assholes at the top will say next.

@Cassiodorus

He Whose Record Cannot Be Discussed - too funny. Belly laugh. And so accurate.

Great comment. One small nitpick. It's not a utopian dream. It's a practical plan of action to bring about a world we can all live in together.

Thanks for the link to the call. Take good care and have a good one.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwE_y6oOel6hzWTWuVs0Q6iBBXkVA8...

They're having a conference call today at around 530pm PT/ 830pm ET.

Bernie Sanders promoted the idea that we could ask for something in return for our hard-earned tax dollars. Now we're back to the Movement to Elect He Whose Record Cannot Be Discussed. And maybe we'll discuss the "value" of having statues torn down or left standing, so we can belong to clubs of like-minded people or something like that.

Other reasons why we need a movement of our own include: Americans do not understand 1) why we should wear masks inside public buildings, 2) why we should get something from government instead of just complaining about having to pay our taxes, or 3) why education is important.

Maybe we just need a guided utopian dream.

@enhydra lutris
Here's what Jimmy thinks of the protests. From lo's post above...

Do I think that these protests are going to have lasting reformative effects?I don’t know. I don’t think so. The corporate state is just figuring out new ways to squash it. Just look at the way the cop co-opted the kneeling. They would kneel and then get up and teargas the hell out of them.

It's certainly not going to be easy. But with black leadership we might be able to pull it off. One can hope.

To true. Heh.

part disruption, part distraction, part age and part laziness,

It's been hot here too. Near the coast but it bakes in the afternoon.

Take good care and have a good one.

and trying to focus my eyes and such and my automatic pessimism-skepticism-cynicism is dominant but you have made me hope a bit, which is good. Thanks for the Baldwin transcript. As you note,they seem to be losing control of the narrative just a little in some respects, though some of their lackeys are at the same time exercising greater control and censorship of the non-aligned independent media sources and voices. As you note, we will possibly find out a lot about their current game plan come the 20th. The next few days will be long days in more ways than one.

It will get to at least 90 today, which may or may not speak to one catastrophe in process. We often do get a few hot & very hot days right around the solstice, and a few more in what used to be called "Indian Summer". Summer will be here in two days and we are still in the middle of spring chores, ah well, part disruption, part distraction, part age and part laziness, I guess. At any rate, said chores are calling, trivial though they may be in the greater scheme of things. Personal life keeps intruding and I have it very easy as things go. Keep thinking of Tulsa.

be well and have a good one

@Anja Geitz
Really, it is baffling. The only thing that makes sense is that Tulsa is a clear shout-out to his base. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Take good care and have a good one.

While we all know Trump is a few sandwiches short of a picnic, his choice to hold his first rally in Tulsa is not only a dog whistle to white supremacy, but it’s a baffling electoral strategy in the long term. While the Democrats are vying for the votes of moderate Republicans in an effort to turn the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, Trump continues to court the bat shit crazy constituents in his party to what end? Broadening his coalition? How does that work exactly?