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[–]BigFatRetard[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Most everyone I know agreed with that on Day 1. It was sickening. George Floyd died, and even after being informed he was dead, Chauvin decided he needed to lean on Floyd's neck for another few minutes just to make a point or something.

That being said, after watching cities burn and people die for 2 months, I fully support the police. It seems to me that current leftists only care to empathize when it happens to them, but I see these places and imagine my city, which I love, and I imagine watching the things I love about my city burned to ash and know they were never coming back, or I imagine hearing them from my home and hoping they don't turn against my family, or I imagine that sinking feeling of dread every time I have to go to work, or worse when a family member has to go to work.

There's a little drive-in ice cream place around the corner from me. Been there for decades. Every year the high school kids go to work there during the summer. They make fresh ice cream from locally sourced cream. If it were destroyed by a riot, the owners would just shut it down. It'd be replaced by...what? Probably a payday loan place, given that they seem to breed like cockroaches.

I know a trans woman in minneapolis who worked at the mcdonalds that they torched, and she had stories similar to mine about that mcdonalds. It was a place the local kids were able to go to work, and the older black workers were able to teach the younger black workers how to hold a job, and it was a net positive. They don't build mcdonalds buildings like that anymore, so once it went up in flames, it's gone forever. Maybe they'll rebuild, but maybe they decide it isn't worth it. Her story, her anguish, the stress you could hear in her voice, it broke my heart because I know I'd sound the same in her situation.

"Oh, we're protesting!" -- what are you protesting? The city council agrees with you, the mayor agrees with you, the governor agrees with you, both political parties agree with you, and in fact a black Republican of all people introduced a bill that would have substantially changed the way police work nation-wide (it got voted down, obviously)

I swear, it's like training a dog. You take away their job and they get squirrely and destroying things.

[–]FediNetizen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

So because rioters exist, you don't think there's a police brutality problem? I don't understand you logic here.

[–]BigFatRetard[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Given a choice between imperfect police whose job is to protect my rights and an imperfect mob that intends to violate them, of course I'll back the cops.

It's the inverse of the gambit the nu left is playing: If one problem is a papercut and another problem is a gaping chest wound, of course I'm going to deal with the gaping chest wound first.

And while we're on the topic, there is no racism problem in terms of who gets shot by police. The number of shootings of black men is directly proportional to the number of arrests of black men for violent crime. The reason there are so many shootings is that there's so many arrests for violent crimes. The fact that black people commit more violent crimes and therefore have more consequences for committing violent crimes isn't something the police can fix. To ignore people committing crimes because of their skin color is racism.

The worst part is, the cops fuck up hard without making shit up. There are so many cases, and they're not even remotely close. The cops who did a no knock plainclothes arrest and didn't announce that they were cops and then they got shot and tried to arrest the guy? That's a structurally fucked situation and should never ever have been allowed. The guy who was shot to death while sleeping during a no-knock raid? Again, that's totally messed up and every officer involved should be rotting in a jail cell. No question. There are so many cops who basically get free sex from prostitutes abusing their position. Those cops should be in jail forever. That's all completely fucked.

But instead we get all this crap... Did you know that BLM is officially opposed to Israel? What does that have to do with anything? Did you know that BLM is officially opposed to a nuclear family? What? You know, a black man I respect a lot suggests that the problem in the black community is the fact that the government has been trying to destroy the black nuclear family, and points to statistics showing that people who grow up without fathers are much more likely to commit crime period, and the data bears that out. 70% of youths in prison come from fatherless homes. 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes - 14 times the average. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes - 9 times the average. If you care about black lives, why would you be trying to create this? If you don't want black people to be killed by cops, then it should be obvious that you want a nuclear family, but that doesn't match with their political ideology so forget that!

Tired of it. Tired of Fortune 500 companies all bending over backwards to kiss the ass of the rioters. Tired of the press apologizing for the rioters. Tired of the Internet nu-leftists lying for the rioters. Tired of politicians acting like the rioters are great folks (until they show up at their homes). Every one of these groups is looking out for themselves and all this helps them out. None of it helps the folks living in the affected communities. The powerful voices just don't care. They want to amplify only out of self-serving interests.

[–]FediNetizen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Believing that we have a police brutality problem doesn't mean you have to believe that rioting is OK. You can oppose the BLM movement, and rioting, and still think that the police need reform. You can also believe that cops aren't racist, and still think we need reform.

And for the record, I don't like BLM, and I don't think cops are racist either. I think Derek Chauvin casually killed that guy because he assumed there would be no real consequences, not because Floyd was black.

I believe that there should be consequences for shooting a 10-year-old while trying to pointlessly kill a harmless dog. I also believe there should be consequences for throwing a mother into the pavement over a minor dispute that didn't need any escalation. I also believe that 4th Amendment protections are important, so threatening a doctor's secretary to hand over medical records that you don't have a warrant for should also have consequences.

This isn't a "police vs. BLM" question. That's a false dichotomy. Being in favor of police reform doesn't mean you support rioting or BLM.

[–]BigFatRetard[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think we can completely agree on this point.

I agree that it is a false dichotomy: I want the same thing in both cases, for police who do wrong to face consequences for their actions, and for rioters who do wrong to face consequences for their actions.

My badly made comic was in response to another one asking why 2a folks didn't come out and shoot cops when rioters were getting arrested, link is in the comments here. The point isn't that we should be arresting all protesters, it's that when rioters are committing crimes, getting arrested isn't a violation of rights, it's the protection of rights.

The political establishment refusing to protect those rights is itself an injustice, and I'd love to see qualified immunity go away so the victims of these crimes can directly sue them for their intentional dereliction of duty for solely political purposes.

In my city there were peaceful protests, and while I didn't agree with everything they said I support their right to say it. I believe the police were there to make sure everything went well but there wasn't any sort of problem whatsoever with either group. Hard to imagine that it was months ago.

Lately I've been finding that discussing this sort of stuff and fitting my different thoughts together on paper has helped me understand where I'm coming from, and our discussion here has helped me realize a lot about myself.