Liberal Protests

[transplantbillsfan]

 

I already know many will dismiss this but I'll post it anyway.

 

I'm starting to think much of this message board rides on a hope and a dream.

 

Don't like the results of polls. Don't trust polls!

 

Don't like what Mainstream news sources say. Never trust mainstream News sources!

 

Too funny.

[GregPersons]

 

Edited June 15, 2020 by GregPersons

[GregPersons]

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

 

Quote

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

 

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

 

This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

---

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

 

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

 

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

 

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

 

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.”

 

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

 

[Reality Check]

57 minutes ago, GregPersons said:

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

 

 

 

[Buffalo_Gal]

The commentary on this thread...


 

 

 

(the show media really is NSFW)
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 15, 2020 by Buffalo_Gal

[BillsFanNC]

 

[dhg]

I can hear my dad saying it now, "Don't any of these people have jobs?"

[Sig1Hunter]

5 hours ago, GregPersons said:

 

This has nothing to do with Trump, or not much anyway. It has nothing to do with Biden. It has nothing to do with Congress.

 

It has to do with the fact that Minneapolis wasn't just one example. There have been, I've lost track, of how many since. Man was shot to death for sleeping at a Wendy's and resisting arrest. He grabbed the tazer. This was such a threat -- though suspects, like this man, Rayshard Brooks are supposed to just go along with it -- that the cops had to shoot him to death.

 

And again Breonna Taylor. Was shot to death in her bed. Her killers have not been brought to justice.

 

It is much bigger and deeper than Biden or Trump or Democrat or Republican. Nobody is more deluded about this than white people, because, white people have been afforded the luxury to simply not think about race as a real concern. Because it hasn't been to them. By design. But this is what is happening, and it's not new. 

 

 

 

 

Social media also allows a lot more first-hand reporting, and the mainstream news (btw Fox News / right-wing --- these are mainstream, by definition) is massively distorting the reality. 

 

In Richmond tonight, here's how police are dressed to deal with unarmed citizens with poster boards and t-shirts. The police are the ones instigating. This is consistently happening.

 

 

He was shot to death for sleeping at a Wendy’s, eh? Your goal to stir the pot has been well noted. You are wrong, and completely ignorant on all things law related. Keep shouting your idiocy from the rooftops in some dungeon of a message board if that’s what makes you feel better. If you truly feel that there is injustice that’s been done, maybe you can actually take some tangible steps toward learning. I might suggest reading up on Graham v. Connor as a starting point. I doubt this is the route you will take, however. You are too engrained in your “perspective” to open your eyes to the other realities that exist. 

[Sig1Hunter]

2 hours ago, GregPersons said:

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

 

 

I guess you weren’t paying attention when this had been discussed earlier? Here’s the Cliffs Notes: it’s a massive pile of horseshit. But, it’s his opinion so he’s entitled to have it. Doesn’t make it fact. You seem to have trouble with the difference between opinion and fact. 

Edited June 15, 2020 by Sig1Hunter

[billsfan1959]

16 minutes ago, Sig1Hunter said:

I guess you weren’t paying attention when this had been discussed earlier? Here’s the Cliffs Notes: it’s a massive pile of horseshit. But, it’s his opinion so he’s entitled to have it. Doesn’t make it fact. You seem to have trouble with the difference between opinion and fact. 

 

He doesn't bother with distinctions between such concepts as fact and opinion, truth and lies, external reality and internal reality, etc.  If it validates his deluded points of view, he will cling to it like a life preserver...

[B-Man]

Anarchy, Seattle, and All That CHAZ

by Jed Babbin

Original Article

 

 

 

Seattle’s CHAZ: Non-conformist Utopia, or Politically Correct Hell?

by John Fund

Original Article

 

 

 

[B-Man]

 

 

[Buffalo_Gal]

 

[B-Man]

 

 

 

 

 

[B-Man]

 

Class, Not Race, Divides America

It is the truth that the white progressive dares not to utter.

 

By Victor Davis Hanson

 

Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

 

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

 

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples. 

 

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it. 

 

Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins. 

 

Progressive, affluent whites run most of the blue states that oversee the big blue cities who hire the liberal police chiefs and their unionized officers. So how strange it is for liberal elite white people to damn supposed white privilege for the logical sins of their own ideology and governance.

 

{snip}

 

The racial divide will not be healed by black separatist tribalism. It will not be bridged by the white apartheid guilt of the well off. It certainly will not end by this absurd medievalism of affluent, sequestered, well-meaning, white progressives championing black causes in ways that are loud and public, but ultimately selfish.

 

 

Much more at the link: https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/14/class-not-race-divides-america

 

 

 

[B-Man]

 

 

HIJACKED: 

 

Black organizers in Seattle autonomous zone doubt sincerity of white protesters.

The Seattle Police Department has so far been unsuccessful in identifying a clear leadership structure to begin negotiations with protesters, and infighting within the six blocks’ perimeters has continued — most recently as some have tried to change the name of the zone from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or “CHAZ,” to the Capitol Hill Organized (or Occupied) Protest, or “CHOP.”

 

 

The Capitol Hill Undercover Menshevik Patrol would like to have a word.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Buffalo_Gal]

"unplanned donation"   ?
 

 

[Rob's House]

This guy just doesn't get it.

 

He needs an upper middle class white millennial to educate him on what it's like to be black in America.

 

 

[Koko78]

22 minutes ago, Rob's House said:

This guy just doesn't get it.

 

He needs an upper middle class white millennial to educate him on what it's like to be black in America.

 

 

 

Clearly he ain't black.

[BillsFanNC]

1 hour ago, Buffalo_Gal said:

"unplanned donation"   ?
 

 

 

More word redefinition.  You didn't have your items stolen from you, you made an unplanned donation.