MAGAts: "Let us in! Let us in!"
COPS: nah
MAGAt: "dude bro these guys really want in"
COPS: uh OK we'll clear the way
COPS WITH REPRESENTATIVES: dude bro BLAM
COPS: uh
I've thought about this many times in the past 53 hours, and I think it's better for everyone it went the way it did rather than having police open fire and have a dozen, or a few dozen, dead idiots on the steps of the Capitol. This way they're reviled by almost anyone. Shot dead they'd be martyrs to some, and even some sane people would mourn their bloody deaths. I can't believe there wasn't a blood bath, but I think it's best there wasn't.
Yeah how did skullcracking not start on first contact. Compare and contrast against police response at BLM protests all year...
I've seen it argued that the DC police response was so... restrained because there were a number of members of the DC police force attending the rally as participants. As such, the DC police force was handling the situation with kid gloves in part because those are their buddies out there and in part because they presumed that with their buddies out there they could shape the narrative in such a way that things didn't go batshit. I believe this video illustrates the problem succinctly: the cops this side of the door see this as a minor issue that won't amount to much, while the cops at the other side of the door have been training their whole lives to protect their charges against armed terrorists. Two minutes in, someone starts yelling "there's a gun" as if this is somehow surprising. At any point up to two minutes, one of those cops could have said "could I have your attention, please? There are armed men beyond this door who will shoot anyone who comes through it and we will be powerless to stop them" but no such action was taken. 2:16, a plainclothes does what the plainclothes was obviously about to do, which is obviously what he's been hired to do and trained to do. 2:31, a tactical guy in riot gear with an M4 select fire assault rifle points it at the plainclothes and you can watch his world melt: he's about to pop off some perps and he tries to gesture the gunman to the ground and realizes that holy shit the gunman has him outranked, has done his job, and that all this shit is suddenly real.
That's part of it, but dude, I told my parents on Christmas how it'd go down on the 6th. It was obvious to anyone reading Trump's Twitter and other absurdly prominent social media postings. So I'm either a better sauce of intel than the most powerful nations' intel community, or there was some shit goin' on behind the scenes involving intentional disregard of a very real and likely threat to the US congress, from the top down. In a shit-goin'-on-behind-scenes administration, yeah. And no, I'm not comparable to the entire US IC (what a terribly unnecessary sentence). Honestly, though, Trump blew it when he failed to use the very protests he incited as an excuse to declare martial law. He might have tried, though, and we just haven't heard about it yet. I'd give 70/30 odds for/against, but wager nothing. Eh, approaching this like a betting game isn't for me.
I doubt I've seen different stuff than you have. If anything I think I can say that generationally, I expect less fuckupitude from my government. Those expectations have most assuredly been let down but speaking for my fellow olds, allow me to point out that crazy-ass hyperbole has been common while legitimate rebellion and coups are new. I mean, fuckn' "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within United States." We made a big goddamn deal about that and it wasn't supposed to happen again yet here we are.
Who could have known?!? I guess all it took was for one showboat with a Twitter to come along and normalize the hyberbole. Obviously, there's more to it than that, but Trump allowed his followers to embrace their worst selves, and then cashed in on it with remarkable effectiveness. You're not gonna get too much out of this, except for maybe appreciating the effective prose and presentation, but Timothy Snyder's essay on the situation should be required reading for people still in the dark.crazy-ass hyperbole has been common while legitimate rebellion and coups are new
Naah Tim Snyder is a tedious fuck. Read any? Here lemme give you the capsule on Black Earth: Snyder points out that tribalism led to the Holocaust but then pretty much completely ignores what makes a tribe. Judt pointed out that Europe has always persecuted Jews and that postwar Europe blamed Germany for the Holocaust while also keeping all the spoils they took from the Jews, even in supposedly "friendly" countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Snyder basically says "look one group can hate another group enough to exterminate them therefore any group can hate any other group enough to exterminate them" and here he doesn't even bother with groups. He doesn't talk about what formed the group that wants to overthrow the election, he doesn't talk about how an incoherent message has led to an incoherent attack, he doesn't talk about how most of these people have been radicalized in less than four years, and he leans into the idea that his familiarity with Hannah Arendt means he's an expert on QAnon and it's fucking tedious.Germans were told they could help take the Jews' stuff or join them in the ghettos. Poles were told they could murder the jews and take their shit or get in the firing squad with them. This is exactly the situation we in America face today.
"Trial by combat" "We cannot be weak, we must be strong" "The radical, left-wing socialists who hate your freedoms" Are Mo Brooks, Trump, Giuliani, Don Jr., etc. legally culpable? I'm worried the answer is, technically, no. If one of the only other ways of dealing with this is social castigation/estrangement from fellow republicans? That's not exactly happening fast enough for me to feel comfortable with things. Lindsey Graham was on Hannity on Friday night raising questions about Hunter Biden. Like that's what we should focus on right now? Go fuck yourself, Lindsey.
What would that solve, exactly? I agree that everyone who committed a crime should be charged and prosecuted and that this is a grave failure of so many systems but it's a failure of systems. That dude didn't get the idea that letting MAGAts walk into a firing squad would be cool on his own, every cop in there was with him. And they were with him because they were told to treat this catastrophe differently than they normally treat protests. I also think it's important to note that these guys managed to let a white woman die. They let black people die all the time. If we're gonna start singling out dipshits for treating wypepo badly this is gonna get worse.
It would be a good first inquiry and prosecution into the criminal negligence and sedition that was executed yesterday by large elements of the Capitol Police. Explain why kid gloves are needed when we can ask each and every officer to testify to their actions individually? It's been documented numerous times on the world stage that "I was just following orders." Is not an acceptable excuse.
it's so pathetic. these people are pathetic. i had more to say but that just about sums it up
I think that as humans, much of who we are is defined by who we follow. What our creeds are, what our allegiances are. I think this is what allows tribalism, politics, philosophy, religion, fandom etc to exist. I think that when we align so voraciously with a movement so... bitter. So unaware. So selfish. It lets the lesser within us subsume the greater. This is why movements matter. Why public discourse matters. Why "both sides" only works when the sides are equivalent. Why authorities need to earn their respect. Because otherwise you get this shit. How fucking bereft of meaning do you have to be to fly to the capital and shout in a cop's face to let you in where the congresspersons are? How devoid of other purpose must you be to invest this heavily in THAT?
The ability of Graham and Rubio to both-sides this within 48 hours has been head spinning. I'm of the opinion that the House is the Wild West, so there's nothing that can be done there, but that the Senate needs a purge. Hawley and Cruz should both be expelled. Ron Johnson's expulsion is already being called for by his home town news paper. Heads need to roll, or else the only lesson that will be learned was that they didn't go big enough.
I think 40 years ago you could argue that opportunism and hypocrisy were characteristics that, unfortunately, permitted one to rise within the Republican Party. I think over the ensuing 40 years opportunism and hypocrisy have become the defining characteristics of the Republican Party.
Ronna McD got re-elected(?) as RNC head, like, yesterday. So yeah. 0 lessons learned. I'll continue helping to destroy the party :).
“bro” “come at me bro” “you’re lucky my bro’s are holding me back bro”
I'm making my way through Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop. It's rough. We got here because Republicans are federalist authoritarians who hate hippies and Joe Biden cheered them on for 40 years. One of the points made early is that "crime is terrible" is an American polling evergreen. So is "crime in my neighborhood is not a problem." As a country, we want to see skulls cracked because the country is going to hell in a handbasket but things are fine where I am it's obviously those no-good minorities over there in the unspecified wilds. It's the othering at the core of the issue.
I wonder if his wife is mortified how many people are now going to judge that skinny Christmas tree.