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Chris Fox's avatar

The problem with riots is that unscrupulous people use them to foment increased hatred for the rioters. And of course the conditions that motivated protest and riot never get a mention.

Just look at GWB's reaction to the looting in New Orleans; about the only time in his presidency that he showed any passion. His vehemence about punishments to come went over the line of justice deep into sadism.

For decades gay activism was founded on confrontational belligerence. The strategy was to proudly endorse the ugliest stereotypes, even unto standing before audiences and saying "yes, we do recruit children." The political message to the other 97% of the population was "we hate you." Public displays like pride parades were grotesque lewdness, as deliberately offensive as participants and organizers could manage.

Staging riots is every bit as clueless as that was.

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Passion guided by reason's avatar

Nicely nuanced again, Steve!

Reading the thread, I was thinking some of the same things you then so aptly expressed. Like the way your correspondent just lumped all violence together - if peaceful means alone are not moving the needle (er, well, haven't yet moved it all the way), then riots are OK, as if riots = productive violence.

I appreciate your distinction that unfocused riots are not a language, more like a screech. Much as I appreciate some of Dr King, I think you've extended his metaphor to include more nuance, still needed today.

One further point is that the volume of the screech is not a reliable indicator of the magnitude of the cause. So, say, people rioting in one geographic region and not rioting in anther, doesn't neccessarily mean that the former is motivated by a stronger injustice. Some cultures and subcultures are more ready to jump from words to violence, even given the same degree of stimulus. Also, a good deal of the violence, in France recently or in the US in 2020, was more opportunistic than cause motivated.

Personally, I don't think it's helpful to discuss the 2020 events as one thing. There were two relatively distinct things going on in the US. One was organized mass protests, almost exclusively in daytime with proper permits, and was mostly peaceful. A quite different group of people, overall, gathered in far smaller numbers at night, and were frequently violent. Some of the looters in our area appeared to be gangs coming in specifically to commit criminal acts for profit, opportunistically using the chaos but without any clear political goals.

Of course, sometimes the people planning on a night of violence peacefully attended the daytime protests as well. There are even videos of people switching from civvies to all black around twilight. But they were vastly outnumbered during the day, by peaceful protesters. So I'm not claiming the two things involved entirely different people, but the demographics of the daytime protests and the night time riots differed greatly.

So I believe there were the George Floyd protests (largely peaceful) in the daytime, and the George Floyd riots and looting (largely violent) in the night after the large bulk of the protesters had gone home. Conflating these two creates confusion at best, deception at worst.

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