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Police riots and Dictator Don: Open thread

Police are rioting, coast to coast, functioning not as protectors of the peace but as counterdemonstrators trying to beat down, often quite literally, those who would rein them in. Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to sic the military on demonstrators, a good percentage of us are living under curfew, and it’s really starting to seem, as Don Lemon of all people noted on CNN, like “we are teetering on the brink of dictatorship.”

So let’s have another open thread. No trolls.

–DF

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Policy of Madness
Policy of Madness
4 years ago

LMPD has released what looks like security camera footage of their murder of the restaurant owner. I won’t link directly to it because I don’t want it to embed, but here is a reddit post that links it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Louisville/comments/gvbh8j/this_is_a_video_that_lmpd_allege_shows_david/

So what we see is a guy with meat tongs in his hand getting, apparently, shot at random, but I’m sure the cops are going to spin this as “well, we had no idea that the tongs weren’t a gun so we felt like we were in danger of our lives.”

There is no sound but the video does show a guy getting murdered so viewer discretion is advised.

Just so everyone is clear, his body somehow ended up in the street and lay there for 13 fucking hours before the cops would let anyone take him away. Just in case the message behind the bullet wasn’t straightforward enough.

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee

They’ve been operating under that delusion for years. When push comes to shove, they’d rather destroy their own party than yield their power to a new generation that actually knows what the stakes are and won’t shy away from angering the big bad donors.

Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Anonymous

they’d rather destroy their own party

And they’d be only too happy to bring the whole world down with them in flames.

Vic
Vic
4 years ago

That has to be the most pathetic picture of the orange man I’ve ever seen. That look on his face just screams “i’m holding this fucking book in front of this fucking church, why aren’t all of those fucking people doing what I say?”

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
4 years ago

@Vic:

I like the one of him walking there, with the very clear “Fuck Trump” graffiti behind him.

At least Facebook is rebelling against Zuckerberg.

Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Vic
It’s made even more pathetic by the fact that he’s holding the Bible so we can’t see the title. It looks like he’s just holding any old book. Even he looks like he’s tired of this.

PS. Is that a Jackson Rhoads in your avatar? I have the RR Minion short scale which I use for tuning above standard.

@Rabid Rabbit

At least Facebook is rebelling against Zuckerberg.

How so? I hadn’t heard that before.

Ooglyboggles
4 years ago

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1267874872467873794

Deblasio showing peak bootlicking.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1267597995845079040

I thought this was liberal or centrist satire. It wasn’t. “The cops should do fascism after bedtime”

Big Titty Demon
Big Titty Demon
4 years ago

@Catalpa

I mean, yeah, there should be. But isn’t it so convenient that the people responsible for investigating and punishing the police’s crimes are also the police?

Very. But every single voter initiative I backed, signed, got signatures for, or ever did anything to forward relating to civilian oversight here was voted down. 🙁 I did the legal bit. Now some people wonder why there are riots.

@Rabid Rabbit

What? It is? Are you talking about the digital walkouts? Those never have any effect whatsoever. Or did something more drastic happen?

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
4 years ago

Well, the digital walkout, but mainly the fact that it involved some fairly high-ranking people there. And there was the one who resigned: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.j.aveni/posts/3006224359465567

Policy of Madness
Policy of Madness
4 years ago

Bunches of police apologists on the Louisville subreddit are making the argument that David McAtee (the restaurant owner who was murdered on Monday morning) was armed and fired at police. There is a video taken from across the street which is relevant only for its sound – there is a shot fired, and then the cops just literally open up in a hail of bullets a few seconds later. It is not known who fired first. The security cam footage shows something on the floor inside the restaurant door after McAtee was shot (there is a woman who points to it and makes it obvious that there was a real thing there and it’s not an artifact of the recording).

The pro-police narrative now is that the McAtee, who was peacefully barbecuing all night and was super friendly with the police, saw some cops, whipped out his pistol which was in his waistband (and which you never see except for his shirt not quite hanging straight), and shot at police for no discernible reason, after which he was gunned down righteously.

There’s some serious pareidolia at work in this, as there is never a gun visible except maybe at the very end when an object is on the floor and notable enough for a woman to point at it. Said object could be literally anything, and it only looks like a gun if you’re looking for a gun-shaped object in the frame. People are really working overtime to blame McAtee for his own murder by putting a gun in his hand and making the cops’ random gunfire into a crowd somehow perfectly targeted.

Vic
Vic
4 years ago

@Naglfar:

It’s a Jackson RX10D, which is a budget line version of the Rhoads V – single volume knob, no pickguard. Still quite a nice guitar – almost as nice as the Mockingbird beside it. They’re my two main metal weapons of choice.

Yutolia the Laissez-Fairy Pronoun Boner
Yutolia the Laissez-Fairy Pronoun Boner
4 years ago

@PoM:

I’m not surprised, but that lie about him whipping out his gun at cops when he’d served them free for years is absolutely ridiculous.

It makes me so mad how they ducking turn like this. “Oh, you’ve been going above and beyond and helping us out for years? Oh ok, we’ll still kill you then blame you for your own death.

Fuck these assholes.

Dalillama
Dalillama
4 years ago

@PoM

There’s some serious pareidolia at work in this,

No there isn’t. They’re just lying.

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
4 years ago

Since this is the current open thread, a question for the Brits here. Apparently Alexander De Pfeffel has just proposed to offer British passports to 3 million people from Hong Kong. How is that going to play with the “We have to control immigration” Brexit crowd?

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
4 years ago

@ rabid rabbit

Good question. Brexit now seems like a billion years ago. It’s funny, the general feeling here once the fateful decision was done was ‘when will we stop talking about this!”. Be careful what you wish for as they say.

As for the HK passports, I’m showing my age now, but I remember in 1997 it felt like a complete betrayal to people whom had always really been considered UK citizens that the government of the day created a new category of passport for them. My own feeling is that this is finally making up for that. I’m sorry for the people of HK that events over there are what it took. I am quite pleased though, and a bit surprised, that the present day government are doing the right thing more or less.

One thing to remember though, these ‘passports’ are really just visa extensions. Currently people holding those passports can currently come here for six months at a time; that’s being extended to twelve.

Hopefully though that will move to permanent residence, or at least ‘indefinite leave to enter’. That’s a visa category that allows free travel to and from the UK. (as opposed to ‘indefinite leave to remain’. That’s given to asylum seekers. It allows permanent residence, but if you leave the country you have to apply again to come back in.)

It’s sad though that it took China’s actions to bring this about. Would have preferred HK to stay self determining until at least 2047 (which was the original agreement) and people could feel as at home in both locales.

ETA: Don’t forget, Bojo just latched onto Brexit to get his paws on No.10. At heart he’d always been a proponent of free movement. He actually did a really good two part documentary about it a few years back.

Specialffrog
Specialffrog
4 years ago

@Rabid Rabbit: the UK still wants to import workers. They just don’t want those workers to have rights.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
4 years ago

Missed the edit window, but maybe to add…

I can’t speak to your actual question; gawd knows what Brexiters think; they’re far from homogenous.

Migration was obviously an issue for a lot them, but there were all sorts of motives. The Lexit people, whom were more opposed to the neoliberal aspects of the EU probably won’t mind. Neither will a lot of the ‘red tape’ business types.

But the fear is that Brexit will have made a lot of people here feel very unwelcome. We need(ed) them though. 26% of NHS staff for example are non-Brits. Loads of businesses fear losing capable people too; the financial sector for one.

So for the govt, Brexit was a pandering to populism, on both left and right, solely for the purpose of getting elected. But being business oriented, and not huge fans of the unions, the ‘four freedoms*’ suited their agenda. They tend to globalism after all.

So HMG will be very aware that a pool of high skilled motivated people is handy to have.

(* Freedom of movement for goods, services, capital, and labour)

Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Vic
My main metal guitar right now is a Dean VXNM-7 Vendetta. I got it pretty cheap and it works pretty well for the price. It’s the only 7 string I own, so it gets used both in standard tuning and as a substitute for a baritone guitar (tuning the G string to an F# and ignoring the high E string).

Moogue
Moogue
4 years ago

Since this is the new thread, imma just gonna drop this comic about “all lives matter” here.

https://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2016/07/07/all-houses-matter-the-extended-cut/

Sorry it’s not an embedded image.

Ooglyboggles
4 years ago

Biden in the face of nationwide protests on police

“We need more cops”

https://twitter.com/mugrimm/status/1267836861055217665

Pelosi: we need a bible for the clapback ignore me voting for Trump’s defense budget.
https://twitter.com/heatherscope/status/1267823160482643970

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
4 years ago

@Vic, Naglfar:

Ah, but do any of these machines kill fascists? 🙂

Ooglyboggles
4 years ago

Literally thiscomment image

Ohlmann
Ohlmann
4 years ago

@Ooglyboggles : what I wish for pretty much any country is what France used to have, called “Proximity police”, and who was a bunch of unarmed police officers dedicated to defuse small conflicts and be somewhat approcheable authority holders that had the time both to socialize with their charge (and were encouraged to do so) and that could be asked for “trivial” things that nonetheless were not easy to defuse. It didn’t worked perfectly, but at least in some part it was a gigantic improvement.

It was, of course, removed by the conservatives and never brought back again by the socialists since in the meantime they become mostly “centrists”, and, you know, clearly there’s some good in the law enforcement of Judge Dredd, we should take a bit from that playbook.

Lukas Xavier
Lukas Xavier
4 years ago
Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@Surplus

Ah, but do any of these machines kill fascists?

Well, I’ve had an idea for a while now to have some custom stickers made that say “This machine kills TERFs,” so maybe one day I’ll actually design and order some stickers like that.