When the looting starts, the shooting starts ...

[Wage Slave]

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So what do you think? A perfectly reasonable way to show leadership or an incitement? Or?

A couple of things strike me:

1. He attaches 100% of the blame to one rogue officer. However, there were a number of officers present and no-one thought he was doing anything unusual.You would have thought that an investigation into the incident and culture of the police force was warranted and might lower the temperature more than threatening to start shooting to protect property.

2. Isn't the problem that if you do start shooting there are a lot of guns on the other side which at a minimum is going to make things difficult and at a push is going to mean a lot of casualties on both sides. There is already one death, does he really not care how many more?

If only there could be some kind of rule that meant there wasn't a real risk of the state and citizens getting into a gun fight with each other. Who polices the police in the US? Do they investigate themselves when and if they feel like it or is there a system of external, impartial oversight?

[Mike Oxlong]

More importantly, are COVID-19 cases going to spike now that lockdown and social distancing are not a thing in Minneapolis? Do you anticipate a second waves of cases from this obvious health hazard?

[Scipio]

Americans, as a whole - white, Hispanic, Asian and to a lesser extent African-American - always amaze me. On a social level, great people, but put them into a uniform or give them a bit of 'authority, and they behave like Germans. While race is an important and divisive issue within American society, a lot of abuses within American society, both domestically and their conduct outside of America, source from their lack of education on how to exercise proper authority and power, rather than anything racial. Yes, the Brits, French and Dutch have their 'episodes' of historical misconduct - much greater and longer than any abuses inflicted by the USA on others - but I can't help believing that the Brits who tortured Kenyans, the French who 'disappeared' 10% of the Algerian male population or the Dutch who carried out Indonesian massacres for the sake of a military collective responsibility policy, didn't know they were committing a moral wrong. Americans seem to lack a sense of empathy to any of 'the other' and thus we have Trump and the Minnesota policemen, to name a few, behaving and speaking as they do. I always remember Chomsky's study of American views to the war in Vietnam. Many people forget that what Chomsky had noted was that the majority of Americans who opposed the war in Vietnam, opposed it on strategic grounds (the war was 'unwinnable"), rather than any moral grounds (Westmorland's body count policy) and that the great anti-war protests that occurred in the late sixties, were a result in Nixon changing the Draft laws, which reduced the exemptions available to lower middle class educated kids; predominantly white.

[Wage Slave]

Americans, as a whole - white, Hispanic, Asian and to a lesser extent African-American - always amaze me. On a social level, great people, but put them into a uniform or give them a bit of 'authority, and they behave like Germans.

Well a particular type of German at a particular time. Things are well out of all control now and it is difficult to see the problem is going to be solved by the police doing a bit of shooting. Very ugly and if the shooting starts it will get uglier yet.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arrested/index.html

[Wage Slave]

More importantly, are COVID-19 cases going to spike now that lockdown and social distancing are not a thing in Minneapolis? Do you anticipate a second waves of cases from this obvious health hazard?

Obviously this is the most important threat facing the city. How could it be anything else?

[Mike Oxlong]

More importantly, are COVID-19 cases going to spike now that lockdown and social distancing are not a thing in Minneapolis? Do you anticipate a second waves of cases from this obvious health hazard?

Obviously this is the most important threat facing the city. How could it be anything else?

Indeed it is the greatest crisis that nation has ever faced. Now crowds forming in Kentucky and Ohio as well. Apocalypse in Two Weeks Time. We were warned.

[Wage Slave]

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[Mike Oxlong]

[Russell]

And it was all predicted by math!

History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future

In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels.

A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These “secular cycles” last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution.

In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s, when the murder rate spiked, civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests intensified and domestic terrorists carried out thousands of bombings across the country.

The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist. For the first few decades of his career, Peter Turchin had used sophisticated maths to show how the interactions of predators and prey produce oscillations in animal populations in the wild. He had published in the journals Nature and Science and become respected in his field, but by the late 1990s he had answered all the ecological questions that interested him. He found himself drawn to history instead: could the rise and fall of human societies also be captured by a handful of variables and some differential equations?

Turchin set out to determine whether history, like physics, follows certain laws. In 2003, he published a book called Historical Dynamics, in which he discerned secular cycles in France and Russia from their origins to the end of the 18th century. That same year, he founded a new field of academic study, called cliodynamics, which seeks to discover the underlying reasons for these historical patterns, and to model them using mathematics, the way one might model changes to the planet’s climate. Seven years later, he started the field’s first official journal and co-founded a database of historical and archaeological information, which now contains data on more than 450 historical societies. The database can be used to compare societies across large stretches of time and space, as well as to make predictions about coming political instability. In 2017, Turchin founded a working group of historians, semioticians, physicists and others to help anticipate the future of human societies based on historical evidence.

[...]

To some, the prediction that Turchin made in Nature in 2010 now seems remarkably prescient. Barring any last-minute surprises, the search engine that decodes your brainwaves won’t exist by 2020. Nor will crops that double their biomass in three hours, or an energy budget that is mostly supplied by renewables. But an imminent upheaval in the political order of the US or UK seems increasingly plausible. The Fragile States Index, calculated by the US non-profit The Fund for Peace, reveals a worsening trend toward instability in those two countries, in contrast to steady improvement in much of the rest of the world.

“We are in an age of considerable turbulence, matched only by the great age of Atlantic revolutions,” says George Lawson, who studies political conflict at the London School of Economics, referring to the period from the 1770s to the 1870s, when violent uprisings overthrew monarchies from France to the New World.

[...]

When Turchin began looking for mathematical descriptions of history in the late 1990s, he found that another scholar had laid much of the groundwork for him, two decades earlier. Jack Goldstone was a mathematician-turned-historian who, as a Harvard student, once used maths to codify Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about democracy. “I tried to produce De Tocqueville’s argument as a set of equations,” he told me recently. “I did not get a good grade.” Goldstone went on to become the first person to apply complexity science to human history, and to conclude that political instability was cyclical. The result was a mathematical description of revolution – one half of a model of societal change that Turchin has gone on to complete.

At the time Goldstone began his research, in the mid-70s, the prevailing view of revolution was best understood as a form of class conflict. But Goldstone made two observations that did not fit that view. First, individuals from the same classes, or even the same families, often ended up fighting on opposite sides. And second, revolutions had clustered in certain periods of history – the 14th and 17th centuries, the late 18th-to-early 19th centuries – but there was no obvious reason why class tensions should have boiled over in those periods and not in others. He suspected there were deeper forces at work, and he wanted to know what they were.

[...]

A few months into his number-crunching, he had his eureka moment: “It was astounding: there really was a three-generation surge in population growth before every major revolution or rebellion in history.”

In the 18th century, the Rev Thomas Malthus argued that a population eventually outgrows its resources, imploding in a toxic cloud of conflict and disease until, reduced once again to manageable proportions, it enters a new phase of growth. The theory Goldstone went on to construct borrowed from Malthus, but importantly, it removed the dismal inevitability of that cycle. It claimed that population growth exerts pressure on societies, which they channel in complex and idiosyncratic ways. The analogy he uses is that of an earthquake. Seismic forces accumulate beneath a plateau until it starts to shake, but whether the buildings on the plateau stand, fall or sustain some intermediate level of damage depends on how they were constructed. That is why revolutions cluster in history, but within a given period of turbulence not all societies succumb.

Goldstone recognised that the different components of a society – state, elites, masses – would respond differently to strain, but that they would also interact. In other words, he was dealing with a complex system whose behaviour was best captured mathematically. His model of why revolutions occur consists of a set of equations, but a crude verbal description goes something like this: as the population grows there comes a point where it outstrips the ability of the land to support it. The standard of living of the masses falls, increasing their potential for violent mobilisation. The state tries to counteract this – for example, by capping rents – but such measures alienate the elite whose financial interests they hurt. Since the elite has also been expanding, and competing ever more fiercely for a finite pool of high-status jobs and trappings, the class as a whole is less willing to accept further losses. So the state must tap its own coffers to quell the masses, driving up national debt. The more indebted it becomes, the less flexibility it has to respond to further strains. Eventually, marginalised members of the elite side with the masses against the state, violence breaks out and the government is too weak to contain it.

[...]

Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. In each case, however, there had been one more factor in the mix: chance. Some tiny rupture – a harvest failure, say, or a foreign aggression – that in other circumstances might have been absorbed easily, against a backdrop of rising Ψ caused conflict to erupt. Although you could not predict the trigger – meaning you could not know precisely when the crisis would occur – you could measure the structural pressures and hence, the risk of such a crisis.

It was a simple model, and Goldstone acknowledged as much. Although he could show that high Ψ predicted historical revolutions, he had no way of predicting what came next. That depended on the precise combination of the three components of Ψ, and on how they interacted with a given society’s institutions. Incomplete as they were, his efforts led him to see revolution in a depressing new light: not as a democratic correction to an inflexible and corrupt ancien regime, but as a response to an ecological crisis – the inability of a society to absorb rapid population growth – that rarely resolved that crisis.

Nor were these patterns confined to the past. As Goldstone was putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, the Soviet Union was unravelling. He pointed out that Ψ had risen dramatically across the Soviet bloc in the two decades prior to 1989, and that it was persistently high in developing countries. He also wrote that: “It is quite astonishing the degree to which the United States today is, in respect of its state finances and its elites’ attitudes, following the path that led early modern states to crisis.”

[...]

When Turchin came across Goldstone’s book, he found it “remarkable”, he says. But the model was incomplete: “He described how societies got into crisis, not how they got out of it.” So Turchin decided to complete the model, and to find out whether it applied to human societies over a much greater swathe of time and space.

[...]

Turchin hopes to discover [...] strategies for easing crises in human societies. If the approach that he and Goldstone take to modelling history is right, it means that they can meaningfully ask not only what 2020 has in store for us, but also what the future holds stretching forward over centuries. We should not expect any prophecies from this new science of history, but it could help us to identify structural threats to our societies’ stability and to act to mitigate them.

While societies tend to enter crisis via the path that Goldstone charted, Turchin has found that they leave it via a range of possible trajectories, from rapid recovery to total collapse. That is because crisis renders a society exquisitely sensitive to external perturbation. If no other destabilising thing happens, it could recover – as England did after the almost bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688.

[...]

But while it is true that human societies have in general been far better at reconstruction after disasters than preventing them in the first place, there are exceptions. Turchin points to the US New Deal of the 1930s, which he sees as a time when American elites consented to share their growing wealth more equitably, in return for the implicit agreement that “the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged”. This pact, Turchin argues, enabled American society to exit a potentially revolutionary situation.

Goldstone continues to spread the message that such pacts can work again. Now a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia, he advises the National Intelligence Council – the US intelligence body responsible for long-term strategy – but says his ideas have had little impact so far. At a workshop on societal collapse at Princeton University last April, someone asked him why historical societies had so often failed to act even when the signs of a looming crisis were impossible to ignore. He suggested it was because elites continue to live the high life for some time after things start falling apart, buffered from the upheaval by their wealth and privileges.

More

Fascinating article.

Suffice to say that in the current riots the trigger was Covid-19 and the mass unemployment it has caused in the US, combined with the brutal murder of George Floyd.

And if Turchin's recommendations are right about getting out of this mess, something like the New Deal of the 1930's would help. Let's call it the Green New Deal, for lack of a better word. Unfortunately, the Democrats are about to select a nominee for the presidential election who wants nothing to do with it...

[Wage Slave]

Strangest riots I have ever seen in most cases. People equipped to smash and smashing the windows of clothing shops. Leisurely looting happening, but I've seen far more action on black Friday. A lot of people wandering around looking far more like onlookers than rioters and the police nowhere to be seen even though the numbers of people are not that large. Are there relatively few police available to be deployed these days? Are they worried shooting will start if they intervene, so it is better to contain rather than control? It all lacks the sense of urgency and movement I associate with riots.

[Mike Oxlong]

[Wage Slave]

Thugs?

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[matsuki]

Seriously though, there is a difference between peaceful protests demanding answers/change and riots...with people taking advantage for looting.

The officer holding the guy down by his neck was malicious and unnecessary. That cop can get fucked and seeing how he is charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, he just might. On the other hand, the riots/looting are looking more like a release of pent up lockdown/unemployment stress, millennial impatience with the law, and the assumption of racism being poured onto the fire like gasoline. I think nearly every (always gonna be some unreasonable assholes) American finds what the cop did absolutely disgusting and wants justice to be served. Even though the preliminary autopsy isn't showing death by asphyxiation, lesser charges would still apply. No reasonable person holds someone down with their knee on the back of their neck, and expects the person to not be injured or potentially die. Anyhow, hope the cop gets put away for this....but the rioting/looting/destroying in "response" to what happened is just a shit excuse to break shit and steal for personal gain. Fuck that

[Russell]

I noticed that it is mainly smaller stores that are being looted.

Looting is to be denounced, but if they are going to loot anyway, targeting some Amazon warehouses would bring home a stronger political message. But then again, those looters are not there to make a point, they just want free stuff.

[Wage Slave]

How about the thought that the problem is not just one rogue officer who should be sent to the electric chair? That actually it is much wider than that. That there is a police culture that accepts this kind of violence and as evidence of that consider that the other officers present saw nothing untoward and did nothing. And also is it part of the problem that the police are not subject to independent regulation? If you complain about the police there is no independent statutory body to complain to, you can only complain to the police who will investigate and judge themselves.

[Mike Oxlong]

In the US, the FBI is responsible for investigating allegations of criminal deprivations of civil rights.
https://www.justice.gov/crt/addressing- ... nt-justice

[Wage Slave]

In the US, the FBI is responsible for investigating allegations of criminal deprivations of civil rights.
https://www.justice.gov/crt/addressing- ... nt-justice

Thanks, the last time I asked that I didn't really get an answer. What is their record like? Can they investigate a force for institutional racism? How independent are they really ?How accessible are they?

Is it the case that the police in America are not really accountable and there is a long standing need for root and branch reform to address things like canteen culture and institution racism?

[Russell]

How about the thought that the problem is not just one rogue officer who should be sent to the electric chair? That actually it is much wider than that. That there is a police culture that accepts this kind of violence and as evidence of that consider that the other officers present saw nothing untoward and did nothing. And also is it part of the problem that the police are not subject to independent regulation? If you complain about the police there is no independent statutory body to complain to, you can only complain to the police who will investigate and judge themselves.

This is not about only police behavior, it is about society and the political system. As said in the article I linked a couple of days before, the combination of factors related to inequality in society, high levels of government debt, etc., makes these protests almost inevitable.

[jingai]

In the US, the FBI is responsible for investigating allegations of criminal deprivations of civil rights.
https://www.justice.gov/crt/addressing- ... nt-justice

Thanks, the last time I asked that I didn't really get an answer. What is their record like? Can they investigate a force for institutional racism? How independent are they really ?How accessible are they?

Is it the case that the police in America are not really accountable and there is a long standing need for root and branch reform to address things like canteen culture and institution racism?

It's not what it used to be, sadly. The Justice Department did enforce police reform with court oversight but that was weakened under Attorney General Sessions.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime ... story.html

The Justice Department investigation found widespread discriminatory and unconstitutional policing in the department going back decades, and it then negotiated with the city to produce the lengthy list of reform mandates in the consent decree. The work is ongoing.
One year into consent decree, Baltimore Police reforms move forward slowly and behind the scenes

Lhamon, a Maryland resident and Democrat appointed to the commission by President Barack Obama in 2016, said consent decrees have been shown to improve police departments and their constitutional treatment of citizens, and reduce use of force. And she criticized what she said was the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” and “deeply dangerous” abdication of its duty to oversee local police departments, including through the use of such agreements.

Lhamon said Sessions’ memo, making it far less likely that consent decrees will be struck with problematic police departments moving forward, ignores pleas for reforms from citizens and police officers across the country.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trum ... government

The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency’s approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.

“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.

After protests and outrage, people tried to work within the system... and then the new administration decided they just didn't care.

[Wage Slave]

How about the thought that the problem is not just one rogue officer who should be sent to the electric chair? That actually it is much wider than that. That there is a police culture that accepts this kind of violence and as evidence of that consider that the other officers present saw nothing untoward and did nothing. And also is it part of the problem that the police are not subject to independent regulation? If you complain about the police there is no independent statutory body to complain to, you can only complain to the police who will investigate and judge themselves.

This is not about only police behavior, it is about society and the political system. As said in the article I linked a couple of days before, the combination of factors related to inequality in society, high levels of government debt, etc., makes these protests almost inevitable.

Yes. And to go back to the tweet that started this thread I would argue that on top of all that there is an executive that doesn't listen and is reckless to provocation. Boom!

[Wage Slave]

After protests and outrage, people tried to work within the system... and then the new administration decided they just didn't care.

Thank you for that summary - I appreciate it. And then the new administration decided they just didn't care or even that it could be manipulated to their advantage. Energises the base and gathers votes through fear. Make America Great Again? America is now less great now than at any time I can remember.

[Russell]

How about the thought that the problem is not just one rogue officer who should be sent to the electric chair? That actually it is much wider than that. That there is a police culture that accepts this kind of violence and as evidence of that consider that the other officers present saw nothing untoward and did nothing. And also is it part of the problem that the police are not subject to independent regulation? If you complain about the police there is no independent statutory body to complain to, you can only complain to the police who will investigate and judge themselves.

This is not about only police behavior, it is about society and the political system. As said in the article I linked a couple of days before, the combination of factors related to inequality in society, high levels of government debt, etc., makes these protests almost inevitable.

Yes. And to go back to the tweet that started this thread I would argue that on top of all that there is an executive that doesn't listen and is reckless to provocation. Boom!

Sure, the executive does not help, but it is a mistake to believe that the situation will be resolved if Democrats are in power, because they didn't do shit for the poorer people (and that includes Obama).

[Russell]

Near the White House. And it only seems to escalate by the day...

It was reported that Trump has spend some time in the bunker under the White House...

[Wage Slave]

How about the thought that the problem is not just one rogue officer who should be sent to the electric chair? That actually it is much wider than that. That there is a police culture that accepts this kind of violence and as evidence of that consider that the other officers present saw nothing untoward and did nothing. And also is it part of the problem that the police are not subject to independent regulation? If you complain about the police there is no independent statutory body to complain to, you can only complain to the police who will investigate and judge themselves.

This is not about only police behavior, it is about society and the political system. As said in the article I linked a couple of days before, the combination of factors related to inequality in society, high levels of government debt, etc., makes these protests almost inevitable.

Yes. And to go back to the tweet that started this thread I would argue that on top of all that there is an executive that doesn't listen and is reckless to provocation. Boom!

Sure, the executive does not help, but it is a mistake to believe that the situation will be resolved if Democrats are in power, because they didn't do shit for the poorer people (and that includes Obama).

Healthcare? Police brought under some kind of scrutiny/impetus to reform? Better protection against an epidemic? The economy? A man who could honestly say he was in office for all Americans and could keep the country reasonably united? I have honestly never seen the US is such a state as now.

[Mike Oxlong]

Sure, the executive does not help, but it is a mistake to believe that the situation will be resolved if Democrats are in power, because they didn't do shit for the poorer people (and that includes Obama).

Most of the cities under siege by BLM/Antifa are governed by Democrat mayors, police chiefs, state judges/attoneys general, and sometimes governors as well. Decades of Democrat rule has lead to this. The Secret Service makes all decisions regarding the US president's security. Doesn't matter if it's Barry HO or The Donald.

[Mike Oxlong]

[Russell]

Sure, the executive does not help, but it is a mistake to believe that the situation will be resolved if Democrats are in power, because they didn't do shit for the poorer people (and that includes Obama).

Most of the cities under siege by BLM/Antifa are governed by Democrat mayors, police chiefs, state judges/attoneys general, and sometimes governors as well. Decades of Democrat rule has lead to this. The Secret Service makes all decisions regarding the US president's security. Doesn't matter if it's Barry HO or The Donald.

Mike, my point is not to merely blame the Democrats, my point is to blame the political system in the US, in which corruption is institutionalized and legalized. The Republicans are not any better than the Democrats when it comes to work for the people. In fact one can argue they are worse.

[Wage Slave]

Sure, the executive does not help, but it is a mistake to believe that the situation will be resolved if Democrats are in power, because they didn't do shit for the poorer people (and that includes Obama).

Most of the cities under siege by BLM/Antifa are governed by Democrat mayors, police chiefs, state judges/attoneys general, and sometimes governors as well. Decades of Democrat rule has lead to this. The Secret Service makes all decisions regarding the US president's security. Doesn't matter if it's Barry HO or The Donald.

Mike, my point is not to merely blame the Democrats, my point is to blame the political system in the US, in which corruption is institutionalized and legalized. The Republicans are not any better than the Democrats when it comes to work for the people. In fact one can argue they are worse.

The way Republicans have governed over the last 4 years, led by the incumbent, has been worse than anything I have seen in an developed democratic country. And he is still doubling down - He has enraged the owners of the church over the road with his latest stunt. The protest that was cleared by force was peaceful and he did not even, as a courtesy, tell the owners of the building what he intended to do. How is it possible to be doing a worse job of re-uniting the nation and stopping the violence?

[Mike Oxlong]

The entire nation was united in condemnation of the police officers involved in the George Floyd murder. Protests are a natural result of that. Vandalism, looting, arson, and mob assaults & murders by an anarchist group taking advantage of and using peaceful protests as cover for their own agenda is domestic terrorism. That is the division you speak of. Putting a stop to that and refocusing on bringing the criminal cops in Minneapolis to justice is the right move. Besides, the protests right next to the White House have been anything but peaceful. It may have been a lull in the storm of shit, but characterizing it as peaceful is utter bullshit. No-one is fooled.

[Wage Slave]

Very selective use of data. How about this?

Between 2013 and 2019, police in the United States killed 7,666 people, according to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group. On May 25, 2020 at 9:25pm (02:25 GMT, May 26), George Floyd, a 46-year-old resident of Minnesota, became yet another victim of police brutality as he was killed in police custody while unarmed. Floyd's death has prompted thousands of protesters to march in cities around the country demanding justice and an end to police violence.

The number of police killings in the US disproportionately affects African Americans. Despite only making up 13 percent of the US population, Black Americans are two-and-a-half times as likely as white Americans to be killed by the police.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/05/mapping-police-killings-black-americans-200531105741757.html

The impression of police forces out of control and unaccountable remains. 7,666 people killed in 6 years? Golly, who even needs a judicial death penalty?