In all seriousness, the combination of the protests, the pandemic, the shit-for-brains president, and the upcoming election is a pile of coincident events of stress and uncertainty that exceeds anything I've lived through, I think. The economic stress on the country should be in the list, too.
But the stock market is almost at a peak!
Spirit of '68! Riots, respiratory pandemic, raging election; Hong Kong will soon step in for Czechoslovakia, Britain soon withdraw from all east of Dover; an ignominious flight from Afghanistan and assassination of Biden (/Obama/whoever) remain eminently possible.
Yes, but the US didn't notice it until December.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-brink-insurrection-act
1. The president has very wide discretion to deploy armed forces domestically.
2. As the discussants point out, Trump may not actually use those powers, anymore than he's actually done anything about Covid-19, because the consequent fuckups would then blow back on him (and he has no idea what to do anyway).
3. As they don't point out, Trump probably figures, correctly, that his base would absolutely love to see a bunch of the Wrong People getting shot.
3.1. In other cases (Iran, Korea) the bloodlust has been outweighed by Trump's cowardice (and to some degree by cooler heads in the cabinet); the protestors though have no obvious means of fighting back (or rather, of making Trump look any worse than he already does); and the cooler heads are all gone.
3.2. For comparison, the bloodlust unleashed on immigrants has AIUI never abated; it's been slowed by legal actions and incompetence, but never stopped.
I went to the high-school-organized march yesterday. A local peak attendee count, 15,000 estimated. Relatively well-organized, with volunteers at the perimeter reminding everyone to mask up, and frequent stations giving away water, masks, and snacks, though still too many for proper physical distancing. Young multiracial crowd. We marched 2 miles down Broadway from the high school, supporters cheering from houses, parking garages, and sidewalks, ending at City Hall for speeches.
It mostly broke up as planned before 7pm, with 8pm curfew announced the same afternoon. A smaller number of people stuck around and encountered rapid teargas/kettling (starting 7:45).
1: It's still 10% down from its peak, but it doesn't make any sense that it's this high. All the news is bad.
Sending military folks with specific training to help with logistics, and MPs to maybe help law enforcement, is a long long way from martial law. It's a bad idea, of course, and it'll definitely blow up in Trump's face if he tries it at scale. He won't -- this is the same kind of marketing exercise as sending troops to the Southern Border in 2018. Already committed Trumpists get a frisson, but everyone else sees him for the pathetic malicious buffoon that he is. Yesterday's church thing was extraordinarily poorly thought out: how much of the kool-aid do you have to have consumed fr this to seem like it projected strength?
(We went to services at St. Johns a few times back in the 90s. Nice little church.)
(The Shrine is surely more Trump's speed. But the authorities there don't seem any happier to be having him.)
The guys with the hats and the little cars?
I think maybe stonks are up because it's clear that the quarantine is ending regardless of any planning.
9: 2 link also makes clear deploying troops doesn't mean martial law.
TBC, I don't disagree some military involvement might be useful in some places. I also don't think military involvement would in itself result in more deaths. I think this administration wouldn't make deployments judiciously or sensibly, or give sensible and judicious orders, and more importantly would accompany the deployments with rhetoric that civilian actors would take as permission to kill anyone they want.
I noticed that the ones who charged the DC protestors and assaulted the Australian cameraman were MPs.
More like spirit of 1920, all things considered. Economic catastrophe, severe pandemic, riots worldwide (which kicked off last year in most countries). Difference being, that was postwar.
I thought Americans had Representatives.
I think the police in DC were United States Park Police. Who normally patrol places like the National Mall. DC is uniquely subject to many police forces.
Re: OP, the Blackout Tuesday thing seems poorly thought out.
Re: the stock market, it seems like one out of many reasons to doubt the efficient markets hypothesis, and/or a reminder that the stock market isn't the same thing as the economy. The only path I can imagine to a strong economy in the near future is a smooth, orderly, quick transition to full fascism. Some parts of that seem fairly likely but not the smooth or orderly parts.
Sorry if I screwed up the link in 21. Try this one.
Josh Marshall had a good take on the church thing yesterday, especially this part:
Thankfully, it doesn't appear there was any loss of life in this staged incident or I think any major injuries. But like so much of Trumpism it manages to bring together with a unique crudity the mix of rightist nationalism and TV production which is the heart of Trumpism - a loud red hat with gleaming white lettering of state violence. Nothing more captures the man than holding a Christian bible in the air as a sort of dominance talisman after driving priests out of a church where they were tending to the needs of peaceful protestors.
I keep imagining that Trump heard the music from Chariots of Fire in his head the whole time he was walking over.
I retract 17. The video I'm remembering had rectangular riot shields with "Military Police" on them, but rewatching the Australian footage they're different, so it must have been a different clip.
Plausible theory on the stock market from Felix Salmon: Money is going into stocks because there are no sports events, the casinos are all closed, and people who enjoy or are addicted to gambling have to nowhere else to lose their money.
Related: those among the investing class who still have jobs, but can't take cruises or buy stsuff are filling up their 401K's.
18. "postwar". How easy it is to forget we've been at war continuously in various places since 2001, itself a somewhat arbitrary start date.
When he held up the bible Trump just barely started to pump it like he pumps his fist at rallies, but apparently he thought better of it lest he be struck by lighting.
It is really good.
My better judgment should prevail, but I guess I'm gonna write this anyway. In Sac, after Stephon Clark, the City Council meetings were bordering on violence for weeks. I totally get it, and mostly understand the need for the speech and the processing. But I (with no real access to their interior states) thought that the City Council was substantially "there" and came into the situation willing to do all the weak reforms that people thought were in the possible universe before last week. Even before Stephon Clark was shot, the mayor had directed the city to settle a policing lawsuit on terms that restricted policing, because it was an avenue to get reforms through.
All that rage had to be somewhere and maybe expressing it is the first part of the process. But it looked so pointless to me, people raging at councilmembers who would have used that same time to do the work people were raging for. I see that Councilmember's tweets and wonder if he will nevertheless have to sit through months of people being horrifically angry at him (for being part of the vicious system) until 2am.
NYPD is proudly rotten up to the very top.
33: Oof, yeah. The "Bullshit, dork" response is surprisingly satisfying!
hot take: covering your badge like that should ipso facto mean that you're not acting as an officer of the law, and other parties whom you assault should be able to invoke their right to self-defense.
Want to see something mind-blowing about the right to self-defense in the event of excessive force? Check out the final paragraph here:
I do not believe the majority of society is willing to accept the idea of a subject with a mere singular and subjective belief (and honestly a self-serving and in most cases an uninformed belief) that somehow an officer's force response is excessive and therefore the subject has the right to defend him/herself with force. This thinking is clearly a "putting the horse before the cart" type of rational. If society were to accept this thought, every person being arrested in the future could freely physically resist with impunity from criminal culpability on charges of battery on an officer by simply stating, "I felt the force was excessive."
"I felt afraid", though--that's fine.
I for one would much appreciate the flamewarring being confined to the other threads.
36. Maybe 35, if it's come up in the other threads.
I got to say. I am really enjoying the French protest chant.
On wikiing, maybe "flamewar" is the wrong word to use. Anyway, the ill-tempered exchanges de jour.
39/41, Wait, what? 35 is a follow-on to 33 and 34, and 36 follows on from that (the article is about the right to self-defense against excessive force). None of those are ill-tempered towards others in this thread? I honestly don't know what you're thinking of here.
Anyway, good news, the (para)military has arrived. I'm sure that they, at least, will be calm, cool, and collected, rather than panicked and underpaid, like that guy in SLC.
You disingenuousize, good neb. Those comments, especially 36 last, are an invitation to continue the ill-temper of other threads in this one.
That Little Green Men idea was stolen from Putin.
Well, that wasn't my intention; anyway, they seemed on topic given their immediate precursors (did you not follow the link in 33?) and for that matter the post to which these comments are attached.
Anyway, no one seems to have accept the putative invitation!
https://twitter.com/ppollingnumbers/status/1267941135521067011?s=21
Not only do 78% of Americans think the protests are justified, 54% agree that burning the police precinct building was!
That's, well it's certainly hard to believe, but taking it at face value: holy shit. The people of this country may be less awful than I believed.
45: I hope you shall be proved correct.
42-4: Has anyone identified the company? ("commercial logos") And what's the context? ISTR the federal government employs lots of private security as a matter of course (perimeter security on bases and such). If these guys are protecting federal property, probably shrug.
has this been linked yet? the state of Minnesota is filing civil rights charges against MPD?
By "commercial logos," l think it was Underarmour logos, specifically. That's off-the-shelf athletic wear.
Boy good thing no cabinet secretaries have direct connections to notorious mercenary force contractors, that might be concerning in the current situation.
Every day, over 90% of the president's cabinet don't violate the Constitution!
Rounded to the nearest whole number, the proportion of Republican Speakers of the House in the post-war period who have molested children is zero.
loving 42.2.
better half drove from tucson to pasadena today with his daughter and grandchild (complicated family situation involving among other things a modern plague exposure scare, thankfully brief quarantine situation, etc., in short it has been personally intense this last week! but all good for the moment on the pandemic front, note this is dependent on trusting the quality of various test results) and stepdaughter video'd an endless stream of military vehicles taking up a highway lane forever and ever.
I've never been to Pasadena, but Tuscon has very nice, tall cacti.
Does Charlotte get to keep the RNC's deposit if they move the convention elsewhere?
I've never been to Pasadena, but Tuscon has very nice, tall cacti.
But have you been to you?
It looks like my state House representative will win re-election (where the primary is the only contested race). Her primary opponent went really low and her campaign called so many times I was worried her campaign was worried.
The stretch between Tucson and Pasadena that goes through the Mojave is about the most desolate driving you can do outside of Arrakis. I've gone through it some dozens of times and every time had terrifying visions of the radiator blowing.
Tucson does not have art museums like Pasadena does, but I was glad to see this go by on Twitter. I didn't live far from St. Philip's and it always seemed like a good church.
36. Maybe 35, if it's come up in the other threads.
Word. I'll let 35 lie unless someone requests a counterpoint.
60.2 is great.
I don't see anything wrong at all with any of neb's comments in this thread.
I likewise can't comprehend any issue with neb's comment's.
33: not that that makes it any better, but worth noting that the tweet is not a recent thing in response to the protests: it's dated April this year.
46: Not only do 78% of Americans think the protests are justified, 54% agree that burning the police precinct building was!
No, no. This is not what the poll said - the tweet reporting it is extremely misleading.
Here's the actual poll https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_060220/
The key questions are:
Have you heard about the protests across the country, including the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis, in reaction to a recent incident where a black man died when a police officer kneeled on his neck, or have you not heard about this?
(97% said yes, they'd heard about it)
Given what happened, do you think the actions of the protestors were fully justified, partially justified, or not at all justified?
17% said fully justified, 37% said partly justified.
Regardless of the actual actions taken, do you think the anger that led to these protests was fully justified, partially justified, or not at all justified?
57% said fully justified, 21% said partly.
You can't really read that as "54% supported burning the police station".
Minneapolis city council looking at disbanding MPD and starting over.
https://twitter.com/MplsWard3/status/1267891892722831361
(Link goes to near the end of the thread, but the whole thing is worth your time.)