If you believe "might makes right" trumps the rule of law, then sure. I don't.
LMAO how are they supposed to apprehend people if not with force? Are we supposed to send well-intentioned PhDs and Kindergarten teachers to stop someone who is shooting and killing passersby for the $20 in their wallets and purses?
More important, are you willing to live in an area without police, or are you hypocrite?
You don't have any problem with destroying the rule of law when it suits your purpose - granted your purpose is burning down Democrat controlled cities, which is self-defeating on your end - so why are you arguing that judicious use of sub-lethal force to catch violent criminals is "against the rule of law"?
You must remember, you need to persuade
NORMAL people. Outside of your hugbox, this includes:
1. The 60 to 70 million people who voted for Trump.
2. The people who can vote but don't, but would be willing to vote for your side or to vote against my side.
3. The 60 to 70 million people who voted against Trump, most of whom don't want their businesses burned down.
I have no problem with the anyone - homeowners, store clerks, bank tellers, security guards, cops, 17 year old boys protecting businesses - killing those who attempt or actually kill others and destroy their livelihoods. The vast majority of the nation agrees with me. If you want to win, you must meet us halfway.
Or you could do as you're doing in this thread, and construct systems of logic which a priori justify everything you want as legal and good, and everything you do not want as illegal and bad. Surely acting like an even less socially adept left-wing version of Ben Shapiro will win you support. "Surely this time it will be different," you think, "if only those stupid evil hateful Nazi bigots just see how I am right and good and holy that I am."
If your arguments are the best the left can come up with, I don't how my side can't win!
Most murders committed by police get little to no publicity, regardless of the victim's race or ethnicity. This just further proves the point that all Americans should be demanding police reform and/or changes to their funding.
... by burning down businesses, got it.
No, he was never shown to have any ties to antifa, and it's frankly irrelevant anyway. You either respect human and constitutional rights, or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose which groups you believe "deserve" them. And plastic/metal wand, rofl? You mean a smartphone?
The theory I saw was that it was an RFID scanner, but hey I'll concede the point if you concede that people have the right to make/provide goods and services for sale without decades of their lives being wasted because some crackhead smoked the wrong 8ball and died on the way to the hospital.
TLDR version: destruction of property is violence, murder is not violence (unless the victim is someone you agree with politically). Got it.
I don't care what you believe, if you burn my business down you will die and you will absolutely deserve it. My kids don't deserve to starve because you are incapable of emotional self-regulation and you strongly empathize with drug addicts who die as a result of the same.
I don't care what you believe, if you are not using lethal force or harming my livelihood, you don't deserve to die. By the way, if those Trump caravaners bother you so much, why don't you use something other than lethal force or destruction of private property against them? Do you seriously think that "saying mean words" is equivalent to "trying to kill me"? Why don't you just shout them down, get air horns or vuvuzelas or something?
Why are left-wing people so lacking in confidence that they feel they need to shoot someone who disagrees with them? What's wrong with a wrestling match?
You should also consider the implications of right-wing people adopting identity politics in reaction to your demonizing them for wanting to be left alone. Do you want 60-70 million people to unite into one cohesive whole that thinks you are out to exterminate them? Because that's what's gonna happen to you.
In that case, you're insulting the audience's intelligence by attempting to pivot from one topic to the next without backing your original claim, and believing they won't notice. You might have the attention span of a gnat, but it's unwise to assume the same is true for others.
Since you're making this assertion, the onus is on you to prove it. I'm not going to dig through my posts to figure out what offended your sensibilities, so if it bothers you so much state it coherently and I'll respond.
Wherever there's conflict, you'll find capitalists funding both sides. The moderate "Bernie Sanders" solution is to simply tax Amazon and others at a much higher rate, redistributing those taxes through comprehensive social programs. The far-left solution would be taking the money they give to us, spending it on the rope we use to hang Bezos and other oligarchs, and then redistributing all of their wealth and land. Personally I'm fine with either of these solutions at this point, but despite wealth inequality in America being worse than France pre-revolution, I still don't believe enough Americans have the fortitude for the latter.
I don't see how giving money to crackheads to buy dope helps anyone. I'd rather we:
1. Close all overseas bases and bring our troops home.
2. Cut the size of the active-duty military to 1% of it's current size, and rearrange the reserves and various guards towards border, coastal, cyber, missile, space, and nuclear/WMD defense.
3. Put at least 300% tariffs on all imports.
4. Dismantle the Department of Education, IRS, CIA, ATF, and some others I can't think of right now.
5. Turn the remaining federal law enforcement agencies into support and logistics agencies for state, county, and local law enforcement and investigation organizations. Do the same for other federal agencies like the Post Office.
6. Ban all corporations and investment banks.
7. Move most federal authority to the states.
8. Ban prisons and replace prison time with corporal punishment. Jails, used to temporarily hold people before and during trial, would remain.
9 . Vigorously punish sedition and subversion with asset seizure, corporal punishment, and exile if they survive that long.
10. Pull an Andrew Jackson on the Fed.
11. Explicitly ban interest on loans, especially compound interest.
12. Allow each state to basically do their own thing, provided they aren't doing something like importing and amnestying millions of immigrants (legal or otherwise) so one party can swamp the other. Californians can pay reparations to black people, Alabama can go full segregation, Utah can establish Mormonism as the state religion and ban the Devil's Lettuce. What someone does 400 miles away from me has nothing to do with me, and if most of the power was in local and state authorities then federal elections wouldn't be winner-take-all existential crises. This is the best option I think, and certainly preferable to dissolution or civil war.
13. Allow non-corporate businesses some degree of limited liability to protect their non-business assets.
Calling Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot/Lowe's and so many others that fund police unions "small businesses" is complete horse shit though and you know it.
I have very few problems with people burning down multi-national corporations. My biggest complaint is that they aren't burning down Walmart's supply and logistics centers, and dragging the Walton family behind pickup trucks until they can't be identified as formerly living human beings.
I stated no such thing. I said that the police are in the business of protecting and serving capital, as well as enforcing current racial and class divisions, to the end that the middle class will continue to shrink and eventually go extinct. From that you somehow interpreted me as saying that BLM was responsible for these things, which is ridiculous. You can easily find both leftist and far-right agitators among any group of protesters, but you're not going to find BLM or Proud Boys or anyone else claiming those who incite riots as their own. Bad optics, as you've said.
There's a big difference between Big C Capital and little c capital. The former is multi-millionaires and billionaires, the latter is a guy who just sold his house and boat repair business and hasn't bought another house with the money yet. Failure to distinguish between tiers of wealth that are literally orders of magnitude in difference is one reason why Big C Capital succeeds in it's divide and conquer schemes.
If I sell my house, I'm in the 1%. If I sell my corporation which owns 5000 rental properties all across the USA, I'm in the 0.1%. Big difference.
The other difference is that one can somewhat reasonably aspire towards a middle class existence. Calling anyone who is middle class an oppressive capitalist pig-dog whose family of unruly Kulaks will be liquidated on the Day Of The Revolution won't win you any votes from people who want to be middle class. If you should aspire towards anything, it should be a political ideology that leaves people to their own devices and allows them as much independence (both on an individual and community level) as they want. Different cultures will want different things, so doing this on a state/local level is ideal.
The difference between far left and far right agitators is that the former are incompetent at physical violence, and either get their butts whupped or they try (and occasionally succeed) at deliberately murdering people. Right agitators usually have the sense to only escalate conflict when others do it first. If I could teach them to wear bodycameras and get it on film, they will win - leftist agitators lack the self-control to avoid taking the bait.
Contrast this with white nationalists who murder people because they (the white nationalists) are mentally handicapped - or, looking at white nationalists from the 70s, addicted to drugs and gay sex - and are looking for someone to blame for it, and whose understanding of optics is so deficient that they then brag about it.
BTW the Proud Boys aren't far right, you're thinking of David Duke, Mike Enoch, The Right Stuff, Richard Spencer, the "Traditionalists" "Worker" Party (google "Matt Parrot Heimbach Cuckbox" for more information), and similar white trash nutjobs. Proud Boys - despite their flirtations with the far right - are basically Democrats from circa 1975. Republicans are Democrats from circa 2000. The Alt Right are Democrats from circa the Civil War.
Police violence and brutality in this country has been out of control for decades, if not centuries, dating all the way back to when their primary purpose was retrieving runaway slaves. You're not informing me of anything new here, but I do appreciate your assistance in pointing out why mass protests are both necessary and justified.
What have mass protests accomplished, if not further legitimization of unwarranted police violence?
There is little point in complaining that something is not fair. Fairness is for winners to decide. If you want to implement your policies, if you want to write history, you must win. Illegitimate riots don't lead to wins. Crackheads and criminals are not legitimate martyrs (read up on the history of why Rosa Parks was chosen to not give up her seat if you don't believe me).
You win by calmly doing the dreary, boring work of learning how policy is made, and by making friends. Burning down your neighbors business does not make friends.
Left-wing people have this belief that Reality should match Theory, and they lash out when it doesn't. Abandon what parts of your theory are excessively convoluted and don't conform to the simplest possible explanation of reality, and you will start winning again.
Get it through your fucking head: police should not be killing people no matter what crime they're accused of. They are not meant to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner. Nobody should have that much power, and especially not the state.
Yes, it is best when a mob of white trash goons decides who should live and die. Just as God intended!
Police should be accountable, and they should be held to higher standards than normal people specifically because they are asked to do something which society doesn't allow normal people to do.
And I would be very wary of "community justice" if I were you. We've had "community justice" for as long as we've been human; it's called lynching.
I've said it multiple times, probably even multiple times in this thread alone: I don't care for either major party's candidate. I'm most likely to vote for Gloria LaRiva if she shows up on my state's ballot. Regardless, as somebody who is seriously considering moving out of this country as soon as possible, I'm still in the awkward position of needing to hope for a Biden win. As long as a reality TV show host is president, other nations will never view us as anything more than unstable and incompetent, even if we miraculously get the pandemic under control by continuing to pretend it doesn't exist. Thus they'll never lift their travel restrictions either.
Like Sweden did?
And you? I find it hard to believe you're not entirely in Trump's camp given all your thinly-veiled bigotry and pathetic excuses for justifying murder. Biden is most certainly a neoliberal, you won't find me arguing against that, but Trump takes that same philosophy, cranks it to eleven, and adds fascism into the mix. If you claim to have any amount of libertarianism or socialism in your political views, there's no excuse for supporting that type of shit.
Productive religiosity, tariffs, nationalism, populism, and especially localism are not neoliberalism. They are antithetical to it. Neoliberalism seeks to turn every identity and relationship of every person into a commodity, which can then be quantified and priced. It is the most destructive force in human history, and must be destroyed if our species will survive.
Regardless of your beliefs about BLM and neoliberalism, BLM is absolutely a neoliberal operation and you should reconsider your support for it even if you support it's planks or platforms.
I wouldn't say I'm a socialist or communist, but I'm definitely some variety of collectivist at least on the scale of family and local community. One can have different beliefs about how society should be organized at different scales. It makes no sense to be collectivist at the global scale because I have little in common with foreigners and putting us all under the same authority guarantees only war and heartache. It's better to leave each other alone.
Never been a (cigarette) smoker, and I'm not much for drinking either. Last time I had an active MMJ card was a little over two years ago, and I'd say that's probably my drug of choice. Been considering getting it renewed lately, since sobriety is hardly all its cracked up to be, and I've never had any issues with addiction anyway.
My preference would be legalizing (or at least decriminalizing) most drugs. It's just a euphemism though, no need to get butthurt over it.
I'd leave it up to states, including enforcement. Some states like weed, they just don't like it legal. I'm not one to judge; let them do what they want (as long as they do it far away from me).
