"Chauvin seemed awfully nonchalant given the circumstances, but he arguably followed protocol, as wrong as that might be."
The testimony of Derek Chauvin's superiors in the police department is that he did not follow protocol. There's no "arguably" there.
"The medics could have come within 9 minutes, but the crowd was shouting violent threats, and EMTs are known to get attacked."
You are bending over backwards with conjecture and speculation. The insinuation that the crowd- whatever their expressed hostility- was so unhinged that they would attack anyone in uniform- even the EMTs coming to Floyd's aid- is not only absurd, it implicitly relies on the assumption that the onlookers are nothing more than a pack of rabid dogs.
I heard some of that testimony firsthand on C-span radio. The witnesses did not present themselves as the type of people who are- or were- so deranged that they're unable to differentiate between the actions of the police officers on the scene and the role to be played by medical first responders pulling up in an ambulance.
As for my response to the question you raised about Derek Chauvin "arguably" following protocol, that's from witness testimony at the trail also. The police witnesses- which included the chief of the Minneapolis police- were unanimous in their position that Chauvin did NOT follow protocol. I don't feature how anyone can overrule their consensus view on that.
Imagine being a juror who is being "protected" by the Minneapolis police. Now imagine that the Chief of Police testifies in a way that shows he wants a conviction. Would you feel any pressure in reaching your verdict?
Just because a police officer goes out and kills a black man in cold blood, should that mean the public will no longer have his back? What's the point of having a Union at all if they aren't willing to cover for your crimes?
I relish the day when all people, black, white or other, have just a modicum of responsibility for their actions. No amount of whiteness is making people ride dirty in a benz truck maskless on COVID, meth, and opioids with a pocket full of drugs and fake currency.
Similarly, no amount of whiteness is making the guy in Brooklyn Station assault and rob a woman with a gun, choke her, fail to show for their hearing, and then once again aggressively resist arrest.
People are out there LARPing like they are in a 50 cent video, posing a severe threat to their community, and we only see a problem behind the badge.
Honestly, is this a serious post? Are you being satirical here with all the buzzwords and tropes? The only thing you missed was welfare queen, or maybe you are saving that for a later post.
It's like a parody of the parody Mr. Bookman, the library cop lecturing Seinfeld on all the sick "pee pees and wee wees" written in library books that are corrupting the youth of America.
Wish it were satire. But you know this is exactly what happened, which is why once again you can't address anything at hand and throw up strawmen and insults.
The great thing about Taibbi's website is I often come across folks I'm ideologically opposed to and learn something, but occasionally I encounter someone so inculcated with John Oliver tripe simple facts that are counternarrative makes them sperg out.
I'm glad to say I learn a lot here too, but only when a person operates beyond talking points and tropes and in the real world. I haven't used a Strawman or an insult. I can't even say I disagree with what you're saying here because it is entirely unserious. Your own posts are a better argument against you than anything I could come up with. Well played.
I'm intentionally not engaging your specifics since Mascot already did that and you put on an amazing version of the game twister in your responses. It's difficult to engage when a person is committed to belieiving something isn't so all evidence and arguments to the contrary. You ended up doing a classic cop "well he was no angle" deep dive into George Floyd's background and rationalized the smear job by pretending it has something to do with this trial. You of course skipped Derek Chauvin's past.
Derek Chauvin may walk free. The police even in situation like this are extended a level of benefit of the doubt, presumption of innocence and due process that average citizen will never see in a court of law. For cops, prosecutors, judges and ultimately juries they actually follow The Constitution.
If he's proved not guilty as better than 98% of cops are regardless of what they did, it will not be due to police report versions of what George Floyd did in that past. Reports that are famously overblown, inaccurate and have nothing to do with this case, your imagination to the contrary.
You use a lot of buzz words, acronyms and seem defensive in thinking I insulted you in your responses. You aren't one of those snow flake anti-pc people that goes through life thin skinned and easily offended are you? If so, that makes you know different than those PC people you compared me to. I think such a person might have a tough time here.
Hmm...what's the legal term for the exercise of that pressure...oh, yeah- Obstruction of Justice. A felony offense. And when more than one person is involved, even one overt act of furtherance- any proof of planning to exercise that sort of "pressure", even if the plan isn't carried out- is Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice, which is an even more severe offense.
So your post is basically accusing the Minneapolis Chief of Police of a criminal inclination to conspire to obstruct justice, with his mere presence on the witness stand tantamount to a threat to the jury that he'll find ways to punish them if their verdict disagrees with his testimony. Testimony that he's offered under oath, as an accredited witness under the rules of criminal jurisprudence that apply to that trial. Officer Chauvin's defense team hasn't objected to his presence on the witness stand- much less casting it as jury intimidation, as you've done.
Where do you get the idea that Chief Arradando would commit such a crime? Do you have the slightest hard evidence on that score? You're inviting me to indulge your fantasy as if it had some relevance to real world events. That isn't just grasping at straws; the straws you're grasping at are imaginary. Based on the amount of evidence you've offered to support your scary concern trolling speculation, which is- Zero.
When did Chief Arradondo stop beating his wife?" is also a simple question. The fact that a question is "simple"- or unanswerable- has no bearing on the validity on its premises. That's a matter of evidence, and you have none.
The question is simple and answerable. A better analogy than someone beating their wife would be to ask if the chief of a military branch would have undue influence if he testified at a court-martial.
Court-martial proceedings and civilian trials are very different proceedings, held under a very different set of rules, with a different set of participants- including a different sets of rules for impaneling a jury.
United States citizens don't live under a military junta, either. Which means that not even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is indemnified against criminal charges of perjury, witness tampering, jury intimidation, or obstruction of justice, if evidence can be developed to pursue an indictment of that sort. As is also the case with even the highest leadership ranks and appointed offices of metropolitan police departments in the U.S.
At this point our conversation has gone wildly off-track- beyond your initial absurd speculations on the actual trial taking place, and into offering yet another hypothetical scenario that requires knowledge of abstruse details of military jurisprudence, including my reminders about the subordination of the U.S. armed services to civilian authority. Irrelevant abstractions, as contrasted with the evidence-based details of the Chauvin trial. I realize that it's undoubtedly turf where you feel more comfortable, but it's also a phony gambit. So, we done yet?
Well the cross examination was pretty rough on these folks credibility, and when their broader statements were broken down, they seemed to contradict themselves fairly severely.
But that said, it's not so easy sticking up for someone, much less your own protocol (if it is such), when violent mobs are demanding conviction or destruction. Hell I might fib just to save the city.
This trial is so overloaded its ridiculous. Humans are meeting superhuman circumstances....such it is in the late stages of an empire with a Marxist takeover disguised as *justice* underway.
I'll settle with Taibbi, and my fault for using a little sarcasm and hyperbole.
But keep insinuating people fascists...just don't be shocked when shit hits the fan again. It's not like history has repeated over and over, for no reason whatsoever, right?
I'd like to ask in return that you consider alternative futures that DON'T involve the shit hitting the fan.
You can increase the peace, or you can undercut it. The people I notice ginning up the unrest tend to be either naive young people craving Drama- young people are always so exaggerated!- or their more cynical and/or embittered elders, harboring ambitions (more like fantasies, sometimes really grandiose ones) of how to exploit a condition of increasing social disruption. For their petty private ends.
And then there are the rest of us, who as a rule sincerely enjoy each others company, even in a casual phone conversation with a stranger, or a brief encounter in a checkout line.
As I once read on a bumper sticker, "Life is good, Business is great, People are wonderful." that's my motto. The rare exceptions are merely rare exceptions. And that's how I'm carrying on. It's going to take a lot more than episodes of vicarious experience promulgated by the Infotainment Show to get me to shift my position about that prospect. I spent many years driving the night shift, while leaving a little dust-covered TV unplugged in the corner of my apartment.
We'll that's a good perspective to have. That said, my day job doesn't allow me to tune out of the news, and I'm middle age and have seen plenty of greatness and ugliness in people.
We are as a country going through a time that can easily be compared to early to mid 20th century Spain, Russia, or Germany in a number of regards from social, civil, to economic...cooler heads should prevail, but the powers that be are only getting more mendacious.
"my day job doesn't allow me to tune out of the news"
I said I spent many years without watching TV. I didn't say I didn't listen to the news.
I've always preferred the radio. And notwithstanding my criticisms elsewhere in this comment section in reference to the sloppy partisan excesses of KPFA-FM, I've very often found considerable value in their news, public affairs, music and cultural broadcasts over the years.
I found KPFA newscasts to be especially worthwhile and content-packed in the 1990s, an era when nearly every TV channel devoted itself to wall-to-wall coverage of two stories- first, the O.J. Simpson trial; and later, the Lewinsky "impeachment" charade that stretched on for years (despite the fact that the result was a foregone conclusion.)
Am I ever glad I had broken free of TV hypnosis many years before that era. KPFA provided me with ongoing coverage of actual news stories of wider import to expand my knowledge of world news and current events, instead of the two serialized infotainment dramas whose every detail and factoid monopolized practically every channel of the sad-ass American television news media between 1996 and the end of 2000.
"We are as a country going through a time that can easily be compared to early to mid 20th century Spain, Russia, or Germany in a number of regards from social, civil, to economic..."
It's refreshing to find someone who shares an interest in 20th century history with myself. So perhaps you can enlighten me on how the history of post-1918 Germany-
-the military defeat and utter collapse of the German nation and the abdication of the monarchy by Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918, followed mere months later in January 1919 by the Spartacist Marxist general strike and armed rebellion from the Left that was bloodily suppressed by government troops; followed by the Kapp putsch from the Monarchist Right in 1920; followed by the Beer Hall Putsch at the hands of an obscure extreme-Right racialist mystic faction in Munich in 1923; followed by a crescendo of murderous pitched battles in the streets between factions of the extremist Left and Right that not only polarized national politics but fragmented the parties between their moderate and extremist factions, culminating in a brokered election for Chancellor that ended up with the parliamentary assembly functionally ceding power in 1934 to the absolutist autocracy of one of the original Beer Hall Putsch conspirators, ten years after his imprisonment for sedition- concommitant with an economic picture between 1919 and 1932 that was punctuated by widespread chronic destitution and devastating traumas ranging from the punitive reparations payment terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to a rate of currency inflation that skyrocketed several million-fold in 1923, and the effects of a worldwide Great Depression in 1930-
has any comparative relevance at all with the conditions that prevail in the US c.2021, as far as the level of intensity of political instability, and the extent of actual, immediate material deprivation on the economic front.
Because I don't buy it.
What I notice is all too many Americans with no sense of history or informed perspective on chronic poverty, immiseration, or tyranny at all, talking themselves into a corner by imagining themselves to be living in conditions of desperation and despair under material circumstances that don't remotely resemble actual conditions of national economic and institutional collapse. They're psyching themselves out. The most sinister aspect of this is that so many news media outlets are fueling the narrative, in some fashion or another.
I'm not a Panglossian. This country has a lot of real-time problems and looming challenges that it needs to face up to and contend with. But our problems are fixable. We have the resources to succeed. It isn't impossible. It's merely not effortless. What's happened, that so many American confuse "not effortless" with "impossible"?
Interesting take, I'll reply but have some real work taking precedent today.
But a couple comparisons, a media establishment that is tightly concentrated in a few hands and flagrantly both dishonest and hypocritical (equality for thee right?).
A leader that barely campaigned and was propped up by globalist moneyed interests as well as globalist revolutionaries.
Mass degeneracy and sexual perversion.
Prolonged social conflict and violent "protests".
No where near the Mark inflation, but we have crypto bubbles popping up left and right, equity multiples are at records, CPI measures are a joke, and we just printed many trillions, not to mention the pension liability benefits that are technically bankrupt.
A deep and growing mistrust of the "elites".
Wars that many across the political spectrum feel an "elite" force us into.
A populace which half is living paycheck to paycheck, a mom and pop sector that is being obliterated in favor of multinational corporations.
But, for now, feels like the power steering the wheel is headed more in the gulag direction than shiny boots.
Literally running out of bandwidth here, but your remarks indicate your lack of experiential perspective and historical knowledge. The dystopian emphasis of your narrative frame is wildly out of proportion to the actual conditions on the ground in this country, and in the West.
For example: "mass degeneracy and sexual perversion"- like, compared to when? I've read the biographical accounts of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco and Five Points in Brooklyn at the turn of the 19th/20th century. The worst dives in Shanghai had nothing on the waterfront district of NYC in the 1890s. Book recommendation: The Heroic Gangster: The Story of Monk Eastman. From 2013. Readers of that book will learn that New York street prostitution, gangland crime, and police corruption was so much worse back then that there's no comparison to be made with the present day. What should be eye opening history, for social conservative nostalgia-mongers, BLM activists, and anyone in between. Or further out on the margins, for that matter.
When I drove a cab in Sacramento, one of my passengers once pointed out the building three blocks from the Capitol that housed one of the largest whorehouses in California. (It was around 10th and K St., pre-mall.) I don't remember exactly what decades it was operating- the 30s through the 50s, iirc. The place was a favorite of legislators and lobbyists. No different from Arkansas, except that Sacramento eventually cleaned up its act in that regard. I arrived there in the mid-1980s, just after Old Sacramento stopped being a mini-Barbary Coast, according to the stories I've heard. And any trucker will tell you that if you want to find a strip club that's a real strip club any more, your best bet is the Bible Belt. Even Nevada is more strait-laced than it once was.
So, don't even...I'm over it. The elite deviance that's been exposed in the present day is nothing, compared to the times of the Borgia Popes, the Ottoman Empire, and the reign of Tamerlane. The main difference is that video technology and the Internet has exposed what was formerly hidden away from view. Grotesquerie gets flaunted these days, because that's one of the most popular uses of the Internet, isn't it? Showing off everything from the perfect dessert, to the most glorious natural vista, to product branding, to torture porn. But the content itself is nothing new or unprecedented.
"Chauvin seemed awfully nonchalant given the circumstances, but he arguably followed protocol, as wrong as that might be."
The testimony of Derek Chauvin's superiors in the police department is that he did not follow protocol. There's no "arguably" there.
"The medics could have come within 9 minutes, but the crowd was shouting violent threats, and EMTs are known to get attacked."
You are bending over backwards with conjecture and speculation. The insinuation that the crowd- whatever their expressed hostility- was so unhinged that they would attack anyone in uniform- even the EMTs coming to Floyd's aid- is not only absurd, it implicitly relies on the assumption that the onlookers are nothing more than a pack of rabid dogs.
This is literally from the prosecutions' witnesses and other recordings.
You should seek them out to buttress your iron clad case.
I heard some of that testimony firsthand on C-span radio. The witnesses did not present themselves as the type of people who are- or were- so deranged that they're unable to differentiate between the actions of the police officers on the scene and the role to be played by medical first responders pulling up in an ambulance.
As for my response to the question you raised about Derek Chauvin "arguably" following protocol, that's from witness testimony at the trail also. The police witnesses- which included the chief of the Minneapolis police- were unanimous in their position that Chauvin did NOT follow protocol. I don't feature how anyone can overrule their consensus view on that.
Imagine being a juror who is being "protected" by the Minneapolis police. Now imagine that the Chief of Police testifies in a way that shows he wants a conviction. Would you feel any pressure in reaching your verdict?
You ask a fair question.
Just because a police officer goes out and kills a black man in cold blood, should that mean the public will no longer have his back? What's the point of having a Union at all if they aren't willing to cover for your crimes?
Looks like you have your mind made up.
I relish the day when all people, black, white or other, have just a modicum of responsibility for their actions. No amount of whiteness is making people ride dirty in a benz truck maskless on COVID, meth, and opioids with a pocket full of drugs and fake currency.
Similarly, no amount of whiteness is making the guy in Brooklyn Station assault and rob a woman with a gun, choke her, fail to show for their hearing, and then once again aggressively resist arrest.
People are out there LARPing like they are in a 50 cent video, posing a severe threat to their community, and we only see a problem behind the badge.
It's demented.
Honestly, is this a serious post? Are you being satirical here with all the buzzwords and tropes? The only thing you missed was welfare queen, or maybe you are saving that for a later post.
It's like a parody of the parody Mr. Bookman, the library cop lecturing Seinfeld on all the sick "pee pees and wee wees" written in library books that are corrupting the youth of America.
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=D9tP9fI2zbE
Wish it were satire. But you know this is exactly what happened, which is why once again you can't address anything at hand and throw up strawmen and insults.
The great thing about Taibbi's website is I often come across folks I'm ideologically opposed to and learn something, but occasionally I encounter someone so inculcated with John Oliver tripe simple facts that are counternarrative makes them sperg out.
I'm glad to say I learn a lot here too, but only when a person operates beyond talking points and tropes and in the real world. I haven't used a Strawman or an insult. I can't even say I disagree with what you're saying here because it is entirely unserious. Your own posts are a better argument against you than anything I could come up with. Well played.
My "talking points" are observations from testimony, video, autopsy reports. This stuff isn't debatable, though my conclusions might be.
What is odd about you is you just call my conclusions Illuminati-tier, but can't refute any specifics.
You are the NPC that Bezmenov warned us about.
I'm intentionally not engaging your specifics since Mascot already did that and you put on an amazing version of the game twister in your responses. It's difficult to engage when a person is committed to belieiving something isn't so all evidence and arguments to the contrary. You ended up doing a classic cop "well he was no angle" deep dive into George Floyd's background and rationalized the smear job by pretending it has something to do with this trial. You of course skipped Derek Chauvin's past.
Derek Chauvin may walk free. The police even in situation like this are extended a level of benefit of the doubt, presumption of innocence and due process that average citizen will never see in a court of law. For cops, prosecutors, judges and ultimately juries they actually follow The Constitution.
If he's proved not guilty as better than 98% of cops are regardless of what they did, it will not be due to police report versions of what George Floyd did in that past. Reports that are famously overblown, inaccurate and have nothing to do with this case, your imagination to the contrary.
You use a lot of buzz words, acronyms and seem defensive in thinking I insulted you in your responses. You aren't one of those snow flake anti-pc people that goes through life thin skinned and easily offended are you? If so, that makes you know different than those PC people you compared me to. I think such a person might have a tough time here.
Hmm...what's the legal term for the exercise of that pressure...oh, yeah- Obstruction of Justice. A felony offense. And when more than one person is involved, even one overt act of furtherance- any proof of planning to exercise that sort of "pressure", even if the plan isn't carried out- is Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice, which is an even more severe offense.
So your post is basically accusing the Minneapolis Chief of Police of a criminal inclination to conspire to obstruct justice, with his mere presence on the witness stand tantamount to a threat to the jury that he'll find ways to punish them if their verdict disagrees with his testimony. Testimony that he's offered under oath, as an accredited witness under the rules of criminal jurisprudence that apply to that trial. Officer Chauvin's defense team hasn't objected to his presence on the witness stand- much less casting it as jury intimidation, as you've done.
Where do you get the idea that Chief Arradando would commit such a crime? Do you have the slightest hard evidence on that score? You're inviting me to indulge your fantasy as if it had some relevance to real world events. That isn't just grasping at straws; the straws you're grasping at are imaginary. Based on the amount of evidence you've offered to support your scary concern trolling speculation, which is- Zero.
I asked a simple question which I guess couldn't be answered in a simple way.
When did Chief Arradondo stop beating his wife?" is also a simple question. The fact that a question is "simple"- or unanswerable- has no bearing on the validity on its premises. That's a matter of evidence, and you have none.
The question is simple and answerable. A better analogy than someone beating their wife would be to ask if the chief of a military branch would have undue influence if he testified at a court-martial.
Court-martial proceedings and civilian trials are very different proceedings, held under a very different set of rules, with a different set of participants- including a different sets of rules for impaneling a jury.
United States citizens don't live under a military junta, either. Which means that not even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is indemnified against criminal charges of perjury, witness tampering, jury intimidation, or obstruction of justice, if evidence can be developed to pursue an indictment of that sort. As is also the case with even the highest leadership ranks and appointed offices of metropolitan police departments in the U.S.
At this point our conversation has gone wildly off-track- beyond your initial absurd speculations on the actual trial taking place, and into offering yet another hypothetical scenario that requires knowledge of abstruse details of military jurisprudence, including my reminders about the subordination of the U.S. armed services to civilian authority. Irrelevant abstractions, as contrasted with the evidence-based details of the Chauvin trial. I realize that it's undoubtedly turf where you feel more comfortable, but it's also a phony gambit. So, we done yet?
Well the cross examination was pretty rough on these folks credibility, and when their broader statements were broken down, they seemed to contradict themselves fairly severely.
But that said, it's not so easy sticking up for someone, much less your own protocol (if it is such), when violent mobs are demanding conviction or destruction. Hell I might fib just to save the city.
This trial is so overloaded its ridiculous. Humans are meeting superhuman circumstances....such it is in the late stages of an empire with a Marxist takeover disguised as *justice* underway.
"he late stages of an empire with a Marxist takeover disguised as *justice* underway"
oh noes sky is falling Trump help us, or maybe Adolf
I'll settle with Taibbi, and my fault for using a little sarcasm and hyperbole.
But keep insinuating people fascists...just don't be shocked when shit hits the fan again. It's not like history has repeated over and over, for no reason whatsoever, right?
I'd like to ask in return that you consider alternative futures that DON'T involve the shit hitting the fan.
You can increase the peace, or you can undercut it. The people I notice ginning up the unrest tend to be either naive young people craving Drama- young people are always so exaggerated!- or their more cynical and/or embittered elders, harboring ambitions (more like fantasies, sometimes really grandiose ones) of how to exploit a condition of increasing social disruption. For their petty private ends.
And then there are the rest of us, who as a rule sincerely enjoy each others company, even in a casual phone conversation with a stranger, or a brief encounter in a checkout line.
As I once read on a bumper sticker, "Life is good, Business is great, People are wonderful." that's my motto. The rare exceptions are merely rare exceptions. And that's how I'm carrying on. It's going to take a lot more than episodes of vicarious experience promulgated by the Infotainment Show to get me to shift my position about that prospect. I spent many years driving the night shift, while leaving a little dust-covered TV unplugged in the corner of my apartment.
We'll that's a good perspective to have. That said, my day job doesn't allow me to tune out of the news, and I'm middle age and have seen plenty of greatness and ugliness in people.
We are as a country going through a time that can easily be compared to early to mid 20th century Spain, Russia, or Germany in a number of regards from social, civil, to economic...cooler heads should prevail, but the powers that be are only getting more mendacious.
t
you wish.
"my day job doesn't allow me to tune out of the news"
I said I spent many years without watching TV. I didn't say I didn't listen to the news.
I've always preferred the radio. And notwithstanding my criticisms elsewhere in this comment section in reference to the sloppy partisan excesses of KPFA-FM, I've very often found considerable value in their news, public affairs, music and cultural broadcasts over the years.
I found KPFA newscasts to be especially worthwhile and content-packed in the 1990s, an era when nearly every TV channel devoted itself to wall-to-wall coverage of two stories- first, the O.J. Simpson trial; and later, the Lewinsky "impeachment" charade that stretched on for years (despite the fact that the result was a foregone conclusion.)
Am I ever glad I had broken free of TV hypnosis many years before that era. KPFA provided me with ongoing coverage of actual news stories of wider import to expand my knowledge of world news and current events, instead of the two serialized infotainment dramas whose every detail and factoid monopolized practically every channel of the sad-ass American television news media between 1996 and the end of 2000.
"We are as a country going through a time that can easily be compared to early to mid 20th century Spain, Russia, or Germany in a number of regards from social, civil, to economic..."
It's refreshing to find someone who shares an interest in 20th century history with myself. So perhaps you can enlighten me on how the history of post-1918 Germany-
-the military defeat and utter collapse of the German nation and the abdication of the monarchy by Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918, followed mere months later in January 1919 by the Spartacist Marxist general strike and armed rebellion from the Left that was bloodily suppressed by government troops; followed by the Kapp putsch from the Monarchist Right in 1920; followed by the Beer Hall Putsch at the hands of an obscure extreme-Right racialist mystic faction in Munich in 1923; followed by a crescendo of murderous pitched battles in the streets between factions of the extremist Left and Right that not only polarized national politics but fragmented the parties between their moderate and extremist factions, culminating in a brokered election for Chancellor that ended up with the parliamentary assembly functionally ceding power in 1934 to the absolutist autocracy of one of the original Beer Hall Putsch conspirators, ten years after his imprisonment for sedition- concommitant with an economic picture between 1919 and 1932 that was punctuated by widespread chronic destitution and devastating traumas ranging from the punitive reparations payment terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to a rate of currency inflation that skyrocketed several million-fold in 1923, and the effects of a worldwide Great Depression in 1930-
has any comparative relevance at all with the conditions that prevail in the US c.2021, as far as the level of intensity of political instability, and the extent of actual, immediate material deprivation on the economic front.
Because I don't buy it.
What I notice is all too many Americans with no sense of history or informed perspective on chronic poverty, immiseration, or tyranny at all, talking themselves into a corner by imagining themselves to be living in conditions of desperation and despair under material circumstances that don't remotely resemble actual conditions of national economic and institutional collapse. They're psyching themselves out. The most sinister aspect of this is that so many news media outlets are fueling the narrative, in some fashion or another.
I'm not a Panglossian. This country has a lot of real-time problems and looming challenges that it needs to face up to and contend with. But our problems are fixable. We have the resources to succeed. It isn't impossible. It's merely not effortless. What's happened, that so many American confuse "not effortless" with "impossible"?
Interesting take, I'll reply but have some real work taking precedent today.
But a couple comparisons, a media establishment that is tightly concentrated in a few hands and flagrantly both dishonest and hypocritical (equality for thee right?).
A leader that barely campaigned and was propped up by globalist moneyed interests as well as globalist revolutionaries.
Mass degeneracy and sexual perversion.
Prolonged social conflict and violent "protests".
No where near the Mark inflation, but we have crypto bubbles popping up left and right, equity multiples are at records, CPI measures are a joke, and we just printed many trillions, not to mention the pension liability benefits that are technically bankrupt.
A deep and growing mistrust of the "elites".
Wars that many across the political spectrum feel an "elite" force us into.
A populace which half is living paycheck to paycheck, a mom and pop sector that is being obliterated in favor of multinational corporations.
But, for now, feels like the power steering the wheel is headed more in the gulag direction than shiny boots.
Literally running out of bandwidth here, but your remarks indicate your lack of experiential perspective and historical knowledge. The dystopian emphasis of your narrative frame is wildly out of proportion to the actual conditions on the ground in this country, and in the West.
For example: "mass degeneracy and sexual perversion"- like, compared to when? I've read the biographical accounts of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco and Five Points in Brooklyn at the turn of the 19th/20th century. The worst dives in Shanghai had nothing on the waterfront district of NYC in the 1890s. Book recommendation: The Heroic Gangster: The Story of Monk Eastman. From 2013. Readers of that book will learn that New York street prostitution, gangland crime, and police corruption was so much worse back then that there's no comparison to be made with the present day. What should be eye opening history, for social conservative nostalgia-mongers, BLM activists, and anyone in between. Or further out on the margins, for that matter.
When I drove a cab in Sacramento, one of my passengers once pointed out the building three blocks from the Capitol that housed one of the largest whorehouses in California. (It was around 10th and K St., pre-mall.) I don't remember exactly what decades it was operating- the 30s through the 50s, iirc. The place was a favorite of legislators and lobbyists. No different from Arkansas, except that Sacramento eventually cleaned up its act in that regard. I arrived there in the mid-1980s, just after Old Sacramento stopped being a mini-Barbary Coast, according to the stories I've heard. And any trucker will tell you that if you want to find a strip club that's a real strip club any more, your best bet is the Bible Belt. Even Nevada is more strait-laced than it once was.
So, don't even...I'm over it. The elite deviance that's been exposed in the present day is nothing, compared to the times of the Borgia Popes, the Ottoman Empire, and the reign of Tamerlane. The main difference is that video technology and the Internet has exposed what was formerly hidden away from view. Grotesquerie gets flaunted these days, because that's one of the most popular uses of the Internet, isn't it? Showing off everything from the perfect dessert, to the most glorious natural vista, to product branding, to torture porn. But the content itself is nothing new or unprecedented.