Looking at the Ferguson protests, and looking at the Bundy Ranch protests, and the thing that strikes me most is the difference in how the police treated the protesters.
So was it race?
The Ferguson protesters were mostly (but not all) black. The Bundy Ranch protesters were almost all white, but there were a couple of blacks there too. But still, it seems to me that cops really don’t care (usually) what the race of protesters are. They don’t like’em, period.
Was it guns?
The Bundy Ranch protesters were very well armed. They had shit for logistics and shit for tactical skills, but they had guns and ammo out the wazoo. Would the Ferguson cops have moved in so swiftly if the Ferguson protesters had been similarly well armed, if the mythical New Black Panthers had shown up with an arsenal and set up snipers on rooftops and so forth? You’d expect the NRA to at this point say, “Yes! The right to bear arms is how a population prevents tyranny!” Except the NRA has been rather silent when it comes to Ferguson. Funny, that, eh?
But personally, I think that guns would have not stopped the cops at all. It would have simply given them the excuse to do what they really wanted to do: kill all these people who are accusing one of their own of being a racist murderer, and accusing them of being racists. Because I’ve found that the last thing any cop wants to be called is racist. Even when all the numbers show that the average cop is racist. For example, random drug testing shows that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate. Yet blacks are arrested twice as often as whites for drug possession, and once arrested, 17% of whites end up going to jail, but over half of blacks end up going to jail. So let me get this straight. You have two people arrested for the identical crime, one white, one black, and the white guy is probably not going to jail, and the black guy probably IS going to jail, and there’s no racism involved here? For realz? Pull the other flipper, yo!
So: What if the crowd in Ferguson had been all white and accusing the Ferguson cops of being racists and of covering up for a racist murderer? Would the response have been the same?
We’ll never know for certain. But my sneaking suspicion is that the answer to that question is “yes”. Because nothing makes a racist angrier than being called a racist, and we now know from the actions and words of many of the cops who were out there in the streets that they were, indeed, racists, who view all black people as thugs and criminals and welfare whores even though crime statistics and employment statistics show that the majority of blacks are law abiding hard working people. But then, what can you expect of people whose favorite news source is operated by an Australian who was a fervent supporter of the White Australia policy, a policy of official discrimination against non-whites that was official government policy of the Commonwealth of Australia until 1975? I was surprised that Fox News didn’t call the Michael Brown funeral this afternoon a “riot”. After all, every Fox News viewer knows that one black person walking by himself is a criminal, two black people walking down the street are a “black mob”, and three black people walking down the street are a “riot”. Why, I bet that’s even the definition in the Fox News dictionary, yo.
So racists be upset at being racists because Fox News tells them they aren’t really racist for believing the same things that Fox News tells them are okay to believe, and there you go. A volatile powder keg — regardless of the race of the people who are calling them racists. (Though being black certainly didn’t make it less volatile).
– Badtux the Racism-smellin’ Penguin
Australia is basically a nice place, but it spawns some shitty people, fer sher. Mel Gibson is from here too.
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Tux, you thinking is sound but…a racist being called a racist by people of HIS race is often doubly angry. The thought process usually moves thus:
“Why are they calling me that?”
“They should see what I see! These people are animals.”
“If they can’t understand why we do this, they are no better than those animals”
“They are all animals, time to round them up, and if a few get banged up a bit…”
Check of thesus, see the suppression of the Occupy movement.
So, no sneaky suspicions needed…
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But is it really racism? Or hatred because of perceived wrong committed by someone? With no recourse? so is that racism? The people there are usually not part of the bi-yearly revolution in america. So they have little or no input to make something, like home area, better to their perception. That lets the loonies in, ie: tea party. That creates a self fulfilling viscous circle of lowering the tax base, meaning administration has less incentive to get rid of the bad actors, and unable to hire the good guys. That creates another self fulfilling prophecy, of worse government, meaning less active to the wants of the people, etc…
Then the bad guys win…and like the poor kid in kansas? police assisted suicide. Poor cops, they went nutz after the first shot….probably some cops first had to kill, poor guy, no thrill of doing the job, you know, like taze him electric and send to the hospital to get better meds, had to kill a poor innocent..damn.
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