Seems that looting and rioting is essentially all over -- just our masters still doing *that* looting, hollowing out the economy and only the pigs rioting.
And with summer, an election coming, significant unemployment and Donnie and his party's historic, deadly mishandling of the pandemic -- and cops still killing Black people for no better reason than they want to -- I hope to see the demos continuing for months.
In speaking about both the global nature of the protests and the surprisingly strong support for them by white people, Jeet Heer observed on Twitter that “there's probably a deeper connection between the pandemic and the uprising than the obvious ones. Botched responses to the pandemic demonstrated to many that the powers-that-be don't care about them, which broke the social contract. The kindle was ready to spark.”
I'm waiting for Trump to begin calling on the militia movement to "counter" the BLM protests by showing up armed, ready, and pre-pardoned for the violence they want to commit.
That probably will be the substance of Tubby's "reconciliation" speech he's being groomed to give tomorrow. But it's cool, Jared said today that law enforcement has already come together to "solve" the problem. And Barr kindly pointed out that there hasn't inequality since the 1960's
I was amused at CNN referring to “small towns like Boise,” whose metro area has >700,000 people. Our little cowtown (pop. 15,000—are we big enough to qualify as a hamlet?) had a demonstration too.
We had 5 people arrested at my town's rally. Most of those arrested laid down in the street. And your hometown is in the top-10 sized cities in South Dakota
I didn’t know about ours until it had already taken place, but about a couple dozen people were lined up at the busy corner of 4th & Broadway/US81, mostly wearing Covid masks and carrying signs.
"St. John’s, even with its windows boarded up, looked handsome in the sun-"
That's a damn fine phrase my friend. A few times a year I'll sit down to one of your columns, ready to get my snark on-a few sentences in I realize" Hey, this isn't funny!" It's true and thoughtful, moving and informative.
There’s a lot of hue and cry both for and against Romney from liberals. I don’t see any reason to demonize OR lionize Romney. He’s doing the right thing, as he did during impeachment. He doesn’t get a cookie because of it, there are no *good* Republicans. But what he’s doing DOES matter insofar as some people in the GOP establishment need to stand up and lead the way away from Trump and Trumpism; it’s not like conservatives are going to listen to and follow Democrats/liberals.
It really is interesting. Five Thirty Eight has been hypothesizing since 2017/18 that if the GOP decides to cut Trump loose it won’t happen gradually but will be rapid, like dominoes clicking over. After impeachment, we’re probably at the second point in his presidency where it’s theoretically possible. A prerequisite would be Biden leading in all major polls by about 10 points, so the GOP realizes Trump doesn’t have time to regain enough ground before the election, starts panicking, and writes him off to possibly save the Senate, governors, and state legislatures. I don’t think we’re there now, and it’s likely we’ll never get there, but it could happen.
Trump, at least recently, was a win-win for the GOP special interests who have been working to have the state enrich them through extractive means. (Yeah, yeah, of course complicit Dems.) Donnie is completely on board with that and is the party's most popular pol. Two huge pluses!
But now, as a godfather might say, Donnie's maybe becoming a liability to the party. Causing Americans to die, tanking the economy and growing ever more unhinged as a result of the stress from his ineptitude, well, it can be a problem. I suppose the big question is whether it's better for them to cut Donnie off or go down with him. Sucks to be them. Then again this problem is well earned and fully deserved.
I just hope the reverse is also true: that Democrats/liberals are not going to listen to and follow conservatives. LOL Who am I kidding? Bill Kristol and George Will have been fully embraced as Leaders of the Resistance, and now Romney will be, too.
Even now people are fondly remembering George Dubya Bush because he was “presidential” and not vulgar. All that unpleasantness about “voter fraud,” the Iraq War, Harriet Meiers, the 2006 homophobia campaign, Michael Brown, Hurricane Katrina, Jeff Gannon, Ari “watch what you say, watch what you do” Fleischer, VP Dick Cheney, Kenny Boy Lay, trying to cut Social Security, Mission Accomplished—all forgotten. All forgiven. Sure would like to have a beer with him now.
I loved it when Shrub was lauded for calling for "an end to systemic racism"...this from the man who fired federal prosecutors who wouldn't go along with his voter suppress scheme.
It's funny how living through the 43rd or 44th worst president (out of 44, because Cleveland) will make some nitwits long for those halcyon days of living through the 38th worst president. Another way of looking at it, of course, is that everyone who misses Bush is essentially saying, "If only Trump had the exact same policies but Twitter didn't exist, he'd be in the Top 40 -- then I could back him all the way!"
Some are just exhausted and want a return to “normal,” but it’s like, “You guys remember what 2000-2008 we’re like? Not good. Really bad actually. We all said so at the time!” Time + Nostalgia is a helluva drug combo.
I'm going to wait to see whether Willard actually does anything substantive. Showing up at a demo to fuck with Donnie, while appreciated, doesn't actually do anything. And as a senator, he has power -- theoretically.
Report from Lafayette, California, a usually sleepy, mostly white and affluent bedroom community suburb of San Francisco: My son attended the rally held downtown yesterday (I would have, too, but didn't want to risk the 'rona, given my advanced age and my wife's immunodeficiencies), and it was, in his words, "wild." The mostly white crowd was chanting, marching and singing; at one point, he said, local high school students were calling out their classmates, by name, for being racist (!). BLM has now officially become mainstream, and in spite of a few of my wife's Midwest relatives linking to Candace Owens on Facebook, almost all of the response has been positive.
"Righteousness — not in the sense we associate with self-righteousness, but true righteousness, the real thing as seen in the holy book Trump profaned last week — spreads among the people like a song, and the song shakes down the walls."
Sing it, brother! That song coming from the tens of thousands taking to the streets is filling this old cynic's heart with hope.
Nice report from DC. Even this old lefty got a dose of nostalgia when I was caught up in a daytime march down 2nd Ave. last week, and again at a post-curfew evening march down York a couple of nights later. The latter began as a protest outside Gracie Mansion, but I have no idea how the other one came about. I was just out getting hot dogs and joined in for a few blocks, which is all my old feet would allow. The vibe was upbeat and defiant, but there were a zillion cops in SUVs, unmarked cars, motorbikes, and bicycles "escorting" the after-curfew protesters. I hope the mostly young marchers didn't get trapped later on by white cop swine from Long Island who were using the asinine Cuomo/De Blasio as an excuse to crack heads. I'm sure the police violence on TV gave a few equally old cops retired on the taxpayer's dime in Tom's River their own frisson of nostalgia, but I could be wrong. I remember those fucks when we were young, and I bet it's probably a lot more than a few.
Over 200 people marched downtown here, generally masked and six feet apart. Local news emphasized the peacefulness, to reassure the white majority that the looting rioters had stayed away. In a town this size it's almost impossible not to have at least one friend who's a cop or sheriff's deputy, and maybe that sort of integration is as important as the racial kind. You can't be Big Racist Cop and not be widely known for it. The last community and police discussion here was about the prejudice against Southeast Asians (a larger group than African Americans), and I only hope the channels opened then will be available to address anti-black prejudice, too.
So that's my optimism for the week. Fuck Bill Barr and hope he accidentally sprays himself with Counter Assault Bear Deterrent.
Righteous column, Roy. The word "righteousness" has been misappropriated by many Christians who take it to mean "acting the right way (i.e., the way we want)"; sort of a neo-Puritanism of not cussin', not drinking, not fornicating. Righteousness, to these people, is entirely defined in the negative.
N. T. Wright and other theologians would disagree--the original meaning in both Hebrew and the Greek translations of Hebrew was probably closer to "justice" than anything else. The word meant "standing up for what is right" rather than "following a list of arbitrary rules set up by the powers that be." Fred Clark has (as usual) a very good take on this idea.
This is why I always use the term "ethics" instead of "morals." "Morals" are arbitrary, ethics are reasoned, derived from empirical evidence, and concerned with justice
Thanks for this Roy! My son told me about a protest happening yesterday (Sunday) here in sleepy Olney MD, starting just 5 minutes from our house, so Keith and I joined him and his girlfriend and what appeared to be throngs of our neighbors. It turned out that there were actually 3 marches occurring simultaneously here. Our crew occupied the post office and our unincorporated town's big central intersection before joining up with the other two groups for a teach in down at the Harris Teeter. It was mostly white people, with a lot of families and high schoolers. We recognized several neighbors. Didn't see any police until the end and then they were mostly blocking off roads for us - no riot equipment visible.
I live in Hollywood and yesterday's protest passed under my window -- for almost two hours. When the tail was finally passing, I looked on the news and saw the head of the march was about a mile west. A mile of people! I also saw the crowd estimated at 10,000. Friends, 10,000 is not even close to what this was. Today I feel genuinely proud of America, and as I type this, I realize it's a feeling that's been absent a while. Absent ever since, oh, the day that [much less than] half of us decided, "Hey, let's put the racist shitgibbon in charge" and the electoral college said "Handled!" Today, I really do feel like maybe we still got it. Maybe we won't collapse into Panem or Gilead or Oceania or flippin' Mordor.
Wonderful!
Seems that looting and rioting is essentially all over -- just our masters still doing *that* looting, hollowing out the economy and only the pigs rioting.
And with summer, an election coming, significant unemployment and Donnie and his party's historic, deadly mishandling of the pandemic -- and cops still killing Black people for no better reason than they want to -- I hope to see the demos continuing for months.
We showed up in Philly.
In speaking about both the global nature of the protests and the surprisingly strong support for them by white people, Jeet Heer observed on Twitter that “there's probably a deeper connection between the pandemic and the uprising than the obvious ones. Botched responses to the pandemic demonstrated to many that the powers-that-be don't care about them, which broke the social contract. The kindle was ready to spark.”
Now this is the kind of report-atorial I would pay to read in the New York Times (instead of unconstitutional fascism from certain senators).
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLYOOezs3DA
I'm waiting for Trump to begin calling on the militia movement to "counter" the BLM protests by showing up armed, ready, and pre-pardoned for the violence they want to commit.
They are doing that themselves with the antifa bus rumors
That probably will be the substance of Tubby's "reconciliation" speech he's being groomed to give tomorrow. But it's cool, Jared said today that law enforcement has already come together to "solve" the problem. And Barr kindly pointed out that there hasn't inequality since the 1960's
Thanks for the real journalism Roy. My subscription is vindicated once again.
I was amused at CNN referring to “small towns like Boise,” whose metro area has >700,000 people. Our little cowtown (pop. 15,000—are we big enough to qualify as a hamlet?) had a demonstration too.
We had 5 people arrested at my town's rally. Most of those arrested laid down in the street. And your hometown is in the top-10 sized cities in South Dakota
I didn’t know about ours until it had already taken place, but about a couple dozen people were lined up at the busy corner of 4th & Broadway/US81, mostly wearing Covid masks and carrying signs.
*my original hometown (pop. 173) makes Yankton look like Kansas City. 😄
"St. John’s, even with its windows boarded up, looked handsome in the sun-"
That's a damn fine phrase my friend. A few times a year I'll sit down to one of your columns, ready to get my snark on-a few sentences in I realize" Hey, this isn't funny!" It's true and thoughtful, moving and informative.
I like those columns.
I gotta say- I stand with Mitt.
Didn't see that coming!
There’s a lot of hue and cry both for and against Romney from liberals. I don’t see any reason to demonize OR lionize Romney. He’s doing the right thing, as he did during impeachment. He doesn’t get a cookie because of it, there are no *good* Republicans. But what he’s doing DOES matter insofar as some people in the GOP establishment need to stand up and lead the way away from Trump and Trumpism; it’s not like conservatives are going to listen to and follow Democrats/liberals.
I agree. It's just an interesting political development.
It really is interesting. Five Thirty Eight has been hypothesizing since 2017/18 that if the GOP decides to cut Trump loose it won’t happen gradually but will be rapid, like dominoes clicking over. After impeachment, we’re probably at the second point in his presidency where it’s theoretically possible. A prerequisite would be Biden leading in all major polls by about 10 points, so the GOP realizes Trump doesn’t have time to regain enough ground before the election, starts panicking, and writes him off to possibly save the Senate, governors, and state legislatures. I don’t think we’re there now, and it’s likely we’ll never get there, but it could happen.
That was my thinking too. A Hail Mary that could just work...
Trump, at least recently, was a win-win for the GOP special interests who have been working to have the state enrich them through extractive means. (Yeah, yeah, of course complicit Dems.) Donnie is completely on board with that and is the party's most popular pol. Two huge pluses!
But now, as a godfather might say, Donnie's maybe becoming a liability to the party. Causing Americans to die, tanking the economy and growing ever more unhinged as a result of the stress from his ineptitude, well, it can be a problem. I suppose the big question is whether it's better for them to cut Donnie off or go down with him. Sucks to be them. Then again this problem is well earned and fully deserved.
I just hope the reverse is also true: that Democrats/liberals are not going to listen to and follow conservatives. LOL Who am I kidding? Bill Kristol and George Will have been fully embraced as Leaders of the Resistance, and now Romney will be, too.
Even now people are fondly remembering George Dubya Bush because he was “presidential” and not vulgar. All that unpleasantness about “voter fraud,” the Iraq War, Harriet Meiers, the 2006 homophobia campaign, Michael Brown, Hurricane Katrina, Jeff Gannon, Ari “watch what you say, watch what you do” Fleischer, VP Dick Cheney, Kenny Boy Lay, trying to cut Social Security, Mission Accomplished—all forgotten. All forgiven. Sure would like to have a beer with him now.
Did I neglect to mention Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, “yellowcake,” Valerie Plame, and Paul Bremer, Viceroy of Iraq?
I loved it when Shrub was lauded for calling for "an end to systemic racism"...this from the man who fired federal prosecutors who wouldn't go along with his voter suppress scheme.
Suppression, damn it.
It's funny how living through the 43rd or 44th worst president (out of 44, because Cleveland) will make some nitwits long for those halcyon days of living through the 38th worst president. Another way of looking at it, of course, is that everyone who misses Bush is essentially saying, "If only Trump had the exact same policies but Twitter didn't exist, he'd be in the Top 40 -- then I could back him all the way!"
Some are just exhausted and want a return to “normal,” but it’s like, “You guys remember what 2000-2008 we’re like? Not good. Really bad actually. We all said so at the time!” Time + Nostalgia is a helluva drug combo.
Thanks! https://edroso.tumblr.com/post/620367879694663680/st-johns-church-at-black-lives-matter-plaza
I'm going to wait to see whether Willard actually does anything substantive. Showing up at a demo to fuck with Donnie, while appreciated, doesn't actually do anything. And as a senator, he has power -- theoretically.
Report from Lafayette, California, a usually sleepy, mostly white and affluent bedroom community suburb of San Francisco: My son attended the rally held downtown yesterday (I would have, too, but didn't want to risk the 'rona, given my advanced age and my wife's immunodeficiencies), and it was, in his words, "wild." The mostly white crowd was chanting, marching and singing; at one point, he said, local high school students were calling out their classmates, by name, for being racist (!). BLM has now officially become mainstream, and in spite of a few of my wife's Midwest relatives linking to Candace Owens on Facebook, almost all of the response has been positive.
"Righteousness — not in the sense we associate with self-righteousness, but true righteousness, the real thing as seen in the holy book Trump profaned last week — spreads among the people like a song, and the song shakes down the walls."
Sing it, brother! That song coming from the tens of thousands taking to the streets is filling this old cynic's heart with hope.
Nice report from DC. Even this old lefty got a dose of nostalgia when I was caught up in a daytime march down 2nd Ave. last week, and again at a post-curfew evening march down York a couple of nights later. The latter began as a protest outside Gracie Mansion, but I have no idea how the other one came about. I was just out getting hot dogs and joined in for a few blocks, which is all my old feet would allow. The vibe was upbeat and defiant, but there were a zillion cops in SUVs, unmarked cars, motorbikes, and bicycles "escorting" the after-curfew protesters. I hope the mostly young marchers didn't get trapped later on by white cop swine from Long Island who were using the asinine Cuomo/De Blasio as an excuse to crack heads. I'm sure the police violence on TV gave a few equally old cops retired on the taxpayer's dime in Tom's River their own frisson of nostalgia, but I could be wrong. I remember those fucks when we were young, and I bet it's probably a lot more than a few.
That should be "the asinine Cuomo/De Blasio CURFEW," which it was.
Over 200 people marched downtown here, generally masked and six feet apart. Local news emphasized the peacefulness, to reassure the white majority that the looting rioters had stayed away. In a town this size it's almost impossible not to have at least one friend who's a cop or sheriff's deputy, and maybe that sort of integration is as important as the racial kind. You can't be Big Racist Cop and not be widely known for it. The last community and police discussion here was about the prejudice against Southeast Asians (a larger group than African Americans), and I only hope the channels opened then will be available to address anti-black prejudice, too.
So that's my optimism for the week. Fuck Bill Barr and hope he accidentally sprays himself with Counter Assault Bear Deterrent.
Righteous column, Roy. The word "righteousness" has been misappropriated by many Christians who take it to mean "acting the right way (i.e., the way we want)"; sort of a neo-Puritanism of not cussin', not drinking, not fornicating. Righteousness, to these people, is entirely defined in the negative.
N. T. Wright and other theologians would disagree--the original meaning in both Hebrew and the Greek translations of Hebrew was probably closer to "justice" than anything else. The word meant "standing up for what is right" rather than "following a list of arbitrary rules set up by the powers that be." Fred Clark has (as usual) a very good take on this idea.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/07/29/on-justice-vs-righteousness/
This is why I always use the term "ethics" instead of "morals." "Morals" are arbitrary, ethics are reasoned, derived from empirical evidence, and concerned with justice
ETHics (Ð, ð) are a THORNy (Þ, þ) issue.
I’ll see myself out.
LOLLLL!
Thanks for this Roy! My son told me about a protest happening yesterday (Sunday) here in sleepy Olney MD, starting just 5 minutes from our house, so Keith and I joined him and his girlfriend and what appeared to be throngs of our neighbors. It turned out that there were actually 3 marches occurring simultaneously here. Our crew occupied the post office and our unincorporated town's big central intersection before joining up with the other two groups for a teach in down at the Harris Teeter. It was mostly white people, with a lot of families and high schoolers. We recognized several neighbors. Didn't see any police until the end and then they were mostly blocking off roads for us - no riot equipment visible.
I live in Hollywood and yesterday's protest passed under my window -- for almost two hours. When the tail was finally passing, I looked on the news and saw the head of the march was about a mile west. A mile of people! I also saw the crowd estimated at 10,000. Friends, 10,000 is not even close to what this was. Today I feel genuinely proud of America, and as I type this, I realize it's a feeling that's been absent a while. Absent ever since, oh, the day that [much less than] half of us decided, "Hey, let's put the racist shitgibbon in charge" and the electoral college said "Handled!" Today, I really do feel like maybe we still got it. Maybe we won't collapse into Panem or Gilead or Oceania or flippin' Mordor.
Say what you will about Mordor, but they have Strong Borders, only the best Uruk-Hai (so beautiful), and Sauron always Kept Us Safe™️.