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A Deeply Fractured US

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Aaaand suddenly -- it's over:

Seattle police retake precinct in CHOP, arrest multiple protesters following Durkan orders
Police Chief Carmen Best said "enough is enough" after fatal shootings in the area
By Stephen Sorace | Fox News

Seattle police have retaken the East Precinct after clearing out the protest area known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, making more than a dozen arrests after Mayor Jenny Durkan declared the gathering an unlawful assembly.

Police issued the order to disperse around 5 a.m. local time Wednesday, telling protesters to leave within eight minutes. At least 23 protesters were arrested for failure to disperse, obstruction, resisting arrest, and assault, police said.

A 29-year-old man was in possession of a large metal pipe and kitchen knife when he was arrested, police said.

The East Precinct, which police abandoned last month following standoffs and clashes with demonstrators, was cleared of protesters, Police Chief Carmen Best told reporters from inside CHOP. Best said police were not moving into the building yet.

“Our job is to support peaceful demonstration but what has happened on these streets over the last two weeks is lawless and it’s brutal and bottom line it is simply unacceptable,” Best told reporters, referring to two fatal shootings.

City workers were dismantling wooden and concrete barriers while police remained on the scene. Best said police and other city organizations will clean the area and the precinct before beginning operations as soon as reasonably possible.
...

See rest here: https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-police-chop-protest-durkan

:cheers:
 
So now someone can calculate the murder rate (per 100,000 people per year) for CHOP and see how it compares to the bad old "system".
 
On a related occupation:

Army shuts down specialists’ Barracks Autonomous Zone
by Lieutenant Dan

FORT HOOD, Texas — Acting on a tip, agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command arrested a group of specialists who occupied a barracks and declared it “autonomous from unrighteous laws and terrible torture such as adhering to the UCMJ, performing PT and eating at the DFAC.”

OBAZ, which stands for Occupied Barracks Autonomous Zone, was created by the shadowy “E-4 Mafia,” long presumed to be responsible for cancelled PT tests, destruction of criminal charging sheets, and the general state of malaise and incompetence that has plagued officers for decades.

The barracks was occupied for just two hours, but the specialists quickly set up barricades made of take-out pizza boxes, inflatable dolls and over 70,000 empty cans of snuff. Specialists also established an Entry Control Point (ECP) manned by a kidnaped private first class, who checked CAC cards while duct-taped to a chair and wearing only basic training-issue undergarments, sockless combat boots, and a horse-head mask. He was later removed under suspicion of being in the cavalry branch.

But during the short-lived occupation, a dispute broke out between the OBAZ organizers and E-4 TDYers from Fort Carson who wanted to rename the occupation the Hood Occupied Barracks Autonomous Gathering, an honorific term bestowed upon the indigenous people of nearby Killeen. HOBAG advocates posted signs with the alternate name, which initially confused undercover agents who thought there were two simultaneous occupations.

This misinformation caused commander-in-chief President Trump, and the U.N., to delay executing a JADE HELM response, or directing chemtrail strikes on the occupiers, according to prepper specialists who had stockpiled hundreds of MREs, pallets of ammunition, and scores of Alex Jones books in in the false ceilings of their barracks rooms.

During the occupation, the well-known social justice films “A Brony Tale” and “Avengers” were shown in the CQ area. Specialists watched while munching on Taco Bell delivered by OccupyEats, and drank Gatorade liberated from a nearby shopette during a midnight cordon-and-steal maneuver exercise.

The released private called the occupation, “Awesome!” and told reporters, “I can’t wait to become a specialist! There are a lot of things I’d like to occupy, like the company commander’s spouse and the CG’s—as soon I make NCO.”

Rick Daniel and Epic Blunder contributed to this article.

https://www.duffelblog.com/2020/06/army-shuts-down-specialists-barracks-autonomous-zone/

;D
 
A lot of articles have condemned the right for the divisions taking place in American society and in many cases rightly so. In this write-up, however, Damon Linker suggests that the left is equally to blame.

Coronavirus is revealing a shattered country

Damon Linker

With President Trump's re-election campaign foundering and polls showing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden surging to a formidable lead in the presidential race, we've begun to hear a resurgence of a refrain that's been sung over and over again since Trump's shocking win in 2016. As soon as Trump goes down to defeat and is replaced by a Democrat, we are told, the country will quickly reset, with the derangements, scandals, and furious political hatreds of the past three-and-a-half years rapidly fading from the scene. Before you know it, America will be back to normal.

This has always been a fantasy, but it's an especially delusional one now. The fact is that America's problems are much vaster than Trump. The big, bad Orange Man is a symptom (both an effect and a cause) of a political system and national culture losing its bearings and spiraling down toward what looks distressingly like a collective nervous breakdown.

Take COVID-19. Trump and his party deserve considerable blame for its handling of the pandemic — first for downplaying the danger, then for failing to take advantage of several weeks in lockdown to set up a nationwide program of testing and tracing, for encouraging Republicans to view the virus through a culture-war lens, for foolishly treating the country's public health and economic well-being as sharply opposed to one another rather than deeply intertwined, and finally for largely giving up on public-health efforts at the federal level once the president decided that such measures were harming him politically.

Yet America's disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is not simply a function of the Trump administration's incompetence and incontinence. For one thing, the worst initial outbreak in the country — among the deadliest in the entire world — took place in and around liberal New York City, where the city's mayor has distinguished himself by the ineptitude of his leadership and the state's governor was responsible for instituting nursing home policies that led directly to enormous numbers of deaths.

Meanwhile, in more recent weeks media reports have emphasized that the current surge in new cases of the virus is taking place in a series of red states (Florida, Texas, Arizona) that may have reopened too quickly and haphazardly, and where many individuals seem strongly opposed to public mask-wearing to mitigate the spread of the virus. Yet deepest-blue California is also experiencing a surge in new cases — and there is mounting evidence that the Black Lives Matter protests of the past month (which were cheered on by many public-health authorities) may have spread the virus among the young people taking part in them.

This isn't a Republican fail. It's an American fail.

What is the source of the failure? It has many names — individualism, cultural libertarianism, atomism, selfishness, lack of social trust, suspicion of authority — and it takes a multitude of forms. But whatever we call it, it amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what's best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what's best for ourselves. We resent being told what to do. If wearing a mask is unpleasant, we don't want to be forced to do it. In fact, a governing authority — or really, anyone, even fellow customers at a grocery store — reprimanding us for failing to do our part for public health is enough to make us dig in our heels and stubbornly refuse to go along.

Who are you to tell me what to do?

This can lead to terrible consequences during a pandemic, when just breathing around our fellow citizens can spread a debilitating or deadly disease. But it goes well beyond COVID-19.

As the Niskanen Center's Samuel Hammond recently argued in a deeply troubling tweet thread, hostility to government doesn't produce a world of morally responsible individuals going about their lives free from external authority. It leads to a world in which individuals defer to different kinds of authorities instead — and sub-national ethno-racial groups in particular. This is clear enough on the far right. But it can also be seen happening on the left, where (in Hammond's words) "the liberal core of American elite ideology ... [is] being succeeded by something new based in racial consciousness." Let's call this new racial consciousness "anti-whiteness."

As Hammond notes, this doesn't imply a moral equivalence between right-wing retirees shouting "white power!" from their golf carts and left-wing protesters pulling down or defacing monuments to people united by little more than their white skin. But it is to note that both are examples of political factions embracing a tribal sensibility — white nationalism in the first case and anti-whiteness in the second — over and against an identity tied to the political community as a whole and its complicated collective history. Both are also examples of those factions enacting their new-found tribalism by lashing out against shared public order and authority.

This is the doom loop into which we appear to have fallen. It's a politics of centrifugal forces that issues not just in partisan polarization and a vacated ideological center, but in an emptying out of any public, common life at all. The siloing of ideas and even reality online, along with the race- and class-based segregation of physical space that has long been a feature of American society, are feeding off of and amplifying each other in the crucible of a country confronting a deadly contagion, economic free-fall, and serious spike in urban gun violence.

Many Black citizens have understandably lost faith in law enforcement. Businesses are shuttering. Police are pulling back from enforcing public order. Acts of lawlessness are increasing. Leading newspapers are under pressure by activists and some of their own employees to abandon the ideal of objectivity in favor of a "moral clarity" that amounts to outright political advocacy. People are dismissing and mocking the advice of experts in public health.

This isn't what a liberal society is supposed to look like. It isn't fascism either. It may well be the early stages of a 10,000-front civil war. But more likely it's something else — a glimpse of a shattered country in decline, lacking consensus about much of anything, fractured into mutually antagonistic factions, and overseen by a government at any given time considered illegitimate by large portions of the nation and unable to muster the capacity to accomplish any public goal with competence.

A debilitating collapse in state capacity — that is what we're seeing, and it is both an effect and a cause of our incorrigible suspicion and distrust of authority of all kinds. Sometimes that suspicion is justified, sometimes it isn't. Either way, a nation of 330 million people will not be able to thrive in even the best of times with a government unable to provide basic public goods.

But in the very bad times in which we find ourselves right now? That's when things could really get ugly.[/url]

Link
 
Thanks for the article, thoughtful bias-free analysis, as far as I can see. :)
 
An article with a positive spin on current events in the US:

Our country is in chaos. But it's a great time to be an American
Analysis by John Blake, CNN

Updated 10:10 AM ET, Sat July 4, 2020

(CNN)On July 9, 1776, a rowdy group of American colonists banded together at a political rally in New York City and did something that today would be called "badass."

They had just been treated to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, which Congress had officially adopted less than a week earlier. After hearing calls to "dissolve the political bands" of tyranny, they marched to a public park that featured a statue of King George III, Britain's ruler, and knocked the 4,000-pound statue off its 15-foot pedestal.

The head of the statue was then decapitated and perched on top of a spike, and much of the rest was melted down to make 42,000 musket balls for American soldiers.

The historian Erika Doss thought of that scene recently while watching protesters toppling statues of Confederate heroes. Doss, who recounts the 1776 episode in her book, "Memorial Mania," sees a parallel between the colonists who fought against Great Britain and protesters who rail against Confederate monuments today.

"They're patriots," says Doss, an American studies professor at the University of Notre Dame, of today's protesters. "They're looking at the symbols and these visual and martial emblems and icons in their midst and they're saying this doesn't stand for who we are today."

It's easy to be cynical this Fourth of July weekend as the US celebrates its birth. The country seems like a mess. Racial protests have rocked every major city. Unemployment has soared. And Americans can't even agree if they should wear face masks in the middle of a pandemic.

But what some see as chaos, others see as an explosion of patriotism. They see it in the armies of Americans that took to the streets to protest racism. They see it in the companies that are taking unprecedented stands against racial and social injustice.

Even the Americans who are wearing masks for the health of their neighbors -- they, too, are reasons to wave the flag.
...

See rest of article here.

:cheers:
 
Facebook groups pivot to attacks on Black Lives Matter

A loose network of Facebook groups that took root across the country in April to organize protests over coronavirus stay-at-home orders has become a hub of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have pivoted to a variety of new targets. Their latest: Black Lives Matter and the nationwide protests of racial injustice.

These groups, which now boast a collective audience of more than 1 million members, are still thriving after most states started lifting virus restrictions.

And many have expanded their focus.

One group transformed itself last month from "Reopen California" to "California Patriots Pro Law & Order," with recent posts mocking Black Lives Matter or changing the slogan to "White Lives Matter." Members have used profane slurs to refer to Black people and protesters, calling them "animals," "racist" and "thugs"- a direct violation of Facebook’s hate speech standards.

Others have become gathering grounds for promoting conspiracy theories about the protests, suggesting protesters were paid to go to demonstrations and that even the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police, was staged.

...


https://apnews.com/ca8c15794c65b1ae8e176deb9be5d718
 
Qualified Immunity is something I became recently aware of in the US. Not sure if we have anything like that in Canada?

Judge to decide if paramedics are protected under qualified immunity after they failed to provide care to a homeless man who was beaten and begging for help outside of a soup kitchen. Paramedics laughed and made fun of him instead of helping him. He died.

Qualified immunity might protect Dallas paramedics who mocked dying man
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/dallas/article244029517.html

Qualified immunity has come under scrutiny after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, who was arrested on a murder charge in June.

 
mariomike said:
Qualified Immunity is something I became recently aware of in the US. Not sure if we have anything like that in Canada?

Judge to decide if paramedics are protected under qualified immunity after they failed to provide care to a homeless man who was beaten and begging for help outside of a soup kitchen. Paramedics laughed and made fun of him instead of helping him. He died.

In Canada that comes under s 25 of the CCC:

Protection of persons acting under authority

25 (1) Every one who is required or authorized by law to do anything in the administration or enforcement of the law

(a) as a private person,

(b) as a peace officer or public officer,

(c) in aid of a peace officer or public officer, or

(d) by virtue of his office,

is, if he acts on reasonable grounds, justified in doing what he is required or authorized to do and in using as much force as is necessary for that purpose.

There are additional provisions in s. 25 and 25.1 which you can find here.

:cheers:
 
I read a lot of novels (e.g. Tim Dorsey) that take a fictional look at how crazy things are in Florida, but none of Dorsey's stories compares to what's happening in Florida real time:

Florida’s Idiocracy

Come and witness the wisdom of The People.

by Charles Sykes
June 24, 2020 8:18 pm

In the 2006 movie, Idiocracy, Mike Judge imagined “a dystopian world where commercialism has run rampant, mankind has embraced anti-intellectualism, and society is devoid of such traits as intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, justice, and human rights.”

Or maybe Judge was just predicting what would happen to Florida if a global pandemic ever hit.

On Wednesday, Palm Beach County held a public hearing. Its purpose: with the number of coronavirus cases spiking in Florida, the county commission wanted to hold a vote on mandating the use of masks in public (as Broward and Miami-Dade counties have). The vote came after a two-hour public hearing, during which angry opponents held up Trump signs, threatened the county board with citizens’ arrests, invoked the wrath of God, and held a festival of crazy.

Here’s a sample:

One woman accused the county commissioners of wanting to “throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door” by mandating masks. “You are all turning your backs on it.”

But this was the mild stuff.

“You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask, knowing that mask is killing people,” insisted one woman. “It literally is killing people.” Literally. (This is super important, if true.)

She followed up this disquisition with a threat:

    "We the people are waking up. And we know what citizen’s arrest is. Because citizen’s arrests are already happening, okay? And every single one of you who is obeying the devil’s law are going to be arrested. And you, doctor [here she is addressing the county’s health commissioner], are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity."

And not just arrested. The woman, who does not understand the meaning of “literally” but is an expert on international law, also dropped some theological bombs on on the board:

    "Every single one of you are going to get punished . . . by God."

    "You cannot—you cannot escape God. You cannot escape God. I’m a say that again: You cannot escape God. Not even with the mask or six feet."

The six feet, you see, is the tip-off for the real agenda at work here.

“Six feet, like I said before, is military protocol,” the lady insisted. “You are trying to get people to train them, so when the camera, the 5G comes out, what, they are going to scan everybody? We gotta get scanned, we gotta get temperatured? The kids are going to have to go school with masks?”

“Are you insane?” she asked. “Are you crazy? I think all of you ought to be a psych ward right the heck now.”

And irony wept.

Link
 
Ya know, I was thinking about this the other day (Who knows why?)

But for all the folks out there who are swept up in government mass surveillance conspiracy theories...the fact that the government is encouraging you, and sometimes mandating, that you wear a mask to cover your face makes it that much harder for them to clearly track you via CCTV. 

Throw a hat on, and you've really got them stumped! 



Aren't we lucky to be living in an age where intellectual objectivity is somehow discouraged, and anybody who thinks they have an impressive vocabulary is given air time?  ;)


"God can still get you...even if your 6ft away!"    Thanks lady, copy that. 
 
The Revolution Is Winning

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-revolution-is-winning/

The goals of the revolution have never changed. It has simply airbrushed its terrorist leaders into prominent public scholars and “activists” with a passion for “change” and “justice.” The revolution has lots of money, organization, control of the schools, support from one of the nation’s two major political parties, and the media megaphone. That is why the revolution is winning. The 1960s never ended, they just paved the way for today.

The division in the US is far more than what is portrayed on the surface.  It's not really about race and orange-man-bad is actually not that bad.  The goal is to use those subjects to destabilize the West, delegitimizing it.  Attacking the current Republican POTUS, like they attacked the last one, is just one more tool in the tool box.  There are lots of useful idiots helping this along for political reasons that don't care or don't see the longer term ramifications of a weaker West.       
 
QV said:
The Revolution Is Winning

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-revolution-is-winning/

The division in the US is far more than what is portrayed on the surface.  It's not really about race and orange-man-bad is actually not that bad.  The goal is to use those subjects to destabilize the West, delegitimizing it.  Attacking the current Republican POTUS, like they attacked the last one, is just one more tool in the tool box.  There are lots of useful idiots helping this along for political reasons that don't care or don't see the longer term ramifications of a weaker West.     

Preaching to the converted here. Ever since the USSR broke up (in name only) the supporters of that corrupt regime have encouraged us to "hug the bear" so to speak.

Bears have claws and teeth - so do tigers.
 
Hamish Seggie said:
Preaching to the converted here. Ever since the USSR broke up (in name only) the supporters of that corrupt regime have encouraged us to "hug the bear" so to speak.

Bears have claws and teeth - so do tigers.

So do eagles - claws anyway. And sharp beaks.

:cheers:
 
Eagle are like leaders.  They don’t have either of them in Washington DC.
 
Jarnhamar said:
Google Liberty And Justice Washington DC ;)

They’ve been MIA since Feb according to the top hit.  Makes sense since most of DC has been MIA since that time.

Edit: grammar and format
 
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