George Floyd protests

[Tero]

Law and order! Never mind customers.

[Tero]

No more Cops. On TV.
The verite police show, which originated on Fox in 1989, had been pulled days before its scheduled season premiere, an action that came amid nationwide questions and protests about policing.

Those same concerns prompted A&E to postpone "Live PD," a newer iteration of the ride-along idea that's one of the network's most popular series.

https://abc7.com/cops-tv-show-cancelled ... e/6240050/

[laklak]

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/lo ... rt-looting

Walmart and Target not sure they'll reopen looted stores in Chicago. Chicago mayor asking for $1.2 million to hire private security firms to protect businesses. Defund the police, bring in Halliburton. What could possibly go wrong?

I hesitate to make the connection between general crime levels, riots and looting and the lack of stores in certain neighborhoods. Surely the two aren't connected, it must be systematic racism.

[Seabass]

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/lo ... rt-looting

Walmart and Target not sure they'll reopen looted stores in Chicago. Chicago mayor asking for $1.2 million to hire private security firms to protect businesses. Defund the police, bring in Halliburton. What could possibly go wrong?

I hesitate to make the connection between general crime levels, riots and looting and the lack of stores in certain neighborhoods. Surely the two aren't connected, it must be systematic racism.

Yeah, I'm sure the "crime levels, riots and looting" in "certain neighborhoods" have nothing to do with systemic racism.

[laklak]

I'm sure it does, but that wasn't what I was saying. Obviously Walmart and Target are being racist by not reopening their burned out, looted stores.

[Animavore]

[Animavore]

This is from January, it's a critique of HBO's Watchmen, and it's ridiculously relevant to now.

[Seabass]

I'm sure it does, but that wasn't what I was saying. Obviously Walmart and Target are being racist by not reopening their burned out, looted stores.

No, they're not being racist, but their exodus from that area will ultimately be the result of systemic racism, albeit indirectly. You're blaming one symptom on another symptom while ignoring the root cause of the problems.

[Tero]

Trump is losing his audience. Also, confederate flag banned at events.

[Tero]

06938ECE-780B-48BF-8816-84F0B49FB084.jpeg (86.2 KiB) Viewed 1723 times

[laklak]

Today, in NARCAR's first Demolition Derby......

[Brian Peacock]

Who calls their kid Bubba?

[JimC]

...knowing that they will become a 200 kg tattooed monster in a Federal Prison, who will tell all the new inmates "you're my wife now..."

[Brian Peacock]

Quite a long, but nonetheless interesting, article in today's Gruniad on Europe's relationship with the US and the civil rights struggle of Black Americans...

What black America means to Europe

In September 1963, in Llansteffan, Wales, a stained-glass artist named John Petts was listening to the radio when he heard the news that four black girls had been murdered in a bombing while at Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The news moved Petts, who was white and British, deeply. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” said Petts, in a recording archived by London’s Imperial War Museum. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”

Petts decided to employ his skills as an artist in an act of solidarity. “An idea doesn’t exist unless you do something about it,” he said. “Thought has no real living meaning unless it’s followed by action of some kind.”

With the help of the editor of Wales’s leading newspaper, the Western Mail, he launched an appeal for funds to replace the Alabama church’s stained-glass window. “I’m going to ask no one to give more than half a crown,” he told Petts. “We don’t want some rich man as a gesture paying for the whole window. We want it to be given by the people of Wales.”

Two years later, the church installed Petts’ window, flecked with shades of blue, featuring a black Christ, his head bowed and arms splayed above him as though on a crucifix, suspended over the words “You did it to me” (taken from Matthew 25:40: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me”).

Europe’s identification with black America, particularly during times of crisis, resistance and trauma, has a long and complex history. It is fuelled in no small part by traditions of internationalism and anti-racism on the European left, where the likes of Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and Audre Lorde would find an ideological – and, at times, literal – home.

“From a very early age, my family had supported Martin Luther King and civil rights,” the Northern Irish Catholic author and screenwriter Ronan Bennett, who was wrongfully imprisoned by the British in the infamous Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland in the early 70s, told me. “We had this instinctive sympathy with black Americans. A lot of the iconography, and even the anthems, like We Shall Overcome, were taken from black America. By about 71 or 72, I was more interested in Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver [of the Black Panthers] than Martin Luther King.”

But this tradition of political identification with black America also leaves significant space for the European continent’s inferiority complex, as it seeks to shroud its relative military and economic weakness in relation to America with a moral confidence that conveniently ignores both its colonial past and its own racist present...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... orge-floyd

[laklak]

Europeans had the right idea, they went to other countries to enslave the inhabitants instead of bringing them home.