stone cold posted:

Trabisnikof posted:

Pretty sure those ATMs didn't drop violence on anyone

Trabisnikof posted:

Pretty sure those ATMs didn't drop violence on anyone

quote:

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.'

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.

Proud Christian Mom posted:

The Berkeley protests will push away those GOP moderates we've been courting!

Trabisnikof posted:

Any violence is justified as long as you're wearing a mask!

Trabisnikof posted:

Lol so now saying "don't let black bloc assholes take over protests and destroy our own communities" is the same as supporting Nazis.

Chelb posted:

So why should protestors have restrictions like "don't break windows" placed on them when the modern day rightist movements and their hateful progenitors have spent their whole existences endorsing genocide, murder, physical and verbal violence, bigotry? At what point do you stop thinking of yourself as the calm and collected onlooker to these shameful rioters and consider violence like this to be an outcry of rage and of self-defense against generations of institutionally tolerated abuse?

stone cold posted:

Calling for Hispanic genocide is a-ok and you should be allowed to and paid to spew that speech with taxpayer money! Anybody who protests is dumb. Also, ATM's matter more than minority lives!

Trabisnikof posted:

Maybe be like the 1000+ protesters at Berkeley protesting rather than the ~100 odd black bloc idiots?

stone cold posted:

sorry you think genocides are dope

The Wiggly Wizard posted:

whenever protestors peacefully block the Bay Bridge or whatever, no one takes them seriously

stone cold posted:

Anybody who protests is dumb.

snyprmag posted:

Conglomerate store fronts are not "the community." Local stores in Oakland and Berkeley learned the displaying Black Lives Matter in their windows magically stopped those windows from being broken.

Leperflesh posted:

The thing is, that's not true. People did and do take Black Lives Matter seriously.

The more widespread a protest is, and the more people that participate, the more seriously it's taken. You can see this most recently with the enormous amounts of media attention and tremendous response to the marches on the day after the inaguration. Those protests were peaceful, very well attended (specifically possible because they were peaceful), and while it's too soon to tell if they've had a policy effect, at the very least they successfully gained media attention, overshadowed the inaguration itself, and prompted the President of the United States and his press secretary to blatantly lie and whine about comparative crowd sizes. The whining and blatant lying has increasingly emboldened the media to actually describe the President's false statements as what they really are: lies, intentional and knowing, rather than merely misstatements or being mistaken etc.

Over a year late, of course, but by most measures those marches were very successful.

Violent protests on once college campus do not work because they don't recruit masses of people to show up to more protests, they don't create a media narrative that favors the protestors, and they don't actually stop the thing they are protesting against either. OK, the bad man didn't get his stage; but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that if he'd gotten his speech, that would somehow have legitimized his message in the eyes of one of the nation's most liberal-leaning demographic - college students and college graduates.

But I guess some people felt the catharsis of violence and some lovely idiot college republicans got maced, so it's all great!


This isn't about protest, it's about violence. Everyone in this thread is in favor of protests.

Chelb posted:

I am desperately tired of the paternalism that leads people sitting at their computers to tell victims how they're not allowed to make their anger physically manifest.

Trabisnikof posted:

I'm pro-protest, just think agent provocateurs want black bloc idiots to destroy third party property and maybe we shouldn't do what the agent provocateurs want us to do?

Sorry you're so caught up in Internet rage, you don't care how black bloc idiots damage the community they protest in.

The Wiggly Wizard posted:

It's clear that the antifas are just patting themselves on the back and scaring away people who would sympathize with peaceful assembly.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

I think there's validity in saying that as a general rule, it's preferable when protests are peaceful and when violence and property destruction doesn't go along with them. At the same time, I think it's incredibly naive to be like "well but protests should always be non-violent" because there's a point to which non-violent means are no longer going to be able to work.

Going deeper, the response should always be to first condemn the people who actually caused the protest to happen in the first place! Like you've got a dude in Milo and his supporters who are radical, right-wing hate-spewing fascist fuckerlords out explicitly inciting violence -- the first response shouldn't be "but those poor, totally insured windows."

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Ah yes, the people that don't support Nazis but want you to be extremely polite to the them. They'll scurry away the second you actually punch a Nazi. That huge group.

Chelb posted:

Yeah. I don't mean to say that violence is automatically preferable to nonviolence, but there are times and places in which it is either a.) efficacious, or b.) morally justified (in a more philosophical interpretation of self-defense) regardless of its efficacy.

And I absolutely agree that protesters deserve less condemnation than those who incite protests. The cause is the issue here, not the effect.

stone cold posted:

Calling for Hispanic genocide is a-ok

stone cold posted:

you should be allowed to and paid to spew that speech with taxpayer money!

stone cold posted:

Also, ATM's matter more than minority lives!

Trabisnikof posted:

More like, if you'd told people the women's march was going to get violent quick, turnout would have been lower.

Leperflesh posted:

Students have a right to invite speakers to their campuses. If colleges try to filter who is permitted to speak based on political ideology, than colleges lose their position as promoters of free speech, and conservatives can correctly and successfully cut the public funding of those colleges by arguing that public funding is being used to support specific political parties and agendas. It's critically important that whenever public money is used to create forums for free speech, that no specific political position be disallowed. This is fundamental to the 1st amendment.

The correct response to someone using the publicly-funded space to advocate for genocide is to vigorously pillory them in the public forum for their outrageous and disgusting views. Ridicule is particularly effective. You can make it clear with a large enough and loud enough crowd that the person speaking is expressing views that are intolerable to the vast majority of the public.

Trabisnikof posted:

More like, if you'd told people the women's march was going to get violent quick, turnout would have been lower.

Trabisnikof posted:

Milo is bad but it is still bad for the movement when people fall for his tricks?

Trabisnikof posted:

More like, if you'd told people the women's march was going to get violent quick, turnout would have been lower.


Milo is bad but it is still bad for the movement when people fall for his tricks?

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Those aren't really the same things. Like the Women's March was a collective action of thousands of people marching in support of women's rights and in opposition to something in a broad sense. Protesting Milo's hate speech is a pretty narrow thing.

Leperflesh posted:

It's true, a single protest on one college campus of a hate-monger's speech is very different from a national movement. The latter requires a lot more work and effort and organization and consensus-building, whereas the former is nearly meaningless and in the long run will amount to absolutely no significant change whatsoever. Antifa punching fascists at Berkeley is never going to build into a national mass-movement of fascist-punching, and the use of violence is one of the reasons for that.

Leperflesh posted:

Nobody claimed that.

Leperflesh posted:

Students have a right to invite speakers to their campuses. If colleges try to filter who is permitted to speak based on political ideology, than colleges lose their position as promoters of free speech, and conservatives can correctly and successfully cut the public funding of those colleges by arguing that public funding is being used to support specific political parties and agendas. It's critically important that whenever public money is used to create forums for free speech, that no specific political position be disallowed. This is fundamental to the 1st amendment.

The correct response to someone using the publicly-funded space to advocate for genocide is to vigorously pillory them in the public forum for their outrageous and disgusting views. Ridicule is particularly effective. You can make it clear with a large enough and loud enough crowd that the person speaking is expressing views that are intolerable to the vast majority of the public.

Holocaust survivor Frans Firon posted:

"If fascism could be defeated in debate, I assure you that it would never have happened, neither in Germany, nor in Italy, nor anywhere else. Those who recognised its threat at the time and tried to stop it were, I assume, also called “a mob”. Regrettably too many “fair-minded” people didn’t either try, or want to stop it, and, as I witnessed myself during the war, accommodated themselves when it took over."

Leperflesh posted:

You could not be presenting a more bad-faith characterization of someone else's argument. Trabiskinof has said or implied no such thing and you undermine your own credibility by so obviously and deliberately twisting his argument.

Trabisnikof posted:

Any violence is justified as long as you're wearing a mask!

Leperflesh posted:

Students have a right to invite speakers to their campuses. If colleges try to filter who is permitted to speak based on political ideology, than colleges lose their position as promoters of free speech, and conservatives can correctly and successfully cut the public funding of those colleges by arguing that public funding is being used to support specific political parties and agendas. It's critically important that whenever public money is used to create forums for free speech, that no specific political position be disallowed. This is fundamental to the 1st amendment.

The correct response to someone using the publicly-funded space to advocate for genocide is to vigorously pillory them in the public forum for their outrageous and disgusting views. Ridicule is particularly effective. You can make it clear with a large enough and loud enough crowd that the person speaking is expressing views that are intolerable to the vast majority of the public.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Those aren't really the same things. Like the Women's March was a collective action of thousands of people marching in support of women's rights and in opposition to something in a broad sense. Protesting Milo's hate speech is a pretty narrow thing.

quote:

At 5:00 p.m., protesters began to assemble outside the ASUC Student Union building, where Yiannopoulos, 32, was slated to speak about “cultural appropriation” at 8:00 p.m. in the Pauley Ballroom. University of California Police had set barricades up around the building’s perimeter.


As organizers entered the building, protestors chanted: “Shame!” Others held signs decrying Yiannopolous as a fascist. Jerome Pansa, a Berkeley undergraduate, was among those who showed up early. “Staying home would be complicit in perpetuating hate speech,” said Pansa. “While we should not give him the attention he craves for, so much is at stake.”

Despite seeming hostility from protesters towards attendees of the speech, the demonstrations still remained calm. But not for long.

Around 5:50 p.m., about 150 men and women in black clothing marched towards the plaza. Many were carrying heavy sticks with black and Communist-themed flags, their faces obscured with bandana masks and hats pulled low on their foreheads.

The protestors dressed in black, some of who called themselves “Black Bloc,” or “Antifa” or who were members of BAMN – By Any Means Necessary – started to throw rocks at the police gathered near the student union. They set off what UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett called “commercial grade fireworks,” and threw Molotov cocktails. They tore apart the metal barricades and threw them into the windows of the Amazon store on the first floor of the student union, shattering the windows.


Most dramatically, the anarchists set fire to a set of portable lights. At times the flames leaped more than six feet into the air, prompting cheers and shouts from many bystanders. Blow horns and drums could be heard echoing through a vast horizon of students fleeing the scene.

Within 20 minutes, around 6:15 p.m., the event was officially canceled. Yiannopoulos was secretly ushered out of the building to an undisclosed location. He later posted a video on his Facebook page bashing what he called the far left.

quote:

By 6:30 p.m. the demonstration was divided in two. While the anarchists stayed close to the Pauley Ballroom, waving their flags and sticks, more than 1,500 people stood peacefully on the steps below Sproul Hall, which was lit up in the colors of the LGBTQ movement. A brass band played and many students danced on the plaza.


The police by then had taken a mostly hands-off approach, which they continued all night. Many were massed and visible in the MLK student union and some stood on the balcony with their paintball and pepper ball rifles. UC Police regularly issued warnings that the gathering was an unlawful assembly and ordered people to disperse within five minutes or face arrest. However, the police never acted on that threat.

Around 8:00 p.m., the crowd suddenly left and crowded along Telegraph and Bancroft Avenues. Some protestors overturned trash cans and set them on fire while other protestors cleaned up the garbage and put out the fires. Cars got stuck at Durant and Telegraph. Protestors would not let them through. At one point, a driver in a white sedan got frustrated and tried to drive through the crowd and had a man dangling off the front hood for a while. Berkeley Police had an unconfirmed report that a car had hit someone, but no one with injuries reported the incident. But Telegraph Avenue was left mostly unscathed.

Trabisnikof posted:

Sure but even at Berkeley, there were far more peaceful protesters than black bloc idiots. And when the black bloc idiots went on their smashing spree the crowd didn't follow with them.

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/02/02/chaos-erupts-protesters-shut-yiannopolous-events-banks-downtown-vandalized/


So by 6:15pm they cancelled the event. That's the victory and the targets of violence are related to the issue at hand, good.


Then the protest split in two and the black bloc people went off to destroy property, that's particularly when the violence became counterproductive.

stone cold posted:

Hey dumbass, instead of making GBS threads up this thread with your whole "capitulating swine" shtick, why don't you post how concerned you are about property in the protest thread?

quote:

stone cold wrote on Feb 2, 2017 13:23:
ushering minorities into the trump camps, you nazi scum

you're real dumb

Trabisnikof posted:

Lol nah. This is California politics. The president has threatened to defund UC Berkeley over it.


Also your PM was cute:

MaxxBot posted:

Sorry for skipping to the last page but can someone help me understand why the California Dems are so lovely on criminal justice and prison reform issues? The fact that Prop 47 had to be approved by the public over opposition from Dems in a "progressive" state with a bad prison overcrowding problem seems odd to me.

stone cold posted:

Milo does.

quote:

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences

quote:

and arguing in favor of Hispanic genocide is not a political opinion, it's white supremacist garbage repugnance, jfc. This isn't a political ideology thing, unless you're a naive white fuckboii, who like, totally doesn't see race, man.

quote:

Validating white supremacist opinions through the forum of the debate

quote:

you are presenting it as an inherently legitimate opinion to have (it's not) and two, you bring in the assumption that this can be debated.

Admiral Ray posted:

Milo's views aren't intolerable to the vast majority of the public though, that's the thing. They are perfectly tolerable to right-wing types because he's a self-loathing gay man without a coherent identity beyond "lol, liberals are sooooo sensitive, guys!" They are intolerable to the majority of students at Berkeley, probably, but the public at large? Nah. He's just a young and dumb Rush Limbaugh, or trying to be anyway.

Leperflesh posted:

Milo's not posting in this thread, dude. If you want to have a debate with Milo, you'll need to find him.


Of course it doesn't. But consequences in the abstract are differerent from literally advocating violence, which itself one of the key exceptions to the first amendment. It's literally illegal to incite a mob to riot, as it should be.


Oh ok, the only political speech is what you say is political speech, and if you say it isn't, then it isn't. Or maybe we should have some sort of government office that decides what's legitimate political speech, and what isn't? Or do you just believe in mob rule, whenever the mob decides someone's speech isn't politically legitimate then it has a right to turn to violence? Because that's a very convenient stance to take when the speaker is promoting bigotry, but becomes massively inconvenient when the speaker is (say) promoting a right to access to abortions to a majority mob that thinks abortion is murder, and therefore promotion of abortion isn't legitimate political speech.

It's actually almost unbelievable the degree to which people in this thread are willing to just set aside basic principles of protection of free speech. The government should not define specific bright-line limits on what sorts of political stances are or are not "legitimate" and then permit mob violence against anyone whose speech crosses the line: that is oppressive and borderline fascist.


Opinions are not "validated" by allowing someone to express them. That's a rhetorical fallacy. You cannot successfully crush an idea by forbidding it from being spoken of in public places; all that accomplishes is to martyr the speaker and deligitimize the people denying the speaker the ability to speak.


I disagree with all three points here.
First, the idea that some opinions are "legitimate" and some are not; second that permitting someone to speak is a concession to their ideas having merit (it isn't); and third that permitting someone to speak promotes the idea that their opinions are debatable.

And finally I also disagree with the notion that there is any opinion or stance or idea that cannot be debated.


Milo's views aren't even known to the vast majority of the public. Most people have never heard of him. But going beyond that, I disagree strenuously with the idea that the "vast majority of the public" are on board with genocide against hispanics. So either he's not actually promoting genocide against hispanics, or his views are actually intolerable to the vast majority of the public. It can't be both.

People are using Trump's election to promote the notion that a huge swathe of Americans are suddenly fascist racist nazis, out of the blue. That's a misunderstanding of how and why he got elected. Definitely he appealed to white supremecists... but that was more or less insignificant to his election, which hinged on A) absolute straight party line voting, and B) poor turnout by Democrats in northern industrial states who hated Clinton for a variety of irrational reasons and more generally a poor campaign by an uncharismatic candidate incapable of simply and straighforwardly articulating a sense of empathy for the majority of swing voters' concerns.

And now we've got Bannon in the white house and that's frightening and disgusting, but his views do not reflect those of a majority or even of a sizeable minority of Americans. Most of the people still on board with Trump simply aren't understanding what's actually happening and how it will actually affect them and their communities.

Leperflesh posted:

And finally I also disagree with the notion that there is any opinion or stance or idea that cannot be debated.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Milo: "Transgender isn't real, gays should be killed, and only whites are real."
Not Nazis: "No?"
Milo: "Says who?"
Not Nazis: "*extensively list of reasons why he's wrong*"
Milo: "Yeah, don't care. But here's a gay person you should all go out an jeer at."

stone cold posted:

that's a whole lot of words to say "i'm white and advocating genocide is just a political ideology"

Leperflesh posted:

I never claimed Milo or any of his follwers were interested in debate; they plainly are not. That does not address at all whether it's possible for two people who are interested in debate to debate the topic.

A person could promote that poo poo and another person could present reasoned arguments for why it's poo poo. That doesn't happen much, but it's not impossible.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Milo: "Transgender isn't real, gays should be killed, and only whites are real."
Not Nazis: "No?"
Milo: "Says who?"
Not Nazis: "*extensively list of reasons why he's wrong*"
Milo: "Yeah, don't care. But here's a gay person you should all go out an jeer at."

Leperflesh posted:

Milo's views aren't even known to the vast majority of the public. Most people have never heard of him. But going beyond that, I disagree strenuously with the idea that the "vast majority of the public" are on board with genocide against hispanics. So either he's not actually promoting genocide against hispanics, or his views are actually intolerable to the vast majority of the public. It can't be both.

People are using Trump's election to promote the notion that a huge swathe of Americans are suddenly fascist racist nazis, out of the blue. That's a misunderstanding of how and why he got elected. Definitely he appealed to white supremecists... but that was more or less insignificant to his election, which hinged on A) absolute straight party line voting, and B) poor turnout by Democrats in northern industrial states who hated Clinton for a variety of irrational reasons and more generally a poor campaign by an uncharismatic candidate incapable of simply and straighforwardly articulating a sense of empathy for the majority of swing voters' concerns.

And now we've got Bannon in the white house and that's frightening and disgusting, but his views do not reflect those of a majority or even of a sizeable minority of Americans. Most of the people still on board with Trump simply aren't understanding what's actually happening and how it will actually affect them and their communities.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Like that's some dumb "both sides" bullshit. Not all opinions are valid, in fact, a lot of them aren't.

And it's not like Milo just started this poo poo, nor does he *want* a debate. He doesn't want to hear why he's wrong. That's not what he's doing.

Take what happened at WVU for example. A gay, very liberal professor had an event planned months in advance at the same time that Milo's event got rescheduled to -- the organizers knew that fact -- but didn't care, they turned it into their own little pitty party and spewed hate speech towards the professor and made it about how it was a COUNTER PROTEST TO MILO, even though it wasn't.

They don't give a poo poo about facts dude. They're loving Nazis who are explicitly advocating for white supremacy and oppression of minorities.

Like it ain't like the protests are protesting "normal republicans," who might nominally be interested in discourse.

You're bloviating to bloviate.

Admiral Ray posted:

I'm not aware of this "Milo wants to kill all Hispanics" thing, though, what is that?