Re: Umbrella Man
 

The protests here are largely not destructive. But mostly white hipster suburbans, and the po po is watching them so the neighborhoods have a spike in shootings/ murders, of black people. Grand Rapids got burned up. I don’t think from white suprematists, but maybe?

Re: Umbrella Man
 

Historically, revolutions are started by upper middle class people. That’s largely white. Check out the videos everywhere and you’ll see whites all over the place.

There’ll be a push to assert, in a conspiracy theory tin foil hat school of thought, that everything bad in the protests is done by double agent white supremacists. This will the left adopting Alex Jones’ style “false flag” thinking.

When this is all done, we sensible folks will pick up the pieces. So it goes...

ETA: In this instance, it indeed was a white supremacist, according to some media.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

My point was it is chaos, and trying to pin any group might be wrong.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

We haven't had much in the way of protest here. We had the initial protests in late May/early June, and then the funeral, and that was pretty much it.

We're a minority/majority city, with a quarter of our population Black. I'm sure there are some organizations doing something right now, but we don't really have a focal point for protesting. More people have been upset about the missing/murdered soldier of late. (She was Hispanic, her killer Black, his girlfriend who helped dismember her is White, and I assume Ft. Hood is pretty diverse. The complaints are about how the Army treats minority women. He had harassed her and apparently killed her because he did not want her complaining about it.)

OTOH, Austin (170 miles away) has been pretty active with the protesting, to the point someone was killed at the protests a few days ago. Its Black population is pretty small, 8 percent of the whole. It feels a lot more white there, roughly half of its population is non-Hispanic white compared to our quarter of the population.

Maybe it's because it's a college town (though the students aren't generally around because summer/Covid). Maybe it's more "liberal", though Houston is pretty damned liberal for Texas. Maybe their police are more of a pain in the ass than ours are. Art Acevedo (who we stole from Austin) has been pretty good about being a public face of the police and seems to care about the inequalities. There are some questions about some cop shootings and the body cams, but they haven't risen to the outrage level yet. Maybe it's because Covid is pretty bad here in Houston right now and our population is focused more on that than Austin's is. Or maybe having the funeral here, being actually able to say goodbye to George Floyd gave some closure to the folks down here. I know a lot of people who went to the public viewing, and I think a good hunk of people watched the funeral here.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

Well, in this instance, the Umbrella Guy was a white power freak. And there will be many instances where that will be the case going forward.

So the narrative that’ll emerge from those abiding the vandalism and looting attendant to some of the protests will be that that stuff was all done by white supremacists looking to undermine the legitimacy of the protests.

But historically, all attempts at full overthrow of the system by the general population are driven in significant part by middle to upper middle, sometimes even affluent individuals. Hoffer’s book, True Believer, gives a solid analysis of the phenomenon. A good bit of it has to do with these people having unmet expectations about life, feeling they’re being stifled by a system in which they should be far up the ladder. Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Trotsky, most of the ‘60s radicals here — a lot of these people came from pretty comfortable backgrounds.

This time it might be different, however, as this attempt at flipping the system is occurring during a depression for the poor. Hoffer asserts that the poor are usually only tepid followers in these movements because typically they’re working too hard to survive, or better their situation, to participate. Presently, a lot of the poor have nothing else to do but join the protests.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

I would distinguish the protests from the rioting, although there is an overlap in the groups. While the rioting here appears to have been instigated in part by a white supremacist, I don’t think there was any one group or ideology controlling the riots. Anarchists, white supremacists, people who just like to burn things. They were all out there. I kind of think there were probably more people who just like to burn things than any ideologically-driven rioters, but who knows. There was a narrative at the beginning that the rioters were mostly outside agitators from other states, and there were certainly individuals and groups who made the trip from elsewhere. But arrest records show that many of those arrested were from Minnesota, although a lot were not from the Twin Cities. But there is also a narrative from the right that the riots here were exclusively the work of Antifa and leftist/anarchist groups, which is demonstrably false.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

Yeah, definitely all different type of shit stirrer, mostly in proximity to the police precincts and Lake Street.

But the thing that makes me wonder about something more organized is that gas stations all across the city were burned (was it Friday night?). It strains credulity that someone looking to cause trouble just happened on the Speedway on 34th Ave and 51st St.

ETA: Not positive that o e was on fire. It was boarded up the next day but reopened after a few days.

Re: Umbrella Man
 

i lived in East Lansing for years, so I can hardly hate on people for burning random stuff.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Sebby will never be happier to read Matt Yglesias, I wager.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I have had a number of conversations, electronic and otherwise, on Shor, and have yet to engage anyone who thinks he should have been fired for that tweet. The message board Matty cites him getting removed for I think I would not be able to bear being on (and I'm at least a little bit progressive), and the one person he cites by name seems to be suggesting the tweet requires a "larger context" (yo, it's a tweet! Every tweet requires a larger context, that's the point) but I don't see what punishment she was advocating for him other than a sound talking to. But, hey, there are some loonies out there, thanks for the reminder. My biggest pet peeve on the left are definitely some of the "Bernie Bro" types, who regularly yell "neoliberal tool" at me, but I'm not going to glorify them by suggesting they have the ability to cancel jack shit, they're mostly just annoying.

Shor is brilliant. If you aren't reading Shor, read him. Something good comes of this if more people read Shor.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Schor’s boss sounds like the true villain here. If you’re smart enough to run a company, you should understand that nothing - nothing - about that tweet could ever even approach being offensive.

When we’ve reached the point where a person trying to help is fired for citing the advantage of non-violence over looting and vandalism, we’re truly hopeless.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I assume Shor is in a better place now, but bosses have been idiots and asses for as long as there have been bosses.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Presumably Adder thinks it was OK to fire Shor, since what he said was "racist" in the broad sense of being arguably unhelpful to the struggle to combat structural racism in this country. But maybe I have misread Adder's posts on the subject and he will explain to me why I'm wrong.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I don't think he'll take that approach. Schor was being helpful. He was shouted down by people who didn't like his advice.

He's in a no man's land. An anti-racist branded racist by anti-racists who aren't terribly smart.

I believe he plays the role of a Danton in this moral panic.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Right. But this was Wrong. This guy was acting entirely in good faith, and simply attempting to offer advice. This boss elevated moral grandstanding to broadcast corporate wokeness over the interests of a guy who was actually doing something useful for the movement his boss is more interested in being seen as extremely supportive of rather than actually and effectively supporting.

This is a social media conundrum. It elevates the awareness crowd above the effective crowd. Saying is of more value than doing.

There's also a critique of corporate marketing and corporate "values" to be raised, but that's a long conversation for another day.