TV news is bending over backwards, both Fox and rest, to distinguish and totally separate protesters and looters. It’s nice optics management, but I suspect the line between them is much fuzzier than they’re willing to admit. Same demographics, similar psychographics.
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In some ways looting is a less clueless response to belief that a system is illegitimate. Skin-in-game subversion. If protests were 100% peaceful and law-abiding with zero slippage into violence or crime, we’d call them parades. Identity performance with zero political potency.
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I don’t condone what’s going on now because I happen to believe the system is legitimate enough for me, not because I believe in some well-posed absolute moral distinction between protest and looting
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My good anticop/bad anticop emergence theory of protesters vs looters is not very popular it seems. Good anticops loudly disavowing bad anticops even though it’s clearly the combo that gets whatever results emerge.
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The protester-looter distinction TV commentary is practically a surreal religious sermon now. Police chief at one point described the protocol for civil disobedience arrests, where they negotiate politely about who wants to get arrested etc. Protest theater is refined art.
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At this rate, I fully expect a tv commentator to suggest giving licenses and uniforms to protesters. Maybe even special “good” prisons for them where they have their own locks and keys to arrest themselves for self-serve civil disobedience. Maybe a system of ranks and badges too.
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I’ll say this though... if the police in very unequal societies is primarily a praetorian guard defending the core bastions of wealth and power, they’ve definitely learned quite a few tricks since the fall of the Roman Empire. They can stabilize far more complex situations now.
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Protest really is a weapon of the weak. You wouldn’t use it if almost any other tactic were available to you.
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Also a desperate pretense that this is only about George Floyd or at best about policing in black communities. Studious avoidance of the thought that there is a powder keg created by how the costs and risks of Covid have ended up distributed in a 4-year-old Trumpist America.
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Aww he’s so excited about delivering on the utopia he promised in 2016, it’s practically dank-cute.
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LAW & ORDER!
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