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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
It will also be against the wishes of the Kirk, who notably thought South Park making fun of him was hilarious.
Not that the dead necessarily get a vote, but it's quite a strange thing to honor a man by doing the opposite of what he would have wanted.
While yes I generally agree with this, and yes this is all against my principles…
…the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people. Those not actively involved in the execution have demonstrated that they will happily burn our cities when they don’t get their way.
My sense is that the conservatives don’t WANT any of this.
A few thousand people have resorted to executing people or burning cities, out of a US population of 350 million.
And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.
I think that is quite an exaggeration. The riots ended up killing a few dozen people and destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country. That's really bad, but that's not what happens when "the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it."
Outside of a few isolated incidents, the police did not let them do it.
To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.
The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.
Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.
Interestingly I would have had no idea if not for occasionally browsing forums like this, and that it still seems to be the center of gravity toward which many conversations tend even now 5 years later confirms it.
Nybbler already pointed out that riots are pretty rare in the USA, so I am assuming that you are not American.
It wasn't the riots themselves, it was how the media -- not just the news media, but sports media, entertainment media, and social media too -- reacted. Everyone lost their minds. Those of us who had even a passing familiarity with the actual events got to see how the consent-manufacturing sausage was made.
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Long 2020 was a fascinating lesson in narrative development, enforcement, and the whole gamut of what well-meaning liberals will find ways to justify or otherwise turn a blind eye on.
And, once they've gotten it out of their system and no longer think it's good, the post-Long 2020 period has been a fascinating lesson in how quickly they forget.
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In the US? They actually are. This isn't France. There have been riots, but nothing really of national interest since the Rodney King riots, and nothing as widespread since the civil rights riots.
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My gym teacher in primary school was an alcoholic. All the kids would watch him show up for work obviously drunk, do the bare minimum required by the bureaucracy (check if all the kids are present), throw us a ball and tell us to play, and he'd lock himself in his office to drink some more.
He never did anything terribly bad because of it, but he did neglect his duties rather egregiously, and possibly the most frustrating thing about it was all the adults gaslighting all the kids about it. I told my parents, and they'd say "can't be, someone would have done something about it". We'd tell the teachers and they'd either change the subject, or go off on us for impugning our coach's integrity.
Anyway, some years passed, I went on to go to high-school and forget about the whole affair. I then ran into an old friend from that school, we catch up on what we've been up to, and then he tells me some news he heard recently - our old coach was fired, got caught red-handed by the principal. So I take these news to my parents and they say "why are you acting so shocked, you were telling us all these years that he was an alcoholic!".
Story unrelated.
Where were we? Ah, yes. Riots happen, you're absolutely right. There was nothing special about this riot, or the way the Blue Tribe, including half this forum (which included moderators) talked about it.
I believe speak plainly is a mandate of the forum. Maybe I'm obtuse but I don't get what you're going for here.
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A fair amount of the "police let them do it" can be blamed on the police preferring to attack people protesting police brutality over maintaining public order. Which, you know, kind of vindicates the people protesting police brutality.
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If you're counting entire blocks. If you're counting individual stores, it would be much, much higher, and much more distributed.
Remind me why cities thousands of miles away from Minneapolis needed to have riots, why they needed to have minority-owned shops destroyed, and why the riots are worth it to you to minimize and downplay?
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More than a few blocks were destroyed in Kenosha alone. This is just retconning recent history. There was billions in damage.
Source
And that number only counts insurance payouts. There were certainly places that were not insured or were underinsured.
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Specify 'a few.'
In some contexts, 'a few' is three. In other contexts, three thousand might be 'a few' due to the scale. 'A few' is as specific as 'a bit', which doesn't have to mean 'one.' The Ferguson Effect was long downplayed for having only being 'a bit' of an impact, even as later research claims argue that homicides during a follow-on period raised one-zero percent (10%) as opposed to one percent (1%). That's an order of magnitude difference than might be implied by a figure of speech.
This is before duration-over-time is applied to metrics. Consider the Seattle CHOP autonomous zone, which lasted nearly a month as a de-facto secessionist zone of no law enforcement at the city's tolerance before being quickly and quietly rolled up after an unambiguous murder. Does that count as one protest, or over two dozen?
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I stand by my description.
Masked and uniformed men with rifles took over several blocks of a major American city, and began threatening and shooting at anyone that displeased them. The police let them do it. Local officials described it as a street festival. After their several attempted murders escallated to an actual murder, the police allowed them to flee unmolested, making no apparent effort to detain or even identify those involved.
I think that fits the description "let them do it".
Hundreds of easily-predictable and highly destructive riots were allowed to proceed without police intervention, or with the police only moving in to close things down after the rioters had their fun. Rioters were allowed to burn a police precinct. Rioters were allowed to besiege a federal courthouse. Rioters rampaging through suburbs were at one point confronted by a homeowner armed with a shotgun; the police arrested the homeowner. Numerous cases of legitimate armed self-defense on the part of citizens were maliciously prosecuted by the authorities, resulting in long prison terms and at least one death by suicide. Numerous cases of highly-illegal and entirely unjustified "self-defense" on the part of the rioters were quietly cleaned up with minimal or no charges.
In the overwhelming majority of these cases, nothing has ever been done to address or rectify the problem.
Nor was this limited to the Floyd riots. Police stand-downs have been commonplace and easily observable at least as far back as the battle of Berkeley, the better to allow Leftist thugs to brutalize those who dissent. My understanding is that this is still happening in Blue strongholds; the thugs wear masks and work in teams, the police decline to intervene, and then shrug at the victims who have no actual culprit to point to. Locals approve, because to them, the thugs are the "good guys".
Here, have some video from a while back, via these guys. Clearly it is only due to their mastery of the criminal arts that these people manage to evade apprehension.
When you have had riots the two previous nights, and you know there is going to be another riot tonight, and you accept this as a fact of the universe to be managed and worked around rather than attempting to prevent the riot before it starts, that is what letting it happen looks like.
Yeah the issue with police stand downs isn't the physical damage, it is the psychological damage. This might sound hyperbolic but it is unfortunately accurate - it works the same way terrorism works, utilising the spectacle of violence to achieve a political or ideological aim by manipulating the emotional state of a much larger audience. It creates deep insecurity and distrust in the general public on top of a general sense of unease and danger.
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