#81
Post rating: ~

88888 posted:

It's an argument that's been mobilized by liberals desperate to save face from having the protests they endorsed a few days prior grow more and more militant, the flip-side of the right-wing "white out-of-town anarchists (Soros antifa commandos???)" argument, and serving basically the same purpose.


sure I'll yield to that if folks here say it's that bad, guess I'm just not keeping up fast enough. can definitely see how that would piss in the pool

#82
Post rating: +

dimashq posted:

Anyone see that maga boomer with the bow get steamrolled?




#83
lies half the time
Post rating: +
up until a couple hours ago our state capitol used to have a big statue right in front of some dickhole politician and newspaper editor who instigated a mob to destroy the publishing house of a civil rights paper that criticized the lynching of several victims of a police race riot. now statue fucker is eating dirt, city's on fire, national guard has been called in
#84
Post rating: +
realizing most people are woefully lacking when it comes to security. a girl i go to school with is currently live-streaming a big protest on instagram. someone asked what street she was on and she described it in detail lol

i've been trying to get some people i know to use signal and they all seem surprised that it would be necessary. one person told me "well instagram can look at your dms but they probably wouldn't"

americans are truly a special breed

Edited by magnetoscope ()

#85
lies half the time
Post rating: ~

The coordinated @MNNationalGuard, @MnDPS_MSP, & law enforcement presence will triple in size to address a sophisticated network of urban warfare.

#86
Post rating: +

招瑤 posted:

The coordinated @MNNationalGuard, @MnDPS_MSP, & law enforcement presence will triple in size to address a sophisticated network of urban warfare.


The "X-COM" phase of civil unrest

#87
Post rating: ~

magnetoscope posted:

realizing most people are woefully lacking when it comes to security. a girl i go to school with is currently live-streaming a big protest on instagram. someone asked what street where she was described it in detail lol

i've been trying to get some people i know to use signal and they all seem surprised that it would be necessary. one person told me "well instagram can look at your dms but they probably wouldn't"



does signal actually make a difference?

#88
Post rating: +
any app with half decent end-to-end encryption is better than nothing, assuming you just want cops not to be able to read your messages in a timely fashion. so just for stuff like "ay meet me at (place) in 15" it's fine and much better than DMs on any social app which could easily be monitored in real time. but any time you communicate electronically you should assume they'll be able to see all of it down the track if they prosecute you for something, so don't say more than you need to for immediate logistical needs?
#89
Post rating: +
Minneapolis cops are doing drive bys with rubber bullets, nazis are doing it with real bullets, and medics are being targeted and baited with false calls

If you hear a car hauling ass half the time it’s a cop shooting rubber bullets at anyone on the street
#90
Post rating: ~

Parenti posted:

does signal actually make a difference?


probably

https://web.archive.org/web/20180324232702/http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35535.pdf

in this NSA presentation they called the combination of Tor, Trilight Zone, CSpace and a ZRTP client (the protocol signal is built on) as

CATASTROPHIC

Near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence


and i know edward snowden has said he uses signal. of course, that's with tails, tor, etc. someone on an iphone with mobile data, plus user error? i imagine it's a slightly different story. still better then fuckin instagram, though.

disappearing messages are also nice

Edited by magnetoscope ()

#91
Post rating: +
end to end encryption is worthless when the endpoints (phones) are all compromised and they can just read everything in plaintext. but its probably worth using anyway because it becomes far more expensive to read your texts when you do.
#92
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Tor is a CIA surveillance project like most "secure" encrypted communications methods. None of that shit "works" or is "secure" afaik. Yasha Levine has done extensive work investigating and documenting that.

mainly kinch is right that it wouldn't matter anyway because the companies that make your phone and provide service to it will hand any law enforcement, security or intelligence agency anything they ask for, as soon as they ask for it. It's all available from every end point whenever they want it.

I'd add only that if you download an app like Signal onto your device, you're almost certainly put on a list for potential heightened surveillance, because you've identified yourself as someone who wants to hide something from the cops.

None of that should scare you away from politics or action but you should be fully aware of all of it. Just because you're under surveillance doesn't mean the government is God or omniscient or invincible.
#93
Post rating: +
The narrative that white people are violent provocateurs and BIPOC are peaceful will likely keep popping up throughout this campaign and in future campaigns, I don’t see how anarchism can successfully resolve this issue
#94
[account deactivated]
#95
Post rating: +++++

pogfan1996 posted:

I don’t see how anarchism can successfully resolve this issue


catchphrase

#96
[account deactivated]
#97
Post rating: +
It's a pretty smart strategy that these police chiefs/sheriffs are using by joining the protests. It gives protesters a false sense of victory while no demands are met.

Imagine a protest at the Pentagon where some high level official comes out, loops the building a couple of times with protesters, tells the crowd that they'll try to kill less people and everyone goes home.
#98
Post rating: ~
Well the real trick is to organize those protests where the cop boss gives a speech through a local hired activist "leader" and also pre-place brick piles in the area with cameras hidden in the bushes aimed at them and squad cars parked in the alleyways.

#99
Post rating: +
the idea that cop/fascist agents provocateurs are fake or somehow marginal or whatever is at least as harmful as the idea that only reason protests caused property damage is because of white out of town anarchists or whatever. they're both worse. police appear on both sides of the argument. police infiltrators will provoke violence or dissuade radical action or both, and treating the issue as a totally general one leads down a blind alley.
#100
[account deactivated]
#101
Post rating: +
the point of provocateurs is that they dont need to be in the majority to start something that they want started. it doesnt necessarily mean that everything that happens happens because of police, that's what i was talking about generalities here leading down blind alleys
#102
Post rating: +

toyot posted:

some of this is the brain worm that the CIA or police are the makers of history when we've read enough to know it's our class. we shouldn't give em credit if we really don't know it's due... look at the world we were born in, walk down the street, count the cars and streetlamps... our class has completely re-shaped an entire planet with its hands in 250 years. of course our class is the lever of history, and we'll slough their dead tissue off us soon...


Sure. Well thinking back to Thursday night, regardless of whatever #fuckery the police were up to on the margins, they still lost their station. And yeah, they abandoned it but I highly doubt they wanted that to happen, anymore than any army wants to abandon the ground they're standing on (feints excluded). Now what forced them to give up and book it like that is interesting and pogfan has shed some light on the mass and discipline required.

#103
Post rating: +
speed was certain part of the equation in that case, right? one thing i noticed at least was that there was just so little time for anyone to react or prepare this time around. the whole timetable from police brutality > viral video > militant protest > firing > indictment (!) was completely tiny and blessedly too short for the usual idiotic pedantry about like, oh was the victim of too frail constitution to withstand assault due to DRUGS, what was his criminal record, how did the officer feel at the time, blah blah blah. thats a very positive development from my perspective. the people who seemed to want to have that debate were just immediately drowned out by the sound of a police station being on fire and the horrified shrieking of liberal onlookers
#104
[account deactivated]
#105
Post rating: ~

kamelred posted:

idiotic pedantry about like, oh was the victim of too frail constitution to withstand assault due to DRUGS, what was his criminal record,


These have all already been trotted out though

#106
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
being "restrained by the police" seems like it could be the culprit here... we just need to know what possible intoxicants he had taken, and to find a volunteer with similar underlying health conditions to serve as a control for this experiment, to see if such a person under such possible influence is capable of surviving nine minutes in the absence of a pig knee grinding their neck into the pavement
#107
Post rating: +

dizastar posted:

im on the other side of the atlantic so i might be out of touch but its clear that these racial generalization about riots hold no actual basis and anyone that could possibly believe that drop that belief as soon as they leave the house. and as the riots spread quick through multiple city, maybe soon it will even be in every city, people who still express reluctance will be forced to see for themselves what is happening.


Where I'm at the level of radicalism for protests of this scale reminds me of the Quebec student protests in 2012. Not as militant as some other cities and that might not sound very impressive but it's militant enough to be a Big Deal because protesting like Montrealers in a conservative part of the country like this has freaked out the state and cities so bad they've begun hitting the National Guard and nightly curfew buttons. I'm also sure that for many protesters this is their first time facing off in a group against armored cops and their munitions. The younger protesters jump and flinch at the airburst fireworks and are more prone to panicking en masse than in some other places, I think, and that's before the cops hit them with what comes after those fireworks. But people will learn from it.

I think another development is that these protests are taking place more in downtown areas with young Hispanic workers and white leftists taking part, which is giving them more mass. It's black-led and predominantly black but racial generalizations do not hold. Some other things that remind me of Montreal is morale-boosting support from people on the street, people banging pots and pans from windows, tooting their car horns in support and older black workers (this is unlike Montreal) getting out of their cars and putting their fists up. Hispanic hardhats on a job site were doing that too. That's as far as I'll make the comparison, it's just a reference point I'm familiar with, since those student protests were mostly white Quebecer students protesting a tuition hike and for all their militancy -- inspiring as it was -- it's just not the same ballpark. The backlash is liable to be very bad, but if the struggle can sustain it has a ton of potential.

#108
Post rating: +



speechless
#109
[account deactivated]
#110
mt.real
Post rating: +

dizastar posted:

opportunist police starting to march with the protestors in some places is a clear sign that for once they are scared and hopeless, theyre scared heads will actually fall this time, so its not the moment for the people to give thought to this divisive talk about whos a paid agent, whos a provocateur and whos a real person.


this seems absolutely correct to me. it is fully irrelevant - lines are being blurred in multiple directions and focusing on that seems like a theoretical distraction at best

#111
mt.real
Post rating: ~
back up for tonight


edit: stream 2

Edited by drwhat ()

#112
[account deactivated]
#113
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

c_man posted:

the idea that cop/fascist agents provocateurs are fake or somehow marginal or whatever is at least as harmful as the idea that only reason protests caused property damage is because of white out of town anarchists or whatever. they're both worse. police appear on both sides of the argument. police infiltrators will provoke violence or dissuade radical action or both, and treating the issue as a totally general one leads down a blind alley.



c_man posted:

the point of provocateurs is that they dont need to be in the majority to start something that they want started. it doesnt necessarily mean that everything that happens happens because of police, that's what i was talking about generalities here leading down blind alleys



^ this is all completely correct and all of you know it so don't pretend like you don't

#114
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

drwhat posted:

dizastar posted:

opportunist police starting to march with the protestors in some places is a clear sign that for once they are scared and hopeless, theyre scared heads will actually fall this time, so its not the moment for the people to give thought to this divisive talk about whos a paid agent, whos a provocateur and whos a real person.

this seems absolutely correct to me. it is fully irrelevant



Lmao.

#115
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +++++
Are you all fucking with me. Cops are "joining" protests and then attacking them with military weapons 5 minutes later. Cops are starting fights because they are a colonial occupation force and they intend to win to by force. The line about outside agitators stirring up trouble is a distinct white supremacist anti Commie line that all of you should know by heart backwards and forwards. Are you fucking with me. Well bye.
#116
Post rating: +++++
i wasnt going to say anything since i am thousands of miles away, and sorry if this comes across as obvious to you all, but yeah, cops "join protests" (in uniform that is) and hang out at the front all laughing and joking with people when the class antagonisms between them and (a proportion) of the protesters is less pronounced in order to weaken the resolve of the crowd as a whole and hive off/bring onboard class elements in the crowd which are sympathetic to the protest but waver in allegiance between (in class terms) the bourgeoisie and the proletariat/lumpen. it just a cop tactic, from the big book of cop tactics. you better believe that they will beat the shit out of you and drag you off to prison in flexicuffs the second the wind changes direction

Edited by tears ()

#117
Online
Post rating: +

c_man posted:


Don't know the providence of those texts but still think this was absolutely true.

Matty glesus of all people is noticing how CNN/corporate media is pushing this good protestors vs unruly rioters dichotomy while their own camera people get shot and arrested, and Bellingcat (???) has a big list of all the incidents of cops attacking reporters

all this gives the lie to the "Just vote for Dems!!" since all these blue dem cities are nevertheless chock full of racist policing and the gangster police departments just keep being granted higher funding to further militarize so as to better oppress their citizens of color

#118
Online
Post rating: +++++

pogfan1996 posted:

opportunist police starting to march with the protestors in some places is a clear sign that for once they are scared and hopeless, theyre scared heads will actually fall this time, so its not the moment for the people to give thought to this divisive talk about whos a paid agent, whos a provocateur and whos a real person.


yeah they're worried enough to attempt this stunt but nevertheless it's clearly a PR stunt that's fooling nobdy



oh wait a minute i guess it's fooling someone

Edited by ilmdge ()

#119
Post rating: +
I'm getting a vibe from this thread that some posters think they're disagreeing with each other, but it's not apparent to me what they're disagreeing about beyond a matter of rhetorical emphasis. The passion is expected and good but let's all make sure we're channeling it properly and not talking past each other.
#120
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
If you can't discern

• "police infiltrate out-of-uniform and instigate violence as cover for more violence" (true & documented, and do you think this is the first unrest in a century where they haven't?), from

• "outside agitators are stirring up the lesser races" (old KKK/cop line fed to journalists)

Or if you can't separate

• "someone's saying police infiltrate out-of-uniform and instigate violence", from

• "they must be saying that anything non-CNN-approved that happens on the street is a cop plot, they don't believe in discontent or class consciousness"

Then you may just want to keep your mouth shut because you are missing the mental tools you need. Separating these is not some academic high-level concept, it's what you need to understand anything like this now or in the future. It stuns me that anyone here can't do that tbh.