Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

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N.S.N.O. said:
Cheers guys... Don't follow American football myself, had only heard a little bit about Kaepernick last year... Now this story is everywhere....sadly you kinda get the impression from the media that the Protest is an anti-trump protest rather than its actual purpose...
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Sadly, that's largely what the protest has become. The owners don't want to be told what to do by Trump and the players don't want to be told how and when they can exercise their First Amendment rights (or be called sons of bitches by the POTUS). My hope is that the players who do care about injustice and racism will be able to marshall the unity that exists in the NFL to further the original intent of the protest.

American sports has a history of helping to effect social change. Hopefully that continues to be the case.
 
BlueTX said:
Sadly, that's largely what the protest has become. The owners don't want to be told what to do by Trump and the players don't want to be told how and when they can exercise their First Amendment rights (or be called sons of bitches by the POTUS). My hope is that the players who do care about injustice and racism will be able to marshall the unity that exists in the NFL to further the original intent of the protest.

American sports has a history of helping to effect social change. Hopefully that continues to be the case.
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Perhaps I am too much of an optimist but I do think that (despite the recent framing of the protests as anti Trump/anti patriotism/free speech) the amplification of the protest will mean that the base message will still reach a segment of society that it missed first time round through clips like Shannon Sharpe or Shep Smiths.

Of course awareness is only the first step in the battle, the next is putting measures in place to try to address it which is much, much harder.
 
Found this a thought provoking article from the other side of the aisle than I am politically. (It is quite long so didn't include all but rest here http://www.weeklystandard.com/its-trump-vs.-the-nfl-and-were-all-losers/article/2009805)
Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:

(1) Why are the players protesting? Police brutality? To bring attention to Black Lives Matter? Trump? Institutional racism? Capitalism? Ask 10 different NFL players and you'll probably get 5 different answers. More confusing still: When should the protests be over? Once you start protesting open-ended societal problems there’s no obvious endpoint. The criminal justice system isn’t going to be perfected tomorrow, or next week, or by the time today’s NFL rookies retire. And even if we did fix the justice system, there would be other large-scale societal woes. Why not protest income inequality? Or the disparate racial impacts of abortion? Protests ought to be organized with bright-line goals and natural endpoints. Otherwise kneeling for the national anthem becomes like wearing pink to “raise awareness” about breast cancer: It goes on for forever (and loses meaning over time).

(2) That said, there are non-crazy reasons why NFL players might protest on the broader subject of police misconduct, which is where this story kind-of, sort-of began. The current unrest began with the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, but that case was always an imperfect cause celebre: Brown wasn't an innocent bystander, and it wasn’t clear that the police acted poorly. But even as the Ferguson story was unfolding there plenty of other examples of police behaving badly. The Eric Garner story sure as hell should have freaked out anyone in the country who worries about having a police force that is (a) empowered to kill for almost no reason; and (b) is not held to a reasonable degree of accountability by the other pillar of the criminal justice system.

(3) Anyone who looks around the country and believes that black folks don't have a totally different experience with the police than white folks is simply kidding himself. There are probably a hundred reasons for this, including: the proliferation of handguns (I say this as a factual matter, not a moral judgment), usage of illegal drugs, and actuarial facts about violence. Racism may have a little to do with it (as Freddie Gray’s death suggests) or a lot (as the Colin Kaepernicks of the world would suggest). But the fraught nature of interactions between police and black people is a basic fact of life and you can't even begin to engage with the questions at hand if you don’t understand that it is a real thing.

(4) Conservatives have a blind spot for the police for reasons that are mystifying. Conservatives, after all, are hugely distrustful of government authority. Someone from the IRS or the EPA bosses citizens around and deprives them of their property and conservatives freak out. But call that agent of the government a cop, give him a gun, the authority to kill, and a public sector union devoted to ensuring he faces zero accountability? Suddenly only racial agitators and liberal namby-pambies question his actions.
..
(7) Yet in an important sense, none of this argument is really about police misconduct, per se. It’s about the institutional response to police misconduct. Think about the Catholic Church’s priest-abuse scandal. The scandal wasn’t that there was a small number of priests who abused their charges. This sort of evil behavior has happened for centuries and will continue to happen for centuries more because people are fallible, all people, even priests. No, the “scandal” was that the bishops observed this evil behavior and then tried to cover it up.

The same is true for police misconduct. If police officers who acted badly faced criminal consequences for their behavior most of the time, then I suspect that society would not get so upset about incidents of misconduct. It would be much easier to accept the few-bad-apples explanation and move on about our lives accepting that the benefits of police outweigh the costs.
 
peteblue said:
A good read, a sensible approach, but it's too big and like trying to boil the ocean. The abolition of prisons etc etc sounds great until they freely admit that some of the crimes in prison are horrendous, and therefore if abolished would put the same people who are committing crimes in prison back on the streets. It's a recipe for chaos. There are some sensible suggestions in there that absolutely deserve an airing and action, but I fear they won't because taken as a whole it smacks of victimhood. The schooling issues and suggestions should be examined and the bail system. It would also help if there was at least some admission that perhaps some black felons only have themselves to blame. Every country of whatever colour has them....
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As luck would have it there just happened to be a GOT prison abolitionist in the house! I find the label rather unhelpful, not alone on this, because it typically leads people down this road. I don't mean to be dismissive, I understand and agree that you'll never have 0% incarceration and some people are just too dangerous for society.

That being said, the final end goal would eventually be creating a society where the prison system as it exists today is no longer needed. That comes through things like not loading prisons and destroying communities for non violent drug offenses, ending for profit prisons, bail reform, ending the death penallty, ending overuse of solitary confinement, civil forfeiture abuse, having police stop killing people constantly etc. I mean can rattle off examples until I'm blue in the face. Yes, there's always going to be prison in some sense but if that's the end goal I'll be happy to settle for Riker's not existing.
 
LinekersLegs said:
Found this a thought provoking article from the other side of the aisle than I am politically. (It is quite long so didn't include all but rest here http://www.weeklystandard.com/its-trump-vs.-the-nfl-and-were-all-losers/article/2009805)
Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:

(1) Why are the players protesting? Police brutality? To bring attention to Black Lives Matter? Trump? Institutional racism? Capitalism? Ask 10 different NFL players and you'll probably get 5 different answers. More confusing still: When should the protests be over? Once you start protesting open-ended societal problems there’s no obvious endpoint. The criminal justice system isn’t going to be perfected tomorrow, or next week, or by the time today’s NFL rookies retire. And even if we did fix the justice system, there would be other large-scale societal woes. Why not protest income inequality? Or the disparate racial impacts of abortion? Protests ought to be organized with bright-line goals and natural endpoints. Otherwise kneeling for the national anthem becomes like wearing pink to “raise awareness” about breast cancer: It goes on for forever (and loses meaning over time).

(2) That said, there are non-crazy reasons why NFL players might protest on the broader subject of police misconduct, which is where this story kind-of, sort-of began. The current unrest began with the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, but that case was always an imperfect cause celebre: Brown wasn't an innocent bystander, and it wasn’t clear that the police acted poorly. But even as the Ferguson story was unfolding there plenty of other examples of police behaving badly. The Eric Garner story sure as hell should have freaked out anyone in the country who worries about having a police force that is (a) empowered to kill for almost no reason; and (b) is not held to a reasonable degree of accountability by the other pillar of the criminal justice system.

(3) Anyone who looks around the country and believes that black folks don't have a totally different experience with the police than white folks is simply kidding himself. There are probably a hundred reasons for this, including: the proliferation of handguns (I say this as a factual matter, not a moral judgment), usage of illegal drugs, and actuarial facts about violence. Racism may have a little to do with it (as Freddie Gray’s death suggests) or a lot (as the Colin Kaepernicks of the world would suggest). But the fraught nature of interactions between police and black people is a basic fact of life and you can't even begin to engage with the questions at hand if you don’t understand that it is a real thing.

(4) Conservatives have a blind spot for the police for reasons that are mystifying. Conservatives, after all, are hugely distrustful of government authority. Someone from the IRS or the EPA bosses citizens around and deprives them of their property and conservatives freak out. But call that agent of the government a cop, give him a gun, the authority to kill, and a public sector union devoted to ensuring he faces zero accountability? Suddenly only racial agitators and liberal namby-pambies question his actions.
..
(7) Yet in an important sense, none of this argument is really about police misconduct, per se. It’s about the institutional response to police misconduct. Think about the Catholic Church’s priest-abuse scandal. The scandal wasn’t that there was a small number of priests who abused their charges. This sort of evil behavior has happened for centuries and will continue to happen for centuries more because people are fallible, all people, even priests. No, the “scandal” was that the bishops observed this evil behavior and then tried to cover it up.

The same is true for police misconduct. If police officers who acted badly faced criminal consequences for their behavior most of the time, then I suspect that society would not get so upset about incidents of misconduct. It would be much easier to accept the few-bad-apples explanation and move on about our lives accepting that the benefits of police outweigh the costs.
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Points 1 through 3 are typical condescending right-wing bullsh_t points: them blacks don't even know what they're protesting about; here's what they should be doing...; racism might play a role in their lives but it's probably drugs and handguns... Jeezus H Christ!!! I couldn't finish the rest.

edit: But then Pete will accuse me of intellectual laziness, so I'll plod on. Point 4: fair point; point 7: fair point, but it doesn't eliminate the fact that some police do treat blacks and whites very differently, often with lethal consequences; such deaths could be prevented with more upfront training/screening, rather than just talking about an institutional cover-up. An institutional cover-up offers little consolation to a family member who's loved-one has just been shot, particularly when it could have been prevented in the first place.
 
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verreauxi said:
Points 1 through 3 are typical condescending right-wing bullsh_t points: them blacks don't even know what they're protesting about; here's what they should be doing...; racism might play a role in their lives but it's probably drugs and handguns... Jeezus H Christ!!! I couldn't finish the rest.

edit: But then Pete will accuse me of intellectual laziness, so I'll plod on. Point 4: fair point; point 7: fair point, but it doesn't eliminate the fact that some police do treat blacks and whites very differently, often with lethal consequences; such deaths could be prevented with more upfront training/screening, rather than just talking about an institutional cover-up. An institutional cover-up offers little consolation to a family member who's loved-one has just been shot, particularly when it could have been prevented in the first place.
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I did wonder if that condescension that almost had you stop reading was purposefully designed to get some of his readers into considering his later points that they would have rejected out of hand without the initial framing.

I agree that training/screening was an important aspect missing from the article, significant changes in that area could do a lot to stop the abuse happening in the first place and concrete proposals need to be championed whenever this topic is discussed (I'm personally amazed by how often in the videos the police seem to actively escalate rather than de-escalate the tension).

But found the focus on the institutional cover up and the Catholic church comparison an interesting approach to persuading some people of the seriousness of the problem who currently see the protests as just an attack on the police and the abuse itself as just "one of those things that happen (although not to me and mine)".
 
verreauxi said:
The regressive left has its own share of bad logic. Apparently if you don't kneel during the anthem and you're white, then you are standing for white supremacy...or something like that.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...them-are-standing_us_59c8acbbe4b0f2df5e83afcd
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Articles like that, and those of conspiracy nutters like Mench, are so depressing. The left should be rejecting the tactics of Breitbart et al, not co-opting their approach to just reflect a different idea/attack a different target.
 
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