The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia Commons
Right before I sat down to write this article, I clicked on MSN to see what the headlines were and I could have read about the George Floyd funeral, Black Lives Matter protests in the suburbs, Trump’s comments about the injured Buffalo protestor, and the removal of a Confederate statue.
Then I went to Google News and the top story was Biden addressing George Floyd’s 6 year old daughter, a million dollar treasure buried in the Rockies that had been found, and a police officer being arrested over pushing a protestor.
As for CNN, they were featuring the WHO discussing asymptomatic spread of Covid19, Daniel Radcliffe’s views on the trans movement, and the reopening of Las Vegas.
Since I’d read about all those things already, I figured no news was good news.
I sometimes venture onto the hellscape known as Twitter, and on Twitter, I follow a variety of people from all across the political spectrum because I want to know what’s actually going on in people’s hearts and minds rather than being in an echo chamber. And on Twitter over the weekend, I had started to read some pretty crazy stuff coming out of Chicago. Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen” for example (sadly deleted and I didn’t screenshot it, because silly me, I thought if it was true it would be on the news), that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses, that the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.
I talked to my dad about this, and he hadn’t heard anything either, so he called our cousin who lives in Chicago. She said she was scared to go outside, there were fires in the distance, gunshots, sirens, and chaos in the streets. Yet there hadn’t been a word on the news anywhere that we had seen. While I felt worried about the disparity of what I was hearing vs. seeing in the media, naively I was still inclined to believe the media. It just couldn’t be true that anything newsworthy was happening in Chicago, because it wasn’t being told to me by the people I have long trusted to tell me things that are worth knowing about.
Yesterday morning I woke up and it appeared that what my cousin had been saying was true. There has been enormous unrest in Chicago, buses had been stolen, police were spread so thin they were useless (911 was not even answering phone calls). The aldermen and mayor of Chicago were upset, frightened, and passionately debating what to do about it. And despite this, the situation in Chicago is STILL not the headline story on any of the news organizations I usually frequent. Even on more right wing sites like Drudge and Knewz any hint of civil unrest was treated like an afterthought, far behind Trump tweeting and Lori Daybell.
Even more shocking, on Twitter I read rumors that seemed fairly convincing that parts of Seattle including Capitol Hill and at least one police station was abandoned and taken over by protestors – by the sounds of it, COMPLETELY, with little to no police presence. Yet when I went onto Seattle news sites like KING, KOMO, and KIRO it was impossible to find real information about what was really happening in the city – KING did not appear to have a single mention of any unrest on its main page at all. My three local stations over here in the eastern half of Washington State had no news of the Seattle situation whatsoever other than a human interest story about a hometown girl who could smell tear gas from her Seattle apartment.
It smelled bad and made her cough.
Protestors have taken over a part of the biggest city in my state and there was next to nothing in national OR local news about that. Rioters have ripped apart neighborhoods in several major cities and Google News is suggesting to me an antiracism reading list. You know where I finally saw found the first mention of the Seattle situation? Breitbart, a site I don’t usually bother to read at all. Only after the protestors stormed into City Hall was it finally reported on in Seattle area news, and not in any national news I saw.
When I posted about it on Twitter I was doubted, both regarding the Chicago situation and the Seattle one. But there was already a Wikipedia page set up for what is being called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and yet there was NOTHING on the news organizations that many people rely upon.
I thought Wikipedia was an encyclopedia, not a news organization.
Now, it may be that by the time this piece is finished and published, the media will have no choice but to start spreading the news, but my question remains, why was this not front page, top story news as it happened??
During the LA riots we all saw tons of footage of people looting and the images of the beating of Reginald Denny being played again and again. Yet the civil unrest of 2020, which by any metric is far worse, is barely being covered in an age of handheld camcorders and security footage. Twitter, for all its flaws, is apparently a better and more reliable source of news and information than the mainstream media is.
Does this strike anyone as a bit weird? Because I sure find it weird. I feel like I have a blindfold on and can’t tell what is actually happening in the world. I built my expectation around getting reliable news from reliable sources, the powers-that-be in fact told me again and again that I should ONLY get news from these mainstream, ostensibly fair and balanced sources, and the people who have been tasked with that sacred duty are completely out to lunch.
After months of nonstop wall to wall coverage of events like the death of Kobe Bryant, the “raid” on Area 51, and the ongoing battle of wits between Chrissy Teigen and Alison Roman, after YEARS spent giving America weekly breathless updates on whatever happened on Saturday Night Live and daily briefings on the the inner thoughts of Taylor Swift, things that have the actual potential to disrupt my life and the lives of my family are being ignored.
Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the protests or their aftermath, the civil unrest across America is news. Big news. Important news. News that could save lives. Where are the journalists? Are you seriously telling me that I now have to assume that Breitbart is more reliable a source of information than CNN? Because if that’s the case, no one ever, EVER needs to be shaming people for watching Fox News ever again – maybe they’re getting some news on there that the rest of us haven’t heard.
I don’t care if you’re conservative, liberal, or otherwise, a media blackout on critically important news is concerning. Deeply concerning. This level of unrest should be reported on. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Because otherwise, this is some Pravda shit here.
Sadly, you heard it here first.
Before you start trusting the right wing news, consider that they convinced a bunch of folks in small towns that “busloads of antifa” were coming to loot them. So one set of townsfolk armed up a terrorized an innocent family.
To be clear, busloads of antifa are not driving around terrorizing small towns. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of antifa would realize how ridiculous that is.
You and I have very different politics. You’re certainly within your rights to hold a negative opinion of antifa and their tactics. However, not all leftist protestors are “antifa.” Moreover, people on the right are literally clueless about antifa. They have a complete disconnect.
I can’t verify this, but someone once claimed that there was an FBI report about leftist radical groups, including antifa. One claim in the report was that they had difficulty infiltrating these groups, specifically because the adherents tended to live in co-op housing where everyone knows each other. These groups overlap heavily with the alt-queer community. We’re tight knit. We know each other.
(To be clear, I’m not part of “antifa” in any way, although I am anti fascist. The point is, I’ve been around. I know people. A cop would have a really hard time infiltrating this scene.)
(Although if you can’t infiltrate with cops, perhaps paid actors will do the trick: https://twitter.com/WolfTheRed/status/1270369754432356352. To be clear, I’m not 100% convinced about anything regarding that group of people, except they look really badass. The “internet sleuths” concluded they’re actors. It certainly seems plausible, but it’s hardly confirmed.)
By contrast, the various alt-right and white nationalists (etcetera) groups tend to be very easy to infiltrate. Their “typical” member is often a disaffected suburban loner guy. It’s trivially easy to pretend to be a disaffected suburban loner guy.
Anyway, I mostly get my news about the protest from Twitter. It requires critical thinking. Bullshit stories get tossed around quite a bit. On the other hand, over time you’ll figure out who you can trust and who you cannot.
Which, by the way, if you want a street level view of what is happening in the PNW protests, @itsmikebivins is worth a follow. He’s definitely sympathetic to the protests, but I think you’ll find he has integrity.
I don’t know of anyone following the Chicago situation closely.
Oh, and Black Lives Matter, quite a lot 🙂Report
“Before you start trusting the right wing news,”
So these things…didn’t happen? Protestors didn’t take over a big piece of Seattle, including government buildings which were abandoned by armed police? There wasn’t massive burning and looting in Chicago? That’s all just right-wing fantasies?Report
None of this would be happening if American police were not completely out of control. And them being out of control is specifically because of right-wing fantasies which insist that unless the police are completely out of control, things will be bad. There is no attempt on that same right-wing to grapple with the fact that all of this is directly attributable to those same police that they fantasize about.Report
I wish to give you all the upvotes.Report
this is not a response to anything that I, veronica d, or atomickristin actually wrote hereReport
Exactly. Completely correct.Report
But we need to not touch Police Unions because you just know that that’s the nose of the camel into the tent where we’re discussing Teacher Unions for the teachers who are teaching in the school districts that graduate functionally illiterate students.Report
Sam, that is a complete non-sequitur.Report
I mean, when armed protestors walked into the Capitol building in Michigan, we saw video as it was happening, we didn’t have to wait for it to show up in a blipvert a couple days after.Report
Do you mean this event: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protestReport
Specifically, busloads of antifa weren’t driving to small towns to loot them.Report
“this story confirms my priors, time to shoehorn it in here”Report
I don’t understand what you mean by that. The story happened. People believed it.
Some questions: Who invented the story? Why? Why did it spread? Did anyone fact check it? (Clearly not.) Why did so many of the public believe it? Why did a bunch of armed people in trucks chase down a family and terrorize them?
How common is this sort of conspiratorial nonsense in the right wing media ecosystem? Was this a rare, one-off event that won’t happen again? In the future, can we expect careful fact checking from the right wing media when presenting stories about leftists?
We’re doing media criticism here, right? This was a thing that happened in the media. I believe it fits a common pattern.Report
“I don’t understand what you mean by that. The story happened. People believed it.”
hey you know I read through Kristin’s entire blog post and I didn’t see anything in her post claiming that “busloads of antifa” were going to “loot” anything
so I’m not sure why you brought it up, except as an attempt to poison the well for any reports about what protestors have been up to
which kinda doesn’t seem like a thing that a person interested in good-faith discussion between equals would do?
that assumes of course you think Kristin is an equal worthy of good-faith discussion, which, I’m begging the question on that I suppose.Report
This x a million billion kabillionReport
Did I SAY I trusted right wing news?
I’m saying someone ain’t doing their job here, and asking why. It’s a legitimate question, and I think it merits some thought.Report
Oh it’s certainly a legitimate question. Moreover, I wasn’t telling you to trust the NYT or CNN instead.Report
The Seattle thing is patently untrue. And yes, there are receipts
https://gizmodo.com/fox-news-host-gop-staffers-spread-fake-antifa-attack-c-1843978315Report
so there isn’t actually an “autonomous zone” in Seattle? that didn’t happen, that’s made up?Report
Funny because now it’s being reported on by the mainstream newsReport
That story is describing a different untrue story than the CHAZ (which is clearly truly a thing that exists, even though certain media descriptions and portrayals are doubtless inaccurate on certain specifics, through whatever combinations of innocent error and deliberate alarmism).
It does illustrate that you can’t necessarily believe what right wing news outlets are reporting, particularly if it’s something that comes up first on one of the more extreme nutjob outlets and only then makes its way to relatively staid outlets like Fox News (I can’t believe I’m characterizing them that way but here we are), and that no non-right-wing outlets is covering at all.Report
This November: Vote for how you want journalism to cover things.
(Also, if you live in a relatively nice place, buy real estate! People are going to be moving to your relatively nice place from Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and other places now that we’ve hammered out that Working From Home is an option.)Report
Avoid Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, or Santa Monica, or Hollywood. All three places had riots and looting.
Compton, South Central, and Inglewood by contrast were entirely peaceful. Buy real estate there ‘cuz its bound to be a magnet for terrified white folks.Report
What happened in the days, months, and years following 1968?
Do we have reason to believe that what happened last time will not happen this time?Report
Yes, ample reason.
Because it’s silly to imagine that history really works that way, where for any given event we can predict the consequences based on history.
That like, here are three things that remind us of 1968, to therefore the Republicans will win in November, and we will wind down the foreign war, then the Republican president will be impeached and resign in disgrace, then bell bottoms will become fashionable and by 2025 we will all be walking around saying “Dyn-o-MITE!”Report
I can get behind “Dyn-o-MITE!” That’s way cooler than “fetch.”Report
I’m still trying to make bowler hats happen.
By the way:
It is not a coincidence that the protests went to fashionable areas, instead of South Central:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/protest-organizers-south-la-deliberately-avoided-target-affluent-areasReport
I’m working very hard to make Bowler hats happen.Report
Forget Fetch.
I’m still trying to get bowler hats to happen.Report
Between the MRAs and their trilbies and all those dipshits who wear that Breaking Bad hat, I think is a rather poor environment for men who want to wear stylish hats. Granted, bowler hats are different, but still.Report
When I was a little boy, my grandpa used to wear a grey fedora and Indiana Jones wore a brown fedora and I used to think Man, I am going to be so cool.and wear a fedora when I grow up. Because the internet didn’t yet exist, you see.Report
don’t forget the codpieces and the exaggerated eyelash makeup!Report
JJ Walker notes that Good Times was the last working class black family on TV, and that we will never see another one. Now everybody in the industry is obsessed with race, gender, and any ism that comes to mind, because the people must be divided and told what to think.Report
Well, if it’s silly to think that because the incumbent Democrat lost to the Peace with Honor Republican in 1968, I guess we don’t even have to consider whether people who can move will move after this group of riots either.Report
Move from where, to where?
The white flight out of the cities happened for a lot of reasons, beyond any riot. The flight started with the postwar prosperity in the 40’s, then was fueled by the Interstate Highway System in the 50’s, aided by racial covenants and generous governmental assistance to construct suburbs in the 60’s.
By 1968, the American urban cores- Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark- were largely abandoned which is why they had already been seen as “Negro” areas.
Other than, “Hey, there’s a riot” I’m not seeing the parallels.
Oh, and by the way- It was not a coincidence that these riots happened in Beverly Hills instead of South Central:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/protest-organizers-south-la-deliberately-avoided-target-affluent-areas
The organizers were hip enough to know that some white people would try to write it all off as “It only happens in those neighborhoods.”Report
Move from where, to where?
Away from Urban Cores to places that are large enough to have some infrastructure like High Speed Internet and grocery stores that aren’t an hour away.
To use Colorado as an example, from Denver to Aurora or Colorado Springs or Fort Collins.
If you live in a place where an hour commute is considered a short commute, move to a suburb where it’s considered a long one and you’ll be able to pay cash for the house (or so neighbors have bragged to me).Report
Are you seeing this, predicting this, or wishcasting this?Report
Chip, I’m saying “this happened last time… I think it will happen again this time”.
So far, the arguments against this observation (a rather trivial and banal one, if you ask me) has, so far, gotten the counter-argument of “oh, and a Republican won in 1968, so you think Trump will win in November?” and “where in the hell will people move?”
Which, lemme tell ya, ain’t disabusing me of my notions.Report
You think a riot in 2020 will have the same outcome as one in 1968, despite almost ever single variable of society and politics being different?
Why?Report
*A* riot? Probably not.
Riots all over the country?
Well… yeah. I think that it might be possible to formulate some hypotheses about whether or not migration will follow.
I’m going to say “yeah, I think migration will follow”.
What’s your position? “No, nothing will change!” or is it a more “maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but I have no reason to believe that anything at all will happen” humility about whether knowledge of the future is possible in an uncertain universe?Report
Things will change, because they always do.
What direction those changes will be is impossible to predict.
We already have seen changes which are startlingly different than previous riots.
For example, public opinion is decisively in favor of the protesters, and opposed to increased police violence; This is new and different.
The riots aren’t coming on the heels of a massive government investment which preferences suburban commuters against urban residents; Instead its coming on the heels of a massive private sector investment in city cores, specifically residential investment.
This is also new and different.
The terrain is different, the players are different, the rules of the game are different.Report
To Jaybirds point:
Wealthy buyers reportedly in ‘mad rush’ to leave San Francisco
https://www.sfgate.com/living-in-sf/article/Wealthy-buyers-in-mad-rush-to-leave-SF-15324574.phpReport
For more than 30 years, every time Californians decide that their real estate prices are insane, there’s an influx to Front Range Colorado and our prices take a nasty jump. One of the historians at the University of Colorado is the first person I heard use the phrase “California Diaspora in the West.”
We’re moving later this year. I am curious to see what difference it makes that we’ll still be in the first wave of sales that adds “within two miles of commuter rail, 18 minutes to downtown” as a feature.Report
My sister and her husband recently retired in the Chicago area. They ended up in Omaha to be near grandchildren, but looked at other places. They said real estate anywhere along the Front Range urban corridor was too expensive for them to afford.Report
Periodically, I look at my neighborhood on Zillow.
It always confuses me because, seriously, I thought I paid too much for this place back in 2005.Report
We need to be careful about over-generalizing here. Detroit, Newark and lots of extended Rust Belt cities had population crashes and have never recovered. (There are a few exceptions that all appear to have obvious reasons.) Outside of the extended Rust Belt, cities recovered from their population declines (if the declines happened at all). Eg, there has never been a decade in the records when LA and Dallas’s populations did not grow. Denver dipped slightly but came roaring back (and has grown ~20% since 2010). Ditto Atlanta and Seattle. And the growth rates I’m talking about here aren’t metro areas, it’s the core cities.
Sanity check… What’s a thousand square feet of residence cost in LA? In Denver? In Atlanta? In at least parts of Detroit — the poster child for urban crashes — they’ve plowed residences into the ground because they couldn’t give them away.Report
I have a number of friends in NYC who, when covid hit, all seemed to ask themselves “Why am I paying more than the price of a mortgage elsewhere to live in a tiny shoebox on a street where the only cultural amenities are 3 identical taco places and 4 identical coffee places?” Every one of them is looking to move. Everyone they know is looking. Same with the folks I know in Toronto, although it was already that way. There was already exhaustion with this stuff. They’re not leaving because of riots. The exodus will be over rents.Report
It’s an exodus that is, IMHO, long overdue.Report
There’s a real opportunity in all of this to rethink how we do housing and infrastructure. Whether we will seize it is of course another matter entirely.Report
Hah. They’ll see a TRUMP 2020 flag on someone’s house and they’ll remember why they moved to the city in the first place.Report
I would cheerfully agree that the riots aren’t the straw that broke the camel’s back but rents were and the only reason that it looks like people might leave because of the riots is timing.
(Though I might admit to running a thought experiment where someone said that they left because of the riots in front of a volunteer commissar and compared that to them saying it was because of rent in front of them.)Report
An exodus over rents should self-terminate when rents plummet because of all the vacancies. But if other very persistent factors cause it, such as crime, drugs, and no employment, the trend will continue.
There can also be a feedback effect after riots like we’ve seen, where the businesses flee, workers flee, rents drop, and the lower rents attract people who don’t have any money. This could cause a once healthy urban area to spiral into ghetto status.Report
One thing I’ve seen is the concern that in areas where the riots happened, insurance will pay out, drop everyone, and folks in that area will have a hard time getting any kind of property insurance going forward for quite some time.Report
I would say the Riot vs. Rent arguement is akin to the age-old Chicken vs. Egg argument, with a soupcon of what is OK to admit to yourself vs. what you can admit to friends.Report
I mean, okay, yeah, it is really hard to say what was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And, remember that I’m just talking about my friends. Maybe we’ll only see 5 or 10 percent of the population leaving a city. Also, the net migration has been out of the larger cities for a while. There’s a magazine called Toronto Life that I joke should be called Farewell to Toronto Life because every other article is about people who escaped.
Rents still don’t drop. There are *at least* 66,000 vacant properties in Toronto that are owned but empty, and rents still don’t drop. As I’ve heard it explained, the REITs don’t need to drop the rents because they know people will keep immigrating to Canada. So, who knows. Maybe the prairies will see rent inflation and the cities will see rents drop in fifteen years.
But, I do think for plenty of people having a pandemic put the brakes on life just gave them time to stop and say “Wait, what the hell am I doing this for?!” I know, for me, I moved to this city because it was kind of a dump, but it was cheap and had lots of funky people and shops. Now? It’s just as dumpy, but the rents have more than doubled in less than a decade and the funky shops and people have been leaving. Besides, I have a book coming out and that’s adjusted some of my priorities anyway.
So, I’ve admittedly been checking out houses on Zillow very very far from here.Report
I live right in the middle of Portland (Lloyd District). Why would I want to move? More people died in a Planned Parenthood shooting in your town than have died in widespread protests in mine–why would I want to move *there*?Report
Yes! Colorado Springs *SUCKS*.
You would never, ever want to move here.
Tell everybody you know. Colorado Springs *SUCKS*.Report
It’s too late–I already have family living in Colorado Springs. (But, yeah, no way in hell I’d want to move there.)Report
It’s a fun place in Horizon Zero Dawn 🙂Report
The mainstream media lies….it’s documented enough. From lazy reports who know nothing of the subject they purport to cover, to folks who write editorials as news. The mainstream media has a decided left ish bent. I have no issue with that, because I can choose to watch right leaning news and left leaning news and distill a “truer picture”. But, in the end, they all bow to their corporate masters so what you see is some degree of truth, you just don’t know what number of lenses it’s been filtered through.
Sadly not enough people believe the news lies.Report
I’ve had the interesting experience of living in the middle of the LA protests and riots, and watching them on local TV, and reading about them in national news media.
In my experience, they mostly get the broad strokes correct. Sometimes, maybe most often, they play up the more lurid or theatrical aspects.
For example, its common for the news anchors to chatter on endlessly while a tape of something burning plays on endless loop. Its easy for viewers to absorb the message of the video (Chaos! Disaster!) while not grasping the audio (Well, Brian, things are calming down here on the street) and even completely missing the underlying logic- That is, the looped tape is played precisely because there are no other burning cars or buildings to report on.
I’ve read the report of the Capitol Hill occupation, and believe it doesn’t make the news because nothing is burning, no tear gas is being deployed, and no blood is being shed. The police moved out of their station but the residents of the neighborhood are going to work, shopping, and coming home just like they always do.
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/06/welcome-to-free-capitol-hill-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-forms-around-emptied-east-precinct/
Here in LA, we had one night of riots, a few more of nightly protests with curfew and arrests, then since about last Tuesday, just daytime protests which were entirely peaceful. I haven’t seen any National Guard since Saturday, and some of the boarded up windows are being uncovered today.
What makes news of urban areas difficult to assess is that there is a tremendous ignorance of urban areas by people who live in suburbia and ruralia. A lot of people have a powerful and unshakable image of urban areas from movies and tv shows as being dystopian hellscapes. So rumors of “busloads of X” start out with a fertile and credulous audience.Report
Protestors did not “storm” into City Hall. A City Council member unlocked the door and invited them in.Report
I head about the CHAZ a few days ago, via a FB post of a Twitter post.
The fact that something like CHAZ happened in Seattle, not surprising.
The fact that the first I hear of it from local stations is this morning, that’s… odd.
On the bright side, I continue to feel good about my decision to never live in Seattle.Report
You might enjoy reading the thread where the Redditfolk are discussing the organic police that have filled the vacuum in the Autonomous Zone.
Who can say whether the people posting are real, of course.
Perhaps we are all brains in vats.
Perhaps we are dead and in Purgatory.
In any case, you may enjoy reading that thread anyway. It may validate your priors.Report
Apparently, Raz has introduced the concepts of “stop and frisk” and “percussive dissuasion” to organic community policing.Report
It was pointed out by someone I know that this tweet account was locked after this, thus it probably wasn’t trolling. Judge for yourself…
Report
A member of the CHAZ or a troll or some rando on the internet has published a set of demands.
Who can say whether it’s authentic?Report
That can’t possibly be real.Report
If only we had a news source that we trusted to look into this…Report
Seems pretty par for the course for the type of people involved in this kind of protest. It does also pack all the power of a Medium post. There is a section of very leftie protester that loves to phrase everything as a demand.Report
*I* know you were talking about the tweet, InMD.
(There were a whole bunch of tweets in the thread… apparently, she came out as an abuser and threatened suicide. Real? Fake? Welcome to 2020!)Report
That’s it. I’m done with today. I’m opening a beer. Maybe I’ll rent the Hunt on prime.Report
The only prior it validates is (assuming it is true) that those who fail to plan, plan to fail.Report
I liked the one that pointed out that once heads started getting cracked, people were no longer LARPing.
That’s *REALITY*.Report
WAIT WAIT WAIT! RAZ HAS BEEN FOUND TO BE A LANDLORD OF SOME AIRB&B PROPERTIES!!! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!
Report
There are substantial protests in many (most?) large American cities. What national media organization has the capacity to provide in-depth reporting on each and every one of them? How many local media organizations have enough reporters left on staff? How easily can media organizations shift reporters from, say, the entertainment desk to the national affairs desk?
(And does the Breitbart reporting actually stick to facts?)Report
Welp, I guess if reporting the news is hard, they shouldn’t do it. I mean, they can only do so much.
You completely miss the point about this story being in Breitbart. The question is why wasn’t it anywhere else.Report
A budget cut of 70-80% does tend to affect one’s ability to do the work, yes.
Your point was that the story was only in Breitbart. My question was whether Breitbart embellished the story to make it seem newsworthy.Report
Even if they did embellish it (which I am sure they did), it is newsworthy, at least locally. I live on the East side and I’m just hearing about this today, and mostly from right wing social media mocking it.
By choosing not to cover it, you cede the story to those who will.
Of course, that gets us right back to “Do you want your news fast, or accurate?”Report
I think it speaks absolute volumes that so many of you replying here are like “welp, this clearly wasn’t newsworthy then”
PEOPLE COMMANDEERED CITY BUSES IN CHICAGO AND USED THEM TO DRIVE AROUND LOOTING STUFF and this was only reported after a leaked audio tape from the mayor and aldermen.
Even aside from the Seattle situation, which was completely newsworthy (given that I can receive mountain pass reports in the middle of June on any local TV station, after all, I should certainly hear that a city I was actually planning to drive through was in utter chaos) this is 1000000000% newsworthy and anyone saying it isn’t is attempting to gaslight.Report
People are presenting different points of view and questioning your interpretations. That’s not gaslighting.
Here is presenting a different point of view: I have lived in cities for 30 years now. Sometimes crazy things happen. If someone here in Portland got hold of a city bus and took it on a looting spree, it would be interesting to know about. But…things like that happen from time to time, and I’m a bit blasé about it.
Here is questioning your interpretation: How does the existence of the self-proclaimed “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” equal Seattle being “in utter chaos”? First, the autonomous zone is tiny, and Seattle is huge. Second, it’s in a college neighborhood, so the new arrangement (such as it is) might be just fine with the people who live there, in a way that it would not be fine in, say, Kennewick. Third, there is an active and fully staffed Seattle police precinct HQ about a mile away, which is probably why the police felt they could temporarily abandon the precinct HQ in the “autonomous zone”.
I do agree with you that these exchanges of views “speak absolute volumes”. We might disagree, though, about exactly whom they speak.Report
To put it in numbers:
The land area of the city of Seattle is 83.87 square miles.
The land area of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” within Seattle is 0.01 square miles.Report
I can’t wait for right wing militias to set up autonomous zones in the heart of liberal cities. I’m sure their left-wing mayors will say they’re just summer block parties. I’m just sure of it. ^_^Report
The right wing already has autonomous zones in cities. They’re called “gated communities”.Report
Those are all white liberal occupation zones. They don’t allow right-wing people to live there because all the Trump yard signs are triggering.Report
Gated communities are more of a suburb/exurb thing, no?
“Luxury Condominiums” are closer to the whole “white supremacy manifesting itself” thing when it comes to in the city itself.
You will know them by their granite countertops and subscriptions to Condé Nast.Report
As Iowahawk said, modern journalism is about covering the important stories – with a pillow – until they stop moving.
The media is in a difficult position. They know that if they show what’s going on, the way any local reporter would normally cover a story, Trump might win in a landslide. So they’re not going to show what’s going on. People will have to rely on the Internet for information.
Hispanics in Chicago have taken a shoot first and ask questions later approach to keep their communities and businesses safe, and both sides of the many firefights are posting clips online. That’s cool because it’s like having a reporter on the scene, blasting away with a rifle or pistol while providing a great audio commentary directed either at the person they’re shooting at or their fellow gang members. ^_^
It’s much easier to follow the dialog than the clips where Yemeni store owners in Buffalo fired AK-47s at miscreants, because they narrated the action in excited Arabic. But I will note this: When non-left wing, pro-police Americans are cheering at Muslims shooting at Americans in America, something inconceivable just a few weeks before, the entire protest movement has gone all pear shaped, left the tracks, plunged into a ravine, caught on fire, and exploded.Report
“pro police Americans” is a neat euphemism for people actively supporting the violent suppression of free speech. I assume we can look forward to seeing that one a whole lot more.Report
I don’t think they were supporting the violent suppression of free speech, I think they were laughing at Arab immigrants shooting at looters. They could become the new rooftop Koreans.Report
First of all, its Chicago, which is part of fly-over country. The amount of national coverage by the MSM has never been as extensive as that of the Northeast corridor’s weather-related traffic delays.
But it does feel like local coverage in general has been collapsing this year. As of June, my newspaper shifted to a 4PM story reporting deadline, which suddenly has hallowed-out a descent paper. For the protest/looting
I’ve had to supplement with some twitter feeds and a somewhat conspiratorial website of the city’s unreported stories. They could be somewhat reliable, I think? On the night that at least one African-American business was set on fire, there was a tweet that repeated that a speaker at the downtown rally said “Let’s head to [the area where I live].” I check the conspiracy website, and they’ve got a post on people’s legal rights to self-defense if someone tries to break into your home. Not comforting, and none of it was real, other than the burned down building.Report
First of all, its Chicago, which is part of fly-over country.
Second of all, it’s Chicago and not the surrounding suburbs. Chicago, 2.7M people. The Chicago MSA, 9.5M people. Chicago proper is a very large example of the Rust Belt core city problem: the population peaked at 3.6M in 1950, began to shrink, and has never recovered. The MSA from 1950, though, has grown from 5.9M to its present size. Rust Belt core cities are particularly invisible unless things are very bad. See, eg, Detroit. OTOH, if rioters were burning down Aurora, or Naperville, it would be news.Report
There’s a recording of a phone call of Chicago Alderpeople complaining to the Mayor about this or that lack of order (the link goes to a local PBS affiliate, for what it’s worth).
This is one of those things that strike me as being a story that will be written in a month or two.
“Why won’t Wal-Mart reopen?” and that sort of thing.Report
we’ll be back to hearing stories about “food deserts” and calls for busing suburban students to downtown schools.Report
Oh man… this is gonna be embarrassing. Did you listen beyond the word “bus”? She went on to say that the trains that were operational were being used by looters to move from neighborhood to neighborhood. That all this led to the decision to shut down mass transit because it was facilitating looting. She wasn’t decrying out of control busses careening the wrong way down one way streets driven by rioters. She was talking about how the mass transit system remaining operational was helping to make things worse so they shut it down.
Is widespread looting bad? Yep! Was it reported on? Yep! Does the audio call support the claims in the OP? Nope!Report
Oh, jeez! Is this the first time you’ve listened to the recording? After two days of us discussing the contents of the recording?
She said “people were commandeering buses”. We got into this above (or below… somewhere).
Now if you’d like to argue “people weren’t commandeering buses” or “commandeering is different than stealing” or something like that, that’s awesome.
Heck, you can do what Chip is doing now and saying that we don’t have any evidence that people were commandeering buses.
And you can point out that the news wasn’t covering people stealing buses because all they were doing was commandeering them.
And feel like Kristin’s concerns have been met and you can wonder why other people are still harping on Chicago when buses weren’t even stolen like people said they were, let alone driven the wrong way up one of the streets.Report
Again… read the claims in the OP.
Read the evidence offered here.
The latter does not support the former.
If you feel it does, enjoy fantasy land.Report
She said that she was hearing all sorts of wild rumors in the first part of the essay. Talking about rumors that she was hearing.
Then, the next day, she said:
Yesterday morning I woke up and it appeared that what my cousin had been saying was true. There has been enormous unrest in Chicago, buses had been stolen, police were spread so thin they were useless (911 was not even answering phone calls). The aldermen and mayor of Chicago were upset, frightened, and passionately debating what to do about it. And despite this, the situation in Chicago is STILL not the headline story on any of the news organizations I usually frequent. Even on more right wing sites like Drudge and Knewz any hint of civil unrest was treated like an afterthought, far behind Trump tweeting and Lori Daybell.
Your response to this paragraph is to say “BUT HER COUSIN WAS NOT SAYING WHAT WAS TRUE!”
She was making distinctions between the wild rumors the night before and the after-the-fact confirmation of many of the details of those wild rumors.
And you’re pointing to the phone call in which the Mayor said that buses were commandeered as proof that the buses weren’t stolen and driven the wrong way up a one-way street.
When, get this, your original statement was, okay fine, I’ll quote it:
I see reports regarding Chicago protests and unrest from the weekend but… no mention of busses being stolen. Do we have any reporting on Chicago beyond what you saw on Twitter? I’m trying to find it and can’t.
Are you still trying to find mention of busses being stolen? (And by “stolen”, of course, we mean “stolen and driven the wrong way down a one-way street”.)Report
My cousin said there had been enormous unrest in Chicago. There was enormous unrest in Chicago.
Gaslighters gonna gaslight.
I’m just sorry to see how many of them appear to be gaslighting themselves.Report
I know there was enormous unrest in Chicago. Do you know how I know? Because I saw it on the news. Do you want me to show you the news reports? Okay…
May 31: https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-george-floyd-chicago-riot-kass-20200601-zcbw4m332nc7bg4ycccaw3mes4-story.html
June 1: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-george-floyd-chicago-protests-20200601-mrgv3rsz3fgztlu5lyrsyuolr4-story.html
June 1: https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-06-01-20/h_c177620eed6b4d1aea95ee06192c296f
Shall I keep going?
It might not have been front page news on every site because damn near every city in America was seeing major unrest.Report
I guess I didn’t need to keep going.Report
Chicago lost about a half million people in the early 70s, so probably at least half, probably more, of the population loss was the direct or indirect result of the 1968 riots.Report
Well call me crazy, but I’d like to think that if people were hijacking city buses and burning police cars that would be a story regardless of where it happened.Report
You did see that at least the Joker was caught though?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgTdFnG20mIReport
I live in a major American city. One that is very small by American standards in terms of geographic size. We have had protests and unrest. Looting has happened in several locations including in parts that are allegedly within walking distance of my apartment.
My area has been so quite that you would think nothing is going on.
There is a lot of evidence that shows police heavy-handed responses are likely to lead to protests getting violent. The police and protestors apparently worked together in coordination in the 1980s to make sure that everything went smoothly. The current command and control module is what produces the bad reactionReport
well, thanks to google, I see this has been covered by:
1) The BBC – https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52984535
2) The local ABC affiliate – https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-news-protests-riots-police/6224450/
3) and NPR – https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/06/01/867140372/50-years-after-m-l-k-riots-the-same-part-of-chicago-s-west-side-reels-from-destruction
It may or may not have made CNNReport
ABC and NPR go back to June 1st. I mention that because those are two of the stories I saw when I was googling stuff in response to Chip saying that he hadn’t seen any recent evidence of looting.
The BBC story is the only story from this week (yesterday).Report
January 15, 2020:
“Fearing potential violence, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is declaring a state of emergency and is banning firearms and other weapons on the Capitol grounds in Richmond ahead of a gun rights demonstration planned for next week.
“We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies that there are groups with malicious plans for the rally that is planned for Monday,” Northam said during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.”
***
April 27, 2020… overheard at DNC HQ
Haha… Trump finally stopped his daily Covid-19 briefings. No way Biden can lose the election now… about the only thing that could stop this train would be… I dunno… can’t think of anything… I mean, as long as Blue states don’t, maybe, like, ah? secede? [Guffaws]
***
June 10, 2020
[literally can’t find a credible news link]
Me: [Google] NPR Autonomous Zone in Seattle
Google: The Revolution Will Be Driverless: Autonomous Cars Usher In Big Changes
Me: You had one job Team Blue.Report
If we use Occam’s razor, the most likely reason that there is no widespread news reporting of an ongoing revolution is that there is in fact no revolution going on.
In the 80th and 70th iI witnessed a number of squatting-related riots in Amsterdam and they were all very local. Three block form where the protests were raging, life continued as if nothing was happening. Many of these protesters where self declared revolutionaries that were out to proof that the state is violently suppressing its citizens. Funnily enough, provoking the police, often started by ignoring an order to disperse, always succeeded in that proof.
Large protests, sure, that’s what is happening, and looting too. Looting gives much more thrilling pictures that massive amounts of angry people, even if they are being dispersed with teargas and other violence. As history shows, a revolution looks a tad different, although it almost always starts with demonstrations. The first signs hinting at a potential revolution, is that these demonstrations keep going on for weeks, as the clear indication that the anger in the populace has has reached a critical limit and people ignore their own safety and suppress anxiety. Attempts to violently suppress the protests, killing random protesters often stops these protests or can escalate the anger making more people come out to protest.
From my perch across the ocean, what’s happening in the USA right now, doesn’t look like a revolution, it’s not even close. the fact that some romantic left thinking people, that hunker for fundamental change in society, declare an autonomous zone, is just that: a dream of ideals finally come true.
Wise governments know that with demonstrations of this scale it should listen to the grievances and find a way to be clearly seen to address these. Failure to do so might escalate and bring a revolution closer, maybe not this time, but then there will surely more of these large scale protests.Report
Trump just announced that he will launch his reelection campaign on June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
June 19th is Juneteenth. Tulsa is the site of one of the worst attacks on black Americans in this country’s history. This is a massive troll from Stephen Miller.Report
Stephen Miller is — and I am not kidding — currently writing his speech on race and unity. STEPHEN MILLER.
I’m absolutely sure it’ll sound great in the original German.Report
It’s unclear what the exact details are going to be, but if the Republican convention moves to Jacksonville, and the dates remain the same, Trump will be holding his giant acceptance rally on Aug 27, the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday. Whites beat black civil rights protestors with baseball bats and ax handles in Jacksonville on that date, and the violence spread to neighboring areas. Permits for commemoration ceremonies of the event have been previously issued.Report
From your own link:
“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is peaceful and growing.
The six-block radius around Seattle’s East Precinct began life as “Free Capitol Hill” on Monday, after the Seattle Police Department packed up and left the building, letting protesters freely march past the station for the first time in a week.
By early Tuesday, demonstrators had established a perimeter with improvised barriers and deputized scouts. In the afternoon, the “No Cop Co-Op” popped up, slinging kebabs, snacks, and free water to passersby. A teach-in square was established at the intersection of 12th and Pine. Tents were pitched near the precinct, where people were encouraged to stay throughout the night, or even just for two or three hours to hold the space. And by nightfall, they’d even built their own outdoor cinema.”
This sounds like a combination of OccupyWallStreet and Bonnaroo, only much smaller than either. With everything else that IS going on, you think this should be top national news?
Nothing has been “taken over”. The cops abandoned a precinct building and in response, some dopes are having what sounds like a lame-ass block party.Report
When I was in Occupy Orange County, they chose the lawn of Irvine City Hall as their site.
Unwisely, because of all the rightwing cities in OC, Irvine was the only one controlled by Democrats.
The Irvine City Council gave us permission to camp out, and politely held a listening session where they made nice noises in support of our overall grievances.
As you might guess, after a day or so the occupation dwindled for lack of an enemy. After about a week it was just the dregs of the idle and homeless, and after a week or so more, the police quietly and without resistance shut the thing down.
I can’t help but wonder if the Seattle city government isn’t doing the same thing.
I know from experience that its hard, really bloody hard to get people out on the streets unless there is something shocking like a George Floyd video, and harder still to keep them coming back day after day.
Without constant provocation to fuel the fire, protests burn out pretty fast. Not that the underlying anger goes away; Its just that people have lives and jobs that demand attention first.Report
“Mayor Durkan has stated that she will “de-escalate the situation” within the Zone,[18][8] while Seattle police chief Carmen Best said that her officers would look at different approaches to “reduce [their] footprint” in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.[19] Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant (a member of Socialist Alternative) spoke to the Zone occupants at Cal Anderson Park on June 8, 2020.[8] She called for the protesters to turn the precinct into a community center for restorative justice.[16]
On June 9, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas stated that the Zone was “endangering people’s lives”.[20]”
From the Wiki… the first section speaks to what you discuss. The second… well, I included it because one of those things is not like the others.Report
I would love to hear an account from people who actually live on Capitol Hill, as well as the occupiers themselves and get their perspectives.Report
You can check out the Reddit here.
If you scroll up in the comments here (or search for the phrase “a set of demands”), you’ll find a link to a Medium essay that purports to be a list of demands from the citizens of the CHAZ.Report
I have a hunch the Wiki is largely being written by those in the zone or at least folks connected to it. I’ll have to check the Reddit… I’m curious about this as well.Report
Seattle Times is covering it:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-protests-live-updates-for-tuesday-june-9/
As is the local TV station:
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/protests/seattle-police-chief-meets-with-protesters-at-east-precinct/281-7639188a-2585-4a86-9cc1-9944b24de7a1
Taking all the sources together, what they all agree on is that the protest became violent the first night, then has been peaceful after the police withdrew.
Simone and other protesters who are pushing for change met with [Police Chief] Best who talked about the path forward.
“How we can keep people safe, first of all, but also how we might find some resolution,” Best asked Simone.
Hundreds of residents live on the block that is also home to a number of businesses.
“I heard some people say they were in support of SPD, but after this week they lost hope and they were angry,” Simone told Best. “I think a lot of the conversations you guys might want to have will be with the residents.”
Best agreed.
“I think you are right. I am actually going to go around and talk to the residents about what they are feeling and what they saw. I agree that people felt traumatized in many ways,” Best said.
The articles also note that SPD is still responding to any 911 calls from Capitol Hill.
In other words, the situation is being de-escalated, it isn’t one of anarchy and chaos.
Even the Medium post about their demands is pretty tame stuff, once you get past the eyeroll-inducing jargon.Report
Comment in moderationReport
I’d imagine the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone is modeled after Hakim Bey’s idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.) from his book of the same name from 1991. The TAZ seems to appeal to the type of anarchist that would rather make their own butter than burn a cop car. It’s a popular book in some circles.
Bey’s idea was really that these sort of utopias would be fleeting, very short term, and very small, but they would give people a taste of what self-governing life might be like outside of the reach of the state. There”s a much older essay he drew from that said, basically, the model for an anarchist society is not a city or a state or a commune, but a dinner party- they’re non-hierarchical, collective, and pleasurable. And then they’re over.
So, yeah, it’s a block party. Or a quilting bee. Or a book club. Or any number of other social groupings that exist in the real world and pose no real threat to the larger society. To the authoritarian mindset, of course, anything and everything poses a threat to the larger society.
But, realistically, they’ll go home in a week.Report
Or, more likely I guess, you’ll have riot cops running amok beating up everyone in the crust punk version of the renaissance fair.Report
I sense that the mayor is shrewdly waiting them out.
From NYT:
The protest zone has increasingly functioned with the tacit blessing of the city. Harold Scoggins, the fire chief, was there on Wednesday, chatting with protesters, helping set up a call with the police department and making sure the area had portable toilets and sanitation services.
“I have no idea where we’re headed,” Mr. Scoggins said in an interview. “We’ve been working step by step on how to build a relationship, build trust in small things, so we can figure this out together.”
…
The city prepared for the possibility that the street demonstrations could linger. On Wednesday, a team from the Seattle Department of Transportation came through and hoped to remove some of the orange barriers — including one marked with the message “People’s Republic of Capitol Hill — and replace them with planter boxes filled with coral bells and other plants to give the new pedestrian zone an air of permanence.
But when the crews went to remove the barriers, some of the protesters objected. The crew stood down, and Rodney Maxie, a deputy director at the transportation department, told his team they might return later, after further talks with the demonstrators.
“This is good practice for the 9.0 earthquake,” he told his team.
The protesters also had differing opinions about how long the autonomous zone would last. Some wondered if the police department would try to reclaim the territory. Others said they expected the barriers to be up for weeks, until state and city leaders had done enough to meet their demands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/seattle-autonomous-zone.htmlReport
Well, I don’t live on Capitol Hill, but I live nearby and work on Cap Hill, and I’ve been in the CHAZ a couple times on my days off, and — it’s fine, guys. People are just getting their Burning Man energy out of their systems because all those summer events they were planning for are canceled thanks to Covid. I’m guessing by this time next year, this will be a forgotten news trivia item.Report
Adding to my brother’s point about Trump and Miller’s massive Tulsa troll, Trump is determined to do everything possible to make America a crueler place. This is because he correctly sees his. best chance at re-election as animating his base by invoking their devils and because he really wants to move America in this racist, white supremacist patriarchal direction. If Trump loses on November 3, I suspect even many more quick and badly though out corruptions will occur in order to make it nearly impossible for Biden or really anybody else to reverse the rot that Trump infected America with.Report
I’ve got some bad news. Trump is a symptom. Not a cause.Report
I agree that Trump is a symptom and represents a deep rot in a plurality of the American public. That doesn’t mean he isn’t doing a lot of evil shit to mobilize this base and because we wants to do it.Report
True, true.
I just deeply suspect that if Biden wins, the response will be “hurray! We can go back to 2015!”
And that if Trump wins… well, I don’t even need to finish this sentence, do I? We all know that Biden is going to win.Report
I imagine if Trump wins then the Dems are gonna be in stark danger of lurching hard to the left. Then in a couple of years people on the internet will muse sadly about how the Dems were being so reasonable when they nominated Biden but then they went off the deep end with whatever left winger they go with next.
But Biden is certainly no shoe in. The Dems need to turn out their voters. Personally I think they will but I’m gonna vote anyhow and make a point to spend some time to persuade some generally disengaged friends to vote too.
Personally I’d like Biden to not only win but get a landslide.Report
I’ve been screaming this since the minute I set foot on this ridiculous website and they still don’t get it. but hey that’s why I changed my middle name to “Divorce Or War”Report
I don’t mind the whole “I don’t agree with your take” thing. That’s awesome.
Even “I don’t see the evidence that you’re seeing” is okay.
It’s the “I don’t see the evidence that you’re seeing and therefore the evidence doesn’t exist” that gets on my nerves. (And when it’s followed by “and even if it were true, wouldn’t that be a good thing?” that makes me put one hand on my wallet.)Report
Reading over the links and comments it looks like your Seattle concern is a big nothing burger so that is reassuring. I haven’t been able to casually find much sign of mass destruction in Chicago. I’m certainly left wing inclined but I’m super twitter disinclined so if twitter is saying that Chicago is suffering mass chaos but the news isn’t reporting it I’m definitely inclined to believe the news even if they’re evil mass media.
But I certainly hope your cousin is ok.Report
It also seems like the media doesn’t pay much attention to the plight of poor Chicagoans and Chicogoans of color in general. Maybe i’m making an assumption but as these things go, they tend to be the ones most affected by violence and unrest. So the media ignoring the plight of that particular slice of America doesn’t stand out as anything new or different.Report
Sure, but if big sections of the city are being destroyed etc… as Kristine is saying then the news ignoring that is a really big deal even if it is Chicago.Report
Agreed. But the tone here is “Liberal media is covering up liberals being bad.” I’d argue “Big media shows it doesn’t really care about everyday struggles of poor folks and people of color” is a more likely reason.Report
That could be a very good read on the situation Kazzy, but it falls into the problem of the whip hand. Right now, the main driver of these stories (at least as far as I am aware) is coming from the right. They are going to report what they believe, and right now it is the malefeasance of the left leaning media. And as there is no real other story coming out to dispute this, it is holding the whip hand, so to speak.Report
I don’t see a single link here regarding Chicago. Did I miss it? This post can’t be older than 2 days because CHAZ is only a couple days old. I see reports regarding Chicago protests and unrest from the weekend but… no mention of busses being stolen. Do we have any reporting on Chicago beyond what you saw on Twitter? I’m trying to find it and can’t. Hell, I saw a picture from Monday of storefronts removing their boards.Report
In my quick research, it seems like that statement was made in the phone call between the Chicago Mayor and her Alderpeople above (search for “Alderpeople”).
I’ll try to find the exact spot in the call and tell you to fast-forward to that part.Report
Start listening at 11:15. You’ll hear the Mayor herself mention it. “People were commandeering buses”.
If you’d like to argue that “commandeering buses” and “stealing buses” are two different things… well. Sure. I’d not want to argue that from the stand, but sure.Report
So did anyone commendier a bus?Report
The Mayor said so. It was the reason she gave for stopping service.
If you want to know what *REALLY* happened, I’ll have to say “I don’t know”.
But if your criticism was “where are you hearing that buses were stolen?”, well. I’d point to what the Mayor said.
Maybe she was lying, of course. I cannot speak to whether she was lying.Report
I’m not calling you out, but given the abundance of video footage, I’d put the burden of proof on the mayor.Report
My argument is not “she’s unimpeachable!”
My argument is “if you want to know where people are hearing this, here. You can hear the Mayor say that this happened.”Report
Yeah I literally heard that buses were being commandeered from the mayor of Chicago, who, call me crazy, I know it’s really wild and everything, but I sort of saw as a credible sourceReport
I think the image of the bus here is representative:
Bus being TaggedReport
Not to go down a semantics rabbit hole, but unless protestors were driving the bus, I’d hardly call it “comendiered.”Report
(Okay, this is going to drive me nuts.)Report
It’s the writhing tentacles of semantics! Turn back before all is lost!Report
I’m pretty sure that this is syntax.Report
Ha!
I can see that trap a mile away.Report
Here’s the Chicago Sun-Times from June 1.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/5/30/21275575/chicago-protest-george-floyd-federal-plaza-loop-police-arrests
Now its possible that someone did commandeer a bus. But its weird that the newspaper would somehow miss such a spectacular event, even if to report on it secondhand.
But the bigger claim here is that somehow the news media were suppressing the big story and not showing us what was happening.
It seems like they pretty much were. The paper is filled with text describing rioting and looting and chaos, with pictures to support that.
But nothing about Antifa or the city “being lost”. Just like in Seattle, the claim that somehow the core of an American city was lost to anarchy, that the government was overwhelmed by revolutionaries just isn’t supported.Report
If you want to say that what the mayor said was false, that’s awesome.
If you want to say that you have no idea where anybody could possibly get the idea that someone took a city bus, well, I’ll point you to the mayor.
At this point, I’d suggest that you bring up how it’s not like the bus was *STOLEN*… but it was more like a joyride. Some enthusiastic scamps took a bus for a joyride. Hey, remember that Roxette album? That was awesome.Report
Entirely possible that it happened. I mean, the newspaper reported that people flipped a cop car, so commandeering a bus isn’t impossible to believe.
But the evidence is weak, a single offhand comment in a private call, never corroborated or repeated by her.
Even weaker, is any evidence of a news blackout or suppression. Which was the big claim in this essay.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of various media actors. But so far it looks like they got the gist of the story right that there was a night of rioting, after which order was restored.Report
So long as we’ve moved from “Where are you hearing this?” to “I admit that there is a source for this and, yes, it’s a Democrat but that doesn’t mean that I have to believe that it happened the way she said”, I’m good.
My defense of the claim was that it existed prior to Kristin writing about it.Report
Oh, and there’s the problem with the whole “linearity of time” thing.
Your article was from June 1st.
The phone call article is from June 5th and seems to be speaking about the phone call as if it took place on the same day that your article was published. I base that on the line that says “As unrest swept the city Sunday, aldermen pleaded with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to help them protect their communities from roving bands of criminals clashing with police and looting businesses.”
So it took time for the phone call to get to the journalist and then for her to write an article and, if it was edited, it had to be edited too.Report
Sure, feel free to post reports of such an event.
I mean, it would be captured by about a million cell phones and uploaded to a million social media accounts wouldn’t it?
Maybe it happened and all the helicopters and news crews and reporters just missed it.
Maybe the Chicago People’s Autonomous Zone has a Wiki page about it.Report
Well, here’s the Chicago Tribune talking about how the Mayor said it and here’s some blog called “Streetsblog” covering the Mayor talking about it.
Ah, you tell me. The fact that the news is just covering the Mayor talking about it isn’t evidence that it happened!
And I’ll tell you I WASN’T FREAKING SAYING IT HAPPENED KAZZY ASKED WHERE ARE YOU HEARING THIS I HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT THIS AND I FOUND THE SOURCE OF WHERE THIS STUFF WAS COMING FROM AND NOW THE GOALPOSTS ARE ALL THE WAY THE HELL OVER THERE.Report
OK, I don’t care to dwell on the bus detail either.
I’m pushing back on the big claim:
Yet the civil unrest of 2020, which by any metric is far worse, is barely being covered in an age of handheld camcorders and security footage. Twitter, for all its flaws, is apparently a better and more reliable source of news and information than the mainstream media is.
I think that 1) it is being covered pretty extensively, and they pretty much get the big picture correct, and 2) that social media isn’t giving us a more accurate picture since it is easily gamed and distorted.
This is an important conversation.
One of the ways democracy gets destroyed is when truth and falsehood is indistinguishable, and rumor and fact are equated.
The commandeered bus is a rumor; The riot is a fact;
The SPD withdrew from their headquarters on Capitol Hill, but are still in control of the city;
This is a truth.
“Parts of the Chicago have fallen to Antifa”;
This is a falsehood.Report
They’ve moved the goalposts so far that I don’t think we can find them without binoculars, which I think says a lot.Report
Within 24 hours of the Joker setting fire to the squad car during the riots, there were 18 homicides in Chicago, the most in a 24-hour period in over 50 years. That’s usually the main story.Report
Here is how I see it:
– Chicago experienced protests for several days, some of which involved acts of violence and destruction, particularly in the early going; this has been pretty extensively reported on in a general sense
– Busses in Chicago may have been commandeered, depending on one’s definition of commandeered; there are no or very few news reports making mention of this; there do exist online images of busses being tagged and sat upon by presumed protestors
– The OP states: “Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen” for example (sadly deleted and I didn’t screenshot it, because silly me, I thought if it was true it would be on the news), that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses, that the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.“. No substantiation offered for any of these claims.
– On a recent day, there were many shootings and killings in Chicago, a true tragedy. This has gotten some play in the media but not a ton. It is unclear exactly how this relates to the protests. Chicago has long had a problem with gun violence which tends garner little media attention.
My takeaway: Chicago does not stand out relative to other cities with regards to what has gone on in response to the George Floyd murder, either in terms of what is happening or how it’s being reported.
OP’s take: Based on Twitter, Chicago is unique in the unrest happening there and the media is blacking it all out, so much so that not a single shred of evidence is available… not even a Tweet.
Two takes… You decide!Report
One good tool to use is “are people moving goalposts?”
Because if people are using goalposts, that can be an indicator that they’re arguing against changing their mind, rather than arguing against the proposition at hand.Report
Also saying things like “well I’m not talking about that” when “that” is something they’ve been talking about loudly and at some length.Report
I asked for cites on what the OP described regarding Chicago. I have not yet been provided cites on what the OP described regarding Chicago.
My question (e.g., the original “goalpost”): “Do we have any reporting on Chicago beyond what you saw on Twitter?”
What OP said she saw on Twitter: “ Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen” for example (sadly deleted and I didn’t screenshot it, because silly me, I thought if it was true it would be on the news), that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses, that the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.”
The goalpost has been moved. You doinked a FG attempt. Try again.Report
Is this one of those things that could be cleared up by quoting what you originally said?
Like, if I copied and pasted what you said, would it clear anything up?Report
Dude… *I* copied and pasted what I said. Do you want to copy and paste a different part of what I said — which I have made clear is NOT the only or main part of my query (in fact, the part I suspect you want to C&P doesn’t even have a question mark)? If you want to do that, you want to strawman me. And if you want to strawman me, you expose yourself as a disingenuous interlocutor and I have no interest in that.
I have RESTATED my original question via a copy and paste and clarified what I referred to by copy and pasting from the OP. If you remain confused by my point, it is because you are willing yourself to. That is 10000% on you.Report
Do you want to copy and paste a different part of what I said — which I have made clear is NOT the only or main part of my query (in fact, the part I suspect you want to C&P doesn’t even have a question mark)?
Yeah. I was going to copy and paste that.
I was planning on pointing out that this was the example that you used of something that you hadn’t seen any evidence for.
And restating/clarifying is *NOT* moving the goalposts.
But mentioning a specific example, having that example addressed, and then pointing out that what you *REALLY* cared about was *DIFFERENT* examples can look like moving goalposts.Report
The claim was busses commandeered and driven the wrong way down one way streets. Did you offer anything to support that?
Here it is… from the OP… to be perfectly clear: “…that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses…”
That is what I meant when I said: “…no mention of busses being stolen.”Report
You’re right. I was only able to find evidence that the mayor said that buses were stolen.
I can’t find any evidence that the buses were being driven in anything but an appropriate fashion otherwise.Report
“The claim was busses commandeered and driven the wrong way down one way streets. Did you offer anything to support that?”
nutpicking whataboutism is cool so long as it’s a Karen, I guessReport
Is that what you think is happening?
The entire point of the OP here is that some really atypical things — even for these times — was happening in Chicago and the media was ignoring it. A list of claims from Twitter were offered to justify this disconnect between what was happening and what was being reported on.
Asking, “Hey, is there any evidence that what Twitter said was happening was actually happening?” isn’t nutpicking. It is verifying.
Because there is a big frickin’ difference between, “Busses were commandeered and driven the wrong way down one way streets,” and “Busses were stolen and sat upon and spray painted.”
One of those being ignored by the media support the OP’s point. Another being ignored by the media… doesn’t.
So, if we are evaluating whether the OP actually proves the point it sets out to make, it would seem that verifying the base claims is pretty important.
I’m sorry you guys couldn’t do that and now seem to have sour grapes about it and thus want to make it about something other than what it is.
Claims were made. Claims were not substantiated. The entire OP rests on the veracity of those claims. This piece wouldn’t pass a high school English class.Report
You’re being a jerk with that condescending high English bullshit. You should apologize.
Mayor Lightfoot said “what we were seeing is people were commandeering buses, they were using the trains that were operational to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, and the CTA became a tool for the looters and the anarchists.” Your making it sound like she just made up shit, when a good portion of the piece is about the paucity of media coverage to allow her to know what happened.
LinkReport
Yes… asking someone who claims to have found alternate sources for what is happening to provide those sources is being a jerk and bullshit.
What are we even doing here?
I’m trusting Kristen enough to ask her to provide the links rather than dismissing a bunch of unsubstantiated claims out of hand. Even if she just shared the Tweets, I could look at them and try to make sense of them.
I don’t have that. I don’t have anything.
So ya know what… fuck you, dude. I’ve been civil here, not condescending. And I’m dealing with the most condescending member of this community in Jaybird… who asked if I wanted him to copy-and-paste my comments LIKE I DIDN’T JUST COPY AND PASTE MY COMMENT!
Fuck off.Report
“I’m trusting Kristen enough”
*KristinReport
Apologies to Kristin for the misspelling.Report
The OP was making a broad claim that wild spectacular things were happening, but were ignored by the media.
This is just not true.
The mayor’s statement now appears to be just a rumor, and the coverage of the media seems to be largely accurate.Report
The mayor’s statement now appears to be just a rumor, and the coverage of the media seems to be largely accurate.
To be honest, I don’t know how you reached this conclusion.
I can understand saying “we don’t have a lot of independent confirmation of the rumors we’ve heard and the rumors were flying fast and furious”.
I can’t understand saying that the coverage seems to be largely accurate.
I mean, let’s ask about the looting.
Was the coverage about the looting minimizing it, was it accurate, or did it overstate the looting that happened?
Keep in mind, the cost of rebuilding after the looting is part of what we’ll need to use to measure whether the coverage was minimized, accurate, or overstated.
And, yes, part of that is because a lot of things are expensive. How much does a plate glass window cost? Lemme google… Okay, found this. Going through the comments, looks like between $140-180 per square foot.
So let’s just assume a small plate glass window on a storefront to be… what? 8 by 5? Let’s use the low end of $140. $5,600 for an 8 by 5 window.
A passer-by throws a brick (hey, these things happen). We could say something like “only one brick was thrown! It wasn’t a riot!” and then scoff when someone else says “They did more than five grand in damage!”
Or someone else could say “thousands of dollars of damage were done in an act of vandalism” and let everybody’s minds go wild as to what could have happened.
Or you might say “that’s for house level glass! businesses use business level glass!” and I would have to admit that I don’t know how much a 5 x 8 window would cost for a business… but just admit that a brick would probably result in that window being just as replaced. Would it be cheaper because it’s business-grade? More expensive because it’s business-grade? I don’t know!
But I do know that they’re rebuilding following the riots and we still don’t know how bad the riots were… which means that we still don’t know how accurate the coverage at the time was.
And won’t. Not for a while.Report
But I do know that they’re rebuilding following the riots and we still don’t know how bad the riots were… which means that we still don’t know how accurate the coverage at the time was.
This is simply not true at all.
Its easy to just walk or drive through cities and see how many buildings were burned, how many looted, how many had windows broken.
And here in LA at least, the scale of destruction was a tiny fraction of 1992.
What are the people of Chicago, the people of Seattle saying about the extent of violence and destruction? What are the fire chiefs, the police chiefs, the business associations saying?Report
What are the people of Chicago, the people of Seattle saying about the extent of violence and destruction?
I can find you a phone conversation between the Mayor and Alderpeople of Chicago, if you’d like.
As for Seattle, I’m not sure we’ll have a measurement until the part of the city that has seceded has been fully repatriated.Report
Sure, an official assessment of the damage to Chicago after they had a chance to walk the city would be great.Report
I will ask again. Do we have any evidence to support the following claims about Chicago, all taken verbatim from the OP, broken down for ease of response:
1.) Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen” for example (sadly deleted and I didn’t screenshot it, because silly me, I thought if it was true it would be on the news)
2.) that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses
3.) that the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.Report
One at a time:
Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen”
Given that Antifa’s membership model is decentralized, I’ll rephrase the claim to be “dumbasses say dumbassed outlandish thing”.
While it’s true that Chicago didn’t fall (to my knowledge… there’s a lot of ruin in a city), I am willing to take Kristin’s word that she saw a tweet, since deleted, of dumbasses saying dumbassed things.
that people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses
I have only seen reports of buses being stolen from city officials. The officials did not mention whether the buses were then used to break traffic laws.
So I have not seen evidence that the allegedly stolen buses were driven improperly.
that the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.
Well, for this one, I’ll just send you to the Alderpeople phone call and point to the riots. Then we can discuss whether the riots indicated that the cops were in retreat or whether they merely withdrew and then we can discuss what “lost” means.
When the destruction is tallied, we can ask the people who say that they “lost everything” whether they *REALLY* lost everything of they merely lost a lot of things.Report
1.) So, we might have idiots on Twitter saying idiot things. Okay. Not sure that warrants media coverage.
2.) So, busses were stolen. The only evidence we have of this is a recorded phone call. No photos or videos. I’ll concede it happened. But there is no evidence it happened as reported on Twitter.
3.). I can’t listen to the phone call, unfortunately. I have the boys around and don’t want them overhearing that. I can try to listen this evening. Reading some quotes in the article, it seems there was indeed widespread destruction and certain neighborhoods or individuals may have lost it all or enough that such claims would be legitimate. Happy to concede that rioting occurred and many residents were incredibly and unduly harmed as a result.
But there is a key phrase there: “cops are in retreat”. Did you hear anything in the audio to support that claim?
What I’m trying to figure out is: What actually happened in Chicago?
Did we have unrest on part with the rest of the country? If so, the media coverage I’ve seen seems appropriate.
Or did we — do we — have a revolution happening, one which involves busses being ridden the wrong way down one way streets and cops retreating? If so, the media coverage would indeed seem woefully insufficient. If that is the case, I would fully endorse Kristen’s position here.
I realize the irony of saying, “Hey, can you cite something?” to someone whose main argument is that the media is blacking out the event. But, we live in an age where you can always find some evidence of something. And if it was on Twitter, it is probably still on Twitter, no?
Right now… EVERYTHING being offered suggest a truly troubling scene on the ground in Chicago, but all of our major cities seem to be reckoning with troubling scenes on the ground and there was breathless reporting about all of it for a week. So while I haven’t loved how the media has handled much of the protest converage, I see nothing to support the final statement above:
“…a media blackout on critically important news is concerning. Deeply concerning. This level of unrest should be reported on. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Because otherwise, this is some Pravda shit here.”
KD has not established that the level of unrest she discusses is real. Thus we cannot determine how it has been reported on and whether that constitutes a media black out.
Now, we can hem and haw over “commandeer” vs “stolen” if you want. Or we can look at the big picture: Is the unrest in Chicago different than the unrest elsewhere? I’ve seen NOTHING here to show me that is the case. Have you?Report
Well, it wasn’t *JUST* a recorded phone call. It was a phone call between the Mayor Chicago and her Alderpeople.
If you want to know how bad things were that night, listen to that phone call.
In the days and weeks to come, we’re going to see some numbers floated for the damage done and insurance numbers and whatnot. You wanna guess as to what the number is? I don’t because I know that whatever I say will either be ludicrous or undershoot the real number by an order of magnitude.
And that tells me that, yes, there were people engaging in hyperbole while the city was burning as people were looting it. But I also know that there were local on-the-spot reporters who were saying what they were seeing and they were saying it without editors or filters as it happened around them.
We don’t know what the level of unrest actually translates to… but do you want to guess a price tag for the damage done?
What number do you think is the floor of unrest that would qualify as KD seeing something real?
Give me a number.Report
The question isn’t KD “seeing something” because she didn’t.
Her claim was that Twitter was reporting a more accurate version of reality than the news media.
Based on what I’ve seen it appears that Twitter gave wildly exaggerated and inaccurate reports, while the media gave more nuanced and accurate accounts of what happened.Report
The cat is still in the box, Chip.
Give me a number. You’re in construction. You have a better grasp of what it takes to rebuild a burned building than anyone else here.
Give me a number.Report
There is no number which would validate Kristin’s claims.
She claimed that Twitter was giving a better representation of reality than the media.
It wasn’t.
She claimed this based on tweets of Seattle “falling to Antifa”; this was a wild exaggeration;
She claimed this based on tweets that buses were being commandeered; This was a rumor.
Damage costs won’t be relevant to any of these claims.
The media got it late, but right. Twitter got it first, but wrong.Report
Well, one of the things that twitter can give that traditional media can’t is unfiltered data.
I admit that someone standing in a conflagration yelling “it’s the end of the world” should not be taken as evidence that the world is ending.
But the fire can be an indicator of something very, very bad happening even if the person-on-the-scene is hysterical.
We still don’t know how bad Chicago got. We won’t know how bad it got for a while.
(And, get this, even though the looting is over, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.)Report
But we do know how bad it got.
We do know that there doesn’t exist any footage of people commandeering buses, despite a week of time for such to come to light.
There also isn’t footage of blocks of burned out businesses, like in other more destructive riots. So it’s reasonable to assume that blocks of burned out businesses don’t exist.
We also know that the newspapers and tv stations aren’t reporting on the destruction as being massive or unusual. And we also know that Twitter isn’t reporting this either. So its reasonable to think that the damage wasn’t shockingly high.
There is a death toll, which was shockingly high, but these appear to be opportunistic murders.
We know that there aren’t riots continuing, that they only lasted a couple nights.
These are facts. Not rumors or conjectures, just facts that we know.
So taking all these sources of information together, its reasonable to think that the mainstream media accounts of Chicago are largely accurate.Report
No. You’re missing the point. Maybe intentionally. The number alone doesn’t matter. Compare the number in Chicago to the number in DC, NYC, Philly, Minneapolis, etc.
If the number in Chicago is much higher than those, it deserves more reporting. If it isn’t, then it doesn’t.
But now who’s moving goalpost?Report
It’s not about the number alone, Kazzy.
I’m looking at the number within the context of all of the other things we didn’t know at the time and still don’t know.
By asking for a number, I’m not moving a goalpost.
I’m asking for one to be set.Report
You are. 100% you are.
The claims were that unrest in Chicago was unlike unrest elsewhere. Busses. Cops on retreat. Antifa. Those were the claims. And further claims that the media ignoring those claims was evidence of a blackout.
No. That didn’t happen. It isn’t happening. Regardless of the number. You want to NOW make it about the number because your attempt to make it all about the bus fell on its face.
You’re wrong. You can admit it. It happens.Report
Kazzy, you may recall: *YOU* thought the bus was the important part. That was the example that *YOU* gave and that I knew that I had heard something about.
Did you listen to the tape, by the way?
I ask not because I wanted you to double-check to make sure that I wasn’t lying, but because you were asking questions about the damage done in Chicago and the Alderpeople in the call were talking about the damage done.
The call wasn’t just about the bus.
Though, granted, it did have the source of the information about buses being stolen.Report
You seem to have me mistaken for the person who wrote the OP, who made repeated mentions of the busses, and who premised her argument on them.
That wasn’t me.
Wrong again.Report
We’re going in circles. I’m tempted to quote you but I know you’ll say “I said that but it’s not what I *MEANT*” and we’re going to have discussions over whether I should have addressed what you meant instead of what you said and how it’s unfair for me to read you the way I’m reading you and I should, instead, be reading Kristin that way and I should be reading you as charitably as I read Kristin.
And it doesn’t change the fact that the Mayor said that buses were stolen. It was the Mayor. Not some rando on Twitter. The *MAYOR*.Report
Please do quote me. Yes, I mentioned the busses. I never denied that. I asked about the busses. I asked about all the claims. I asked for cites to substantiate the claims. Either they exist or they don’t. Nothing has shown the claims — bus or otherwise — are true as they’ve been described in the OP.
Play your games. Do your thing. None of it will actually accomplish anything other then showing that you treat this as a game, rather than an actual discussion.
If you or anyone else provided a single source to support the claims offered in the OP — that Chicago is experiencing unique levels of unrest that the media is refusing to report — I’d be right there with you to criticize the report.
You haven’t done that. Presumably because you can’t. And you want to make that about me.
So, yes. Quote me. I stand by my words. The problem is… your words are meaningless. Cuz you’re a clown.Report
And when the buses were pointed out, which was your response?
A: Oh, jeez. The Mayor said that? I guess it’s not surprising that that news was out there. I hadn’t heard that the Mayor was talking about the buses being stolen. I figured it was just some nut on the street who was responding to the bus being tagged or something.
B: Well, I said the buses being stolen but I meant the buses being stolen and driven the wrong way down a one-way street. Do you have any audio of *THAT*? I thought not.Report
Yea because… the claim was B. So, yea, you didn’t substantiate the claim. So, yea, the thrust of the post remains in question.
Do you want me to say, “Well, obviously, the situation in Chicago is as bad as the OP says it is and the media is blacking out all reporting on these awful events” because you showed evidence of… none of the awful events mentioned in the OP?
Yes, the mayor mentioned busses stolen. Fully conceded. I’ll take that as evidence that busses were stolen. HEAR THAT?!?! Kazzy admits busses were stolen.
Which… doesn’t matter. Because the claim wasn’t “Busses were stolen.” The claim was “Busses were stolen and driven the wrong way down a one way street”… which was among many other claims… all of which paint a picture of *unique unrest unlike any other city in America* that the media was blacking out reporting on.
Come on… you’re smarter than this. You’re quadrupling down on the same “gotcha” nonsense because you have nothing else to stand on.
You’re wrong. The OP is wrong.
Prove the OP right. Do it. Because that is exactly what I asked for: OP, show your work. You can’t do it. Kristin can’t do it. Because the OP is wrong.Report
I’m willing to read Kristin’s post as “I’m hearing all of these things. Why isn’t it being covered?”
The answer to some of them is because, indeed, she was giving credibility to Chicken Littles out there who were saying that things were happening that, at this point, can’t be proven to have happened.
But other things that she mentioned, and that you specifically questioned, *DID* happen. Or, at least, some of the things that she said she heard were said by people that you can listen to.
Did she give credibility to Chicken Littles that she shouldn’t have? Sure.
Did some parts of the sky fall? Looks like it.Report
“Why aren’t the news media reporting these unsubstantiated rumors?” Is a question that answers itself.Report
It depends. If something is caught on film by citizen journalists, it might be fair to ask why didn’t the “real” media cover the story?
I mean, let’s look at what would be required to demonstrate that a bus was stolen.
You’d need… what? A bus found on the side of the road? Well, that’s not proof it was stolen, was it? Let alone proof that it was driven up the wrong way of a one-way street.
We’ve got the Mayor saying that a bus was stolen. That doesn’t prove that a bus was stolen. It just proves that she said that a bus was stolen.
Maybe she’s lying.
Maybe the people who briefed her were lying.
Maybe the people who informed the people who briefed her were lying.
We don’t know.
So it’d be downright irresponsible to report that a bus was stolen.
The Mayor said “a bus was stolen” *MIGHT* be news… but, let’s face it, people are dying and George Floyd will never hold his daughter again.
Why are you still talking about buses?Report
Which is why I keep saying that Twitter got it first, but the media got it right.Report
But we still don’t know whether a bus was stolen/commandeered or merely taken on a joyride.
We don’t know.
Not even an “we investigated the claim made by the mayor and we were unable to find that any buses were temporarily borrowed from the city before being returned”.
It’s just… not covered.
Which, if buses being stolen was an important indicator of something, you’d think would merit investigation.
Never mind.
Never mind.Report
You would think that if such a spectacular event happened, in the midst of mobs of people holding cell phones, it would show up somewhere.
Why did thousands of people decide not to record it?Report
Which brings me back to the thing that I said in my comment that you’re responding to:
Not even an “we investigated the claim made by the mayor and we were unable to find that any buses were temporarily borrowed from the city before being returned”.Report
This strikes you as strange?Report
I don’t know what the “this” is.
The claim made by the Mayor?
That the claim was made by the Mayor to her Alderpeople?
That we can dismiss the claim made by the Mayor in her official capacity in a conference call with her Alderpeople because the media hasn’t followed up on it, even to say “we haven’t found evidence of a bus joyride”?Report
Any of it really.
I mean, in times of crisis, isn’t it normal for wild rumors to circulate, even among officials in charge?
And that these same people, when in private meetings speak rashly and foolishly when repeating the rumors?
And that there isn’t much appetite to track down exactly who started the rumor because, well cui bono who would benefit from such an expenditure of resources?
As with Kristin’s original post, I don’t see any of the media coverage of this as strange or mysterious.Report
It is normal for wild rumors to circulate.
It is also normal for out-of-the-ordinary events that happened to be talked about.
What is the difference between these two things?Report
Which out-of-the-ordinary event happened?Report
I’ll answer my question, then. The difference between a wild rumor and an out-of-the-ordinary event is that the wild rumor is only tangentially related to a thing that actually happened while an out-of-the-ordinary event is an out-of-the-ordinary event that actually happened.
So the difference is that the rumor is wildly overblown while the out-of-the-ordinary event being talked about is not particularly overblown.
So when you ask “which out-of-the-ordinary event happened?”, I’d say that I don’t know whether buses were commandeered.
I know that the mayor said that they were… but I don’t know if that was a wild rumor or an out-of-the-ordinary event.
Which brings me back to what I said before:
I’d like for somebody to interview somebody and come out with a statement like that says “we investigated the claim made by the mayor and couldn’t find any evidence of this sort of thing having happened”.
And before you say “well, why should they do that?”
It’s because, apparently, it’s important for us to argue that we can’t say for sure that what the Mayor said happened was happening and therefore we can assume that it was a wild rumor and therefore we can dismiss claims talking about it happening.Report
We DO know that buses weren’t commandeered.
This is by now, a fact.
To assert otherwise demands a preposterous explanation that somehow this spectacular event happened and yet was missed by the thousands of recordings that were being made that night.Report
It’s not a fact, Chip. You’re saying “well, if it happened, I would have seen evidence of it!” when we’ve got the Mayor talking about it on a phone call.
“Someone would have tweeted it!”, you point out. I imagine that that’s true. I also can imagine that someone might not want to livetweet commandeering a bus.
“Ah,” you point out. “There were people livetweeting Raz the Warlord policing the CHAZ! There were people livetweeting him hitting them!”
“Not that he’s representative of what’s happening in the CHAZ”, you add.
Yes, that’s a good point. Maybe the Mayor merely made up the whole bus commandeered thing out of whole cloth as an excuse to shut down the CTA.
Or maybe the people (COPS!) who were advising her made that up.
WE STILL DON’T KNOW.
For my part, I’d like to know what was behind the Mayor saying this.
Because we still don’t know what was behind the Mayor saying this.Report
At this point, believing in People Commandeering Buses is less credible than alien abductions.
We have hours of cell phone videos of people smashing windows, setting fire to cars and looting in broad daylight, in full view of news cameras.
The idea they would suddenly become shy about taking control of a bus is preposterous.
“But the mayor talked about it!” Yeah, and Air Force pilots talk about seeing strange lights in the sky.
Authorities get bad information all the time, and sometimes help spread it. But an authority spreading a rumor doesn’t change the fact that it is still just a rumor.
This insistence is especially strange in light of Kristin’s original comment, which was to ask why media weren’t reporting on it.
Well, we now know why they weren’t reporting on it- because they couldn’t find any evidence. That’s like, Journalism 101.Report
Then the Mayor has a credibility problem.
Or her advisors have a credibility problem.
You’d think that that would be worth covering.
“There’s no story there” may be true about “a bus was commandeered”. But it’s not true about the Mayor declaring that a bus was commandeered during an official briefing to her city officials.
That’s not being covered either.
“Mayor, why did you say that?” is one of those questions that would be, like, Journalism 101.Report
True, along with “Why did you say no tear gas was used when we have canisters that say ‘tear gas’?” or “Why did the police say he tripped when he was obviously pushed?” or even “Mr. President, why are you lying to us?”
The media unwillingness to confront lies by authorities is a real thing.Report
Have they confronted the Mayor yet?Report
Yes, but you won’t read about it because of the mainstream media blackout.
I only know because a guy on the bus told me he heard about it from his brother.Report
Well, maybe we’ll get a journalist who has taken 101 in that room someday.Report
The media’s inability to call out political leadership that lies and exaggerate the damage done by left protestors would seem to lead to _entirely different_ implications than the media’s inability to cover the left seizing control of a city.
A large potion of people here are trying to pretend the OG post had no implications at all, and end up arguing in what would be a very surreal manner if the discussion was _actually_ ‘The media is bad and won’t cover things that don’t fit its narrative’. But they’re not, really, they were trying to argue ‘the left is out of control (and the media won’t cover it, and this is my hook to pretend to be neutral)’.
People who honestly are arguing that first thing, that media is bad at their job, should, at this point turn around and ask ‘Why is the leadership of Chicago being allowed to lie freely without being called out by the media, and in how many other places is this happening?’. For some reason…that’s not where this is conversation is going. (Addition: And, Jaybird…you are going there, at least. You will notice that others aren’t.)
—
And the lies are a strange thing to care about, anyway. As I pointed out below, there is a very large and important thing that needs covering, which isn’t: The police are utterly out of control in every possibly way. We don’t have to take people’s word, there’s video after video on Twitter showing them out of control. Here:
https://tinyurl.com/GFProtestPoliceBrutality
480 instances. During just the protests. Often with multiple camera angles. But, I know…we need ‘context’. We need get excuses from the police, justifications about how what they do is legal. The thing is…demanding context really doesn’t work when it’s hundreds of times. Like, there’s a lot of these that are utterly indefensible by themselves (Many of which actually result in charges now!), but…the media still isn’t treating what is very obviously a systemic nation-wide problem of police violence (Honestly, the best way to describe it is a ‘police riot’.) _as_ one.Report
Oh, and to be clear, when I say police being are charged, I’m not talking about the Georgia Floyd killers. I’m talking about police officers being charged for things they do _during_ the protests. I don’t have a full list, but there’s Krasner in Philadelphia, Bologna also in Philly, the _six officers_ in Atlanta, D’Andraia in New York, and more I’m having trouble finding because _no one_ is bothering to note ‘Hey, a lot of police are getting charged for their insane behavior during these protests’.
It seems like that should make the news. It makes local news, of course, but…no one seems to have put the numbers together. (Hell, neither the Kranser or Bologna article mentioned the _other_ officer arrested in Philly!) Like…either the police have suddenly started to be this violent, which seems newsworthy, or they always were like this, which also seems newsworthy.Report
It wasn’t “Why isn’t it being covered?”
Do you want me to quote the OP? I’ll quote the OP.
“Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the protests or their aftermath, the civil unrest across America is news. Big news. Important news. News that could save lives. Where are the journalists? Are you seriously telling me that I now have to assume that Breitbart is more reliable a source of information than CNN? Because if that’s the case, no one ever, EVER needs to be shaming people for watching Fox News ever again – maybe they’re getting some news on there that the rest of us haven’t heard.
I don’t care if you’re conservative, liberal, or otherwise, a media blackout on critically important news is concerning. Deeply concerning. This level of unrest should be reported on. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Because otherwise, this is some Pravda shit here.”
The OP wasn’t saying, “Huh… weird… Twitter says one thing and CNN says another and Breitbart seems to be saying the Twitter things… what’s going on?”
It was, “There is a revolution happening. The major media sources are blacking out. This is Pravda shit.”Report
Well, whether there is a revolution happening is still up in the air, isn’t it?
I could certainly see saying that about the riots. I mean, you’ve seen the people crowing about the new charges being levied against the police officers. “All of this damage to keep from arresting four cops”, is one way that I saw it.
I also think that there are going to be a lot of institutions overturned because of this. “Revolution” isn’t the worst word.
As for “blacking out”, Eh. I can see it. She wanted to know stuff in real time and the regular media wasn’t doing a good job of sifting through the real-time footage coming through.
“This is Pravda shit” is an uncharitable reading of what was happening.
But if someone has seen evidence in the past of the media being willing to run with real time information under some circumstances and appealing to journalistic ethics under others, I can see reaching the conclusion.
You probably hold the media in less contempt than I do. You read a paragraph like hers and say “that’s not accurate!”
I read a paragraph like that and say “yeah, that’s more or less accurate.”
Even if, in this case, what the media did was in the ballpark of responsible (using Chip’s “choosing to be right rather than first” formula), it’s always interesting to see when they choose to be right and when they choose to be first.
And *THAT* is where it’s likely to see a pattern form.Report
Don’t even get me started on the ethics of gaming journalism.Report
Jaybird, if you’re looking for the number of blacks killed in Chicago, along with overall crime numbers, that’s something that media doesn’t care about, and will never care about. The media has always avoided those numbers because to pay attention to them is racist, and can get someone flagged as a white supremacist and cancelled.
During the Ferguson riots, even black people who brought up Chicago’s homicide rates were labeled as white supremacists who were trying to undercut BLM’s narrative. What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.
It sounds like you’re looking for data that says “If we follow policy P, it’s probable that X number of extra black folks will die.” Well, nobody advocating for P wants to address what X might be because then there will be a trail of documentation showing that they knew about X when they were advocating P.
It would be also to easy to later point out that they took the position they did knowing X number of innocent (or not so innocent) black people would die. It would make it really hard to defend their morally virtuous reputation if they were going full bore for a policy whose predicted outcomes were so heinous that even the KKK would denounce the policy as viciously racist, if not outright genocidal. Even admitting the question exists could have profound repercussions for them.
There were far less politically loaded versions of this dilemma in the debates over Covid policies, where if you publicly accepted that your favored policy P would kill X extra people, and it did, you might be lambasted for it by the outraged relatives of people who were in set X.
Another analogy would be a wartime commander under immense pressure to do P, even though you think it will be a total disaster that will get a big hunk of your army slaughtered, simply because the mob is looking to lynch any treasonous officer who’s too cowardly to do P. So you’re going to do P.
Instead of trying to explain to the mob that P is a horrible idea, which will get you branded as a traitorous coward and removed, you’ll spend your time thinking of good ways to cover your a**.
If you’re a junior officer who wants to dig into data that might undercut the general’s #5 and #6 defensive arguments, you’ll find yourself peeling potatoes or marching at the front of the column to make sure you’re the first soldier that gets shot.
The serious consideration of the questions you’re asking are would have consequences that are order of magnitude more socially and politically damaging than the similar Covid questions, so expect the goal posts to bounce all over the soccer field like Ronaldo on crack. I’d also expect folks advocating P to try to engage in all sorts of ad hominem attacks to make sure they can claim that nobody who wasn’t a racist or a troll was asking these questions, because they don’t want their avoidance of the questions to bite them later, when people are really upset about the eventual outcome.Report
Dude, it’s four blocks.Report
it’s intriguing that you’re coming at me here with “THE WRITER MADE CLAIMS WHICH SHE IS UNABLE TO SUBSTANTIATE BY REFERRING TO A NEUTRAL THIRD-PARTY SOURCE”, and in other comments on this same page you’re taking as cold hard proof some bro’s comment that he lives in Seattle and is sure it’s not as bad as people are saying.Report
So… yes… reading comprehension IS particularly hard right now. Later.Report
Well, that’s not at all my take, but thanks for the stunning illustration of a person in the throes of cognitive dissonance, I’m not sure I’ve seen it so blatantly in the wild before.Report
You didn’t say this?
“…a media blackout on critically important news is concerning. Deeply concerning. This level of unrest should be reported on. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Because otherwise, this is some Pravda shit here.”
Weird. I must have imagined it… way out here with the goalposts I supposedly moved.
I’ve made a single inquiry, repeated ad nauseum:
What substantiation can you offer for the following claims:
1.) “Members of Antifa celebrating that “Chicago had fallen” for example (sadly deleted and I didn’t screenshot it, because silly me, I thought if it was true it would be on the news)
2.) “[T]hat people were driving the wrong way down one way streets in stolen buses.”
3.) [T]hat the cops were in retreat and parts of the city were effectively lost.”
Can you offer any evidence that any of that is true?Report
From the sound of it, journalists are a little busy getting beaten, teargassed, and arrested at the moment.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/george-floyd-protests-reporters-press-teargas-arrestedReport
Going after journalists directly had to be the stupidest strategic move the police made in this.Report
People who think they are untouchable often make this kind of strategic error.Report
It’s definitely up there with cracking an elderly man’s head on the concrete while someone’s filming, although not as entertaining as stabbing water bottles.Report
What does “journalist” mean in this context? We talk about the difficulty in distinguishing between protesters and rioters. Who is the guy holding up his cell phone walking through the middle of them? If the crowd is vandalizing, or protesting without a permit, how can you distinguish between the journalist, the activist, or the guy who saw something interesting and decided to film it? Is there a difference? And if you’re shooting tear gas at the crowd, how do you avoid the journalists among them?
I mean nothing against citizen journalism. Quite the opposite. I respect them because they’re willing to take risks in pursuit of stories that the mainstream press can’t be bothered with. But that means risks.Report
Maybe the same way we distinguish between the good apples and the bad apples among the cops.Report
I think the more important question is how do we stop the police from using indiscriminate violence so… indiscriminately.Report
Someone with press credentials? We already have rules about who you shouldn’t teargas, arrest, fire rubber bullets at, etc. because they’re the press. I do realize the lines are going to be blurred, and yeah I don’t know what you do with someone who’s running around in a riot with their iPhone saying it makes them press, but what’s disconcerting is how often it seems the police have been choosing to ignore the norms altogether.Report
Gee I don’t know – a CNN Reporter wearing his CNN badges and other Press Credentials was arrested on air along with his producer/camera man. An Australian Reporter and camera person were hit more then once by Park police while wearing press credentials. Other people with press credentials on places where the police have told the press to stand have been shot with rubber bullets and gassed. They are not hard to distinguish – the police just didn’t or don’t care.Report
Ice Cube goes anti-Semitic:
https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/06/ice-cube-antisemitism-twitter-controversy/
Rowling unleashes a tirade against transpeople.Report
The Ice Cube thing is rather disappointing.
Rowling has been transphobic forever. Nothing here is really new, except enough people noticed that she chose to go mask off. Needless to say, it is also disappointing.Report
As somebody who lives in Seattle, I bet I’ll have more trouble in Capitol Hill as far as getting around that neighborhood if Bumbershoot comes back next year, than a bunch of LARPer’s largely sleeping in a park for the next couple of weeks. Probably far more crime during the music festival as well.
I’ve heard far more whaling and gnashing of teeth about Seattle collapsing into anarchy from, I’m sure, very well-meaning conservatives on Twitter, than anybody I personally know.
As far as the rest goes, perhaps the press has figured out that the larger structural problems of a broken policing system is more important to talk about, than scattered violence. If It Bleeds, It Leads doesn’t actually have to be Holy Scripture.
I guess the real question is, why do you care more about supposed chaos in the streets from Antifa Super Soldiers than ya’ know, the continued and unending violence of the police toward protesters?
Also, to Jaybird’s 1968 trolling – https://newrepublic.com/article/158140/black-lives-matter-backlash
“One of the latest, published Tuesday by The Washington Post, shows 74 percent of Americans support the protests, including a 53 percent majority of Republicans. That poll also produced a figure much more striking than the headline result. While the Post found that Americans were about evenly divided on the question of whether the protests have been mostly peaceful or mostly violent, a 53 percent majority of those who believed the protests were mostly violent supported them anyway. The Post also reported that 69 percent of Americans believe Floyd’s killing reflected “broader problems in treatment of Black Americans by police.””Report
“I’ve heard far more whaling and gnashing of teeth about Seattle collapsing into anarchy from, I’m sure, very well-meaning conservatives on Twitter, than anybody I personally know.”
So there’s no Autonomous Zone? That’s a lie? That didn’t happen? It’s made-up, it’s a right-wing fantasy, I can go down there right now and look around for myself and I won’t see it?Report
Is reading comp particularly hard right now? He described his very real observations and likely interactions with CHAZ as a local. And he shared a local perspective to counter an outside perspective.
You took that as him denying what’s happening when it is literally the opposite of that.
Seriously, what the fuck people?Report
Checking in on the chaos and anarchy in the CHAZ:
An Exceedingly Chill Day At The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43888539/an-exceedingly-chill-day-at-the-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone
Apparently people are wandering around eating snacks, like a street fair.
There is a Twitter video link, with one comment being: “If this is what anarchy looks like, sign me up.”Report
Don’t forget to keep checking the Reddit!
(There seem to be a lot of lines to read between.)Report
Of course, Trump is incapable of not taking the bait, tweeting threats to “take back” the city by force.
Both Durkan and Inslee swiftly hit back at Trump.
“A man who is totally incapable of governing should stay out of Washington state’s business. ‘Stoop’ tweeting,” Inslee wrote on Twitter, mocking Trump for a misspelling in his tweet.
Durkan added, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker…”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/11/trump-seattle-autonomous-zone-inslee/
I can’t help but think that what is causing so much conservative fixation on the CHAZ is not the fear that it will collapse, but that it won’t.
Personally, I can’t help but see it through the eyes of my own Occupy experience, where poor planning and refusal to grapple with the hard work of organizing a community were its undoing.
But hey, maybe these guys will do something different.Report
Hence my “fail to plan, plan to fail” remark.
Personally, if they can make it work, more power to them. They probably won’t, because I see too many idealists and ideologues running around, and not enough pragmatists. But who knows…Report
” He described his very real observations and likely interactions with CHAZ as a local.”
so, yes, he’s saying “there’s no autonomous zone and anyone who says there is one is lying”?Report
“…a bunch of LARPer’s largely sleeping in a park for the next couple of weeks.”
What do you think that was referring to?
Reading is fundamental. Not here, though, it seems.Report
so, yes, he’s saying “there’s no autonomous zone and anyone who says there is one is lying”?
this shouldn’t be hard for a super-smart dude like you to answer, yet all you keep doing is quoting parts of the post that don’t answer it. you said “he described his very real observations” except he hasn’t, actually, made or described any observations. you also quoted a characterization based entirely on his opinion and claimed it was fact.
get better at this. you’re embarassing yourself.Report
Again… what do you think he was referring to? Here’s a hint: it rhymes with Kaz.Report
I’m saying, “there are people there, but 90% of the population is treating them as the utopian anarcha-kiddies they are and waiting on them to burn themselves out, while CapHill is basically shut down anyway.”Report
I’m saying, “there are people there”
“yes there’s people there and they’re describing themselves how you describe them but I personally don’t take them seriously” starts out with “yes there’s people there”, so, this means you’re agreeing that the thing actually exists, which means that Kristin isn’t wrong to say “this happened and the major media didn’t discuss it until several days layer”.Report
Only if you believe a random group of people largely camping in a public park and using a largely disused (at the time) intersection is more important than the continued violence of the state against protesters.Report
“Only if you believe a random group of people largely camping in a public park and using a largely disused (at the time) intersection”
It’s exactly as important as a bunch of guys hanging out on completely disused scrub-land in the empty corner of a mostly-rural state, I’d say.Report
This analogy works in favor of Jesse’s point.Report
Chip, the Bundy Ranch standoff was covered right from the start, extensively, and all through it happening.Report
And liberals on this site where raging at how terrible it was for the Bundy’s to take over the preserve.
I’m sure Jaybird can find that post.Report
There are a lot of discussions in comments about Bundy, I’m not able to find any posts (yet). I mean, here’s kind of a post about him? But it’s mostly about guns.
Bundy is mostly brought up in contrast to stuff like Ferguson (and in comments, not in the essay itself).
Which is weird. You’d think that we’d have had an essay…Report
We had a big post when his supporters took over the bird preserve.Report
Dude, I’m doing a search on:
site://ordinary-times.com “Cliven Bundy”
site://ordinary-times.com Malheur
site://ordinary-times.com Bundy “wildlife preserve”
site://ordinary-times.com Bundy “bird preserve”
And I’m not finding anything except for folks getting into it in the comments. (I found this and this… but I don’t know what exactly to search for.)Report
Probably this one.
He was also name-dropped in some others, but that’s the only one about him.Report
Jeez Louise.Report
That’s the one!Report
So, can we agree that both groups are a less than ideal exemplar of a broader movement?Report
I can meet you there, no problem.Report
Jesse, my trolling was to ask whether the riots would be followed by migration.
I still can’t tell whether the counter-argument is “no it won’t” or whether it’s “you have no reason to believe that these riots will be followed by migration”.Report
I think the counter-argument is “blame isn’t transitive when racism is involved, so if we do something and racists respond and their response has negative repercussions for the people we said we were helping, that’s all the racists’ fault and none of ours”.Report
I’ll bet anybody who wants it that Trading Places style dollar that the population of people in urban areas is the same or higher in 2025 than today and also, housing in the heart of Seattle will continue to be stupidly expensive.Report
OOOH! SOMETHING WE CAN COME BACK TO!
Awesome.
We need measureables.
Let’s pick the cities where looting was the most boisterous.
Minneapolis
Chicago
Um… let’s have five cities. What are three more with the most interesting looting?
Now let’s have a measurement. We should go straight population, sure, but also population as a percentage of the state. Like, the population of the country is going to go up but if (city) has 20% of the state’s population today and 19.5% of the state’s population tomorrow (but less boisterous cities have gone up), that’s interesting even if 19.5% is a larger raw number in 2025 than in 2020.
We also need 5 cities that are going to be our control.
Like, cities in which looting wasn’t particularly boisterous.
I want to say Colorado Springs would be at the top of any such list. We’d need four more.
And then, in five years, we can compare the numbers from today with the numbers in 2025.
Dude. I am totally down with this.Report
There are actually people who study the housing market. What they tell us is that housing choices are messy to graph, but appear to be driven by a number of variables:
Wages in comparison to rents;
Interest rates;
Transportation linkages;
Household formation;
Local amenities like parks, shopping, entertainment;
Schools;
Security;
All of these variables are in flux both in the short and long term. It could easily be that a small and barely noticeable change in interest rates by the Fed, or a policy ruling by the Biden administration Department of Transportation, or a SCOTUS ruling on schools will have more of an impact on the housing market in 2025 than anything we have discussed here.
Not to mention the massive collapse of the economy this year; How that affects people’s choices going forward is anyone’s guess.Report
Jesse, have you interacted with the CHAZ?
Could you describe what happened? (Like, what time it was when you walked through it, who you talked to, if anybody talked to you, if you engaged in any commerce while in there (ICE CREAM!!!), and that sort of thing? Thanks!)Report
I haven’t personally (busy week), but I’ve had friends and roommates visit friends or do other things in the neck of the woods, and run into no more or less problems they usually have in Capitol Hill.Report
If you manage to get there this weekend, I would totally appreciate a travelogue-kinda comment.
“We walked past the barricades, people waved, everybody was nice, there were members of the John Brown Gun Club walking around, we got ice cream, it was jalapeno caramel which wasn’t very good but I saw what they were going for, we listened to a nice speech, I petted the cow, then we went home.”
That sort of thing. I’d *LOVE* to read a first-person account from someone I trusted to not be making stuff up out of whole cloth.Report
I was only there for a little bit both Tuesday and Wednesday, but I basically got the same vibe as when I was down as the Oregon Country Fair last summer, minus the hallucinogens. It’s pretty chill. It also seems like the kind of thing that will burn itself out after a few more weeks, if that.Report
During the day or at night?
Because everything I’ve seen there during the day reminds me of the time I went to Portland and went to a farmer’s market.
At night, though, it seems to turn into something weird.
Report
Tuesday evening and then again Wednesday afternoon. But I was there for maybe 20-30 minutes both times, so I can’t exactly claim to have captured a broad swath of the experiences. Still, that leaves me with infinity more knowledge than 99% of the people on this forum, so…Report
Dude, write an essay about it.
I’m stuck with the Reddit page and citizen journalists helpfully recording altercations during dodgeball games.Report
Well there was only a little bit of fighting and it wasn’t by anyone important and only, like, a tiny bit of stuff got wrecked, so, it’s purest pro-white-supremacy derailing whataboutism to point this out!Report
Raz Simone has spoken up:
Report
I think Raz has perhaps been doing a lot of good, with border walls, ID checkpoints, armed security, etc. I think what’s happened is that all sorts of left-wing people in Seattle hated Trump, but had a desperate internal need for more Trump, so they set up their own super Trump who would give them Trump policies cranked to eleven, without actually being named “Donald Trump”.
Another way to look at it is that the transition from a revolutionary utopia all the way to living under the thumb of a rich goon with a private army of armed thugs implementing strict controls is less now less than 48 hours. Most socialist revolutions go through long months of chaos before gaining to that level of oppressive military organization.Report
living under the thumb of a rich goon with a private army of armed thugs
An excellent description of the United States in 2020.Report
Here he is rooting for violence.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270914092295950337Report
“all sorts of left-wing people in Seattle hated Trump, but had a desperate internal need for more Trump, so they set up their own super Trump ”
That must really be some powerful LSD you’re taking to think that sentence even remotely makes sense.Report
I can’t get the link to work, the Washington Post is now covering the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle.Report
As far as I can tell, the CHAZ is awesome and, yes, Raz is running around and there does seem to be video evidence of a tagging/vandalism altercation that may have involved violence but we cannot judge the entire CHAZ based on a few weird incidents that are not representative of the CHAZ as a whole.
Have I got that right?Report
Uhhhhh… what? Relevance?Report
(hangs head in shame)
I meant this to be a stand-alone comment and not a reply.Report
Personally, I’m far more worried about state representatives teaming up with hate groups to “protect” Snohomish from “looters” all while the sheriff describes it as a ‘festive night of tailgating’ than whatever some folks up on Capitol Hill are doing.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/after-public-outcry-snohomish-police-chief-is-reassigned/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/peaceful-protesters-experience-unrest-from-counterprotesters-at-snohomish-rally/ar-BB14WLhLReport
These protests and riots are only the beginning if the government is expecting millions of people to pay 3 months worth of rent or mortgages in one lump sum because they forcibly shut the country down for coronavirus. If they start evicting all these people out of their homes there will be hell to pay.Report
AnonaMoose raises a good point. If we pressed pause, and that’s all we did, we’re going to have to press play again. But we’re going to have to start from square one and that means *NOT* starting from square -90 and playing catchup or whatever. Rent forgiveness/mortgage forgiveness and it needs to be done in such a way that doesn’t cause problems.
And I have no idea how that’ll be done.Report
The simplest way would’ve been to say, that for the purpose of loans, the months of March to X didn’t exist. So, if your last morgage payment was dune in June of 2025, it’s now due in December of 2025. No extra interest of penalties, we just blank those months out of existence. Unfortunately, that was never going to happen.Report
I like that idea. I paid my mortgage on time and I like that idea.Report
Who forgives the landlord his rent? I mean, the idea of all tenants renting from owners is patently absurd. So, some of the landlords are also tenants in a way, and may have their own mortgages to worry about. Indeed, those rents may be their only source of income.
But, if a state actor, at any level, declared that a business must shut down and enacted this by force of law, than that state actor is responsible for any lost incomes by those affected businesses. Don’t you think that is appropiate?Report
The argument that this is a taking makes sense to me. We shut everything down AT THE POINT OF A GUN. The guy who rents should have access to recourse if he got shut down. The guy who rents to this guy should have access to recourse when it comes to his mortgage.
The only people who take it in the shorts are the people who managed to pay on time or already own their stuff outright.
And I have no idea how to codify that into a workable policy.Report
California is wrestling with this right now, with regard to commercial tenants and landlords.
The state’s Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill on Friday that would allow small businesses — like cafes, restaurants and bars — to renegotiate and modify lease deals if they have been impacted by shelter-in-place orders and economic shutdowns.
https://commercialobserver.com/2020/05/california-senate-sb939-commercial-tenants-renegotiate-break-lease-coronavirus/
Its often overlooked that businesses themselves are tenants and struggle to pay their rent. The question on the table is, who will bear the brunt of the shutdowns? The small restaurant who has had no income for three months? Or his landlord?
The bill allows the tenant to renegotiate with the landlord to come to a resolution of the issue, or to break the lease and walk away.
Wiener said they are sensitive to the needs of property owners in terms of their loan obligations.
“It’s a complicated issue. We don’t want these property owners to default on their loans,” he said. “But we also need to be clear: these landlords aren’t going to be able to collect the pre-COVID rents from these restaurants, bars and cafes. That is not the reality. The choice is not between full rent and reduced rent. The choice is between reduced rent and no rent.”Report
In Ontario, they tried a program where the landlord would write off 25% of the rent for the time in lock down, the government would pay 50% of the rent, and the commercial business would pay 25% of the rent. The catch was only the landlord could apply for the program and they could not own the building outright- meaning they were still paying the mortgage. The end result was it’s been a nearly complete failure.Report
I think it says a lot when a family member has been calling me each evening, asking what’s Twitter news posting. He’s not ready to brave the dumpster fire on his own, but he’s trusting them for the news updates.Report
I like how everyone who talks about this story (Edit: Not here, like…on Facebook.) seems to think the police were driven out. No. They left. Like, they just took all their stuff, shredded their paperwork, and walked away. They expected chaos.
And instead everyone there mostly acted like rational people, a few of them made very silly demands and claiming they were a government, and most of them are just happy the cops aren’t beating people anymore and having a bit of a street party. The worse problem is the people who honestly believe they’re the ‘government’ nonsense and have started trying to enforce rules, which isn’t great…but strangely different from how protestors seem to be behaving when there _are_ police.
Like, there’s this huge difference in how these people, who do have people with really extreme radical political ideas, as evidence by their demands, are behaving there…vs. everywhere else.
It’s almost as if the police are driving most of the violence, not the protestors. (And the violence not being created by the police is being deliberately being created by unrelated people who think ‘Hey, I can show up and act however I want’, and they are mysteriously ignored by the police. Assuming they aren’t actually undercover police themselves.)
What happened in Seattle, and this is pretty much the only explanation, is that the police started believing their own nonsense about the left and their protests and decided to show everyone who the protestors really were. How the protestors _really_ acted it without the firm hand of the police. They were expecting the protestors to riot and burn the place to the ground (They literally prepared to have their police station burned down, even alerted the fire department.), as an example of what happens without the police.
That didn’t happen. The protestors made it very clear that what happens without the police is: Leftist protestors walk around holding signs and making a bunch of demands, some of the demands kinda dumb. Also they set up hippy communes.
—
At worse, all this proves is some of the protestors are too utopian and their ideas don’t work…except it didn’t really prove that, they don’t have the support of the government. They have no tax base or anything. The fact they can’t make a functional society by themselves doesn’t really prove their demands are bad…because their demands aren’t to do anything like that!
If we simplify their demand to ‘defund the police’, as a sorta consensus protestor demand, that demand is actually to direct all, or almost all, _police resources_ (Which, again, they have no access to) to other existing governmental programs (Which they have no access to.) and expand those (Which they can’t.), and set up other systems where they don’t exist (which they have no ability to set up scratch.) And sometimes setup something like a police force that is very very small, but not build from the current one, under the idea that no current police force is salvageable. (Which they sorta tried to do, but without a justice system, the police are just thugs…I mean, the existing ones are anyway, but…my point is, you can’t have any law enforcement system without a justice system at the end.)
Thinking that maybe a hundred people being unable to set up a government disproves their ‘this specific part of this existing government is bad and needs to be gotten rid of’ idea is…poor logic. Although admittedly it would be funny to see Republicans have to set up their own society to repeal Obamacare.
—
Meanwhile, the problem isn’t the news isn’t covering Seattle. The problem is the news isn’t covering the hundreds of phone videos elsewhere, showing cops act like violent lunatics towards protestors during all this. While we’re looking on Twitter for news of what the media is ignoring, please spent ten seconds looking on Twitter or anywhere for these.
There is a police riot going right now, equivalent to the 1968 DNC except nationwide. That’s why the media’s not covering it, because they don’t know how to present it in any sort ‘balanced’ way…it is extremely hard to find examples of the police not out of control. And they don’t want to show that.Report
“[A] few of them made very silly demands and claiming they were a government…”
So what you’re saying is that a few bad apples don’t spoil the whole barrel?
“the problem isn’t the news isn’t covering Seattle.”
so you agree that this is happening in Seattle and the news isn’t covering it
which is…what Kristin said…
so you agree with her
“yeah I agree with her but, but!” dude, the first words in that sentence are “yeah I agree with her”, so, you agree with her.Report
Random people are not a ‘barrel’. They are just random people.
Things that are ‘barrels’ would be things like an entire organization with the ability to discipline members, and yet, instead of that, not only ignore problems but say the rules that lead to the problems are justified, and should be like that, and constantly fight efforts to fix them.
It’s sorta the ‘What is the difference between the Catholic church and a neighborhood that happens to have a child molester living in it?’. I mean, the neighborhood probably had a _higher_ percentage of child molesters than the church, right?
One of those is an organization, one that not only didn’t discipline people, but actively worked to cover it up. The other isn’t, and can’t.
Also, at this point, we’re way past any sort of ‘a few bad apples’, and into the ‘how quickly do good apples go bad when they enter the barrel entirely full of bad apples’.
Yes, I do? Good catch, I guess? I wasn’t arguing with that.
You know, it is possible to think the media isn’t covering something, and also that there’s a bigger problem going on that they should be covering, specifically, how the police everywhere else have apparently just devolved into violence. (Except they haven’t ‘devolved’, because they already always acted like that with left protests, but at this point it is very clear and open and undeniable.)
It even has been happening _to the media_.
Which is why the media stopped covering the protests. Because they don’t know how. It’s incredibly difficult for them to spin it in any way…because they’d be showing videos of the police out of control.
Granted, they’ve done that before, but they always do it very carefully, one video at a time, being sure to allow the police to lie, and it slowly filter into the public consciousness, and everything goes ‘Oh they must have had a reason’ or ‘Oh those officers made a mistake’.
But there are so many current videos, that are clearly just the police attacking people with literally no provocations. Something like eight people have lost eyes to rubber bullets.
That why the media isn’t covering this. Because it is too hard to make the police not look like crazed lunatics.Report
“I wasn’t arguing with that.”
why are you derailing the discussion on this post, then?Report
Um…I don’t think two paragraphs about ‘A related topic that the media is also not covering’ after my _seven_ paragraphs about Seattle is ‘derailing’ anything, especially since it was my top post, I didn’t leap into some other thread and ‘derail’ things.
Mentioning ‘other BLM protests and their lack of media coverage’ on an article about ‘two specific instances of the media’s failure to cover BLM protests’ seems…pretty clearly on topic! Not that we _have_ rules about being on topic and certainly not very strict ones, but I would argue that my post was on topic _even if we did_.
Hey, wait, didn’t you bring up _Cliven Bundy_ in another thread?Report
“Yes, yes, honey, I know, the scary men doing bad things are very troubling to you. You’ve had your say, and as progressive men who are definitely not misogynist we believe it’s very important to let women have their say. Now shut up while I explain what’s really important.”Report
No, no. I had had a nice short response there, but no. I deleted that.
Kristin posted something that had _literally nothing_ to do with her gender. You wouldn’t even _know_ her gender from reading her article. Not a single mention is made of it. A lot of the article is merely her repeating anecdotes, or things she heard on Twitter, that don’t involve her at all.
I guess she had some feelings about that, she said she felt ‘weird’ and ‘blindfolded’ about the lack of news, but did I say she shouldn’t feel that way? No, I did not.
Kristin is a conservative and has a lot of conservative takes that I disagree with. I will state my disagreement when I feel like it. That is the purpose of this site. That’s not the same as dismissing her experiences or feelings as a woman, or dismissing her because she’s a woman.Report
didn’t you bring up _Cliven Bundy_ in another thread?
and if I’d been using it as an example of “what we should be talking about instead of what this dumb white Karen wants to talk about”, you’d have a point.Report
Is it so hard for people to just admit “well agreeing to no implications (which I don’t think I was making any), yes, that does seem a little weird”
apparentlyReport
I disagreed with implications you didn’t have?! If you weren’t making any implications, then why you do you think I’m disagreeing with them?Report
“shredded their paperwork”
– I believe the legal term is “destroyed evidence.”Report
The protester who sent people out to get 80 boards that were 96″ x 2.5″ x 3.5″ was hilarious. It’s like are rebellion by seven year-olds who’ve never been outside their parent’s house before. I’d wonder what they’d do when they get their power and water cut off, but it won’t get to that because as soon as the cell towers go down, they’ll have to flee to find a signal.
But it’s not going to come to that, either, because all their communications are flowing through an FBI Stringray that’s documenting things for federal charges before they’re rounded up and arrested at their mom’s house when they try to go home for lunch. Violation of 18 USC §2383 carries ten years federal prison and bars a person from ever holding public office, and there’s nothing state or local law can do about that.Report
You realize that if they were to actually interpret the law to be able to get these protestors… (Or at least…the people who put up signs and asserted they weren’t in the US…unlike what you seem to imply, that law couldn’t be made to criminalize just _being there_.)
…you basically would criminalize a pretty large chunk of the far right. They actually have a defense ‘theory’ called Sovereign Citizen that asserts that they literally are not subject to US authority. (In some vague manner, they’d not very good at legal logic.)
Also…the far right runs around fantasizing about declaring war on ‘the government’ and shooting at them. They assert this is actually something society should do every once in a while. Which again, is not inciting rebellion under US law (Unless they actually do that, or…maybe just start pointing guns. Ahem.)…but it’s far worse than what CHAZ is doing, which merely saying ‘We do not consider ourselves under US law’.
There’s no logical way to make what CHAZ is doing an act of rebellion or insurrection without criminalizing huge amounts of the right.
Later…if the CHAZ has armed people who pull out guns and holds off the police, we could reevaluate this idea, and maybe they would be ‘in rebellion’. But until then, you can’t just assert people violating some random laws about construction and property and whatever random laws the protestors are breaking are ‘engaged in rebellion’ because a few of them supposedly say random things about not being part of the US, and because the police wandered off.
Not even ‘inciting rebellion’…to ‘incite’ something you have to have proximate cause it to happening…and no actual rebellion or insurrections is happening, because rebellions and insurrections happen by force.Report
UKTV memory holed a Fawlty Towers episode.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8412479/Germans-episode-Fawlty-Towers-taken-air.html
No doubt this trend will accelerate.Report
TW: Sexual Assault
One of the things I think we haven’t reckoned with is the nigh-total loss of moral authority on the part of the cops.
Here, check out what the Police Chief here is saying:
She’s saying that there have been increased reports of sexual assaults in the CHAZ. Well, of course she is. Is she telling the truth? We don’t know. That’s the sort of things cops would say. “We left, more bad stuff happened. This is why we have to go back.”
But remember Occupy Wall Street? They had a handful of problems with this sort of thing. They had to set up womens’ only tents, for example. There was a pamphlet handed out in Baltimore that asked people who were assaulted to not go to the cops. Was this a “real” pamphlet? Was it disinfo from a smart opponent of OWS?
We don’t know.
And now the police chief is saying what she’s saying above.
Is she telling the truth?
We don’t know.Report
Not just moral authority, but trust that they are telling the truth and not simply saying anything to preserve their place in society.
Honestly, IMHO, one of the bigger problems we, as a society, have is that we’ve not only agreed to hand over the seeking of justice to the government*, but we’ve also largely surrendered all violence to them as well, including violence to protect ourselves or others. And I don’t mean we can’t defend ourselves, such laws are still on the books, it’s that people are conditioned not to. They are conditioned to call the police and either try to get away or bunker down**, with no thought to what happens if those don’t work.
* Which is why the lack of justice when the government is wrong is so sharp.
** It’s not the wrong response, one should try to run, hide, or seek protection, but if that isn’t going to happen, one has to be ready to fight, not just hope the police will get there in time.Report
Yesterday, there was a tweet floating around of the NYPD bragging that they busted a guy for riding a scooter without plates and he had weed on him.
Here, lemme find it…
My main thought reading that tweet was “READ THE FREAKING ROOM, GUYS”.Report
NYPD has their collective heads so far up their own rectums they can’t even see the light of the room, much less read it. Been that way for years, probably decades.Report
This is one of the best comments I have ever read at this forum Oscar.Report
There’s a concept that gets thrown around a lot in New Zealand government called “social licence”. It”s about the public’s willingness to go along with government policy, as distinct from just looking at the legal powers a government agency has.
I think a lot of US police forces are about to find out what it looks like when they lose their social licence, and I don’t think they’re going to enjoy it.Report
I like that term, ‘social license’. I’m going to remember that one.
For people like this, the police have clearly lost all social license:
https://youtu.be/llci8MVh8J4Report
I heard this on This American Life today. Pretty powerful stuff.Report
Pretty powerful from an angry emotional standpoint, but very short on logic, and reason. I can see a small child watching that video and with his mom
Mom: “See honey. This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Child: “What do you mean?”
Mom: “Every ten years, to commemorate what happened in Tulsa in the 1920’s, we burn down our own neighborhood, destroy our business district, and make everyone start over from nothing.”
Child: “Why do we do that?”
Mom: “Because white people wouldn’t keeping waste their own money on gasoline and hired arsonists, so we supply those now.”
Child: “But I thought Tulsa was a bad thing, so we do we keep repeating it?”
Mom: “Because our leaders’ jobs depend on keeping us angry and poor. It’s their only schtick.”Report
To be fair I think social license for many institutions in the United States is a lot more tenuous than other Western countries. It’s a blessing and a curse.Report
Bear in mind that social license is more about specific activities than whole agencies. For example, the police here recent trialled having some police armed as fast-response units. Cabinet didn’t intervene to stop it, but the police have decided not to implement the armed teams permanently, in no small part due to public outcry. Because the police don’t have social licence to walk around carrying guns in New Zealand, unlike in the US.Report
Got it. Even then though it’s become pretty unfathomable in the US for any authority to willingly strip itself of a power or unilaterally change from a more aggressive posture to a less aggressive posture. Instead it tends to become a tool floating around the social and political landscape to be captured by whomever can take it.Report
I liked that tweet yesterday by David French, who said what his leftwing friends imagined CHAZ was like was hippy flower children dancing in a meadow, while what his rightwing friends imagined it was like Road Warrior.
There’s a powerful desire on the part of both left and rightwing people for CHAZ to be something radical and bizarre and revolutionary.
But it isn’t really, at least not yet. One of the more common crowd control tactics of police is to strategically withdraw temporarily in order to avoid inflaming the crowds. Which is what they did here. The city of Seattle still controls Capitol Hill just as it always has; The police and fire departments will still respond to a 911 call, the city will still repair potholes and so on.
The Seattle Times has a good overview of the situation including interviews with a few locals who live there.
It also gives some history of previous occupations, which led to long term changes and recognition of minority groups.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/welcome-to-the-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-where-seattle-protesters-gather-without-police/Report
There were only a couple of recorded incidents of violence. You shouldn’t use these isolated incidents to make judgments about the entire CHAZ.Report
“Yet the civil unrest of 2020, which by any metric is far worse”
A majority of the businesses that were burned in LA in 1992 were never rebuilt. We spent $1 billion and didn’t come close to addressing the damage. There was also significant damage in other cities.
It remains to be seen what the inflation-adjusted cost will be for 2020, but so far the footage I’ve seen, while matching the severity, does not match the scale, at least not at this point.
So I’m not sure that it’s worse, from a damage standpoint, while it is certainly much more widespread and intense, from a public action standpoint.Report
Speaking of media, rumor and truth:
Police retract claims that Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ protesters tried to extort local businesses
At a Wednesday news conference, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette had told reporters: “We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area. This is the crime of extortion,” Fox News reported.
The report became a headline item in several other right-leaning news and commentary pieces, including on the New York Post, PJ Media, and One America News Network.
But later on Thursday, Best emphasized those claims effectively only have the status of rumor, and that nobody had formally reported anything to the police.
As with many such shocking lurid claims, this started as a rumor, then was picked up by the police, then distributed to the media who ran with it uncritically, because, well they tend to just take information from the police as gospel.
It would be bad enough if the media was just universally gullible and credulous of rumor, but they aren’t.
They tend to be credulous of rumors that confirm their own internal biases, and trusting of sources of authority like police and military in a way that suggests that Vietnam and the Iraq War never happened.Report
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itselfReport
Instead of stories from the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN, people have decided to get their news from Tweets from BigBoobAnimeGirls69 – because it’s more reliably accurate.
Now I’m sure most folks don’t assume that the person behind BigBoobAnimeGirls69 is an hard nosed and experienced journalist with years of experience covering some of the most dangerous beats on the planet. Far from it. It’s just that BIgBoobAnimeGirls69 doesn’t lie like a dog to push yet another made-up moral panic on us.
And that’s the way it is.Report
Another exhibit in rumors and the police:
The curious case of the colorful school bus
First rumors were circulating on social media:
As demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement gained nationwide momentum in late May, rumors began circulating about busloads of militant antifa fighters supposedly infiltrating towns across America. The same weekend Buttercup was impounded, the rumor spread to Upper Arlington. People believed it, and the rumor had staying power. Last weekend, in Washington state, a multi-racial family in a school bus was reportedly followed and harassed by multiple vehicles; community members even trapped the family by cutting down trees to block the road. A similar version of the rumor, this time focusing on Chillicothe, recently showed up on Facebook:
“Warning to those in Chillicothe, Ohio. Antifa has brought 2 busloads of protestors to Chillicothe. They are already here staying at a local hotel. … Businesses have already begun boarding up their businesses. We have word that people are already spreading bricks around town for the mayheim [sic]. It’s also being reported that they are planning on hitting more rural areas and will kill farmers and livestock along the way.”
The rumor was a baseless hoax, part of a since-debunked misinformation campaign that can be traced, at least in part, to a tweet by a fake antifa Twitter account that Twitter has said was created by white nationalist group Identity Evropa. Still, localized versions of the rumor have persisted, and each time, the gossip involves antifa fighters coming to town by the busload.
The bus in this case was a home which a group of hippies were living in. The police stopped them, searched and impounded the bus. Then:
Columbus police posted a photo of the bus on social media and gave its own account of the incident: “This bus was stopped yesterday at Broad St. & 3rd due for obstruction of traffic. There was a suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters. Detectives followed up with a vehicle search today and found numerous items: bats, rocks, meat cleavers, axes, clubs and other projectiles. Charges are pending as the investigation continues.”
But as it turns out, the story was not what it seemed:
“Hey everyone! This is my bus,” Digati posted. “We were at the protest handing out water and washing mace off of people’s faces. If you have any questions, please feel free to talk to me. This bus is my home and I often use it as a supply vehicle. We were peaceful the entire time. The ‘weapons’ that were found are tools. Axes for my wood stove, knives for cooking, etc. … The ‘riot gear’ was literally a child’s shoulder pads, elbow, and knee pads for sports.”
As with so many of the wild lurid spectacular claims, the End Of Western Civilization was a bit premature. But many people had a powerful vested interest in making the rumors. Some of the rumor mongers were white supremacists, some were police trying to justify their paranoia, but in the end, the “Busloads of Antifa” will go down in Snopes history like the Satanic Pedophile rings as a hoax.
Once again, Twitter is NOT a reliable window to the world, especially as a single source. Its commonly stated that there is no editor, but what people forget is that Twitter DOES have editors, just lots of them decentralized all working on their own particular agenda.Report
Well, this is getting embarrassing…
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/media/seattle-antifa-protest-trump/index.html
Report
I think it’s a pretty bad idea for anyone to stake their own credibility on the right wing media machine.Report
Believe me, there was plenty of coverage here in Chicago. And on the day it happened. Perhaps if you want stories about Chicago, you ought to check Chicago media. I don’t read the Chicago Tribune for news about Seattle
I don’t quite get the thrust of this essay. Are you saying the stories were suppressed? Ignored? What point are you trying to make?Report
So this is basically the same deal as the Jeffery Epstein thing.
Jaybird: “people are talking about this but the media isn’t, is that weird?”
Commentors: “shut up you dumbass, if there were anything at all to talk about the media would definitely be talking about it.”
(a week later)
Commentors: “and see, they are talking about it!”
Jaybird: “It’s a week later and they’re talking about the thing other people were talking about a week ago, and saying exactly the same things that people were saying a week ago, plus a little extra color.”
Commentors: “BUT YOU SAID THEY WEREN’T TALKING ABOUT IT AND NOW THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT IT!”Report