Siege June 21: Fireworks and Obscurity

Antifa are using fireworks to harass police in various cities. It's a clever innovation. With the cover of a friendly media they're deploying their own crude riot weapons and maintaining their "mostly peaceful" status at the same time because, well they're just fireworks.

Municipalities might want to move now to ban the sale of fireworks this year, if they can, and aren't safely remote from the madness somewhere in Red State America. A cursory look suggests cancelling consumer fireworks isn't being suggested anywhere, and the normal--or above normal--supply of consumer fireworks are about to be made available. Fourth of July should be lit yo.

Of course the fireworks we're seeing already are bigger grade than the consumer variety. Their lineage should be traced.

As the nation's police are now dividing their time between riot control and sheltering in place in their stations and patrol cars, lawlessness increases.

In Brooklyn they're lighting off fireworks all night apparently, and for the gentrifiers there it must come like the sound if Indian war drums to the settlers. Some have dared complain, not yet aware that the Rules Have Changed.
At Buzzfeed this is fed back into the narrate-o-matic as Karen calling in the cops to oppress black bodies:

Just over two weeks after the NYPD violently suppressed peaceful protests around New York City, police early Monday morning responded to reports of illegal fireworks in a Brooklyn neighborhood with dozens of officers in riot gear — who blocked off a street, threatened anyone who was outside with arrest, and stormed inside an apartment building. Fireworks aren’t unusual in the summer in Flatbush, though even lifelong residents say there have been a lot more this year. What was alarming, those residents told BuzzFeed News, were the police helicopters circling overhead as officers — wearing helmets, shields, batons, body armor, and holding Tasers — pointed flashlights into apartment windows. As residents watched nervously from their porches, some livestreamed the event from their phones. Police took at least one person into custody, as captured by a cellphone video.

Monday’s response came as three dynamics in Brooklyn, some brewing for years, seemed to converge: the genuine increase in the amount of fireworks, possibly out of solidarity with Black Lives Matter demonstrations; police frequently rolling through the streets in riot gear after this month’s protests; and people on Facebook, primarily white gentrifiers, complaining about the level of noise and demanding that the city responds.

“The deployment of riot gear is a sign of a police department in total crisis that has no idea what they're doing, and has completely lost any connection to the community,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who wrote The End of Policing, told BuzzFeed News. “And this is going to just make tensions between the police and the public worse.”

Presented with a community dispute, Buzzfeed goes directly to the sociology professor, whose answer is defund the police, touches base with the activist community, and apparently didn't even seek out a quote from the other side.

Of course, there is no other side. The Karen purge has been going on for some time. I know it's Buzzfeed, but it's still jarring to see what is ostensibly journalism throwing in with this:

For some Flatbush residents, the show of police force on Sunday night and Monday morning wasn’t a surprise and was emblematic of growing tension in the community. For years, they say, white gentrifiers have discussed their issues in the community, like noise complaints, in private Facebook Groups. 

Palmer said gentrifiers have gathered on social media instead of engaging with their new community. Two years ago, she said, she and several other activists of color raised concerns about posts in a Prospect Lefferts Garden Facebook Group, where people were complaining about local residents "playing music, or people 'loitering' or smoking weed,” adding they wanted to call the police. After these concerns were raised, she said, they were kicked out of the group.

Gentrifying areas as points of contact between whites and blacks are the physical front lines of a broader conflict that is--for blacks if not those who manipulate their anger--about who gets to decide social standards of behavior.

Western standards oppress black behavior. Not because they are oppressive. Quite the contrary. Our liberalism, equanimity and individuality, born of our unique historic and genetic profile, are in fact oppressive to someone born of another.

Equality before the law is oppression, to the mediocre. But to be fair, for anyone, living in a culture not created by his own ethnic group the normal is oppression. Kind of like how it feels now to be white--you have no home in the culture. US culture, ironically, can't feel natural to any group, not just whites. With the George Floyd hoax, black America is making its play to own not just the politics but the culture of the fading United States.

"Equality will feel like oppression" to white people, one black mediocrity enjoying his new status as moral inquisitor said in reference to the re-education of Jimmy Fallon, who's been obliged by his network to undergo a public re-education for doing a "blackface" routine back when there was no hysteria surrounding it. 

Indeed. It's really this: equality feels like oppression to blacks.

Ours are standards black people, when left to their own devices, would never choose; they keep telling us as much. So far they have borne the cost of that disparity, as they see it--in incarceration numbers, for starters. That's why they toss aside all logic and common sense in simply trying to hammer that disparity flat, public peace be damned.

So no amount of objective argument is going to change things. We're stuck arguing-without-arguing that giving black people the society they want is bad for blacks, as measured in crime and murder, for starters. But black people are saying loud and clear--to the extent they're capable of clarity--they don't care. One thug dead at the hands of white cop offends them more than a hundred dead thugs and innocents outrages them, because this is personal, this is "family" as they sometimes say.

And why are the casualties of black America's alternative society dismissed by blacks, misinterpreted as the product of white racism? Because they come at the hands of other blacks, of course, and are not therefore a racial affront.

But black people are--absent the demagogy of the elite--indifferent to the slaughter on their streets.

Thus we arrive at the real problem with "black lives matter": life, generally, matters far less to American blacks than to whites. Thus their appalling violence, which ultimately leads to the violent encounters with police and the handful of cases such as George Floyd who, ironically, is made a martyr in part to ensure the slaughter in the inner cities goes on unimpeded by white cops.

Cheerio.