The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "This meme from Robert Reich is false, given the evidence that the KY AG laid out yesterday. Many of the prior narratives (and memes) in this case fell apart after his press conference, and once again we have a case where the initial narrative presented wasn’t supported by the evidence. Here are the facts laid out by the independent investigation, which involved 1000s of hours. And not that it should matter, but the AG is black...
-Evidence shows that the officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartment. This was confirmed by an independent witness in a nearby unit. This is counter to the previously popular narrative that this was a “no knock raid.” The AG stressed it wasn’t a no knock raid. (19 min)...
-Upon entering, the officer identified two individuals, standing beside each other, at the end of the hall, Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend Mr. Walker. This upends the other popular narrative, and the claim Reich makes even after this conference, that Taylor was in bed. The officer reported that the male was standing, holding a gun, arms extended, in a shooting stance. The officer heard a shot and immediately knew he was hit after feeling heat in his upper thigh. (19:45)"
Comment: "It's really emerged as a pattern that the media keeps getting the initial story completely wrong and it's always wrong in the same direction."
Rep. Ronny Jackson handcuffed and 'briefly detained' during rodeo while trying to assist with medical emergency, witness says - "Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas was handcuffed and placed on the ground face-first by local law enforcement while he was trying to assist a teenage girl in medical distress at a rodeo over the weekend... In a Facebook post, Linda Dianne Shouse, a home healthcare and traveling nurse, said her 15-year-old relative was “seizing due to possible hypoglycemia” Saturday night at the White Deer rodeo, about 45 miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas. Jackson represents the Amarillo area and was an attendee at the rodeo. Shouse said she and another family member, who is also a nurse, were attending to the girl when Jackson, who is an ER physician, stepped in to assist. Shouse said she didn’t know Jackson was a congressman at the time but told CNN they were all working together to help the teen girl... Shouse said she was pushed back and then punched in the chest by a woman and said she saw a law enforcement official screaming in Jackson’s face, telling him to “Get the f**k back.” “He was trying to tell them that he was a doctor and probably trying to tell him who he was, to be honest. And they were screaming that they did not effing care who he was,” she said. “And the next thing I knew, they had him on the ground, grabbed him by the shirt, threw him on the ground, face first into the concrete and had him in cuffs.”"
Too bad he's the wrong race, so no one cares
Meme - "Why not just use a real $20 bill?"
"That's why no one will remember your name."
Racial inequity in fatal US police shootings, 2015–2020
Someone cited this shit paper as proof that there is racial bias in police shootings, and claimed the Fryer paper was bad, with ridiculous nitpicks (like sample size). But this paper does not even attempt to control for relevant factors but just looks at one variable: race. You might as well claim that there is overwhelming bias against men, since almost everyone shot is male. He also called the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health "one of the world's most highly respected scientific sources", even though its impact factor is 2.105, making it rank 25th in Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health. Ironic that he claimed I spread fake news, when he was verifiably wrong
Scrabble for snowflakes - "Scrabble owner Mattel has banned 400 words from the game’s official word list, including numerous racial slurs... slurs against black, Pakistani, Irish and even white people have been axed. But don’t worry about classist insults – you can still use ‘chav’. Ray Adler, Mattel’s global head of games, told The Times that the ban was inspired by Black Lives Matter... Adler (perhaps unwittingly) revealed what’s really behind the change: he said that with sales declining, ‘to get to the next generation of Scrabble fans we need to modernise it’. Of course, by ‘modernise’, he means ‘make it woke’. Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, made a similar move last year. Numerous games and toys have undergone woke rebrands recently. Hasbro dropped the ‘Mr’ from the Mr Potato Head brand earlier this year in order to ‘promote equality and inclusion’, while Mattel, which also produces Barbie, released a range of gender-neutral dolls in 2019."
Meme - End Wokeness @EndWokeness: ""They just want bread to feed their families" Anyone know where to get a good recipe for a Ferragamo handbag?"
Libs of TikTok on X - "BLM burned down our country for 6 months and most of the protesters had their charges dropped. Enrique Tarrio was just sentenced to 22 years for Jan 6th and he wasn’t even at the Capitol. Two tiered justice system."
Meme - Garbage Human @GarbageHuman23: "It's officially election season because these NPCs are about to start torching and looting shit in the name of a criminal who was killed by a cop who she tried to run over."
Brendan Gutenschwager @B...:.""Black Lives Matter!" and "Say her name, Ta Kiya Young!" chants as protesters marched in Columbus, Ohio tonight"
The infantile crusade against Robert Baden-Powell - "A statue of the founder of the Scouts movement, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, may be removed from Poole Quay by the local council after police advised it might be on a ‘target list for attack’... the Nazis included his name in their list of some 2,800 prominent Brits who would be arrested should they successfully conquer the UK – not what you would expect if they were chummy. Baden-Powell is best-known for the Scouts movement. Desperately digging through his past to find evidence of wrongthink is an unhealthy approach, because it tries to artificially change what he meant for history. It is like a hack going after evidence for a hit-piece: if you dig deep enough and suspend context, there is always something you can say to discredit your target. The rage against Baden-Powell is part of a wider, bizarre campaign against the past. Having run out of things to complain about in the present, today’s so-called radicals have declared war on history. Their campaign, if successful, will eventually result in us being left with no historical figures we could feel a positive association with. This is an attempt to cleanse history because there are some parts of it that are offensive or upsetting. This is an infantile approach to politics"
From 2020
CHAZ/CHOP Creates Conflict Resolution Council, and the Rules Are SPECTACULAR - "NOTE: It remains unclear at the time of this writing whether this is real or just an expertly executed troll job. It’s sort of like the Babylon Bee, if it is a troll job. It’s impossible to tell. Real or not, it’s glorious."
Why the art world’s anti-police stance isn’t as ‘radical’ as it makes out - "We look back at socialist realism with a kind of bemused horror. What kind of state would dictate the type of art that people could make – particularly if that art had to be chintzy, representational and traditionalist (unlike the sexy constructivist stuff that preceded it)? In the 21st century, we Westerners look back at Stalin-era paintings of collective farms, ruddy-cheeked peasants and patriotic battle-scenes with a sneer. Yet state edicts are no longer required to sway our own contemporary art and culture in a particular, and extremely narrow, direction. A set of beliefs and positions can line up without the need for a Big Brother-type leader: indeed, such a line of thought, without nuance or compromise, is perfectly suited to the internet age. Critic Adam Lehrer has noted that today “art is praised for having the ‘correct’ ideological allegiances, not for its complexity or form”. We all know what those “allegiances” consist of, because the correct mantras are everywhere: “Trump = fascist”, “men = evil”, “white people = guilty” and so on. Since the killing of George Floyd in May last year, though the idea is hardly new, we could add “police (bastards) = to be abolished (or at least defunded)”. The ICA, in this vein, will reopen in July with War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truth and Rights, curated by the activist group Tottenham Rights, Kamara Scott and Rianna Jade Parker... as recent figures show, the majority of people in every ethnic group have confidence in their local police (the figure is lower for black people, but still relatively high). A world without police could be a kinder, more community-minded world in which people looked after each other instead of calling the cops – but it could equally be a world in which the rich paid for security guards and the poor were left to fight over scraps in burned-out cities. The kind of painstaking archival work promised by the ICA show – texts, film, photography, hi-tech new research – is welcome and important. But it is also indicative of a certain, perhaps inexorable, slide towards the total politicisation of art... The collapse of a powerful Left, one that would hold state institutions to account, has left a vacuum here, and a malleable and weak-minded art world, desperate to seem relevant and to apologise for its own hypocrisies and grotesqueries – money-laundering, corrupt sponsorship by immoral companies, inequalities up and down the system – has led to the fusion of art and politics. More popular cultural forms – television in particular – are often less rigid than the increasingly conformist art world, for whom niche beliefs can operate as a kind of cover-story. Where there is only one “correct” line to be taken, art becomes, once again, propaganda. Across the Atlantic, the recent response to a positive representation of the police in a suburb in Detroit, titled, To Serve and Protect, demonstrates this. The artist, Nicole Macdonald, on whose work the image is based – although originally without the American flag – has since clearly distanced herself from the work and wants it removed from the police department building on which it sits. The Detroit Institute of the Arts, who were involved in the mural’s production, has come under serious fire for being ‘pro-cop’ – an utterly unacceptable position in the arts... If art becomes nothing other than yet another story about the right way to think, and if art can only ever be read literally, without ambiguity or nuance, then it has lost its unique power – the power to subtly expand the way we think and feel, rather than be didactically instructed."
The rise of the White British Saviour - "The Black Lives Matter movement seems to have hastened the importation of divisive US culture-war politics into the UK. This has led to a number of absurd claims being made which are completely irrelevant to the British context. This includes framing police brutality as a shared UK-US problem, and arguing that the UK’s race relations are as bitter as those across the pond. As a consequence we also seem to be developing our own version of the White Saviour figure: those middle-class white people who lecture other white people on racial issues. Britain is witnessing the rise of a youthful white middle-class convinced that it represents the height of enlightened thought... Overwhelmed by ‘white guilt’, members of this new tribe strive to spread out culpability for racism among the rest of the white population. Often it is insufficiently woke working-class people who they have in their sights. According to these White British Saviours, even those in deprived coastal towns and former industrial areas, places which have been starved of meaningful public investment for decades, including communities which have witnessed the large-scale abuse of white working-class girls, must be lectured about their supposed privilege... The UK government recently offered a pathway to citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong, in light of China’s clampdown on freedom there. Moreover, the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that the vast majority of ethnic-minority people have confidence in their local police force – with a number of non-white groups having even a higher level of confidence than white Brits. In the British workforce, the two highest-earning ethnic groups, by hourly pay, are workers of Chinese and Indian origin... the members of this ever-growing ‘Brahmin class’ of pseudo-intellectuals are ultimately more concerned with gaining brownie points from fellow snobbish peers, on social media and among their friendship groups, than they are with the facts. They also frame BAME communities as an oppressed mass, and so ignore, or even scorn, those from minority populations who think differently to them. This is where their neocolonial mindset is laid bare – they believe that non-white people who ‘resist’ identity politics have been duped into sustaining the structures of ‘white supremacy’, as opposed to being independent-minded individuals with agency."
To Destroy America | City Journal - "Though many who joined their ranks may have been moved by outrage at the images of Floyd’s death, those operating behind the scenes have prepared for this moment for a long time. Indeed, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organizations fueling this summer’s disturbances were trained by self-described Marxist revolutionaries who have long used the plight of black Americans as justification for overthrowing America’s constitutional order. They frankly admit that such “organizing” is the key to their goal of world revolution. Our political leaders owe it to themselves and to their fellow Americans to understand this blueprint before rhetorically embracing, let alone implementing, the radical changes that the protesters and rioters are demanding... In a 2015 interview, Patrice Cullors, another of the three founders, said that she and Garza were “trained Marxists.” Abdullah, of the Los Angeles BLM chapter, was born a red-diaper baby—“Raised in the 70s, in the picket lines of Oakland, by activist parents,” as the interviewer put it. Her paternal grandfather was Gunter Reimann, a member of the German Communist Party. Garza cut her organizing teeth as director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), founded by Marxists Garth Ferguson, Patty Snitzler, Regina Douglas, Brian Russell, and Steve Williams. To Williams we owe the concept of “transformative organizing,” which insists “that effective organizing for social change cannot simply be based on an apolitical and highly specific analysis of what is possible in the short term.” Cullors trained for a decade as a radical organizer in the Labor/Community Strategy Center, established and run by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground, the 1960s radical faction identified by the FBI as a domestic terrorist group. The “Weathermen” explained in their 1969 foundational statement that they were dedicated to “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of classless world: world communism.”... “The university,” Mann explained, “is the place where Mao Zedong was radicalized, where Lenin and Fidel were radicalized, where Che was radicalized. The concept of the radical middle class of the colonized people, or in my case the radical middle class of the privileged people, is a model of a certain type of revolutionary.” The goal for students, he told his class, was to “Take this country away from the white settler state, take this country away from imperialism and have an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist revolution.”... These are the ideological sources for what could be the largest radical movement in American history"
The BLM movement could not be more wrong - "BLM is primarily a radical movement which, contrary to its name, is disingenuous about black lives. Its fundamental aim is not protecting black lives, but revolution. UK BLM campaigners fail the sincerity test in preferring to topple statues of 17th-century Bristolian slavers over highlighting the fact that real human beings are sold in Libyan slave markets today. As Dr Tony Sewell has noted, BLM as a political project is more interested in fostering white guilt than improving the welfare of black people. In the United States, BLM’s deafening silence on the 18 murders which occurred over a single weekend in Chicago amid the riots tells a similar story. All black lives are, evidently, not on a par. Further, BLM’s central claim of a race-based disparity in police homicide in the US is not based in fact... It is doubtful that many British BLM protesters know about this data. In fact, it is likely that the evidence is of little importance to them. A slick slogan and a compelling call to action trump careful analysis. Behind the slogan, however, BLM’s organisers have snuck in a radical set of proposals which include dismantling capitalism and ‘patriarchy’ and defunding the police. BLM also advocates disrupting ‘the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’. BLM is cynically sneaking in a revolutionary programme off the back of the George Floyd tragedy. And this is a programme that if implemented would be to the detriment of black people... it would be false to imply the situation is worsening or, as the Bishop of Dover recently suggested, that we are experiencing a ‘racism pandemic’. The reality is much more positive. The British Social Attitudes survey shows a consistent decline in racist attitudes on key questions across decades. Introducing an adversarial, US-style racialisation of politics can only serve to reverse this tremendous progress. Inviting us to view everything through the prism of race invites all sorts of racisms to spring up. This is ultimately harmful to society. When BLM supporters talk about a ‘resurgence of the far right’ they are, in part, talking about a reaction against their own racial politics."
Chris Kaba murder: Met officers don’t want to carry guns after colleague charged - "Scotland Yard’s firearms command has been plunged into crisis after dozens of armed officers handed in their weapons following the decision to charge one of their colleagues with murder. Highly trained officers working for SCO19 - the specialist firearms unit - told their bosses they were no longer willing to carry guns the day after a Met officer appeared in court charged with murdering Chris Kaba, an unarmed black man who was shot dead in south London last September."
Chris Kaba’s car collided with police vehicles before he was fatally shot, inquest hears - "The car driven by Chris Kaba collided with police vehicles in the incident when he was shot, a court has heard. The construction worker and rapper, 24, was unarmed when he was shot in the head by a Metropolitan Police officer in Streatham Hill during a car stop. The vehicle he was driving had been linked to a firearms incident the previous day, leading to it being tailed by police and then eventually stopped... “Armed officers exited the vehicle and approached the Audi driven by Mr Kaba. “The evidence suggests contact was made between the Audi driven by Mr Kaba and police vehicles. “The evidence further suggests (the officer) was stood in front of Mr Kaba’s vehicle.”... After the shooting, witnesses reported seeing Mr Kaba attempting to ram his way free before he was shot... In a statement after the hearing, Mr Kaba’s cousin Jefferson Bosela said the firearms officer should be questioned under caution, there should be a swift charging decision from the Crown Prosecution Service, and the family should be kept fully informed as the investigation progresses. “Today’s hearing was another step in achieving justice for Chris”, he said. “We need answers. Not just this family, but the whole of London – the whole of the country - needs to know how something like this could occur? “How can a young man, sitting in a car, unarmed, be shot in the head by police in London in 2022? “This should never have happened. It must never happen again. We must never accept this as normal. Someone must be held accountable.”"
Protests across UK over killing of unarmed black man Chris Kaba - "Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Streatham, who has been vocal in her support for Kaba’s family, criticised the fact that the firearms officer who is under investigation by the IOPC was not immediately suspended by the Met. “In any other profession, if you did something which ended someone’s life, you would be suspended immediately,” Ribeiro-Addy said. “It makes no sense to me, and I’m a politician.”... Rigg said: “Another black man shot unnecessarily by the Metropolitan police … It shouldn’t take a death for us all to wake up again and come out on the streets to fight for equal rights and justice.”... “I’m a black woman. It’s really traumatic seeing people being killed by the police, consistently,” Morgan added... one round was fired from a police weapon"
If a police officer defends himself from a black man who's trying to kill him, he's a racist white supremacist
A car is not a weapon. Unless a "white supremacist" uses it to attack people, of course
A Rebuttal to Brown University’s Letter on Racism - "I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”... I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling. Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?... Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing? I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges. The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History. What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.” Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s."
Nuance and complexity are racist
Murder of U of C alum sparks anti-Black sentiment - "Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng, a 24-year-old international student from China, was shot and killed near campus during a robbery on Nov. 9. Three days later, the Chicago Police Department announced that Alton Spann, an 18-year-old Black man, had been apprehended and charged with Zheng’s killing. Spann is charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon, according to police... “Hyde Park is already one of the most policed neighborhoods in Chicago,” said Grace Pai, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago. “Increasing policing and surveillance will not deter future gun violence because policing and surveillance do not address the root causes of violence such as decades of disinvestment, structural racism, poverty, trauma and lack of opportunity.” Those who gathered Monday, including Asian and Black UChicago students, also said there has been a rise in anti-Black sentiment on campus, particularly over social media, that paints Black students and Black residents of neighboring communities with a broad brush... On Chicago’s South Side, which includes large populations of Black and Asian residents, violent deaths of Asians have often been met with calls for more policing. In February 2020, the arrest of a Black man for the killings of two Chinese men in Chinatown was followed by an increase in anti-Black sentiment in the community and demands for increased police patrols."
How silly. Don't the Asians know the right thing to do is blame white men?
Jury fails to reach verdict after brutal attack on 68-year-old Asian jewelry store owner - "Calvin Ushery Jr., a known repeat offender, is accused of attacking Chang Suh, then 68, inside Solid Gold Jewelers on West 9th Street in Wilmington on Sept. 15, 2022. Ushery allegedly grabbed the store owner, pistol-whipped him in the head, stomped on his head and then struck his head with a hammer before swiping items worth $100,000 and fleeing the scene."
Clearly, it's white people's fault
Black Lives Matter protester admits fraud over missing donations - "A woman who helped organise the Black Lives Matter protest that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston has admitted fraud after £30,000 donated by the public went missing. Xahra Saleem, 23, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud by abuse of position after an investigation into a fundraiser linked to the BLM movement."
Marxist Nature of Black Lives Matter Exposed in New Book - "Their goal is what Alicia Garza said … in 2019, when she was visiting a group of Maine leftists. She said, “What we want to do is dismantle the organizing principle of society.” She said that, and that’s what they want. They want to dismantle the way we’re organized. They want to dismantle the American system... on the family itself, it was Marx and Engels who put that in “The Communist Manifesto” of 1848 that they wanted to “abolish the family.”... Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Melina Abdullah believe that we live in an oppressive society. Obviously, they haven’t traveled, or they haven’t traveled extensively outside of the U.S. I have lived in at least seven countries, at least a year, as a foreign correspondent. I lived in Kabul for a month. And I can tell you that compared to the rest of the world, not only are we not oppressive, but we’re pretty, pretty good."
No, silence is not violence - "The slogan ‘Silence is Violence’, which has appeared in Black Lives Matters protests in the US, UK and around the world, is a powerful and emotive message. It is also, however, a danger to freedom of speech – the same freedom that has been central to struggles for liberty and against oppression. In my book Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, published five years ago this month, I wrote about the powerful culture of ‘You Can’t Say THAT’ in Western societies. Since then the war on any speech deemed offensive or hateful has become far more intense, as extensively criticised on spiked. Now, in addition to ‘You Can’t Say That’, we are faced with a new order: ‘You Must Say THIS.’ The slogan ‘Silence is Violence’ does not only mean that you must speak out, but that you must follow the correct script. You are free to say exactly what everybody else is saying, and say it loud... What is called ‘compelled speech’ has long been opposed by civil-liberties campaigners, notably in the US. Now it is apparently embraced by woke activists... (We might note in passing that, at the same time as speech is condemned as violence and silence is said to be violence, sometimes the actual violence of protesters is apparently not seen as violence, so long as you approve of what they’re protesting for.)... In the past, compelled speech was commonly associated with authoritarians and traditionalists. Now it is the woke activists who want to police speech through their ‘Silence is Violence’ campaign... In a sign of changed times, the American Civil Liberties Union has all-but abandoned its campaigns for free speech for all and against compelled speech... fighting for free speech has been key to every struggle for liberation and equality. As the former slave and campaigner against slavery in America, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1860, ‘Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power… Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.’"
