11 ms·

I think this is a lot of it, for better or worse. I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as

I think this is a lot of it, for better or worse. I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as not supporting the protests.

ianai 6y ago
What’s crazy though is for the first time in my life I actually fear for the future existence of the US. I watched 9/11 in real time and that didn’t feel as much of a threat to our existence as this does. There’s an actual civil war movement among the extremists now. I don’t think that existed during the civil rights movement days, even. Nor even the Vietnam fallout.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Do you have a link to the civil war movement claim? Are they being reported anywhere or by anyone?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The "boogaloo" movement?
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      I live in the middle of NYC, which has had several scenes of looting not 30 min from me broadcast to the entire nation, and I haven't heard of any such movement here. Maybe this is my east coast classist bubble, but I'd appreciate being educated on this matter?
      - ianai 6y ago
        So there’s the boogaloo movement. There’s the Calexit campaign that was propped up by Russia in California last election. Probably you’re not seeing it because you’re not being targeted on social media for it and not going those parts of the internet. I really hope Zuckerberg was serious about policing foreign governments from buying ads on their platforms.
        TeaDrunk 6y ago
        Yes, do you have links to said movements or reporters of said movements? Where are you getting this information?
        briefcomment 6y ago
        Facebook has taken steps to limit Boogaloo groups on its platform. https://www.engadget.com/facebook-limits-boogaloo-groups-122931505.html https://www.engadget.com/facebook-limits-boogaloo-groups-122...
        meddlepal 6y ago
        For the record there are some of us who actually have uninfluenced interest in breaking apart the US either into separate countries or at least geographic regions with a significantly weakened federal government modeled after the Articles of Confederation from 1781. My general feeling is that it is too difficult to manage democracies over large geographic areas because the people at the edges tend to not have enough interaction with each other on a social or economic basis to recognize each other's problems. So I don't know about CalExit but I have definitely spoken about New England or Northeast Secession (heh NExit) as something I'm at least interested in. I just hope if the opportunity ever comes up we can do it peacefully...
      - wheatocean 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogaloo-movement-terrorism-related-charges-3-men-feds-say/3147563001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogal... There's been a lot of reporting on it as they've stepped up action over the last year. Did you not see the news stories about these individuals stationing inside the Michigan Capitol with assault rifles?
        Izkata 6y ago
        "Boogaloo" is a longstanding meme that refers to a possible upcoming civil war, that the media has recently misconstrued into a movement trying to cause a civil war. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo
        messick 6y ago
        “The media” isn’t causing dudes in aloha shirts to go to protests with a bunch of guns.
        refurb 6y ago
        Yup, I frequent a lot of website where "boogaloo" is discussed and it's a freakin' joke. Reminds me of "jenkum", the drug the media reported on that turned out to be a prank.
        TACIXAT 6y ago
        It's being misconstrued by the MSM to stop the left and right from uniting in their common goal of reforming tyrannical governments.
        nl 6y ago
        http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf
        notabee 6y ago
        Here's a good in-depth exploration of the movement. Some of these people are quite eager for such a war. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...
- lostapathy 6y ago
  I think there's a lot of rose colored history about the civil rights movement. We're mostly taught one side of it in school - that good people protested and won out over bad people. We don't, in general, talk about the horrible things that were happening back then. Only unlike a lot of racial problems today, they happened in plain sight and were celebrated. I know Rand Paul got a lot of hate for his recent speech against the legislation to make lynching a federal crime, but the things he talked about happening back when lynching was a frequent problem really opened my eyes to how bad things were. We don't talk about the fact that before MLK was assassinated, he was widely disliked by the american public. We don't talk about the fact that a lot of American gun control we still have was passed as a reaction to the civil rights movement - as a way to disarm minorities and weaken their ability to protest. I wasn't there, but I get the feeling we're still a long ways from things being as bad as they were during the 60's civil rights movement.
  - scruple 6y ago
    Most people don't even know who Fred Hampton was. Even people who lived through the civil rights movement don't recall his name. My own parents downplay the violence of the 70s in favor of the rhetoric du jour that they're fed from mainstream media, and they lived in DC from 1972 until late in 1980 (and, all things considered, they are leftists, not liberals, which makes it even more astonishing to me). It's quite astounding just how fragile our memories are and how easily we can be (emotionally) manipulated. "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough is a good read on the subject (political violence in the late 60s and 70s). There's a good blog / semi-book review that I link people to when they seem intent on learning more of the history (which I originally got from a comment on HN during the 2016 election cycle) [0]. [0]: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/ https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      This is fascinating to me. The more I see about America's protest history, the more it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020. A quote I liked from your linked article: >You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
- double0jimb0 6y ago
  Yea, you are going to have to provide some references for that one.
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  White supremacists have wanted civil war since... the actual civil war? I'm not sure there has ever been a point when civil war was not on the table among extremists. Do you have particular current examples that are especially disconcerting?
  - thatoneuser 6y ago
    Have these white supremacists done something on the scale of vandalism that's gone on during these protests? I saw $55 million in damages have been done to Minneapolis alone a couple days ago. Idk about "white supremacist" (I don't think I've met any), but the more "rebel south" people I've known may talk about civil war, but I've never seen any severe damage, violence or death come from them. These protests are filled with those things.
  - messick 6y ago
    Pretty sure OP was calling the people peacefully protesting police brutality as “the extremists”.
    - ianai 6y ago
      Nope.
- messick 6y ago
  Nah man, the cops don’t have it in them to actually destroy the country. Those extremists will quit long before then.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Where have you been? There's been groups pepping for a second civil war (the meme-name is "boogaloo", as in "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo") for at least a decade now. I'm optimistic that red and blue America will have something more like Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce involving minimal bloodshed, but I'd be surprised if the USA makes it to 2100 as a single polity.
- refurb 6y ago
  If you think things are worse now than in the 1960's, I don't know what to tell you. They were way worse. Multiple politicians assassinated. Major multi-day riots across multiple cities with hundred dead. Then a president being impeached. 2020 doesn't even come close to the 1960's.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    I remember the 1980 Miami Riots and the 1992 LA riots. This is basically nothing like that. Fundamental difference the protestors aren't the ones engaging in violence, the cops are.
    - DuskStar 6y ago
      I seem to have missed the police setting buildings on fire and beating up shopowners. Not to say that the police haven't committed a ton of violence in these protests, but it's not all them.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        There are looters and then there are protestors.
        DuskStar 6y ago
        Well, sure. But if you define "protestor" as "no violence, no looting, no arson", of course the protesters won't do those things.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Yes, yes. The "No True Protestor/Scotsman" argument.
      - andrewzah 6y ago
        > but it's not all them. Sure, and the other ones look the other way. Totally "good" guys just lettin' bad guys be bad guys. Until the "good" guys start going after and punishing the "few bad ones", they are all bad. If we're going to use the "just some bad apples" argument, then it might be prudent to apply it to the protestors, too? At this point it's borderline ignorant to be unaware of the ongoing police brutalities. And if one -is- aware, it's disingenuous to compare what they're doing to some stores being set on fire- turns out people really, really care about property damage suddenly. [0] [1] [0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/reports/New%20York.md https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor... [1]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/reports/California.md https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...
- HaloZero 6y ago
  I mean, people like to throw around race war occasionally now but I only hear about it from the far-right. Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence. During the 1960s, I believe Malcolm X was ready to have a real war to defend Black Americans. Now, at worse the discord is about justifying some looting that has diminished.
  - banads 6y ago
    >Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence I have seen many people talking about "burning the system to the ground".
    - HaloZero 6y ago
      I think that's a metaphor like they want to destroy systematic racism or prison industrial complex? But I haven't seen those posts. Anything public you wanna share?
      - banads 6y ago
        >I think that's a metaphor Maybe we could consider it purely metaphorical, if there hadn't been a rash of arsons across the US in recent weeks.
        HaloZero 6y ago
        I mean... I'm was looking up stuff and it seems the arsons have been up since March at least in Vancouver. https://www.straight.com/news/vancouver-police-warn-of-sharp-increase-in-arson-crimes-during-pandemic https://www.straight.com/news/vancouver-police-warn-of-sharp...
        banads 6y ago
        Cool story, its completely irrelevant to what happened last week in the US
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as not supporting the protests. That's exactly it. I've some friends who are on the whole rather apolitical, in fact I'd call them politically ignorant as it's not something they tend to invest any time into, but who either run relatively large social media pages as a side hustle or do so professionally on behalf of the company they work for. From chatting to them over the last week or two, they've said they've been put in a place whereby they can't not post something in support of the protests in either case. The companies want to get info out to customers, however feel that if they post without the promo post first they'll be castigated for it. Those with influence pages want to retain engagement and are in the same position. In essence, those actually supporting the protests have created an environment whereby they'll never be able to judge the true sentiment around their movement, as dissent or even public agnosticism toward it has been all but quashed. Something that, in my eyes at least, has dangerous potential.
- matwood 6y ago
  > From chatting to them over the last week or two, they've said they've been put in a place whereby they can't not post something in support of the protests in either case. This tells me the protests are working. When people who normally do not pay attention are forced to see what's happening, then change can occur. It's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people as they come to terms with their own privilege and the plight of other groups. But, growth doesn't occur without first being uncomfortable. > sentiment around their movement, as dissent or even public agnosticism toward it has been all but quashed Sentiment will be judged through action and change.
  - zarathustreal 6y ago
    >When people who normally do not pay attention are forced to see what's happening, then change can occur. It's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people as they come to terms with their own privilege Unfortunately you're very correct there, though not in the way I think you're assuming. Force people with influence, power, money, ability to be above common problems, to see what's happening and you're not going to get a pat on the back. Change is certainly going to happen, and it's not going to be the change you're hoping for.
grandridge 6y ago
Yeah it's called mob rule

I think this is a lot of it, for better or worse. I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as not supporting the protests.

ianai 6y ago

What’s crazy though is for the first time in my life I actually fear for the future existence of the US. I watched 9/11 in real time and that didn’t feel as much of a threat to our existence as this does. There’s an actual civil war movement among the extremists now. I don’t think that existed during the civil rights movement days, even. Nor even the Vietnam fallout.

TeaDrunk 6y ago
Do you have a link to the civil war movement claim? Are they being reported anywhere or by anyone?
- pjc50 6y ago
  The "boogaloo" movement?
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    I live in the middle of NYC, which has had several scenes of looting not 30 min from me broadcast to the entire nation, and I haven't heard of any such movement here. Maybe this is my east coast classist bubble, but I'd appreciate being educated on this matter?
    - ianai 6y ago
      So there’s the boogaloo movement. There’s the Calexit campaign that was propped up by Russia in California last election. Probably you’re not seeing it because you’re not being targeted on social media for it and not going those parts of the internet. I really hope Zuckerberg was serious about policing foreign governments from buying ads on their platforms.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        Yes, do you have links to said movements or reporters of said movements? Where are you getting this information?
        briefcomment 6y ago
        Facebook has taken steps to limit Boogaloo groups on its platform. https://www.engadget.com/facebook-limits-boogaloo-groups-122931505.html https://www.engadget.com/facebook-limits-boogaloo-groups-122...
      - meddlepal 6y ago
        For the record there are some of us who actually have uninfluenced interest in breaking apart the US either into separate countries or at least geographic regions with a significantly weakened federal government modeled after the Articles of Confederation from 1781. My general feeling is that it is too difficult to manage democracies over large geographic areas because the people at the edges tend to not have enough interaction with each other on a social or economic basis to recognize each other's problems. So I don't know about CalExit but I have definitely spoken about New England or Northeast Secession (heh NExit) as something I'm at least interested in. I just hope if the opportunity ever comes up we can do it peacefully...
    - wheatocean 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogaloo-movement-terrorism-related-charges-3-men-feds-say/3147563001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogal... There's been a lot of reporting on it as they've stepped up action over the last year. Did you not see the news stories about these individuals stationing inside the Michigan Capitol with assault rifles?
      - Izkata 6y ago
        "Boogaloo" is a longstanding meme that refers to a possible upcoming civil war, that the media has recently misconstrued into a movement trying to cause a civil war. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo
        messick 6y ago
        “The media” isn’t causing dudes in aloha shirts to go to protests with a bunch of guns.
        refurb 6y ago
        Yup, I frequent a lot of website where "boogaloo" is discussed and it's a freakin' joke. Reminds me of "jenkum", the drug the media reported on that turned out to be a prank.
        TACIXAT 6y ago
        It's being misconstrued by the MSM to stop the left and right from uniting in their common goal of reforming tyrannical governments.
        nl 6y ago
        http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf
        notabee 6y ago
        Here's a good in-depth exploration of the movement. Some of these people are quite eager for such a war. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...
lostapathy 6y ago
I think there's a lot of rose colored history about the civil rights movement. We're mostly taught one side of it in school - that good people protested and won out over bad people. We don't, in general, talk about the horrible things that were happening back then. Only unlike a lot of racial problems today, they happened in plain sight and were celebrated. I know Rand Paul got a lot of hate for his recent speech against the legislation to make lynching a federal crime, but the things he talked about happening back when lynching was a frequent problem really opened my eyes to how bad things were. We don't talk about the fact that before MLK was assassinated, he was widely disliked by the american public. We don't talk about the fact that a lot of American gun control we still have was passed as a reaction to the civil rights movement - as a way to disarm minorities and weaken their ability to protest. I wasn't there, but I get the feeling we're still a long ways from things being as bad as they were during the 60's civil rights movement.
- scruple 6y ago
  Most people don't even know who Fred Hampton was. Even people who lived through the civil rights movement don't recall his name. My own parents downplay the violence of the 70s in favor of the rhetoric du jour that they're fed from mainstream media, and they lived in DC from 1972 until late in 1980 (and, all things considered, they are leftists, not liberals, which makes it even more astonishing to me). It's quite astounding just how fragile our memories are and how easily we can be (emotionally) manipulated. "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough is a good read on the subject (political violence in the late 60s and 70s). There's a good blog / semi-book review that I link people to when they seem intent on learning more of the history (which I originally got from a comment on HN during the 2016 election cycle) [0]. [0]: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/ https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    This is fascinating to me. The more I see about America's protest history, the more it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020. A quote I liked from your linked article: >You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
double0jimb0 6y ago
Yea, you are going to have to provide some references for that one.
alexilliamson 6y ago
White supremacists have wanted civil war since... the actual civil war? I'm not sure there has ever been a point when civil war was not on the table among extremists. Do you have particular current examples that are especially disconcerting?
- thatoneuser 6y ago
  Have these white supremacists done something on the scale of vandalism that's gone on during these protests? I saw $55 million in damages have been done to Minneapolis alone a couple days ago. Idk about "white supremacist" (I don't think I've met any), but the more "rebel south" people I've known may talk about civil war, but I've never seen any severe damage, violence or death come from them. These protests are filled with those things.
- messick 6y ago
  Pretty sure OP was calling the people peacefully protesting police brutality as “the extremists”.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Nope.
messick 6y ago
Nah man, the cops don’t have it in them to actually destroy the country. Those extremists will quit long before then.
ForHackernews 6y ago
Where have you been? There's been groups pepping for a second civil war (the meme-name is "boogaloo", as in "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo") for at least a decade now. I'm optimistic that red and blue America will have something more like Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce involving minimal bloodshed, but I'd be surprised if the USA makes it to 2100 as a single polity.
refurb 6y ago
If you think things are worse now than in the 1960's, I don't know what to tell you. They were way worse. Multiple politicians assassinated. Major multi-day riots across multiple cities with hundred dead. Then a president being impeached. 2020 doesn't even come close to the 1960's.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I remember the 1980 Miami Riots and the 1992 LA riots. This is basically nothing like that. Fundamental difference the protestors aren't the ones engaging in violence, the cops are.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    I seem to have missed the police setting buildings on fire and beating up shopowners. Not to say that the police haven't committed a ton of violence in these protests, but it's not all them.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      There are looters and then there are protestors.
      - DuskStar 6y ago
        Well, sure. But if you define "protestor" as "no violence, no looting, no arson", of course the protesters won't do those things.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Yes, yes. The "No True Protestor/Scotsman" argument.
    - andrewzah 6y ago
      > but it's not all them. Sure, and the other ones look the other way. Totally "good" guys just lettin' bad guys be bad guys. Until the "good" guys start going after and punishing the "few bad ones", they are all bad. If we're going to use the "just some bad apples" argument, then it might be prudent to apply it to the protestors, too? At this point it's borderline ignorant to be unaware of the ongoing police brutalities. And if one -is- aware, it's disingenuous to compare what they're doing to some stores being set on fire- turns out people really, really care about property damage suddenly. [0] [1] [0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/reports/New%20York.md https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor... [1]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/reports/California.md https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...
HaloZero 6y ago
I mean, people like to throw around race war occasionally now but I only hear about it from the far-right. Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence. During the 1960s, I believe Malcolm X was ready to have a real war to defend Black Americans. Now, at worse the discord is about justifying some looting that has diminished.
- banads 6y ago
  >Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence I have seen many people talking about "burning the system to the ground".
  - HaloZero 6y ago
    I think that's a metaphor like they want to destroy systematic racism or prison industrial complex? But I haven't seen those posts. Anything public you wanna share?
    - banads 6y ago
      >I think that's a metaphor Maybe we could consider it purely metaphorical, if there hadn't been a rash of arsons across the US in recent weeks.
      - HaloZero 6y ago
        I mean... I'm was looking up stuff and it seems the arsons have been up since March at least in Vancouver. https://www.straight.com/news/vancouver-police-warn-of-sharp-increase-in-arson-crimes-during-pandemic https://www.straight.com/news/vancouver-police-warn-of-sharp...
        banads 6y ago
        Cool story, its completely irrelevant to what happened last week in the US

cmdshiftf4 6y ago

>I feel like a lot of people are afraid to talk about anything but the protests lately, lest they be branded as not supporting the protests. That's exactly it. I've some friends who are on the whole rather apolitical, in fact I'd call them politically ignorant as it's not something they tend to invest any time into, but who either run relatively large social media pages as a side hustle or do so professionally on behalf of the company they work for. From chatting to them over the last week or two, they've said they've been put in a place whereby they can't not post something in support of the protests in either case. The companies want to get info out to customers, however feel that if they post without the promo post first they'll be castigated for it. Those with influence pages want to retain engagement and are in the same position. In essence, those actually supporting the protests have created an environment whereby they'll never be able to judge the true sentiment around their movement, as dissent or even public agnosticism toward it has been all but quashed. Something that, in my eyes at least, has dangerous potential.

matwood 6y ago
> From chatting to them over the last week or two, they've said they've been put in a place whereby they can't not post something in support of the protests in either case. This tells me the protests are working. When people who normally do not pay attention are forced to see what's happening, then change can occur. It's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people as they come to terms with their own privilege and the plight of other groups. But, growth doesn't occur without first being uncomfortable. > sentiment around their movement, as dissent or even public agnosticism toward it has been all but quashed Sentiment will be judged through action and change.
- zarathustreal 6y ago
  >When people who normally do not pay attention are forced to see what's happening, then change can occur. It's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people as they come to terms with their own privilege Unfortunately you're very correct there, though not in the way I think you're assuming. Force people with influence, power, money, ability to be above common problems, to see what's happening and you're not going to get a pat on the back. Change is certainly going to happen, and it's not going to be the change you're hoping for.

grandridge 6y ago

Yeah it's called mob rule