Our Commitment To The Black Lives Matter Movement

[N.E. Brigand]

9 minutes ago, skevinp said:

Who says the company didn’t improve?  Who says they weren’t already a model of anti-racism?  Who says the managers you refer to aren’t black?  Who says the owners aren’t?  

If you are thinking of a specific incident, by all means give us the details. But we seem to be talking about hypotheticals, so I'd say that if a lot of people believe a company is doing wrong, to the degree that they are boycotting and the company might have to shut down, then the company needs to convince the protesters that it's taken the necessary steps to fix the situation. If the company has done those things and the claims against it are libelous, then they can sue for damages. This particular conversation started with MikeD mentioning two specific people who created a list of how theater companies are responding to the protests. If one of those companies shuts down as a result, because of protesters who act on the basis of that list, and if the company can show that the claims are not true, those two people could end up in a world of hurt.

Which is probably why the two people making the list state that they won't take submissions from others, specifically noting that they're doing all the work to document the information they compile. That way no one can sneak in something that's not true and gets them in trouble. Back in 2017, when the Me Too movement started, there was a similar but initially private document that was titled "Terrible Men in Media" or something like that, to which any woman who worked in television, radio, print, or internet news could post a name and an allegation. The list leaked. The woman who launched the page was sued. 

[N.E. Brigand]

4 hours ago, Fred Windish said:

It’s important to understand we see 2 major ‘protest’ groups operating in places like Seattle. Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA. Both groups do not always have the same goals in mind when they present themselves. I’m not so sure everyone on the streets really understands this. Nor, people at home watching this all go down
 

This is a fair point, though I think there are more than two groups interacting, and I don't think that most of the protesters belong to any of them.

Lots of people support Black Lives Matter, but most of the people marching in support of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breona Taylor, or other apparent victims of police violence aren't members of the group itself. 

And sure, there have definitely been some opportunists taking advantage of the protests to spread chaos. And also some people who see the chaos as their only opportunity in life to take something from the people they view as their oppressors. (Which is sad.) And as skevinp notes, there are among the Black Lives Matter members, or other people who are clearly protesting for entirely altrustic reasons, those who have tried to calm protesters or prevent looting. Three videos that got a lot of attention were from the protests' early days. In one, a white guy carrying an umbrella uses a hammer to calmly break the windows of an Auto Zone store in Minnesota over the ojbections of black protesters, who then confront him. In another, a black woman in New York forcefully excoriates people breaking windows for the harm they're doing to her community. In the third, protesters grab a man who is hammering at the pavement, from which he means to break bricks that he can hurl at windows or the police; the protesters drag him over to the cops and turn him in.

And then there have been the police, who seem to have engaged in a fair bit of unnecessary new violence themselves. See the video from Minnesota, for instance, in which police walk down a residential street, following an armored vehicle, shouting at people to go inside their homes because of the curfew, and then actually shoot people on their porch (with some sort of non-lethal projectile) for not complying. This despite the fact that Minnesota's curfew order explicitly said you were allowed to be outside after hours on your own property. And that's one of the milder videos. On top of which, there were too many reports of police who seemed to be not doing anything about looting: reporters note large groups of police on one block, monitoring quiet protesters, while reporters a few blocks away are filming looters breaking into store after store with nary a cop in site. Incompetence in where the police were staged? Or malice, designed to make the protests look worse than they really were?

But to return to one of the groups you mentioned, Antifa, they're nowhere near as important as many people claim. I think this quote sums it up well enough:

"They’re small, but not too small. They’re amorphus and misunderstood. They like to take up space and be loud. They are not actually dangerous at any meaningful scale. They do punch above their weight a lot of the time, but they’re not good at translating that into expanding their base. They’re not politically powerful, and no one speaks up for them. In fact they have so little power that they can’t defend themselves from organized slander. Some of them are misguided, some of them are incredibly well-read, quite a few of them end up as academics or working in NGOs. This makes sense, they don’t want to be part of the business world they see exploiting the global poor, but they do want to grow up and participate in society in meaningful ways."

Or as an article from yesterday is titled, "Federal Arrests Show No Sign That Antifa Plotted Protests", and from that article: "despite cries [to the contrary], none of those charged with serious federal crimes amid the unrest have been linked so far to the loose collective of anti-fascist activists known as antifa." But maybe that will change.

(Also, don't confuse Antifa with Black Bloc. Two different things, apparently.)

Finally, there are other kinds of opportunists, like the people sharing all those false stories on social media scaring people with claims that busloads of Antifa members will soon be arriving to terrorize their towns. One family in the northwest on a camping trip in a modified bus found themselves shut into their campsite after locals, terrified by the phony stories, chopped down trees to block the road and prevent them from leaving. And then there were the more notable people who sent out these messages a couple weeks ago:

---"The limited arrests to this point do not reflect the significant safety concerns we have for the city. I would point to the recovery of a bus registered in Vermont filled with bats, rocks, meat cleavers and axes on Sunday night.”

---"Police in Ohio found a bus near protests filled with bats, rocks & other weapons. But I guess still 'no evidence' of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests right?"

Well, it turns out, per the Columbus Dispatch, that: "A group of hippie circus performers on a converted bus named Buttercup were briefly detained by a SWAT team at a Downtown protest. The next day, Columbus police stoked fears over rioting in social media posts about the bus that went viral". It's basically a camper. The people in it were detained for less than an hour for questioning and then sent on their way, and they were permitted to keep all of their supposed implements for spreading anarchy, which were in fact perfectly innocent items. The "clubs" in particular were juggling clubs.

Edited June 13, 2020 by N.E. Brigand

[Cappybara]

I'm still wondering how the heck anyone thinks boycotting a business is against the free market. Boggles the mind. 

[skevinp]

8 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

If you are thinking of a specific incident, by all means give us the details. But we seem to be talking about hypotheticals, so I'd say that if a lot of people believe a company is doing wrong, to the degree that they are boycotting and the company might have to shut down, then the company needs to convince the protesters that it's taken the necessary steps to fix the situation. If the company has done those things and the claims against it are libelous, then they can sue for damages. This particular conversation started with MikeD mentioning two specific people who created a list of how theater companies are responding to the protests. If one of those companies shuts down as a result, because of protesters who act on the basis of that list, and if the company can show that the claims are not true, those two people could end up in a world of hurt.

Which is probably why the two people making the list state that they won't take submissions from others, specifically noting that they're doing all the work to document the information they compile. That way no one can sneak in something that's not true and gets them in trouble. Back in 2017, when the Me Too movement started, there was a similar but initially private document that was titled "Terrible Men in Media" or something like that, to which any woman who worked in television, radio, print, or internet news could post a name and an allegation. The list leaked. The woman who launched the page was sued. 

Black people are human beings, not hypotheticals.  I’m talking about anywhere this may happen, not just theaters.  And I’m talking about businesses facing consequences for not expressing allegiance to an ambiguously defined movement, not for their actual practices.  

[N.E. Brigand]

1 minute ago, Cappybara said:

I'm still wondering how the heck anyone thinks boycotting a business is against the free market. Boggles the mind. 

The first boycott that registered in my consciousness was in 1989 against Fox, meaning the entertainment network not its sister news station Fox News (which didn't launch for another seven years), on the grounds that Married With Children was obscene.

[N.E. Brigand]

1 minute ago, skevinp said:

Black people are human beings, not hypotheticals.  I’m talking about anywhere this may happen, not just theaters.  And I’m talking about businesses facing consequences for not expressing allegiance to an ambiguously defined movement, not for their actual practices.  

What "may happen" is that maybe some company that doesn't do the right thing faces consequences for that?

[skevinp]

12 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

What "may happen" is that maybe some company that doesn't do the right thing faces consequences for that?

Are you equating expressed allegiance to a movement you have already admitted is ambiguous with the “right thing”?  Would you tell a black business owner, who refrains from expressing such allegiance because they feel it includes supporting things that could remove important protections and thereby endanger their lives, that they are doing the wrong thing and deserve to be put out of business?

[skevinp]

41 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

The first boycott that registered in my consciousness was in 1989 against Fox, meaning the entertainment network not its sister news station Fox News (which didn't launch for another seven years), on the grounds that Married With Children was obscene.

I remember that. THEY decided it was obscene so no one else should be able to watch it. I’m sure they would say they just wanted them to do the “right thing”.

Edited June 13, 2020 by skevinp

[N.E. Brigand]

1 hour ago, skevinp said:

I remember that. THEY decided it was obscene so no one else should be able to watch it. I’m sure they would say they just wanted them to do the “right thing”.

Or maybe it was the right thing? Maybe THEY were right? I mean, lots of things are never broadcast on TV because of the idea of community standards. Some people feel there never should have been such standards. But I think most people think there should be. This show, which pushed those boundaries, managed to get on the air, and it was too much for some vocal people, and Fox decided to listen to them, lest the movement grow and start to affect their bottom line.

So they pushed the show from 8:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., toned down some of the jokes, and canned one episode altogether; it never aired. (But you can see that one on the DVD.)

Some people will see some irony in the identity of the protester, but we really can't talk about that.

[MikeD]

6 hours ago, Cappybara said:

Why? It’s a free market, and many would prefer to support businesses that are speaking out on this issue. 

Putting together s “gotcha” list scares me. No way of knowing how accurate it is, for one thing. In effect demanding that every theater in the country put out a pro forma statement is hardly taking a stand.