I really agree with you here, except for your inclusion of looters in that group. You're goddamn right opportunistic looters are nothing like me. Those fuckers care nothing about the fight of the protests, and are willing to tarnish the whole movement for some free shit. Fuck them.
Otherwise, right on. I can't tell you how often I come to dead ends in arguments regarding poverty and crime, where folks who've never been poor or desperate give themselves 100% of the credit for their good fortune. Like they picked their fucking parents before birth.
Without the rioting and looting, the protests may have accomplished nothing. Climate March and Women's March were way bigger but led to absolutely zilch.
So if the climate and women's marchers had destroyed blocks of neighborhoods and looted and burned a bunch of stores and small businesses, you think they would have "accomplished" more? Are you fucking serious?
This is such a stupid argument. The only thing violence, vandalism and theft "accomplish" is further retrenchment of police power. It turns otherwise sympathetic people against the protests, and makes it much harder for policy makers to justify police reform to the huge part of the population whose quiet racist and classist biases were just confirmed by the looters.
If anythin's going to spur change from this particular upheaval, it will the hundreds of videos recording police brutality against peaceful demonstrators.
In this post alone, there are people saying that looting is justified... For every person saying that the looters are unrelated, there is another person or two that either condones that behaviour or justifies it.
Either we have looters in this thread, or the movement is a big umbrella that encompasses the unsavourable elements too.
That's a strawman. Nobody's talking about "stealing a TV from a corporation". That's not what looting is. Go spend five minutes on google and see what's been happening. Looters have destroyed thousands of small businesses -- destroying equipment, ransacking the buildings, and in many cases setting them on fire. The theft is only a small part. Many of these losses cannot be be recouped through insurance, and many of these small businesses will die. For nothing.
Looting and vandalism don't hurt corporations. The corporations have insurance and can rebuild. Looting destroys livelihoods of people who often can't recover, accelerates the decay of already struggling neighborhoods.
Otherwise, right on. I can't tell you how often I come to dead ends in arguments regarding poverty and crime, where folks who've never been poor or desperate give themselves 100% of the credit for their good fortune. Like they picked their fucking parents before birth.