Nazis are the enemy.

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Have I said anything incorrect, or was I just more honest and blunt than you appreciate?

Agreed. I assume other people's basic honesty way too easily.

I watched the video. I saw no evidence of BLM complicity, and I feel sure that I heard the founders personally address that exact video. I made an explicit offer about someone giving me a name and evidence that they advocated violence in the name of BLM. I intended it to be completely fair, if people want me to believe that the group officially condones killing cops. I'll leave that to the various neo-nazi groups who constantly daydream of scenarios where they get to kill cops "in defense of their rights."

On this board alone, how many people on the left and on the right to you personally suspect harbor such fantasies?

That's just it - what people think in their own minds privately but don't say is absolutely none of my business. I have no justification to tell people what they're fantasizing about. If I did think I could read people's thoughts I'd be showing clear signs of a DSM-classified mental disorder.

What I have to do is judge people on what they say as well as the rationality of their reactions to what's said. People will be wrong about things here, on a regular basis. The current media doesn't help that at all. It's part of why the red team vs. blue team bit really pushes my buttons; to act like this is a game of L337 jousting is a grotesque display of disrespect to the topics of discussion.

When I say suspect, I mean that anyone who's been around here a while knows who's exceptionally well-armed and why on account of the fact that they post about it explicitly. I only said "fantasy" in order to have a bit of fun, although I'm not wrong.

Also, back on the topic of the thread, I just can't let it go. There are no "very fine people" marching shoulder to shoulder with neo-nazis and white supremacists, regardless of their feelings about statues. I can see people having some confusion about "blood and soil," although I got the gist even before I looked it up. I don't see how anyone could take "Jews will not replace us" as a statement about the importance of preserving US history, or even honoring the confederacy. No "very fine people" would march through the streets with people chanting such things, especially not at night, carrying torches. Frankly, no "very fine people" could see that happen in their town and sit home and ignore it.

It seems like, from what I've read thus far, BLM is more of a throng than an organized group when I try to look at the body politic of it. I did see the 13 points on the web page, did a quick browse of the history, and it's a lot of different things happening both official and unofficial. Enough of the kinds of things I posted, the 'fry em like bacon' and vandalizing/smashing a police station apparently happened in the course of events. Threatening to kill police or vandalizing police stations isn't part of their central charter, it seemed to happen either way. I also got reminded of something I'd almost forgotten about - Bernie Sanders having his microphone pulled and him getting called a white supremacist.

I see a lot of the same things happening that I complained about with respect to BLM when it came to Ferguson, Missouri. They showed up, demagoged a situation where the police (for once) were actually right, got people riled up about the wrong issues, and it did turn out that the Ferguson PD was utterly corrupt and was running their district like a for-profit entity and looking at the community like a direct revenue source for property seizures and the like but you never actually would have heard about the real issue underneath all the noise of BLM trying to lionize and sing the praises of one Michael Brown who, when questioned, attacked the police officer and tried to take his gun.

I think that particular incident did a lot to form my own sense that they were inept at promoting their own cause and would mostly stand up for men who the police ended up killing either directly in self-defense, unintentionally in self-defense, or in the case of the guy in Baltimore something like a grand mal seizure in the back of the police car. There seem to be more than enough very valid issues facing the black community that they could have been championing and instead going for the nutritious stuff like promoting peace on the streets, education, scholarships funds for black achievement, or staging their protests more toward laws that they felt were particularly pernicious to their civil rights - they spent a lot more time trying to figure out when and where a non-black police officer, or white or mixed group of police, killed an African American with little or no qualification as to what actually happened.


I don't think it could be stated that they definitively support police killings because if a certain quantity of event attendees are for it but they aren't in leadership roles then BLM isn't for killing police. I don't think the alt-right and white identitarians should be given a break on their nazis even if they're a disorganized group as well with no authority centralized enough to qualify who shows up to their events and who doesn't. That last point brings up what I can't stand about identity politics in the public sphere - it's usually a populist thing and it's rarely leading a particular identity group to reach for the high-hanging fruit in terms of problems or to address the kinds of problems that have the most long-term impact but may or may not have emotional punch in the moment.

If it turns out that in the next few years BLM is repossessed by a group who has much longer vision and means to do very healthy and positive things for the black community I'm all for it. I'd need to see them getting a lot more objective about things, pouring over the details of what's going wrong in our society, and offering solutions that make sense. To whatever extent they may have done some of that already I'd commend. As far as I can tell though it's not what they're known for.