"It's Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you"

[notorious bum]

To those who don't know any better, you're probably right. Virtually all prominent protestors I follow (mainly outside Baltimore, i.e. Ferguson, NYC, Cali) laughed and dismissed his condescending nonsense.

[Abandon]

guess it's fortunate he was talking to the baltimore youth and not them, eh?

[notorious bum]

The youth will not stay ignorant, they have too many people invested in them, contrary to popular belief.

In other news: Keegan Stephan ‏
Now at arraignment, judges sending #BaltimoreUprising arrestees to jail on up to $500K bail: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...P=share_btn_tw …

[Gokku]

video of Fox news getting called out after protesters demanded they leave
https://twitter.com/IamAkademiks/sta...65858724384770

Rivera commented on the incident Wednesday morning, telling "Fox & Friends" that the protester he argued with was being "truly annoying and obstructionist."

"I had an important story to tell standing there," he said. "It’s exactly that kind of youthful anarchy that led to the destruction and pain in that community.”

[Xajii]

The youth will not stay ignorant

You clearly don't know much about Baltimore. That's the entire problem. No funding for education; good teachers won't take the jobs there; nearly half of the studnets skip school regularly; their parents are the same; they are raised in poverty and learn the ways of poverty over and over and over again.

I'm not going to get in a slap fight about Ray Lewis with idiots in here but don't give me this "people are invested in them" bullshit. Yea fuckin right. People's lips are invested in them and their wallets are invested in the fucking inner harbor.

[Xajii]

To those who don't know any better, you're probably right. Virtually all prominent protestors I follow (mainly outside Baltimore, i.e. Ferguson, NYC, Cali) laughed and dismissed his condescending nonsense.

And another thing, gimme a break. The people who need to hear what he had to say arent the ones live tweeting shit for people like you to suck up from afar.

[Tyrath]

Daily show last night was actually talking about the education problem.

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/sv...timore-on-fire

[Gokku]

http://patriotnewswire.com/2015/04/g...-on-facebook/#
WARNING READ AT YOU OWN MENTAL RISK *this filth was on my fb feed from a fox fan*

[notorious bum]

You clearly don't know much about Baltimore. That's the entire problem. No funding for education; good teachers won't take the jobs there; nearly half of the studnets skip school regularly; their parents are the same; they are raised in poverty and learn the ways of poverty over and over and over again.

I'm not going to get in a slap fight about Ray Lewis with idiots in here but don't give me this "people are invested in them" bullshit. Yea fuckin right. People's lips are invested in them and their wallets are invested in the fucking inner harbor.

You need to only look at how the youth came together in Ferguson, to debunk the myth that the youth don't know wtf they are doing, what they are protesting for, whether they are being supported more than exploited.

The media portrays these protests perfectly as just some excuse to cause trouble because one black kid died. No, they are not organized now, but they will be as time passes. The cat who got disappeared on national TV was a prominent protestor who also participated in Ferguson. Baltimore isn't some isolated city of confused youth.

[Byrthnoth]

Rioting over this injustice is going to result in further targeted policing and will increase the likelihood of future injustices.

Nonviolent protest could work if people actually notice it. Reaching out to the mayor and politicians in Annapolis for help while holding on to the threat of obstructionist nonviolent protest would probably have been more effective.

[Xajii]

You need to only look at how the youth came together in Ferguson, to debunk the myth that the youth don't know wtf they are doing, what they are protesting for, whether they are being supported more than exploited.

The media portrays these protests perfectly as just some excuse to cause trouble because one black kid died. No, they are not organized now, but they will be as time passes. The cat who got disappeared on national TV was a prominent protestor who also participated in Ferguson. Baltimore isn't some isolated city of confused youth.

And it also ain't a charity case for bused-in protesters lookin for another march to come and "organize everything for them", like that has ever worked for them in the past. You're ignoring the enormous population of actual Baltimore residents that care about the city and a lot more than just Freddie Gray. Ray Lewis is talking to the city, not the wandering troupe of protesters. If you can't take his words at face value without spatting some ill-informed misinterpretation of his past (which, even if he did do half of what you think he did, wouldn't discredit his points), then again I say: you don't understand Baltimore.

Are you seriously triyng to tell the one person in this thread who'sa ctually from the area that they're being twisted by the media's portrayal of what is happening?

[notorious bum]

Targeted policing is nothing what anyone has witnessed over the past year. This is a show of force and gratuitous abuse of power. The Bloods and Crips have actually show more tact than anything we have witnessed in Baltimore. Chicago was also a shit-show, I lost the link, but officers on bikes basically trying to herd hundreds of peaceful protestors onto a sidewalk, then had the balls to crash into them and make "snatch and grab" arrests.

Proven once again, money is the loudest voice in America:

edit: wrong tweets, but Mayor also stating that the curfew may be lifted because small businesses are complaining.

[notorious bum]

And it also ain't a charity case for bused-in protesters lookin for another march to come and "organize everything for them", like that has ever worked for them in the past. You're ignoring the enormous population of actual Baltimore residents that care about the city and a lot more than just Freddie Gray. Ray Lewis is talking to the city, not the wandering troupe of protesters. If you can't take his words at face value without spatting some ill-informed misinterpretation of his past (which, even if he did do half of what you think he did, wouldn't discredit his points), then again I say: you don't understand Baltimore.

Are you seriously triyng to tell the one person in this thread who'sa ctually from the area that they're being twisted by the media's portrayal of what is happening?

You are seriously devaluing and underestimating the presence of "outside protestors." There are tens of thousands around the nation showing solidarity with Balitimore, the same way they did for Ferguson, Cleveland, NYC, etc. Thousands of protestors and organizers coming in from out of town to help support, you don't think they will help shape the direction this movement goes? Black Lives Matter ain't just a catch phrase, my dude.

[notorious bum]

I haven't been able to find a collection/Twitter list to follow for Baltimore activists, but @deray is there, along with many others, thousands will be protesting at Penn station, it appears.

[notorious bum]

Baltimore Police Will Not Publicly Release Findings of Freddie Gray Investigation (UPDATED) http://bit.ly/1bEFdvT

[Tyrath]

Shocker.

[Kyreth]

In other words, someone (or someones) looks guilty as hell given the evidence and they figure giving it to the state attorney will keep the lid on long enough to prevent more riots.

[Lucavi]

That ball game was eerie.

O's won, at least. Back to .500!

[Byrthnoth]

In other words, someone (or someones) looks guilty as hell given the evidence and they figure giving it to the state attorney will keep the lid on long enough to prevent more riots.

No, an ambivalent report would also cause riots, as will their decision to not release a report. This is just strategic so the rioting happens on a weeknight instead of spilling over into the weekend.

Also going to thunderstorm there tonight. They are just playing damage control.

[Marootsoobutsu]

Let me put it this way, I believe that black people in ghettos sometimes don't help themselves to improve their situation. HOWEVER, I am a believer in that the "system" is worked in such a way that it makes it unbelievably difficult for them to improve their lives. It's working against them to keep them poor, and perpetuates the ghetto and impoverished lifestyle within their communities.

The media does the exact same thing to perpetuate this. It seems like every few days there's another black man gunned down by police, and hey! guess what? The police do some shady shit and they get away with it. You don't hear about that on the news. The second a little white girl goes missing, there is 24 hour coverage dedicated to it. Do you see what I'm getting at?

Long post is long

Spoiler: show

So, I'm a big student of history, and one of my mentors in college is pretty much THE expert in Pacific Northwest history. I can't speak for the nation as a whole, and I am very keenly aware that every region and city has its own unique circumstances and problems. I know that the issues in Seattle are completely separate from the South, that general tone is different here than there.

However, I do have a pretty solid bit on Washington State's history, particularly urban Seattle. Forgive the meandering-- I promise I will have a point.

So, pretty much since the beginning of the 20th century, Seattle (and Washington as a whole, though definitely not the Northwest as a whole), has been very black-friendly. It wasn't really altruistic. Hell, it wasn't altruistic at all. It was still racism-- it's just that the whites in charge were a lot more hateful toward the Asians than the blacks. But they were smart enough to realize that if the blacks and the Asians allied up, the whites would really be hurt. So, the racists in the unions and idealists in the unions (it was a time of a lot of "We're all people!"), were on the same side, and blacks not only got into previously-white-only jobs, but got leadership positions. By the time WWI started, blacks and whites were integrating well, and what had started out as expediency became something as close to friendship as there ever really was in the country.

When WWI ended, things backslid a little, but not much here: lots of jobs were available for the unions, and the black leadership held enough sway that things kept going. Blacks were about as well off here as anywhere in the country-- in fact, the predominantly black schools were generally better than the white schools in the area. They were well staffed, and had community support out the wazzoo.

Then the depression hit. Almost overnight, community support for the black schools went out the window. The black community's leadership in Seattle-- starting with the unions, but definitely not ending there-- actively discouraged schooling past grade school. Not for mistrust of the system, but because the general feeling was that there wasn't a need for it: early jobs in the union meant better jobs in the unions, more influence in the unions, etc... and those were the best jobs available-- not just for blacks, but for anyone.

At the same time that Asian-hate in the west was at its peak-- nearly on par with north-Southern hate for blacks-- Asians stayed focused on education. They weren't getting union jobs, and were largely getting shut out from their homes, and certainly weren't welcome to leave "their" neighborhoods (unless it was to get out of the area entirely). During the Depression, when blacks were ditching education in droves-- NOT because they were lazy, or stupid, or unethical, or whatever, but because they saw an opportunity that worked for most of the next couple decades-- Asians were sticking with it.

By the end of WWII, though, things were shifting. Uneducated Union jobs in Seattle weren't the creme de la creme-- the University of Washington was successful, and Boeing's best jobs were for folks with an education. The Port was still a big thing, but it was increasingly staffed by GIs from all over the country-- Seattle had been hit less-badly by the recession than most areas, and there was a pretty solid glut of jobs available that had been vacated by internment camps for the Japanese. Blacks were still welcome in the unions, but their influence rapidly deteriorated with unions losing their overall influence.

By the mid-50s, the Japanese in Seattle were well on the rise, but the good times of the 20s, 30s, and 40s for blacks were pretty much gone. When the World's Fair came in the early 60s, the Space Needle and Seattle Center basically evicted large portions of blacks from their homes, in part because they were run down; one of the oldest high schools in central Seattle was basically empty. There was a lot more that went into it than that-- it really was one of the most reachable areas of a city split by a big ol' lake, and it was close to down town without disrupting down-town business (one of the reasons there were huge fights about the Kingdome being built in Seattle a decade later). But the consequence of it really was ousting of the black community from its roots. A LOT of the community moved to Rainier Valley, which was one of the other black communities of the time.

Things got bad there, vast. Rainier Valley was one of the worst areas in Seattle for decades. Violence and poverty were rampant, and schools had huge turn-over rates. It was Exceptionally Ungood. Well-meaning politicians from all over wanted to help, but nothing really resulted in major changes.

Until the mid-1990s. That's when the local leadership there basically said, "Screw it. We have to help ourselves." While it would be a stretch to say Rainier Valley is prosperous and well-off today, almost every criminal statistic is trending downward. Education is trending up. Cooperation with the police is up, police violence is down. Within 20 years, Rainier Valley may well be one of Seattle's more well-off areas-- they are at a point of accepting help from outside, but it's on their terms. Which, cool.

The POINT is that, no matter what ANYONE has done in the past, you cannot enforce change on others. There are a LOT of factors that go into what causes poverty, violence, discontent with the system. There are a LOT of factors that go into why the system doesn't help those who need it the most. Racism is, for most people, in most parts of the country, near the bottom of the list if not off it entirely.

Culturalism is a problem-- poor areas, white or black or Native American, or whatever, tend to have poor local leadership, and poor local values. From the other side, folks who are not poor-- especially people who are not poor now but USED to be poor-- have a load of negative stereotypes about those in poverty. A lot of what is posted as racism "THEY are just lazy", "THEY are just thugs", etc... isn't about black, white, whatever. Ask cops who deal with the white thugs in Idaho, Montana, Eastern Washington or Oregon-- they say the same thing about the white trash there. But because it's whites saying it, because it's about blacks, it obfuscates the issue. It makes it appear something that it's not-- not that it's not a problem, but the problem is misidentified.

And because the two sides-- the many sides-- aren't approaching the same problem, of course things aren't going to be solved. The police look at the situation and see huge rates of crime. They don't have the time or the resources to look at the issue sociologically: that's not their job, and it's frankly beyond most of their ability. They just see the stats. They see the distrust-- and the cultural acceptance of that distrust. They see an incredibly small number of them doing a wrong thing, and everyone getting labeled with it (sound familiar?). They see themselves doing the RIGHT thing, and getting BLASTED for it because the person they dealt with was black, while the officer was white-- the immediate assumption of guilt brings in the Jacksons and the Frankins to try them in public before the information about what happened is even out. Tensions are pumped against them every day.

And their (the police) leaders don't help. The people who DO have the time and the resources to look at the issue sociologically, and economically. They don't reach out effectively to local leadership-- because these folks suffer from Too Smart Syndrome. Wilson had it in WWI, Obama has it now. And a LOT of local leadership has it. It's the idea that I KNOW what the problem is, or what the other side things, and I know how to solve it. Oftentimes, they are right. The problem is, Too Smart Syndrome tends to manifest with a lack of communication.

Obama, for example, gets a lot of flack from Democrats because he caters so hard to Republicans. And he does-- he throws in a lot of compromises. The problem is, he doesn't talk to the Republicans. He gives them the win without them feeling like they earned it. That comes across as weakness, from both sides. It also has the fatal flaw of often missing what the other side REALLY wants. It's something that cheeses me about a lot of Republicans: they don't realize that Obama is doing his absolute best job he can to reach across the aisle, that he's trying to solve the problem. I'm far from an Obama supporter, but he's also far from the demon most folks on my quadrant of the XY-graph label him.

The same thing happened in Seattle. A lot of our more well-off folks put in policies designed to solve what THEY saw as the problem the poor in Seattle. And a lot of times, they were right about what the problems were, but there was no dialogue. There was no communication. It was handed down from on-high-- WE WILL SAVE YOU! It was incredibly insulting, and it met with resistance. It projected the idea that the poor had no agency.

When Rainier Valley's local leadership essentially told everyone else to screw off, it became internal. They saw their problems, and they addressed them. THEY decided the avenues for success, and they did it responsibly. When they reopened the talking tables, it was with a clear mandate: others could opine, their help might be accepted, but only on the local terms. And man, it has WORKED. It's working incredibly well-- not that anyone is hearing about it. Because it's a slow-simmer, it's a success story, and it wasn't done sexily, and it most definitely doesn't follow either the Republican line or the Democrat line: it wasn't done with help from DC or Olympia, it wasn't done with help from taxpayers, but it also isn't a bootstraps story, and it doesn't fit with the culturalist-attitude.


I know that BG is left-leaning, and libertarian-leaning on the XY; I am right-authoritative. I look at the stats on police violence, and I see them going down (we have a 100 million more people now than in the mid-90s, but the number of deaths we know of from police is about the same-- that's a pretty dramatic percentage decrease). I know-- the numbers aren't reliable from the FBI database, and getting them voluntarily is close to impossible. I understand police reluctance-- they have a very strong victim complex from the media. I think it's mostly earned-- as mostly-earned as a lot of the poor's distrust of the police (and, through them, an extension to authority in general).

But I look at the history of what has WORKED, and it's not the police backing off, it's not state senators, or mayors, or whatever leading the way.

Seattle's blacks found success first when their local, city, every-day community leaders pushed for hard work and working with others. They missed, largely, the trending shifts, and things got bad. They got real bad-- but the problems are getting better, because once again local leaders are pushing a cultural shift. They are demanding to lead, and are insisting on working with-- not for-- others. This is a GOOD thing.

When folks say a change needs to happen, I agree. Poverty-stricken areas, regardless of race, have deep cultural problems that need fixed-- and many of these stem from distrust of authority and a dismissal of the importance of education (my family on the whole has disowned/trashed me since I went to University). The police have a pretty strong distrust of the poor.

But here's the thing: the police aren't the leadership of their side of the problem, and their leaders aren't anywhere near the area of the problems. The police can't fix the problem-- they can't. Local community leaders ARE in the area, they CAN start to solve the problem form their end. They just can't solve it if they expect others to help from the outside first, nor if they place blame EVERYWHERE except themselves.

It's not that the police and leadership don't bear their share of guilt. They do. It's not that the system if fair. It's not. It's not that the poor can pull themselves up all alone. They can't-- even those who escape now, even the most exceptional exceptions get help. To tie in to the depression thread, though, you can't get yourself out until you decide to pull yourself out. Improvements in one's life start personally, from not only deciding to make a change, but following through on it. But you can't FORCE someone to make that change. And someone else making changes won't help, if you don't do it yourself first.


And unless you want to say things are worse now than they were in the 40s, 50s, 60s-- 1900s or 1800s versions-- don't tell me that it can't start locally. It started with black leadership in both centuries, and improved with whites helping the black plans. With whites listening to, instead of identifying, black problems (even if the white activists were right most of the time). But in both centuries, with problems that dwarf what we have today, progress started not with the system changing, but with local mentalities changing. With local behaviors changing. In both cases, the system was FAR more at fault than it is now.

It sucks-- it really, really sucks that the areas least at fault need to do the most work. It's not fair. It's not right. The problem does not lie entirely at the feet of the poor. I don't know if the majority of the problem does or not any more. I just know that the blame-game hasn't ever solved anything, and that the "change comes from within" cliché isn't just a cliché.

Wish I were better at tl;dr