how about the tax bill followed by an extended government shutdown?

Why the **** can't you just make a point? It's absolutely not "if I say so". It's yes or no. If you think it's "no", state that **** and explain why. (you can't, like always, so you do this weird tone policing discursive gibberish SMP ****)

LOL wait so you DID Google it up, scanned it for a line you could cheekily quote to imply you hadn't read it, and do ALL of this in service of advancing the argument that MLK's actual point from that letter was wrong?

What the **** is wrong with you? Like even taking you at MAXIMAL BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, that you're totes a cool tolerant lib who just LOVES SPIRITED BUT CIVIL DISCOURSE, how exactly do you imagine any of your responses to me are moving towards that discourse? You melt down into absolute incoherence at the first hint of disagreement.

Pretty weak sauce if you think the time has come to do something but you're waiting for someone to start. Cowardly, really. Don't be complacent. Put your own skin in the game and start organizing. Don't wait for someone else to do something. You're basically waiting for someone else to take the risk for you because you're too afraid and won't stand up for your beliefs. Talk is cheap.

For the record I don't think we're even close to a breaking point and direct and violent action would be folly and backfire but it just irks me when someone wants others to take the risks for beliefs they are too afraid to stand up for.

OP, if you really believe in your heart of hearts that now is the time then ****ing do something.

A compassion that extends for everyone does not exclude an ability to feel moral outrage. Compassion, at times, demands moral outrage and/or action. MLK was calling for actions against unjust laws to be done “lovingly, openly”.

That is different from “**** these people, we need to break ****.” This unconsidered anger will miss the mark often enough that it will do more harm than good.

When ?
do ?
we ?
start ?
breaking ?
****?

****

Nope. Ain't nobody gonna do **** until it starts to hurt white people, or until minority groups feel they will be worse off than the decades-long prison sentence they risk for felony riot charges.

and being shot and killed.

We will all bend over and take it because we lost this war years ago when nobody was paying attention.

The deplorables will engage in mental gymnastics to find a way to blame people other than the culprits even when hurt by the GOP.

Nobody starts breaking **** until they are hungry.

You once defended police brutality against black people solely and entirely because internet posters called someone racist for endorsing it.

What? What the **** are you talking about? Like people have done all the steps for you here already.

Someone mocked the cliche right wing mythologizing of MLK as a non-rabble rousing kumbaya guy. Another person provided primary source documentation of how MLK was viewed in his time by the right. And I pointed you to a specific piece of writing by MLK himself on this very subject!

I'm being incredibly nice here and giving you some vitally important life advice.

When you, someone who is clearly sympathetic to white supremacists but not at all towards the victims of white supremacy, tries to lecture people about MLK preaching love and compassion as a way to morally preen over people complaining about injustice, online all that will happen is people will laugh at you for being disingenuous and dumb.

In real life, this **** you're doing will put you at risk for physical harm. It's not wise, it's not clever, it's insulting. And some people respond very poorly to morally reprehensible insults.

http://www.patagonia.com/home/

patagonia broke their web site today as a reaction to the giveaway of national monument land.

No, I didn’t. The reason I generally ignore you is that I think you know that I didn’t. [Cue the mischaracterization]

You are still not following the plot. “Lovingly, openly” resisting unjust laws comes directly from the very piece you are referencing. Maybe you need to reread it.

If you “love thy enemy”, they are still your enemy. Opposition (even violent opposition, in some rare cases) is still necessary. What I object to is the “**** my enemy” part. Did you read the link that I left a few posts ago?

I’ll try to engage but I’m still going to ignore the noise.

This.

There weren't exactly famines raging in the US in 1968.

No, but there were a lot of kids dying in a really stupid war. The Pentagon has had great success since then keeping the number of killed, crippled and PTSD'ed to a more manageable number.

I think its closer to the opposite. "MLK was the best, and since I think its ok that black people can eat at restaurants I'm on the same side as MLK, and anybody still talking about racism is some kinda extreme agitator and traitor unlike MLK who we all love and is an American hero!"

The rebellions of 1968 in the US had more to do with civil rights.

On the general scale, the civil rights movement was quite peaceful. Most of the violence came from the repressors, not the aggrieved. It never approximated anything like a civil war except in terms of the response of the repressors, whose system had always depended on violence.

Also, in fact, there was some hunger in the rural, black south. But in any case here "hungry" is a proxy for "have nothing to lose", and there are social contexts where people can feel they have nothing to lose without being straight up hungry, but the sense of not being able to feed the family is a standard tipping point.

Also, the civil rights movement, and the conflicts associate with it, began long before 1968. There were civil rights related riots back in the 30s and 40s that resulted in dozens of deaths. The unrest started in the Jim Crow era, when people definitely were hungry.

Yeah, you did, and you threw forth some sophistry about how you totally didn't, but you did.

Yeah, you did. And again, this SMP **** where you constantly cut out questions you're asked and instead respond to posts with this nonsensical preening is a bad look.

I absolutely did not. Did you read the ****ing letter? I believe you skimmed it looking for quotes about "love" but I don't think you read it. Though maybe "several paragraphs" is a big ask for you.

You accuse me of not "following the plot." What the **** are you even talking about? What the hell is the plot, if not the discussion about reactionaries coopting MLK? That was the plot. I followed it. You haven't engaged at all on that.

You thoroughly embarrassed yourself by responding to dth calling you out with these pseudo-rhetorical questions: "Who are these people? Why would they do such a thing? How do you know so much about them? Why did you choose to bring them up?" (you, racism, you're literally posting in this very thread, and you're literally posting in this very thread, respectively)

As we've seen, your opposition to social unrest extends to THROWING A TEMPER TANTRUM WHEN LIBERALS ARE MEAN ONLINE TO MILO. ****ing Milo!

So cut this constant lying ****. The issue for you is not "**** my enemy"(quotation marks there by you NOT to indicate a direct quote), the issue for you is that if anyone on the left or liberal side says that there IS an enemy it provokes an emotional breakdown.

Because you're the enemy. And you, at some level, know it. That's why you get so sad and so mad at the same time when some nice boy with some thoughts about Islam gets called a mean name online.

I don't think you even know what engagement is. If you were smart enough to see discussion and argument as honest exchanges of ideas, you wouldn't have the political and cultural beliefs you do.

A SMP racist writing
and meaning it as an INSULT is also too perfect.

Knowing stuff? That's ominous. Explain yourself, knowledge-haver.

Fly, opposition informed by an overarching compassion exact thing MLK is trying to say. Read it again, it’s there. Once you understand how to square the fact that those two ideas can exist together, what I am saying will (hopefully) start to make more sense.

Going too far down this road will derail this thread entirely but I’ll say a few things. There was what, to me, looked like an ambiguous post made and I saw people racing to find the least charitable view of that post. I was trying to get people to attack the most charitable view but I admit that I made at least a few mistakes. (1) I should not have done it with that topic and (2) the person I was trying to get people to give the benefit of the doubt to should not have been wil.

In case it is unclear:
1)Police brutality is bad.
2)Some police brutality is driven by conscious or unconscious biases as a result of race. That is also bad.
3)There are structural/historical problems in our society that make it so minorities are disproportionately affected by police brutality. Also bad.
4)There are people who don’t fully understand point 3 and this contributes to an urge for some of them to blame minorities for this police brutality. It also contributes to the problem I laid out in point 2. Also bad.

**** off, man. Do we need to go back to the start of the thread? Reactionary dip****s co-opting MLK in defense of oppression? That ring a bell?

As we've been over repeatedly, the issue is not and has never been people failing to understand. We understand quite well, which is a real credit to us because if you are a native English speaker you are easily the worst, least coherent writer of the whole SMP/Chezfront clique.

Man, if you believed 1-4, you wouldn't have defended wil at the time, denied you did so in this thread, or written a 2 paragraph rambling defense of your own bull****.

You're so full of ****, son. Be less so. I don't know who is teaching you guys that if you are able to sort of loosely recite liberal principles in a list that therefore get a liberal-tolerant-guy pass to say whatever the **** you want about Muslims, trans people, BLM, and so forth.

(LOL though even in Madcap's face saving apology world, you notice a missing category there? He never acknowledges the possibility that 5) Some people are actually ****ing racist and support police brutality because of that. He thinks he's being AS LEFTY AS POSSIBLE to say that wil "don't fully understand". Love thy enemy, but also more importantly there are no enemies, and you saying that there is an enemy is being VERY UNCHARITABLE and that REQUIRES IMMEDIATE RESPONSE)

Your number 5, as written, would not stand up to much scrutiny. There could be a biological gap wrt empathy for people of different races but clearly most (if not all) of that can be overcome if people are convinced of the right arguments. The difference between how we would describe what is happening there highlights the point pretty well.

5) People have a hard time honestly considering arguments that challenge their world view and so, when faced with one of the other points, they will look to find ways to protect their previously held beliefs.

My suspicion (and this is probably going to be the last post I try to make on this subject ITT) is that the same impulse to protect previously held beliefs is precisely the reason you are having such a hard time with my argument. You have tied your identity to angrily yelling at people who you disagree with. You would rather ignore the point that I am trying to make (and brush off anything that you have no argument against by just attacking my motivations) rather than consider the fact that the way you approach these conversations is not morally justified. (If only because it leads to worse outcomes. As you would know if you had read my link)