Disclaimer: This is absurdly long - and one fucking hell of a rant. With that in mind, this is my opinion and it comes from immense amounts of thinking, questioning my initial opinions, and new things happening every single day. I'm going to be exceptionally blunt and brutal on so many different topics, and if that causes you to feel "personally attacked" by this in any way (because I am pulling NO punches here) - then you're 100% part of the problems in this situation. In some cases, I provide solutions; In others, I do not. I'm just a slightly smarter than average guy with a lot of facts, some strong opinions and a lot of passion. I'll never have all the answers - sue me.
TL;DR: First - starting at low level law enforcement, all the way up the chain to the president, widespread arrests need to happen right now. Prosecution can happen after we finalize the systematic reform necessary to adequately hold them accountable. Let them rot in a cell until then. Second - The American people need to realize and act upon the fact that our issues are systematic, including our elections and law making processes, and take the steps necessary to change them for the people. Third - The people need to "appoint" and get behind a new presidential candidate (the favorite now is Biden - HA), one that isn't proven to be two-faced or part of the fucking problem; And throw absolutely everything they have behind them. Fourth - America needs to set the precedent for the entire world that this bullshit, in every facet of society, will no longer be tolerated. We have entered the modern era - fucking act like it.
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Part One: Taking the tangible first steps necessary to making an actual change.
Finding a place to start when it comes to listing the issues that need change is like trying to list the stars in the sky without equipment, so I'm just going to pick one and start to run with it. Essentially what these protests are about is: "Rules for thee, but not for me". Literally. Accountability. When everything is said and done, yes, this is about a racial prejudice that is prevalent within our legal and law enforcement system - but it stems from those who carry a certain status (police in this case) getting away with literal murder because the system is designed to let them. A post of mine from a few days ago explains my opinion about how this isn't just about race. Here's an excerpt:
Our country failed at preventing a mass pandemic. It failed at stopping the collapse of our economy. It failed at preventing the worst job losses ever recorded in our country. The government did however, succeed in making you pissed at the person standing next to you, who's going through the same nightmare as you, simply for the color of their fucking skin. Trump knew a period of civil unrest was coming, and he managed to make it about the same thing our country had a war about over 150 fucking years ago.
Congratulations - you just fucking played yourself.
Racism within our systems is a serious fucking issue, which is the main priority right now, but trying to fix a singular issue (racism) within a system that is fundamentally broken will not logically fix the larger issues at hand (corruption and no accountability), nor make any long-term tangible difference because of that fact.
To return to the fact that the biggest single issue right now is accountability, I want to point out a few things that I think highlight this issue perfectly. In Buffalo New York, two officers were seen on camera pushing a 75-year-old protester to the ground so hard that he immediately started bleeding from his ear. First their statement was that "During a skirmish involving protesters, one person was injured when he tripped and fell." Video proved that they were blatantly lying. PBA president John Evans said that "The officers 'did nothing wrong' and were 'simply following orders.' Hmm.. Where have I heard that before...? The two officers responsible for shoving the man were suspended without pay, so in response, 57 officers resigned from the forces's Emergency Response Team - in support of the officers - not the "accountability." Just this ONE example shows that, not only will officers support each other when wrong, caught on camera, and punished for it - but the departments and the fucking mayor will cover for the officers as well.
"Mayor Byron Brown said he wants the two suspended officers to get due process. 'I am not calling for them to be fired.' Speaking of the injured man, the mayor said, 'He was asked to leave numerous times last night.' Police felt that it was important to clear the area before fights broke out among the protesters, the mayor said."
How the fuck does that work?? You want them to follow due process, but are not calling for them to be fired, never-mind arrested. How can you simultaneously have your head that far up your ass - and still be able to lick fucking boots until they shine? The "DuE pRoCeSs" that is associated with police is the fucking problem - and you're advocating for them to have lenient punishments within the same exact systems we're demanding reform in. You're the one who should be fired. All 59 officers involved should be arrested. Period. They all showed who they care about.
Any officer that has been caught on camera committing acts of police brutality during these protests, as well as before hand - should be immediately arrested and thrown in jail with no bail posted. The curfew isn't to "stop the rioters" - it's an excuse to quell the protests in general via excessive force and "justified" arrests. This is a small article explaining just some of the ways curfews have been used to restrict the freedoms of individuals in America in the past, and IMO this video proves a bias (call it racial if you want) in these curfews. Plain and simple. The government did it at Standing Rock, what makes you think that they aren't trying to end the protests here just to get their way again??
Let's start to move up the chain, shall we? So - we touched on a single mayor, how about De Blasio? The point is - law enforcement personnel have been backed and covered for in every step of the government. How about a Senator calling for war crime levels of force? (To the people saying he wasn't being serious - he served in the 101st Airborne in Iraq. He knew what the fuck he was saying.) What about a congressman calling for Americans to be "Hunted down like terrorists in the Middle East." Let's go higher than that. The white house press secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeatedly said that "police have a right to defend themselves" against protesters - and that no tear gas or rubber bullets were used to push back peaceful protesters at the white house. (Press Conference. Relevant Video of Trump's speech.) Even though overwhelming evidence to the contrary made them change their tune in a later statement. The issue with a "right to defend yourself" according to police, is that the second they get scared like a little fucking bitch - they are allowed to execute someone. (This man was on his knees with his hands up. The officer was in his patrol car.) Does this look like the "best interests" of the people to you??
My point is - I couldn't give any less of a fuck about what position you hold in our society. If you're acting against, or calling for action against, the best interests of the american people - you should be immediately arrested and put in jail. Additionally, we cannot try and follow the due process that is already in place for these people. Especially Law Enforcement. We have to wait until the reform necessary to actually hold these criminals accountable for their actions is passed. Throw them in prison without bail, with a court date "Pending Law Reform." Because guess what? That's gonna get that ball rolling real fucking quick. Lots of things need to change immediately. Including the fact that Trump is president. He should be impeached and arrested. Period.
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Part Two: Law Enforcement is just the tip of the iceberg.
This one, you're gonna have to open your mind about and accept the fact that you've been repeatedly lied to. It sucks, but deal with it. This Independent Survey titled "Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested" delves into the issues surrounding police officers committing crimes and the rate in which those crimes are recorded and prosecuted. Here's a couple excerpts, but I suggest you take the time to read through a bit of it.
The contrast between the topic's substantive weight and comparatively light coverage within the scholarship is mostly due to an absence of suitable data. The traditional sources of data and methods of study, whether official statistics, self-report surveys, or direct observations, either do not exist in any usable format or are ill-equipped to identify, count, or provide the basis for empirical analyses of instances in which police perpetrate crimes themselves.
The first general observation is that police crimes are not uncommon. Police officers get arrested for crimes with some regularity in jurisdictions around the nation, including rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and large urban centers. Law enforcement officers in the current study were arrested at a rate of 0.72 officers arrested per 1,000 officers, and at a rate of 1.7 officers arrested per 100,000 population nationwide. Of course, only a small percentage of the total number of law enforcement officers will ever be arrested for a criminal offense, but our data directly contradicts some of the prevailing assumptions and the proposition that only a small group of rotten apples perpetrate the vast majority of police crime. Those assumptions relate to previous studies, journalistic investigations, and special commissions that described the misconduct of a single and/or handful of rogue officers operating within a single and/or handful of jurisdictions. The assumption that only a small group of rogue officers perpetrate crimes also presumably stems from traditional notions and public expectations regarding the straight-laced, law-abiding police persona. In contrast, our method provided for the identification of an unprecedented number of police crimes that occurred within virtually every sort of place, and the opportunity to draw some conclusions about how often these events occur across the nation. The data demonstrate that police crimes are not isolated events, and that hundreds of police officers every year get arrested for crimes including assault, rape, robbery, and murder across the United States.
The current research project identified and analyzed an unprecedented amount of data on the arrests of nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The research data collection methodology was designed by Stinson (2009) and allows for the aggregation of information on the phenomenon of police crime that would not otherwise been possible (Payne, 2013). It would also be very difficult to process and code the content of the vast amount of raw data analyzed in the current project without sophisticated database resources.
Not only does this study basically say that police officers committing crimes is incredibly fucking common, but that they hardly get arrested (never-mind convicted) of those crimes because of the way the system is set up. Also, IMO, it calls into question the credibility of law enforcement as a whole, including the Department of Justice that allows these issues to go unchecked. I could go on much longer about law enforcement - but as I said: Just the tip of the iceberg.
Our electoral college is FUCKED, and so are our elections. I mean, really fucked. Our elections are slanted in a way in which the minority of voters have more power - it's called Gerrymandering. As in, a smaller group in our country holds more weight in our elections than others. I really do not know how else to explain this. Your vote doesn't fucking matter with the way our system has come to be. It just doesn't anymore. The 2016 election proved that - and so has the preliminaries for 2020. Bernie had more independent financial donors than any other candidate, and he didn't have enough support? Are you kidding me? This literally shows that more Americans were supporting Bernie than any other candidate, and he dropped out that early?? I wasn't even given a chance to vote for him. Don't you dare fucking tell me that this shit is a fair election in any way shape or form.
Now lets get into some scary shit. It doesn't fucking matter if we have an election. Here's a couple excerpts from that link...
The main reason for this phenomenon – that is, increased regime failures in the year after an election – is linked to the effect that an election has on resolving so-called “coordination problems”. Coordination problems arise when individuals can realize a gain without contributing to the process of realizing it. The democratic system of government is a classic example of a coordination problem – East Germans who stayed at home in 1989 and watched the demonstrations against Erich Honecker’s regime are today benefiting from German democracy on a par with those who participated actively in the demonstrations.
Active participation in demonstrations, however, comes at a price. First of all, you may lose a day’s work, but the main risk lies in the fact that participating in such demonstrations is often directly hazardous for your health. Dictators use violence to suppress movements within civil society.
As a demonstrator, you risk being beaten up, imprisoned, tortured and, in extreme cases, killed – simply for having joined a demonstration. Accordingly, a key problem for anyone who wants to topple a regime is quite simply how to mobilize enough people.
The survival of an authoritarian regime depends highly on its ability effectively to suppress other groups in society or to incorporate them into its own alliances. Dictators who understand when a group should be suppressed and when it should be incorporated within the regime will stay in power longer than dictators who either blindly suppress all groups or undermine their own position by bringing too many groups into the regime.
This is where elections are important. Elections reveal information about potential opponents and challengers who are particularly strong, and accordingly where a dictator should concentrate his resources. Similarly, an election reveals information about the effectiveness of the dictator’s own organization. A key problem for a dictator is that he may quickly find himself in a situation where he no longer receives reliable information from his underlings. If a dictator has asked to get 95 per cent of the votes in a particular constituency but only gets 78 per cent, he will know that his local apparatus in that area is less effective than it claims to be. Such information is invaluable for any leader.
Oh - "Trump's only being rough because they're rioters! Trump and the police are perfectly justified!" Uhhhhh - Fuck you. This is a cop showing bias to Proud Boys. (Remember this from two paragraphs ago?? "or to incorporate them into its own alliances. Dictators...") Fucking hell - we're one step away from having gas chambers. Get your fucking head out of your ass. Now, do I need to start talking about our Healthcare system? What about the fact that we have a serious incarceration problem because America has made slavery legal? How about our bullshit tax system? The wealthy got a tax break in the Covid bill, but those rich fucks were already not paying taxes to the tune of 45.7 billion between 2014 - 2016. After the botched attempt at protecting the country from a virus that caused 40 million to become unemployed, while citizens get charged with terrorism and politicians lie about infecting colleagues; after politicians took the virus seriously enough to commit insider trading but not enough to protect the public. How fucked up is it that our government spams us with so much fucking bullshit - that we think our stimulus checks are JUNK MAIL? Oh yeah - it's "just Trump" or "just the police". The naivety in the air right now is fucking deafening.
"VoTe SoMeOnE nEw In." - yeah.. First - Can I just ask you why you think that solving the issue of a broken system is to continue to use it? Just curious. (I legitimately want your opinions on that one.) I really think we should scrap the fucking system as it is, personally I love the idea of the Venus Project going worldwide. Since that is arguably not something I will see in my lifetime.. Think about this: Our constitution was written before we had indoor plumbing or modern electricity. Rewrite that shit! Start fucking over! You adapt (evolve!) or you go extinct. Too much has changed for that shit to even be applicable anymore in most situations - We just slapped a bunch of sticky notes on that bitch and called it a legal system!! The fuck is wrong with you?!? Additionally, I think we should remove the status of "President" and instead have an appointed "speaker for the nation". All he does is speak on behalf of a panel of scientists, educators and other experts of many fields (all of which have their own panels for specific areas of expertise within that field), and the elected officials that work within the legal system simply go to the aforementioned panel and say "Hey, this is the problem - this is our proposed solution." Then the panel decides based on years of fucking study and expertise how to best go about solving the fucking issues using their fucking brains. Then the speaker just tells the people. No more political figures writing laws in fields they know absolutely nothing about. This is fucking bullshit and all of you fucking know it.
For arguments sake... here's a start.
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Part Three: We need a new "favorite" candidate.
Trump. Biden. Jorgensen. Those are the three that we are currently left with that I'm aware of, and frankly I haven't really heard shit about Jorgensen. People keep saying how you should vote Biden, because we need to "PlAy ThE gAmE" in order to remove Trump, yadda-yadda blah-blah-blah. Trump obviously has to fucking go. But Biden is one of the fucking reasons that these racial and law enforcement issues are so bad in the first place. (VP for Clinton when the "Tough on Crime" bills were passed. Advocated to Clinton that they should be harsher.) Now he's sitting here going to protests and advocating for change in things that he helped put in place in the first place. He's just another two-faced, lying, racist sack of shit, who also has a thing for touching fucking kids. Stop fucking thinking that the lesser of two evils is reason to elect a fucking piece of shit. Just because he's less of a piece of shit doesn't mean he's going to fix or do anything you fucking want. He can't even remember when he's on fucking TV, or when the fuck he was VP of our country - why do you expect him to remember these protests next month? You're trying to elect a racist, two-faced, pedophile with dementia - because he's better than Trump. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT SAY ABOUT THE PEOPLE IN POWER IN OUR COUNTRY?!? Oh! Oh! This racist will help us end racism! Pick him!
Were you dropped on your head after eating lead paint chips as a baby? Because what the fuck is wrong with you and the way you think??
As a country, we need someone completely new that isn't steeped in two-faced bullshit, and isn't a fucking TV personality and failed "entrepreneur". I don't know too much about Jo Jorgensen to be honest, but she seems far better than Biden and Trump, and if you couldn't get behind Bernie then you could probably get behind her. She's in favor of free-market healthcare (eh, better than single payer - not as good as universal publicly funded healthcare IMO, but whatever), she says she "supports individual liberties" and "shrinking the government" - which is also good. The thing is, I haven't been able to dig up things that she's done within her political positions during her career except for when she ran for other offices - so I can't tell if she's a two-faced liar or not. BUT - she's been maintaining her position that the government should have far less power. So at least her campaign positions are consistent - win or lose. On top of that, she received a BS in psychology at Baylor Uni in 79', followed by a Master's in Administration from Southwest Methodist Uni in 80', and in 02' she received a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Clemson Uni. She's pretty god damn smart and good at understanding how people think and why they do what they do. She's a pretty solid fucking choice in comparison to the other two fucking two-face bigots.
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Part Four: The world is watching, and will react accordingly.
I don't really need to elaborate too much on the first part, this bullshit is live across the globe. The vast majority of people are sitting at home, waiting out this virus. Guess what? The world's eyes were already on us when our Covid death toll was reaching 100,000. Then as they were watching our country erupted into chaos.
Trump has declared war on the American people. He has labeled an organization (whether you believe it exists or not is besides the question) as a terrorist organization. Even though he has no power to do so the fucking FBI said that he has no fucking proof to even say that. Slap a fancy name on something, call it "terror" and go to fucking war. That's what this country has always done, which is the biggest fucking issue right now. Do you know how many fucking proxy wars America has played a role in? Do you understand how many places we've destabilized and exploited? We need this shit to fucking STOP - and as the (arguably) most powerful nation on the face of the fucking earth, it's up to us to hold those within our borders responsible for their atrocities both domestically and abroad. The violence needs to END - as does the hypocrisy and corruption. If we can manage to do it here, maybe we can inspire (not force) other countries to do the same.
This is it. This is what happens in late-stage capitalism when the system gets repeatedly exploited over and over again. We either ensure that we hit fucking rock bottom first before we build this back up by stripping everyone from their positions that have been abusing them and getting away with hurting the american people, or we pretend like we're not trying to build a house on fucking sand without any sort of solid foundation; because worst case scenario? If the rest of the world sees America fall into something that by definition is a fascist dictatorship - then they will take that shit seriously. How could they afford not to??
The world has seen violations of the Geneva convention, he's using violence and curfews to try and silence protesters saying he "Didn't know they were there", we have seen Trump break fucking laws and start to remove political opponents very quickly. This is a textbook takeover - and we have to stop it.
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Conclusion: Get your heads out of your asses, fuck you if you aren't in favor of massive reform, and have a good fucking day! #BLACKLIVESMATTER
Edit: thank you for all the kind words and discussions! If you feel this should be read by more people please spread it - crosspost and linking in comments (don't just take my words as your own please). People are saying I should run for office... idk about all that, but if this post is enough for people to say that, then maybe this does need to be read by more people.