Back to your bunker, sweaty boy
We will never surrender!
Hundreds of protesters marched into Seattle’s City Hall late Tuesday, calling for Durkan to step down after police continued to use chemical irritants to disperse crowds — despite the mayor’s 30-day ban on tear gas that she announced Friday.
Led by city council member Kshama Sawant, the protesters peacefully marched from Capitol Hill to City Hall, where Sawant allowed the protesters inside the building, CNN’s affiliate KOMO reported. Protesters left the building around 10:30 p.m. local time, and Seattle police did not report any arrests.
Durkan’s office responded late Tuesday in a statement to KOMO, saying the mayor “will not be distracted from the critical work that needs to be done at a moment that Seattle is facing its most challenging time in its history.
Well, its recent history. I think it’s had some pretty challenging times in less recent history, what with world wars and fires and earthquakes and general strikes.
“As the person who originally investigated the Seattle Police Department for the unconstitutional use of force, Mayor Durkan believes that SPD can lead the nation on continued reforms and accountability, but knows this week has eroded trust at a time when trust is most crucial,” the statement read.
Protesters have also camped out and occupied the area outside Seattle police’s East Precinct building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, which protesters are now calling the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
Contrary to online rumors, Seattle officials say they have no indication that the occupied area is being coordinated by left-wing activist groups under the umbrella of Antifa.
Capitol Hill is the hipster neighborhood in Seattle. Having an occupied area around the closed police precinct there does not equal a takeover of the whole city, to put it mildly. Trump’s frothing is completely absurd.
Updating to add: CNN reports that Assistant Police Chief Deanna Nollette says police had received reports that protesters allegedly set up barricades, “with some armed individuals running them as checkpoints into the neighborhood.” That’s four levels of meta – reports, says, received reports, allegedly, so make of that what you will. The right-wing gun-brandishers do it where there are cameras, proudly, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t barricades and armed individuals in Capitol Hill.
I often try to imagine how people’s rhetoric would change if political affiliations were reversed. In this case, I imagine how people would talk about armed right-wing protesters occupying a six-block area of an important American city, preventing police and other government officials from entering.
I’m sure the word “militia” wouldn’t be used. I’m sure everyone on the left would be totally A-Okay with it, because the protesters would just be expressing their despair and anger toward a government and society they believed to have it out for them. And when they issued demands to abolish the police, I’m sure that left-wingers would be saying not to worry, because all that means is to reform the police. /s
Hang on though.
Are the left-wing protesters here in fact armed? I haven’t seen any reporting that said so (but I haven’t looked far, yet – there’s a lot going on today).
Is there any left-wing equivalent of those guys carrying assault rifles into the Michigan legislature? Standing on the gallery above the legislators, with their guns, staring down at them?
Ok, reading the CNN link you provided.
No, I’m not keen on that.
And get the…police. Hmm.
Point made. I didn’t realize some of them were armed.
There are some reports that they’re armed. (https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-protests-armed-guards-local-businesses-extortion , https://komonews.com/news/local/seattles-chaz-movement-stretches-into-third-day , others) Whether those reports are true, I can’t verify, because I’m in Missouri.
The left-wing equivalent of the guys with assault rifles would, I suppose, be armed “communists” or “anarchists”. After all, true Leftism’s relationship to guns is something like “arm the proletariat”. For good or ill, America’s Left has hitched itself to what used to be the traditionally Rightist ideal of limiting the possession of arms to the government. So what we usually get is Antifa bashing college professors’ heads with lampposts and bike locks.
Yeah, the qualified nature of the reporting on this whole thing (reports say, we have heard, etc.) is genuinely troubling. It doesn’t help that our news media are so god-damned politically polarized that journalism often becomes little more than propaganda for your team.
We have plenty of highly motivated right-wing reporting here, especially from Fox and the Sinclair-owned KOMO. I’m confident they’re up there searching for the armed barricade-guarders as we speak.
Well Redneck Revolution was a thing though they don’t seem to be active these days… they style themselves after the labor movement of the Coal Wars and are *very* anti-capitalist and pro-2nd amendment. They got censured in connection with the Charlottesville events alongside the Nazis.
Omari Salisbury has been live streaming from the area since the start of the protests, and is a good source for breaking news, and pretty objective reporting. He’s had access not just to the protesters, but also to the police, including Chief Best. He was just now interviewed on NPR affiliate station KUOW, on their local show “The Record.” He reported that the night the police barricades were taken down, the protesters put up their own, due to a credible threat that members of the group Proud Boys would come up to the area. He said that there were a number of armed persons in the area that night, due to that threat – Black persons, that is. Today, he again interviewed Chief Best, who said that the police would like to reclaim the precinct at 12th and Pine, but that there is no timeline at the moment. He has interviewed business owners in the CHAZ, who did not confirm the extortion rumors.
Fox and KOMO are not unbiased sources, to say the least.
Of course, and therein lies the problem with having so many partisan, untrustworthy sources. We have to sort out what to believe and what not to, knowing that different sources have different biases. Sometimes the biases of sources we generally trust lead to nonsense (e.g., liberal media and trans issues), while the biases of sources we generally distrust allow the truth to seep through (e.g., conservative media and trans issues).
All this is just to say that our media’s dereliction of integrity has left us in the epistemically precarious position of being forced to choose our truth. And that’s bad, because it is trivially easy to engage in motivated reasoning, to go looking for reasons to believe stories that fit our existing paradigms, or for reasons to disbelieve those that don’t. For instance:
Motivated response: I’d not expect them to, much as I wouldn’t expect a woman to confirm that her husband beats her with him standing nearby.
I miss the days when the news helped give us a shared reality, rather than the silently, secretly siloed interfaces we have to deal with now.
My husband says he’s been hearing him referred to as “bunker bitch”. Sure. Have to work in the misogyny by implying he’s a woman for hiding in the bunker. Bunker boy is fine; it puts him in the category of immature and irresponsible male person. Bunker bitch suggests something totally different…and ugly to women. I think my husband was stunned by my outburst.
Yep. Worst insult there is: like a woman.