This post is a rambly attempt to sort my thoughts. It's a rough draft. Be prepared for a mess. Maybe there's some wheat among the chaff though. A meme dump will follow at the end.
The American left/right divide is magnified whenever there is any form of protest. At the time of this post, there are numerous protests across the country over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
These protests are for a valid cause.
My disagreement only relates to some of the tactics some of the protesters are employing. Rioting is counterproductive and destructive. We need solutions that are constructive. There are some working toward the proper ends. However, the 'right wing' seems to lean toward supporting the police no matter what abuses are committed.
I find this particularly strange when only a few weeks ago, the protests against the COVID-19 lockdown were trumpeted as right-wing hysteria, and those protests were NOT OK. We were told these armed nutjobs were going to shoot up the city before unleashing a new wave of disease.
Neither the murder spree nor the outbreak happened.
Look back another few months to the protests in Virginia where armed men and women descended on the capitol to protest proposed anti-gun legislation. No one was killed. Heck, they probably left less litter than there was when they arrived.
Again, no bloodshed. No murder spree.
Invariably, the political slant of the protesters, not their actions or their arguments, is used to condemn or applaud their movement. Remember the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge? The only people doing any killing were government goons, but the protesters were universally depicted as a menace to society in the mainstream media. LaVoy Finicum was ambushed and executed in cold blood. The 'patriot movement' didn't make reprisals.
The result? Nothing. Nada.
No more effect than the decades of protests against police brutality. No more effect than the Occupy Wall Street movement, either.
Protesting is easy. Make a sign. Shout. Feel the catharsis of doing something.
But what really gets done? Nothing. The State continues to grow like a cancer. More laws. More taxes. More regulations. And people act as if it's all somehow for our benefit, despite all these abuses that spark protests.
Protests don't work. Elections built the mess we face today. Revolutions simply install new tyrants. What we need is disobedience. They don't care how much you shout or how many signs you wave if you pay your taxes and submit to their laws in the end.
What we need is a way to starve the State. We can starve it financially by working in the gray market. The underground economy lets us build something better within the rotting corpse of the status quo. Encryption, cryptocurrencies, and other internet tools let us bypass the command economy and censored media. And we do need to weigh the risk of open conflict when the State seeks us out, because they cannot abide us living free in spite of their rules.
Protest is good. Meaningful action is better.
If you work as an enforcer for the government, know that you will be ordered to attack the disobedient. Your job is to rob us, kidnap us, and kill us if we resist. Not because we have harmed others, but because we object to being harmed. Are you eager to do harm? If we resist, are you willing to face the risk of real harm to yourself as you enact the wishes of others who send you as their puppets? Are you sure you want to go into harm's way for them?
Maybe so. You have never cleaned up the mess of corrupt cops in your midst. You have never refused to enforce unjust laws. You have never refused to disobey orders. Alcohol prohibition, immigration laws, drug prohibition, the patchwork mess of firearm rights infringements, license/permit mandates, tax laws, and every other governmental infringement on individual liberty ends the instant you refuse to enforce any of them.
Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem? Your move.
And now, the meme dump. Sources unknown. Most via Facebook.
There is a really big problem.
We actually do not know the terrain. Our map is wrong.
The entire left-right paradigm is bogus.
It is closer to say that most people fall into three camps based on their core value.
So, although freedom loving people are usually lumped in on the right,
they are not really part of the conservatives.
Both the conservatives and the left (socialists) want the police, because they need the police for their ends.
Further, unfortunately, there is also a fourth group. The oligarchs.
They want power, and the police belong to them. They are the pointy end of the spear that is used to make people do things.
In the end, we are not dealing with a group that is there to protect the people, but we have 2/3s of the people believing so, and needing to believe so else their world crumbles.
People tend to forget that politics is a compass with two axes, not a sliding scale on only one. Furthermore, there are so many beliefs that are not tied to socio-economic orientation that trying to categorise people in such a way is absurd. I'm not the first person to do so (in fact I reference few others), but I've dissected this at length already:
https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/another-point-about-false-dichotomies-reality-denial-knows-no-ideological-bounds/
Finally, even my five-thousand-word travesty here barely scratches the surface. Of course, if you want to see some real hypocrisy, spend some time on the blog that I was originally responding to. I think mine is the only dissenting voice in that blasted echo chamber.
Edit: to anyone who actually checked out that article that I linked to, I'd like to know where you think you fall on that satirical little chart that I came up with.
Here in North Carolina our governor/dictator marched with protesters on the sidewalk in the same spot where he had his cops arrest a young mother peacefully protesting his unconstitutional executive orders destroying her business. In my city of Greensboro, birthplace of the sit-in movement, pastors (including black pastors) were arrested for praying 6 feet apart on private property with owner's permission. Orwellian, communist, whatever you want to call it.
I call it authoritarian. Flavor is irrelevant when it comes to poison.
Yup, violence against people and property in this context is almost always counterproductive. It drives people away from the cause, confuses the issue, and usually ends up hurting people not at fault for the issue being protested on.
Not only that, but trying to out-do the government and State on violence is like trying to beat Keith Richard's record for drug use... highly likely you will not only fail, but will also not survive the attempt. 😉
Ah yes, it's never as simple as the media try to portray.