Same Planet, Different Universes

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This is some cray cray shit. First of all, from Spook Magazine:

Meet Black Brunch

In the wake of the non-indictment of the police officers responsible for the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, emergency actions have arisen across the States to draw attention to what is understood as a war on Black Americans. One such response is Black Brunch, led by a group of young Black folks who are claiming space around the city of Oakland to draw attention to the crimes against their communities.

I met up with two young activists involved in the Black Brunch actions, Wazi Maret Davis, a graduate student and violence prevention educator, and Brianna Gibson, a paralegal at the Supreme Court in San Francisco.

Wazi scooped me up from out of the rain to take me to an upscale Southern food restaurant. The restaurant, where we drank whiskey and ate mac and cheese that was surely cooked in bacon dripping, is “fancy,” she told me, “but not bourgeois.” The distinction is marginal, but a significant one for Black Brunch, which has staged actions that involved walking into white neighbourhoods to disrupt the sacred bourgeois institution of brunch.

SPOOK: So can you explain, what exactly is Black Brunch?

Wazi: Black Brunch is a tactic for direct action. It’s not an organisation, it’s not a group. Black Brunch is a specific tactic for Black organisers who want to take out some kind of direct action.

So what’s the methodology?

Wazi: Black Brunch is saying no business as usual. Every day, Black people are murdered by police, and millions of other things, too. We’re not going to let people sit around and pretend this isn’t happening. One part of the violence that Black folks face is about simply being able to exist and be. We can’t just exist and be in public space because we’re thought of as threatening.

We were thinking a lot about historical tactics like the sit-ins that Martin Luther King used to do. We decided that we’d go into communities where people do not necessarily think about our pain, and take up space there. Our first action was going into the Rockridge neighbourhood, which is a predominantly white, pretty wealthy area. Not very inclusive to a lot of Black folks and people of colour.

We marched in this area, and we went into different establishments: restaurants, brunch spots, where people would be carrying on their usual business, and we went to interrupt that. In those particular communities where they’re surrounded by money, or they’re surrounded by white folks, they don’t have to engage with what’s going on in Black communities, and they can easily disassociate from that and pretend it’s not happening. So we say, no. We’re going to take up space in your community, let you know what’s happening outside this. We exist, and we’re here.

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There is a whole bunch more where that came from.

I don’t know why anybody would feel threatened by a group of black people who take over a restaurant and start yelling and chanting. Wazi is right about one thing though – what they are doing is a tactic. More specifically, it’s a disruptive tactic.

Modern Leftists are really big on tactics, but they lack any coherent strategy and their goals are vague or non-existent. This latest bunch of protests is like Occupy Wall Street for black people. They go out and enthusiastically protest but accomplish nothing except annoying and disrupting the lives of other people.

But it feels good! And we all know that feelings are important.

This next one comes from Ta-nehisi Coates, so you know what the theme will be:

Why the NYPD Turned Its Back on the City

On Sunday, a relatively large group of New York police officers, sworn to protect and serve the public, turned their back on the public’s elected executive, Mayor Bill de Blasio:

The show of disrespect came outside the funeral home where Officer Wenjian Liu was remembered as an incarnation of the American dream: a man who had immigrated at age 12 and devoted himself to helping others in his adopted country. The gesture, among officers watching the mayor’s speech on a screen, added to tensions between the mayor and rank-and-file police even as he sought to quiet them.

This particular protest came after Commissioner William Bratton asked them not to stage a repeat of Officer Rafael Ramos’s funeral. This request included the telling caveat, “I issue no mandates, and I make no threats of discipline, but I remind you that when you don the uniform of this department, you are bound by the tradition, honor and decency that go with it.”

[…]

Or is there something more? Forgive me. I have not yet fully worked this all out. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the prisoners headed to the Soviet Gulag as waves flowing underground. These waves “provided sewage disposal for the life flowering on the surface.” I understand this to mean that the gulag was not just mindless evil—was not just incomprehensible insanity—but served some sort of productive and knowable purpose.

Could it be that believing our police to be constantly under fire is not mysterious—that it serves some productive function, that society actually derives something from its peace officers engaged in forever war? And can we say that the function of the war here at home is not simply a response to violent crime (which has plunged) but to some other need? And knowing that identity is not simply defined by what we are, but what we are not, can it be that our police help give us identity, by branding one class of people as miscreants, outsiders, and thugs, and thus establishing some other class as upstanding, as citizens, as Americans? Does the feeling of being besieged serve some actual purpose?

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Didja catch that? Coates was being sneaky – he invoked the race card without ever using the “R” word. But what he really meant was this:

And knowing that identity is not simply defined by what we are, but what we are not, can it be that our police help give us identity, by branding one RACE of people as miscreants, outsiders, and thugs, and thus establishing some other RACE as upstanding, as citizens, as Americans?

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The hive-mind of the Left is collectively butthurt by the refusal of the NYPD to demonstrate loyalty and obedience to the Mayor of New York City. Of course they would treat as heroes any cops who refused to obey orders and break up an illegal protest. Just like they treated as heroes the few military members who violated their oaths, disobeyed orders and refused to serve in Iraq.

Can a hive-mind go collectively insane?

Hackers have taken down a conservative website over THIS “BLACKS ONLY” manual for ‘Black Brunch’ protests!

When hackers attack a website because they’re angry about information being spread, you can bet we won’t back down. That’s exactly what happened to our friends at WeaselZippers.us when their incontinent writer @DefendWallSt discovered and published a manual for the stupid “black brunch” protests this weekend.

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Years ago I was at a friend’s house for a small get-together when her kid started acting up. Mom was down to her last nerve and he was getting on it. I knew he was gonna get a beating. The other guests knew he was gonna get a beating. Mom knew it too but she was trying to avoid it or hoping to at least wait until all of us guests had left.

The only person in the house who was shocked and surprised when that kid got his ass beat was the kid. Everybody else saw it coming a long way off.

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ATTN WHITE Man, I have no guilt disturbing your brunch. Its YOU that has no right to be here. #blackbrunchnyc pic.twitter.com/mFRq5Q9hbe

— Camila ibanez (@QuePasaApaza) January 4, 2015

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