I don't have any close friends in Los Angeles who can give me a more eyewitness account of what is happening with the protests, riots and insurrection (?) there, so have to go on the images and information from the media. However, from the looks of things, it doesn't actually look like that many people are involved, yet the police are "overwhelmed" and the military has been sent in to help... inflame things further.
My take away from all of this is:
States are fragile.
Not just the United States of America, but all states are fragile. Because if a city police force is overrun by what is a very small part of the entire population to the point that the military is brought in - what happens if this starts in all major cities, and smaller cities? Back in 1992 there were the LA riots that took place, but that was "localised" because of the event that led to it. Also, there was no internet then to spread the word and wind up the masses like there is today.
This group is again a sub-group of the population, but a larger, more diverse group, spread across the country. This makes it more "contagious" than past protests, and it is going to benefit from a changed culture where people will join a "cause" at the drop of a hat, without much thought and a nihilistic attitude that tends toward violence. Not only this, it is being fuelled by extremely polarized politics that are looking to gain more control through the chaos.
No one is talking about the Trump v Musk fight now, are they?
Convenient.
And as said, this is in the US at the moment, but the entire global societal shift has created a tinderbox waiting for a spark in pretty much every country on earth. Except for possibly North Korea. And, while currently this particular protest is concerning a sub-group, I don't believe it is going to take much more economic disparity and hardship for larger, and increasingly more diverse and more "normal" protests to start. And if that happens, what can a state do - start shooting its citizens?
Yes.
Yesterday I wrote an article on "how to destroy the next generations" and if you read through the suggested list of methods and acknowledge that they are all in play in society now and have been pushed for decades - where we are today is an inevitable outcome. And where we are headed tomorrow is not going to be any better. Because to be in a better position, the entire world needs to change tact, including the way the entire economy works.
It isn't about learning from the past (other than not repeating it), because all that does is make us use a broken template of what didn't work to create an assumption of what should work - which tends to be the opposite to the extreme. What needs to happen is a fundamental shift, meaning that no creating an entirely new method of approaching this life for humanity.
But people aren't interested.
Instead they will tether themselves to one side of the argument or another, without putting the thought in to realise that not only are both sides wrong, the entire setup is a false dichotomy that is used to divide and control them. But, they are too smart to be fooled by this, aren't they? They know their side is better than the other.
Which murderer is better, the one who killed ten people, or the one who killed eleven?
This world is being absolutely torn apart, because people are unwilling to behave well. This goes for all people from all groups. Other than young children, there are no innocents in this. We all are part of the ecosystem in some way, and we all could make life better, but it would mean being better ourselves.
Are you going to be better?
Don't lie to yourself - it is pathetic.
Stop buying into the shit being dealt from all sides of the political spectrum, and start fucking thinking and acting for yourself. Start doing what you believe is right, all the fucking time. Whether you are raising your kids, or talking to the barista who got your coffee order wrong.
DO THE RIGHT FUCKING THING.
The majority of people won't though, will they? So, we are going to live in an increasingly violent world where people are reactive based on their emotions, that are triggered by lower and lower level "harms" and the subsequent behaviours will be worse. The average person is moving backward along the evolutionary scale, and acting on instinct alone. But unlike the instinct of an animal, it is the flawed instinct of a preconditioned human, with a fantasy world of opinions driven mostly by imaginary fears.
Can't blame an animal acting on its nature.
Is it the same for a human who has chosen a nature of ignorance?
They still made a choice.
The governments of the world should be paying close attention to what is happening in LA at the moment, because it is going to be an increasingly common occurrence in most countries in the not too distant future, and it is going to be engineered to happen more and more by those who can benefit from the chaos. Who'd have thought we'd get the world to a point where civil war becomes good for business?
Yet here we almost are.
And it is just the beginning.
Taraz
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Check out twitch or tik tok for live streams if you want first hand accounts. Main stream media is doing it's thing on both sides. I like seeing the raw footage
Twitch is a good idea, Cheers! -
I don't do TikTok :)
Twitch is very good I watch a few hours and they actually were at the waymo car burnings that were on MSM and it was not really that crazy like the news made it seem. I have been recommending Tik Tok more and more lately it's the superior app TBH.
I just stay away from as much media as I can. I only geta trickle of news per day also, because most is irrelevant and nonsense.
I remember seeing shots of a protest in the media that made it look like there were thousands. A shot from a window of the "crowd" showed a handful of a couple dozen.
Yes they need to get views so it's miss leading at best
My daughter in law returned the day before everything kicked off in LA, landed in London and safe and sound.
I think you’re spot on with this synopsis. The unrest is never going to be contained within LA. In the days to come these problems will spring up everywhere.
Are you in London yourself? I hear that crime has increased there too among the younger folk. I guess it is a trend everywhere and will get worse, as communities fall further apart.
Glad that your family are safe.
I don’t live in London, we’re close to Reading that’s 35 miles from the city. Sadly our nearby town has as bad record this past decade. There was a knife attack a few years ago in its main park, a homophonic one and more than one person lost their lives. Much like London it has seen a wave of knife crime in some housing estates. Driven by drugs, low income and a lot of gang culture.
We often see young people travelling around on high powered electric bikes, masked and just looking so suspicious it’s unreal. Here in the UK there is a drug network known as “county lines”, mainly operated by kids who’ve been sucked into this life by shady adults exploiting them, threatening them.
We were once walking through the main shopping mall in Reading which is very smart, clean and a decent place to go for stuff when a young masked (scarf across his face) walked past us at speed on his phone. We overhead him say, “Are you mobilised? Do you have your knife. Don’t be scary to use it. “
We watched him vanish around a corner. Should we notify the police? We just didn’t know.
Society has fallen apart at an alarming rate.
I have heard from friends it is pretty "stabby" lately. The same is happening all over the world too. Australia has a lot of knife crime too - for the same reasons. People just can't control themselves and be even half decent humans.
Never heard of county lines. Sounds like something out of a movie.
Totally off-topic:
Colleagues have talked about a bar in Reading called "The Purple Turtle". It was near the Reading office for a company I worked at.
Sorry to hear these problems are on the rise in Australia. County lines, there was a film and have just found it here - County Lines https://g.co/kgs/fr7YhWf
I do know of the Purple Turtle, yep it’s down Gun Street (ironically) https://www.purpleturtlebar.com/ The Purple Turtle
Have never been though but our kids have.
It's happening in France as we speak. Your piece is a good analysis in my opinion
So many factors come into play to make it all worse - but we don't seem to do a single thing to make it better.
It may be a small thing, yet feeling so fortunate in the abundance in my Boomer Life, my habit is to now tip at 20% with few exceptions.
Spot on man. The distractions are so obvious it's painful, every time there's real corruption or power grabs happening, suddenly there's a new crisis dominating the news cycle. People are waking up to how manufactured this all is.
Not enough, and not fast enough. But, when they awake, they are going to react emotionally and uncontrollably. More pain coming.
And also more drama coming up in the future, hope it doesn't get too messy
To be a bit funny, the remedy is the Men in Black, a total brain wipe with the Neuralyser and that's it. heh, heh, heh.
They can do it already, but not in a flash like in Men in Black - it takes time. They call it social media.
I don't think the police claimed to be overwhelmed at all. They had it all under control. Orange man is trying to turn it into something else and stuck his nose in the middle of it.
He wants to declare Martial Law so badly...
I know. I can't understand how people are so upset about this but they think Jan 6th wasn't a big deal.
A difficult situation that affects not only the United States, but the world.
The sad thing about it all is that even the American people themselves have not fully grasped the seriousness of this situation.
What do you think it would take for people to grasp the seriousness?
There are many factors to analyze.
Many people live alienated from their daily routines; others simply ignore the issue because they choose to live selfishly according to the comfort of their lifestyles; others are so poor that they can't even access real information; others are incapable of thinking for themselves and seeking out verified information from both sides in order to process it and arrive at a solid, approximate opinion about what's happening. In short, the issue is complex.
Most people will only do something, when they are in enough pain.
That's exactly what happens. Many only take a position when they are personally affected, while sadly ignoring the reality of others.
I completely agree, a state's fragility doesn’t only show in major events but also in its limited ability to handle rising public anger especially when it's amplified by some digital tools.
It seems as if some leaders of today are capitalizing on chaos rather than seeking right solutions, which only deepens societal divide or polarizing.
I remember when immigrants were rioting in Paris. The streets looked sad, shops were broken into and cars were burned out. And the approaches to the central areas were blocked with concrete blocks.
The individual awareness contributes considerably to the configuration of the collective awareness which, in turn, serves as the operating system on which the fundamental pillars of the State are based. Being the citizens co-participants of the social, cultural, political and economic reality that has been built and consolidated through legendary struggles for the longed freedom and universal justice; sealed in a social pact that is often broken for a myriad of reasons that always find justification. For this and many other reasons, the holder and executor of power resorts to the theory of legitimate monopolistic violence of the State, being a mechanism of desperation that in supra-democratic nations and not so practicing democracy is implemented as part of the system of social tax control.
All war is always good for business - at least the big business. It destroys small businesses.
Two quotes, same questions - what is behaving well and the right thing? If our hypothesis is that there are natural laws (most of them repeated in most religions/spiritual paths as described in "The Abolition of Man"), we can easily derive something from that.
But most people aren't neither religious nor spiritual anymore. Some claim to be, of which a lot just use it as a label for an inherited habit. As no spiritual "truth" is there to be referred to, it's the game of Sophists - arguing for the sake of arguments, not to seek the truth. We can argue for days about what is "The Right thing to do" - but the answer will depend on many things in our individual lives, influences by the usual suspects: culture, society, values.
Most people these days are taught that being a superficial machine for the system is the right thing. Which is true - it is the right thing to maintain the system, which then maintains society as it is.
I agree that a fundamental shift is needed. But that won't be comfortable. It takes more than becoming enlightened and exchanging platitudes about work-life-balance. And in the spirit of democracy - that's not what the majority believes to want.