Yeah like, does it kinda suck that people are like that where they will only have empathy for a situation when there's video of it right in front of their faces? Yeah but I think humans are just like that. We didn't evolve to have global news constantly fed into our brains in real time.
So be inclusive for people for whom this is an awakening. Their privilege to be asleep this long might be galling to you, because you never got that privilege. But getting mad at them, blaming them for that slumber, will not turn them into allies and will not create solidarity.
Copaganda is real. Mainstream media lionizes police and unless you are someone with lived experience of police brutality and cruelty, the odds are straight up against you to realize how bad police always have been, and how bad they are now. The media, the government, all of it is actively lying.
I think people for whom police brutality and state violence is and always has been a part of their lived experience can forget how easy it is for people who do not have that lived experience to ignore, downplay, or outright deny that sort of thing.
That society indoctrinates them that way.
Rodney King wasn't the first Black man brutalized by police, but the footage of his beating was so shocking to people who otherwise were able to live in a bubble of whether or not these things were real because it was undeniable. Even some people who doubted police brutality before couldn't anymore
Renee Good is becoming a flashpoint not just because she's a white woman or her killing was especially unjustified. It's how demonstrable it is. How there's footage, from multiple angles, showing how she was murdered unjustifiably. That's what makes this different, in a real way, to people.
To expand on the Renee Good/George Floyd comparison, the reason why George Floyd became a flashpoint and not all the Black people killed before (or contemporaneously) to him was footage. We didn't have footage of Breonna Taylor being murdered by cops. We did have footage of George Floyd being killed
So if you find yourself angry at Hank or your mom or your co-worker for only NOW coming to the conclusion that things are bad, how about you instead direct that anger at the systems and institutions that blinded them that way until now. Because getting mad at them, who are now coming around? Useless
It has been, up until recently, very easy for a white cis het man from the Midwest to be a liberal largely blind to the worst parts of his own country. And Hank is more aware than most of his clade; he's extremely online, has left-wing friends, etc. and even he has had to overcome all of this.
It's always been bad, but it's delusion to behave as if it's not WORSE now. It is. It's so bad that even liberals who have grown up being indoctrinated by copaganda their whole lives are taking notice. Instead of chiding them for being late to the party, show them how they can help.
Yes, American cops have always terrorized minorities. Yes, they've always been a gang with badges. But the US has not previously had masked, anonymous thugs snatching people off American streets and putting them in secret prisons, extraditing them out of the country despite court orders.
When George Floyd was murdered, yes we had right-wing pundits immediately victim-blaming him, but the official stance of the police and the government was "We don't know all the facts, we will do an investigation".
With Renee Good, you had the VP of the US that day publicly calling her a terrorist.
When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, people knew who Chauvin was *immediately*. He was not masked. His identity was not secret. The police did not refuse to identify him. It did not require internet sleuths to figure out his identity. We knew who he was.
America has not, in fact, "always been like this". Yes, cops have always been bastards. Yes, cops have always murdered people, minorities especially, to little to no accountability. But if you don't think things are materially different now, you're wrong and I'll give examples.
I've seen a lot of leftists get very mad about this post, ranging from "oh you're just noticing NOW?" to the far worse take, which is "America has always been like this."
And I'm going to get into why this is both unhelpful and like, objectively false as a response to have to this sort of thing.
To heal our divided nation I propose splitting Game of the Year awards into two categories:
- Game of the Year That’s 3D and You Use a Sword and/or Gun to Explode a Guy
- Game of the Year That’s Some Gay Bullshit Indie Meditation on Grief or Whatever
i owe so many video game designers an apology
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Dime and Nickel
recession indicator
I've been laid off from Polygon. I'm devastated but not surprised. I don't know what's next, but if you know of a remote writing gig in any industry, I'm all ears.
He decided to decorate the tree with one of his own toys
Every year with this little orange goblin
When the catnip hits
I've been posting a lot of Penny on here, but I have two other cats: Dime (to the right) and Nickel (bottom). I should post more of them too .
