omgtehblackbloc

Every RPG rulebook I've ever read has a preface or afterword where they say something to the effect of "These rules aren't set in stone, this is your game! If a roll will take the story in an unsatisfying direction, or a rule is getting in the way of your players' enjoyment, throw it out!"

In fact, that might be a better litmus test for what distinguishes a role playing game from other kinds of games: do the rules direct you to break the rules whenever it would be more fun?

People need actual homes. Even if it's a modest efficiency apartment, we all need a place we can call our own - where we can keep our stuff, manage it how we choose, be alone or with only the people we chose, feel safe, and be assured that in the future all of that will still be true.

There's plenty of housing around - it's one of the big things our economy produces. It's not that hard or expensive to just provide homeless people with the same housing everyone else has. There's no reason to come up with elaborate or convoluted plans for "how to handle the homeless problem" when the answer is facepalm straightforward.

If you tweet to your enemy "I'm gonna toss a molotov through your window while you sleep, so that you and your family are cooked alive", they might be legitimately scared. Because that threat is not obviously imaginary. It could feasibly happen, and it is exactly the kind of thing that has been done by hate groups before.

So a threat only becomes a Threat when, in context, it's sufficiently plausible.

That context is key. The plausibility of a threat changes based on who makes the threat, and whom they threaten. If a misogynistic troll on the internet says that he's going to rape me (a man), I can pretty easily laugh it off. I feel safe in assuming the troll is a hetero-male, and therefore probably has little interest in actually raping me, and besides there's relatively little precedent for guys like me being stalked and raped by weirdos.

If the troll says the same thing to a woman, it's interpreted differently. Very many women are raped in our society, it is a constant real fear. And it's not at all unbelievable that a weirdo might seek to stalk and rape a woman he's become obsessed with. Rare, sure. But real enough to be scary.

Point being, yes both men and women are threatened with rape. But while to men it's obviously just an especially colorful way of expressing hatred, to women it can constitute a real and serious threat.

If you want people to care about your shit, they need to have some stake in it, some meaningful reason to respect it.

You don't prevent riots like this with tanks, you prevent them by having a healthy society. And ours is seriously ill.

All this moody, gritty ambivalence about what the future could become? That just encourages people to reflect and think about stuff, rather than working hard and uncritically towards a goal that - while we might not even understand it - is definitely awesome in every way.

Racism in America is not an act, it's a caste system. It's not something you do, it's a form of social structuring. Black people are systematically disadvantaged, and white people receive privileges due to their race.

So you're wrong that racism is just "the actions of a few". This implies that you are a neutral white person, and shouldn't be blamed for hate crimes or whatever, which are done by a minority of bad white racists whom you don't even like.

In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard to change it, and end up reinforcing it without even realizing. The caste system puts in place all the preconditions for the police brutality, the hate crimes, the denial of employment, etc. None of those things could happen without the caste system supporting and incentivizing them.

So we're all responsible for the existence of racism - the whole society. But in particular, consider the group of people who systematically benefits from said caste system, and who despite having drastically more power, are doing pathetically little to eliminate the caste system.

Were I looking at the situation from afar, it would seem completely reasonable to say "hey, fuck those people".

Not really, no. It's just not that dangerous. We imagine it must be dangerous, and so do cops themselves. But you're a lot more likely to be killed as a garbage collector or airline pilot, or a construction worker, or plenty of other jobs.

It's like with the "war on terror". The fear of danger is much more powerful than the danger itself. And like with terrorism, the fear is actively promoted for political reasons.

They do what everyone does, what has to be done for policing to be viable.

That seems like an argument against the department as a whole, not a justification for an individual's abuse.

Most of the people they deal with are lowlifes, lyres, cheaters.

Most of the people they deal with are ordinary innocent civilians whom they assume are "lowlifes" because they have been trained and conditioned to.

That said, this following cops around only plays to the problem paradigm. It's harassment, like what paparazzi do. It's belligerent. Maybe it's valuable as a protest, but it isn't as solution.

It is belligerent, and it is harassment, and it is protest. And that's the point. People with power do not voluntarily stop abusing it. They continue until met with resistance - until they are forced to stop.

Unfortunately it's effectively suicide to physically force the cops to stop, but we should do everything we can short of that to stand up against them. Standing up against the cops sets an example for others that we don't need to fear them, that they don't deserve respect and deference, and that we can do something directly to stop their abuse.