Images with weapons
Facebook on Tuesday removed almost 900 accounts associated with the far-right Proud Boys and American Guard, including those belonging to Proud Boys supporters who marched into a protest zone in Seattle Monday and confronted anti-racist demonstrators.
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Facebook had previously banned the groups for promoting hate, but individual members continued to post images with weapons and urge others to attend protests that followed the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd in police custody.
Facebook is under heightened scrutiny as provocateurs use it to coordinate and recruit. It has also acted to make it harder to find groups in the so-called Boogaloo movement.
Now about those Russian accounts…
And about those radical transgender accounts that encourage people to commit violence against “TERFs…”
Another way to detect systemic racism is not by looking at what a group confronts but instead to look at what it tolerates.
The Proud boys and other white asshats with assault rifles at the ready don’t seem to elicit the same level of angst or forcible police response as say a black man with a banner or an antifa protestor with a bottle of water. Why is that? A charitable explanation would be that police are as scared of these dipshits as the rest of us but all that training and equipment was for the express purpose of neutralizing gunmen who threaten the peace. People of color get shot for holding a gun in a ‘threatening manner’. How does an out of town redneck hold an assault rifle in an unthreatening manner? A person of color jogging in your neighborhood is a threat, but an armed white outsider who buses from out of town to show the confederate flag isn’t?
Is the Second Amendment more important than the First?
A snarky sign may be intimidating but an assault rifle is just pure intimidation. It’s a macho dare ya.
When you slash water bottles and confiscate medical supplies citing the potential threat of Aquafina as a missile, but pass by a white dude armed for war, people are going to wonder if these guys aren’t just the white Id running free. We start to wonder if these groups aren’t serving as the extensions of the police.
Pliny:
A rhetorical question, I assume? When the president rants that Democrat state governors’ attempts to halt the spread of Covid 19 are attacks on the 2nd. it’s clear where that amendment stands in the priorities of the political right.
You can hold a rifle in an un-threatening manner but it seems rare: have it slung over your shoulder. If you’ve got it out you clearly intend to use it and if you’re pointing it at anyone then you’ve already used it regardless of the end result.
Which is not to say that people should not feel threatened.
BKiSA:
I wouldn’t say that having a rifle slung over a shoulder was un-threatening in a place where there is absolutely no good reason to have a rifle. Carrying a rifle can be a threat even if you make it clear that you don’t intend to use it there and then.
There’s probably a better word for it than non-threatening,honestly, but I don’t know what it is.