Scenes of Minneapolis - home of the PEACEFUL Protest

The protests were peaceful. The rioting was not. You understand the difference--stop pretending that you don't. Be a Trumper, but at least don't be a hypocrite.

Protests are crowds of angry people. Sometimes, incidents occur. That does NOT invalidate the legitimacy of the protests, the message of the protestors, or their Constitutional right to protest.

Even though people like you want to take that away.

Kevin, I suspect that if your shit was getting burned, you might have a different attitude.  Yes, protests are peaceful.  There are not big cities that experienced peaceful protests and not rioting.  I do appreciate your well thought out comments without attacks.

Kevin, I suspect that if your shit was getting burned, you might have a different attitude.  Yes, protests are peaceful.  There are no big cities that experienced peaceful protests and no rioting.  I do appreciate your well thought and expressed comments without any personal attacks.

We should do this more often.

I don't know what you mean by "different attitude." If "my shit" got damaged or destroyed, that would not change my position that the protestors who remained peaceful were exercising their legitimate Constitutional rights. I would blame the persons who had caused the damage, not the entire mass of protestors, the protestors around the world, the liberal fake news media, the Deep State, the snowflakes who are soft on crime, Hillary, the people who run Taco Bell, the government of Finland, or Humpty Dumpty.

I think you understand what I mean when I say that focusing on the negative aspects of the protests obscures the very real and legitimate issues that caused the protests in the first place. This country has been here before. Some of the civil rights marches and protests turned violent. Some of the Vietnam War protests turned violent. In the early 20th century, MOST of the labor rights protests turned violent. And of course, in 1775, there were many violent protests---and the protestors were labeled anarchists and terrorists. Notably, the protests worked. The Civil Rights Act was passed. We got out of the Vietnam war. Workers' rights were expanded. And we beat them Redcoats.

Ideally, all protests would be completely peaceful. But I can think of only one example where they were completely so AND SUCCESSFUL--India in 1945-1947. People protest because they're angry--and a group of angry people can get violent. Particularly when the police are whacking them on the head, teargassing them, and shooting them.

If this represents a true shift in attitude on your part, I applaud it. It's best to discard prejudices and regard the present-day world with an open mind.

KevinLewis comments: "News media covering the protests by focusing only on the incidents of violence and looting is in and of itself systematic racism."

DonDiego does not understand how "focusing on incidents of violence and looting" could be classified as "systemic racism".

Poor old DonDiego requests an explanation.

Peace can't compete with violence.    Violence sells...news, movies, music.  Unfortunately.

The simple fact is that most of the protestors--though by no means all--have been Black. The collective actions of the protestors have thus been expressions of the desires and concerns of the Black community. Focusing on the incidents of violence and looting that have been, unfortunately, incidental to the protests creates the false implication that the protests and the protestors are themselves violent.

This, in turn, feeds into the narrative, espoused by Trump among others, that the protestors are "violent thugs"---and though few people come out and say it, the narrative is that the protestors are inherently violent people--rather than the truth, which is that protests themselves often turn violent. This is a vital distinction.

To directly answer DonDiego's question, though the violence and looting are tangential to the much larger issue of the social problems that sparked the protests in the first place, the former has gotten at least as much media coverage as the latter. I watched Fox News over several days during the first two weeks of the protests. They actually had more coverage of the looting than of the protests themselves. They played, over and over, clips of Black people looting Target stores, etc. etc.

Imagine, as an analogy more than an example, if a sports network spent several minutes each day panning the crowd to find fat white guys holding cups of beer and screaming. You might conclude that fat white sports fans are drunken louts. What you choose to focus on carries an implication that it is a common occurence.

So I interpret the message of the disproportionate coverage of the violence and looting to be an implied comment on the Black community. Surely DonDiego has heard people say hundreds of times that Blacks are inherently violent and disorderly--as I have heard. Making it look as if these Black citizens are rampaging and looting and sowing mass destruction feeds into that racist narrative.

But at the end of the day, people will see what they want to see.

Don't you think that people's appetite for it has been diminishing, at least a little--or at least, that it CAN be diminished? Look at the way we police and punish acts of assault, for instance. Or how we feel about corporal punishment. Society has evolved, at least to some extent.

Though if we weren't still fascinated by violence, there wouldn't be so much gun love, not so much prattling about the Second Amendment, no glorification of movie "heroes" who rack up huge body counts, no cheering and clapping for a President who jokes about murdering people...so I don't know.

I think Europeans tend to have a much dimmer view of violence than Americans do, given their direct experiences of it. Though I've never been shot, knifed, bashed over the head, etc., I would hazard a guess that having such an experience would dramatically diminish my appetite for watching it. I wouldn't find it entertaining in any event. Maybe it's because we see violence as an abstraction rather than directly experiencing it that we feel so comfortable with glorifying it.

Remember - 

Hilarious. LeBron James was 16 years old in 2001 so I guess he couldn't ''carrying injured to safety''. 

Yet trump lied that he was at Ground Zero and bragged (wrongly, as usual) hours after the attack that he had the tallest building in manhattan now that the WTC was gone.

Stupidity knows no bounds with the trump swallowers....