In many cases last summer, there was no rioting, but still orders to disperse quickly followed with violence before any opportunity for the command to be heard by most, much less followed.

Portland excluded, most BLM marches, 97%?, had no violence at all, and half the 3% was violence against them...reportedly 1/2 of the remaining 1.5% was by opportunists not involved with the March but using it as cover for crimes. BLM isn't blameless, but they are targets more often than perpetrators. It's hardly fair to charge them with the violence perpetrated against them.

The reporters I watched be beaten were 1) asking police where they wanted him to go when beaten mercilessly and 2) sitting on the sidelines well back from any order to disperse given to a peaceful crowd and trying their hardest to comply as soon as they heard an order, punched in the face and bloodied and shoved hard repeatedly breaking their camera while offering zero obstruction and attempting compliance. I didn't see any intentionally refusing to follow orders.

I'm going by what their representative said. It wasn't over one person, it was over fear of accountability, because they cannot do that job without violating people's rights, they don't have the patience or restraint.

Portland isn't a BLM issue, it's what happens when outsiders take over a popular nonviolent protest.

...or a bloody knife?

This is a "Thuggish morons vs thug" kind of situation though. It wouldn't surprise me one bit that the thug would open fire in multiple directions THEN ram away out of the scene.

That would be the easiest/laziest response though. I was honestly being unfair to the cop with the above statement if I left it at that.

It seems the cop was just honestly looking into a reported illegal racing/gathering situation. Situation quickly got out of hand and got ganged up by those cop-hating (or not cop-fearing at least) kids. Legitimately panicked, the cop wanted to extricate him/herself out of the situation. What to do? Ram out a bloody path, putting people's body or even life in danger be damned, of course.

You've got to understand that the cop simply WOULD NOT be thinking any of those people are "innocents" and act discriminately, feeling they "deserve protection."

Cops feel so empowered these days they can do anything and feel justified to do anything without risk of consequences for themselves. The whole Law Enforcement and Justice Department "brotherhood" is behind every cops. With that mentality, why would this particular cop NOT do what he/she did? Why would this cop care what happened to the people that got rammed through? I can imagine they would do all these things.

Besides, the cop have to assume some of them came packing guns. It WAS a legitimately dicey situation he/she got into...

The lawsuits.... anyone want to bet what portion of the blame the cop will get? I bet the verdict when the gavel drops is a big fat ZERO.

Want to blame the cop? Why not blame the System first? Since it's all too easy under America's law enforcement system to train even an honest-to-goodness, idealistic person to go from "I want to Protect & Serve" to "I can kill/main anyone for looking at me funny and call it police work."

This is just not "Shocking!" anymore. In fact, I don't expect any less these days of police encounters. Cynical? Of course, But how can I NOT be?

Thing is, any American - be it Republican or Democrat-leaning - think that powerful countries/block of concern (i.e. the EU, Russia or then USSR, China, Japan, etc.) DON'T want to influence US presidential politics is a bloody fool. The US *IS* the #1 meddler of world politics by far, both overtly and covertly. And the US is not shy of using any means necessary: military, economic, culturally, sanctions, covert-ops. So what right does the US have to ask those countries NOT to do the same?

External meddling should be EXPECTED. Is foolish not to. To say there's no external meddling is to lie to its people.

To focus on external meddling is to lose focus. So it's up to the parties to work their political messages to counteract those noise. That how you win elections.

I don't disagree with you there, but fail to see how that would excuse leaving Trump in office....abandoning all hope and learning Mandarin. Biden is far from perfect, and old enough that who his VP is matters, but compared to Trump it's night and day.

Yes, we are likely headed into depression. One team has a chance of shortening it, one will certainly make it worse.
Yes, the pandemic is still in phase 1 of many, but one team sees a problem to tackle, another just sees an optics issue to deflect from.
Yes, there's a huge cultural divide, one team seeks to minimize it, the other exploit it.

I have zero hope Biden will solve our n national problems, nor any doubt Trump would exacerbate every one until there's no nation left. Trump might be a symptom,but so is suffocation. Sometimes you must deal with the symptom first to have a chance at fixing the cause.

Trump is no longer the candidate of change, he's the establishment. They won't vote for him to fix their lives after he ruined them, imo.

I agree, we are headed in the direction of dissolution.

The civil war was plenty bloody, but we have avoided responsibility for most of our sins, agreed.

Yes, 90% reduction if we acted 2weeks sooner is criminally negligent imo. We really dropped the baby on this one....bigly. It's going to get worse.

"This business will get out of control, it will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."
https://youtu.be/kvNAid29vv8

Oh for fuck sake! Roger can't let a single goddamn thing go, can he? He's spent so long grinding axes that I'm surprised the entire planet's not covered 3 inches deep in metal shavings.

I'll bet he got short-changed by a waiter in 1965, and on his next album there's going to be a song called 'Oi! That Was A Fiver, You Cunt! Gimme My Bloody Three Pence! Also: Fuck David Gilmour.'

It's easy to argue this as hyperbole, but then what constitutes a crime? If your actions directly result in (as of now) 9,600 deaths (admittedly not all of them could have been prevented with better measures, but surely many more could have), should you be held accountable?

I sure think so.

These actions are on video, definitively. And these actions caused death.

But really, when has reality ever affected this set of politicians? He admitted to bloody treason and is still walking around. This won't end any time soon.

Well...I tried to like it, and watched the first 4 episodes this winter....one kid pushed off a building was the extent of the violence I recall. After Vikings, I was expecting more.
I told my wife to find me an episode with action, not just drama...she tried starting at season 7, which started well with a mass poisoning (quickly ruined for me with a Mission Impossible style mask removal...WHAT?!), but nothing else. Maybe she just chose poorly, but I still wasn't impressed. I want some blood eagles or better with a minimum of two protracted gruesome deaths or a medium to enormous bloody battle per episode to feel I've gotten satisfactory ultra violence, I wasn't overly impressed with the few sex scenes I've seen either.

I never watched House Of Cards, just wasn't interested in a political drama, I see far more of that than I ever wanted in real life now.
So yeah, I don't think it's for me....that's fine, most popular shows aren't. What I've seen so far was fantasy soap opera more than action. If basic cable can give me semi-historical brutal live organ removals, hundreds of bloody deaths, and three ways, I expect the same or better from premium cable.

I got lazy on the title, that is the video one. The best bar fight I ever saw was outside of a Korean bar in Harker Heights, Texas back in the 90's. I had exited the bar next to it with some friends when we saw the bouncers toss out two elderly Korean gentlemen in full suits. I would guess they were at least 50 or so.

Anyway, once they were outside, the bouncers left and these two guys proceeded to get into a full fledged Tae Kwon Do (or maybe Hap Ki Do, I don't think it was that though because it had a lot of power kicks) fight. I mean they were going at it, and I mean HARD. Much more contact than in any of the TKD matches I had been in at tournaments. After about a minute of not landing a solid hit, they stopped and mutually allowed one another to remove their suit jackets. Then back to the fray. They did get a few kicks in and got a bit bloody, but that is when the bouncers returned, apparently with their WIVES.

Hilarity ensued, because both wives basically glanced at one another and then waded into the fracas. They each started slapping and kicking on their husband, screaming at them. I don't speak Korean, but you could tell by the tone they were dressing them down hardcore. The fight stopped and two bloody, formerly distinguished looking guys looked like a couple of kids who had really torqued off their mom. I was dying off to the side from laughter. I swear if camera phones had existed back then it would have been an instance classic.

Seems she crawled near 200 meters...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/108548588/teenagers-courageous-marathon-effort-on-bloodied-knees-and-a-broken-leg

All British except for the drummer. But they recorded "Even in The Quietest Moments" in Colorado and "Breakfast In America" in Los Angeles so they bloody well stopped being British in the mid-70s.

Next morning chuckles the barber wakes up next to a bloody ear.

Bloody brilliant.

Yeah I completely disagree with performance. I'm all about well recorded albums. I couldn't give a shit if it can be performed live, they don't call it "recording arts" for no reason, recording/ mixing/ engineering is an art! Look at My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" - an album that is highly regarded and cost so much to engineer that it put a well known record label out of business. It took them 20 years or so to be able to perform that album live.