Moscow Detention Centers Have Run Out of Space, Filled with Peaceful Protesters
amnesty.org
amnesty.org
This fact astounds me, I cannot believe that the Russian Government still somehow think they are the good guys here.
> Any highly corrupt society is bound together by a series of interlocking reciprocities: the local policeman who shakes down a passing civilian must in turn pay tribute to his police supervisor, who must pay his supervisor, and so forth; favors or spoils may be distributed in the other direction.
My guess is the cops justify their work like in Stanford prison experiment, and they accept without further thinking what Putin says that the protesters are "foreign agents".
[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/cost-of-corruption-in-ru... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...
No, many Russian police are well aware that protests in Russian are often driven by honest local frustration with the Russian government, and these frustrated people do not need pushing from abroad. (I speak from personal acquaintance with several.) Some police officers might even sympathize with the protesters’ lack of opportunities. However, modern Russia is a country where people affiliated with the force structures live much better than the average citizen, and so naturally they want to hang on to their own families’ prosperity at all costs.
If Russia ever liberalizes, then somehow appeasing the force structures for their loss of privilege and stability is something the new regime will have to ensure, distasteful as it might seem. During the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime the US insisted on completely disenfranchising the old Baathist functionaries, for example, and this was a major driver of the civil war and instability that ensued.
Big "if" right there.
It's a lot more likely that the US and the rest of the western world will continue to slide into oligarchical-drive corruption.
Lots more likely.
It was much better done, even if it was part of a TV show.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cnn-ridiculed-for-fi...
Any sane government would be arresting people involved with torching police buildings. If these people are innocent, I pray for their release.
15-26 million people participated in the protests in the US last summer. The 1-2 billion in damage[1] is a shocking number taken on it's face, but if 20 million people poured into the street with the intention of causing damage, they would cause orders of magnitude more damage than that. Adjusted for inflation, the 1992 Rodney King riots in LA caused 1.4 billion in damage[2].
The main demonstration in my city last year, which I attended and attracted thousands of people, were totally peaceful in vibe. A group of people burned a bank down in the evening, but it was a totally different group that formed hours after the main BLM march and was 20 miles away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-insurance-civil-unrest-ri...
Protestors are not cohesive groups, and looters are even a step further removed. They're people who take advantage of the confusion of protests.
And anyway, property damage during a protest is older than the Constitution (see: Boston tea party).
And moreover I think that police killings are kind of the top line item because that is punchy, but most activists would say their problem is with the entrenched structures that allow police to behave badly with impunity. It's impossible to sue an officer as an individual for even the most egregious offenses, police unions have fought really hard to protect bad officers and policy, even when people do "win" legal action against the police the bill is footed by the taxpayers, and in general the thousands of bad interactions people have and film that never even get attention. I'm biased, but I think that the system of policing in the country is more corrupted by bad actors than the protests were.
Accidents: 76.6 deaths per 100,000, Suicide: 26.7 deaths per 100,000, Non-police homicide: 22.0 deaths per 100,000, Heart Disease: 7.0 deaths per 100,000, Cancer: 6.3 deaths per 100,000, Police violence: 1.8 deaths per 100,000
If you were to tune to any government-controlled news channel (pretty much all of them), you'd only see three-minute compilation of "violent protesters" whereas numerous internet media outlets were showing the full picture, all day, live, from all angles.
Go figure.