It's easy to argue that 'democracy is the answer' when you are comfortable and enfranchised. But flip that around – put yourself in the place of someone who is poor, continually subject to discrimination, and does not have the same influence on democracy.
The natural response of people in that situation is to say "fuck it". From their view, what's the point of engaging with a system that is comprehensively biased against them?
Now, I won't defend property destruction and looting. But I do understand how it can happen. If you feel completely alienated from society, then the advice to 'solve problem peacefully using democracy' is less than useless.
Democracy fails when it is manipulated for abuse and harm.
You literally don't comprehend that the rioters weigh up property damage versus the danger of being randomly murdered by police, and don't give a hoot? OK.
People who have hope, don't riot.
This. Riots happen because the system is broken and can't be reasonably changed. (Or at least that is the perception.)
I don't think assholes rioting over sports are equivalent to savagely oppressed rioting for their livelihoods and for their suffering to be heard.
There's a more detailed explanation of this viewpoint here: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5911.html
You should look at this from the same perspective as irrational rage, or nuclear war. The risk of a destructive conflagration even when it is also harmful to the people who start the destruction is an impetus to solve disputes peacefully and fairly, and to not push structural power imbalances too far to gain an advantage.
In Baltimore it was pretty much black people throwing stuff at everyday white people. The difference in race allows for a stronger generalization by both parties.
Similar to when we attack institutions, we just go against all politicians. We fail to understand that many of them are not corrupt and are on our side.
Generalization is a scary thing.
Citation needed. Lots of white people are protesting along with blacks. The protests in general are against law enforcement.
> We fail to understand that many of them are not corrupt and are on our side.
This doesn't seem relevant, the protests are not happening against "white people at large." Law enforcement is not on the side of the oppressed in this case. The corruption is systemic.
Your little country would still be a British colony of peasants and slave holders.
Also, Canada.
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
>The Revolution was a bloodbath with ~100,000 casualties or fatalities followed by 62,000 Loyalist/Tory refugees fleeing the country for fear of retaliation and their expropriation (the ones who stayed did not escape persecution); this is a butcher’s bill that did not seem justified in the least by anything in Britain or America’s subsequent history (what, were the British going to randomly massacre Americans for fun?), even now with a population of >300 million, and much less back when the population was 1/100th the size. Independence was granted to similar English colonies at the smaller price of “waiting a while”: Canada was essentially autonomous by 1867 (less than a century later) and Australia was first settled in 1788 with autonomous colonies not long behind and the current Commonwealth formed by 1901.
Given a regime which imprisons the most people in the world, strangles black people to death on camera in broad daylight, shoots black children dead...
And given a regime which sends "uniformed killers" (as Mark Twain put it) across the world, and cheers/supports Ukrainians to lob petrol bombs at THEIR police...
Then yeah, what kind of halfway ethical person gives a fuck all about "property destruction and looting"? When whites go rioting because some sports team... well, I don't actually know what goes on in their savage minds... it's not an emergency. But when black people decide maybe they should not get slaughtered and humiliated, it threatens the white way of life and must be eliminated.
No wait, perhaps you meant "without resorting to violence" to affluent, white people?
Because it's clear that state sanctioned violence against black people is A-okay with you.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviole...
and then this as background infomation:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...