Ferguson, MO
 

I got a good friend who lives in Florissant which borders Ferguson so I've been following these developments like a hawk. I'd like to just say...what the fuck? The town is under martial law and there's practically a media blanket. Where's the freedom of speech in the Leader of the Free World?

I was waiting for this thread

There is none. This country is becoming a totalitarian police state, assuming it wasn't already and it's only now surfacing.

I'm hoping the Anonymous threat and doxing actually accomplishes a law/laws written into place to handle police brutality and misconduct properly, because if this fails then I'm legitimately afraid because this shit keeps happening and it gets worse and worse with each incident. I'm just amazed none of it's hit any areas around me yet.

E- Relevant update

Are you high on drugs? Like, right now? At this exact moment? Or do you honestly have no concept of what the history of this country is?

We live in a shameful, bigoted society that preys on, disenfranchises, and then ignores every single minority, and differing ideology. Things have gotten immensely better than they used to be, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still bad. We still have a large portion of our population that can remember a time when black people had to drink from separate drinking fountains. We live in a society that screams about how Christians are persecuted, but when prominent atheists receive death threats from Christians, not a single major news outlet will cover the story. Homosexuals still aren't allowed to get married in most states.

A big part of the problem is our hubris as a nation. America is the greatest society on Earth! Changing our society will only damage that! Freedom! People can't understand what's wrong with our country because they aren't willing to accept that we are not the country that they think we are. We do not provide equal opportunities for freedom, and we oppress everyone at every chance we get. Fortunately, we do have a conscience as a nation, and over time we attempt to fix the wrongs that we perpetrate on our own citizens, but it's a slow process. Too slow.

There's only so much progress the people can make towards social change when your government is an oligarchy though. The American government runs on token appeasement, it always has and it always will. Give the plebs just enough of what they want to stop them rioting. In this case they didn't give quite enough. But who cares when you can blanket the media and impose martial law on a whole city though?

@OANST:

Yep you caught me I am completely oblivious to the history of this country and that wasn't a cut to the chase comment expressing my concerns about current time events based on what I've seen occur over the past 5 years minimum.

"Where's the freedom of speech in the Leader of the Free World?"

In the Ferguson situation so far, Freedom of Speech has been violated so many times in such a short period of time and it continues to happen, and nothing's been done about it. That link I posted was the first I'd heard of any higher power taking action, and I haven't checked to see how that's going over yet.

So in the most pessimistic way possible, I responded to STM with "There is none". It's an over exaggeration, I was hoping it was read as a dark joke rather than completely dead serious.

People can't understand what's wrong with our country because literally every source of teaching for the past 20 years, at least, has told us our country is the greatest on the planet and people are dying to get in here and every other county strives to be us, and you will never live in any place better. We are truly free. We established this country peacefully. The world loves us.

We pledge our loyalty to our country every day before class in unison, and don't even understand the words. Then, once we're old enough to understand what we're doing, if we refuse we're looked down upon and punished for it. It wasn't until I was almost out of highschool I found out I had the right not to say the pledge and it was illegal to be punished for it.

At least, that's the kind of education I got.

When you're told something continuously for so long, if someone says otherwise, it seems like a crock of shit, even if they're a reliable source. That takes a lot of unlearning and suspension of belief, which is too much effort for a lot of people, slowing down the progress an insane amount.

Also what STM said because he's a speedy shit

These situations always back fire on the city's government, though. Major changes will occur there because of this.

@Slog Bait: Any time that you bring up how things are getting worse when they are demonstrably getting better, the people who are capable of making any kind of change just roll their eyes, and wait for you to stop talking, and sit down. Because you have no idea what you're talking about.

Where the fuck did I even flat out say things were getting worse

Just because I think things are bad doesn't mean I don't acknowledge things aren't better than they were before holy shit

This situation is getting worse, yes. It's going to keep getting worse until somethings done about it and then things will change for the better in the long term. Things are better than they were 50+ years ago, but they're still fucking bad

I live in St. Louis and shit is gettin wild down here. SWAT tanks tear gassing peaceful protests, people looting and firebombing places... Getting real out here.
http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/l...01812b27-2.jpg
E: Switched the image to fit the page.

HOM, you can manually resize the image using the [img] tag. Just replace W/H with pixel dimensions. I think you only need to fill in one and the other will be automatically adjusted to scale.

Cool, thanks! I was about to ask, but this picture actually expresses how crazy this shit is more so than the original. It doesn't even look like a police force anymore. It looks like the fucking ARMY. Fucking 5 stars in GTA. Like I'm fucking trying to escape Black Mesa or some shit.

I don't know about that though. I would say it's optimistic to expect any major change in the near future.

For anyone who just read SB's post HTML image tags work with percents, but I'm not sure if the BBCode ones do. You can use this to auto-stretch images to fit the page perfectly and be future proof if we ever upgrade the theme:

On topic this is some crazy shit. Best wishes to anyone living in and around the area!

Nahhh. When a city makes this kind of mistake, you usually see pretty swift changes. It's unfortunate that it takes events like this, but it does.

I really hope you're right

I'm with you. The cop who killed Michael Brown will, worst case scenario, get fired, not even tried. He'll probably continue to collect unpaid leave though, and then be transferred to another county. It's awful how much trust we put in our law enforcement. When it comes down to it, more people will believe a police officer's account of a situation than a civilian's account, and what makes that even more scary is the fraternity-like bond most cops have with each other. A lot of officers will prioritize looking out for their own kind over any moral or legal sense of duty.

The problem is that people don't want to believe that we live in a world like this; where cops shoot down unarmed kids, so they'll believe that the kid was threatening the cop because "they couldn't have just shot him!! he had to be doing something awful! that's not the kind of America I live in!". I've even heard people point out that Michael Brown is a multiple felon. As if that makes it okay to kill him.

How are things in the UK? Jumping ship sounds better by the day.

@OANST I suppose we shall see. I try not to be overly pessimistic with things like this. I'd rather look at things neutrally and make a serious, realistic conclusion but I think it'll take more race riots to sort things out. What good is change in one suburb of one city when the rest of America is also broken? Obama won't even cut his golfing holiday short to sit down and take this seriously.

@HOMINIX Agreed, the cop is a murderer but because he has a badge he's acquitted of his crime. It's insane. It's why I'm so glad most English police don't carry guns or even tasers.

The UK has its own problems but not on the same scale. We had the Tottenham race riots in 2011 but the cause of those riots were lost by the second day as looting took hold. Though arguably it was still an impoverished underclass doing the looting, regardless of colour.

Good luck getting a work visa, buddy. I'm still trying to figure out a way to pull that off myself.

I also doubt that. The events surrounding this shooting pretty much ensures a trial, and probably a conviction. Let's not be cynical just for the sake of being cynical.

Hm... I'll look into the Canada option :fuzwink:

It's not just being cynical, although I'll admit, cases like these have made me more cynical. This happens all over the country, and the majority of the time, the police officers get paid leave. The actual riotting is what sets this apart from similar stories, but I can say with near certainty, the only changes you'll see in Ferguson in the foreseeable future is a higher police presence.

We dropped our racism in favour of merciless classism. Conveniently enough, most of our ethnic minorities are working-class.

As I speak UK citizens are starving to death in their homes because they can't get work, so yeah. There are problems everywhere, but this isn't a thread about that.

Good luck with that, too. They've tightened the border significantly. If you plan to live there long term you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops because the Canadian government basically hates us and is doing all they can to keep us from flocking up there.

It's easy as piss to get into England you just need a qualification or skill and a company who will want to take you on. My girlfriend is going down this route and we hope to have her here by next Christmas.

Also what MM said, racism isn't a huge problem like in the US but the working class is absolutely demonised.

Yikes.. I've heard that there's a large anti-immigrant push on the rise in the UK, too. Here, a lot of us just hate illegal immigrants. A lot of racial profiling around the bordering states of Mexico.

Problems everywhere... The massive, damn near military police force in America is what scares me. Also, the fact that most citizens regard our Constitution almost as some kind of religious text is frightening, and it allows for easy "reinterpretation" as the words on the pages age decade after decade.

I promise you that he's taking it seriously, but he also has to be careful. He's stepped into race relations before, and actually exacerbated the situation.

And changes in a city spread. You don't judge progress on where it happened because progress is contagious.

I think I would have more hope if there was a bigger push for organized peaceful protest, and not disorganized looting etc. There are peaceful protesters, but the violent protesters are only getting in their way of success.

You'd be surprised how much looting actually affects change.

The violent protesting didn't even start happening until the police showed hostility towards the peaceful protesters though. You'd think people would realize by now that attacking peaceful protesters is a sure fire way to stir up shit.

E- speedied again god dammit

We'll see, man. I hope there is a change, but I don't have a lot of hope left honestly.

Change will happen eventually, it's just a question of how long and how much shit will go down before the change is made.

Nah, that's just UKIP. They've got about as much mainstream credibility as the Tea Party.