What the fuck is this shit? This is horrifying and holy shit are all these people, drivers *and* spectators, stupid.
This is part of a Twitter thread last night by KOMO News reporter Cole Miller. At the end of the thread had adds, crucially, "And while I shouldn’t have to say it, I will. This was NOT related to any protests happening in Seattle tonight. These sideshows go down once or twice a month, at least during the summer months." Once or twice a month?? How often do they plow through a bunch of spectators?
Of course, some dipshit replying in the thread still had to politicize it needlessly: "I'd lay odds there's not one Republican in the group." Uhhh ... a) you would almost certainly lose that bet; b) what the fuck does it have to do with anything at all here? Anyone who thinks there are no Republicans or Conservatives in Seattle is an idiot; anyone who thinks "Only Democrats" do anything this dumb is, to put it generously, naive. I guarantee you that crowd had people of all political stripes in it (and probably had plenty of people who pay no attention to politics at all ... these people are, after all, morons).
Side note: the totally-unrelated (aside from it being a distraction from this for the police) protest chaos last night was a little much, even for me—and I'm about as bleeding-heart liberal as it gets. Don't go thinking that means I'm leaning back toward sympathizing with the SPD, though. I'm just wondering what ultimate utility there is in a march "leaving a trail of vandalism," lending credence to the notion of Seattle as a so-called "anarchist jurisdiction" (which it really isn't). I can tell you this much: it doesn't do much to quell protest when our cops are shooting a protester in the groin multiple times with paintballs at close range, or pushing their bikes over a protester's head. And those things happened *before* the chaos last night.
In one of Renee's many great photos, someone wrote a JFK quote into the stripes of an American flag: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Certainly as long as police across the country face little to no retribution for killing people who pose no threat to them, this notion will absolutely hold true.
Unfortunately, these idiotic doughnut-races plowing into spectators is already getting conflated with these other issues, even though they just happened to occur at the same time. I'll never say vandalism is *necessary,* but I do get tired of people characterizing it as a crime equivalent to straight-up murder. And this is all traced back to the issue of cops killing civilians—disproportionately Black ones—and consistently getting away with it. THAT is the starting point of all this. People aren't going to just step back and accept that as the way things are. And without that happening, the protests would not be needed, the unrest would not be happening, and the police would be free to address things like morons engaging in truly pointless reckless endangerment, doing doughnuts into crowds.
