I don’t dive into politics too often on NG nowadays and I know a lot of people appreciate that NG is a haven from the total shitshow that happens elsewhere on social media. A lot has been happening in America this past week but really it’s been happening for generations and this week is an opportunity to pause and think about where we’re at in this current moment.

I don’t have all the answers but I want to stand in solidarity with those seeking change. Black lives matter - try saying it! Maybe you’re afraid someone will think you’re virtue signaling, or that you’ll be made fun of because of course RACISM = BAD and you don’t want to look like an NPC. Stop worrying about those people for a minute. Life is interesting because sometimes you get tired of people for being too self-righteous but the opposite can also happen, where you get tired of people trying to silence voices that need to be heard. We should all be listening more and antagonizing each other less right now.

Here are some things I read this week:

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change - A Medium post by Obama, I think he can address a lot of this better than I can.

How the Philadelphia Police Chilled Out About Protesters - This is an article from 2016 that I found while thinking back about the 2000 RNC protests in Philly. I attended the protest with Shok to film a segment for Troma’s Edge TV. I don’t think we ever ended up using the footage but it was an eye opening experience, being my first time in a protest crowd. Despite some fires and vandalism by the Black Bloc types (white kids btw), the crowd was largely well-intentioned people who wanted to make the world a better place. The only real danger I found myself in was almost getting trampled by a police officer on a horse. The things I witnessed inspired my Police Bike game.

Reading this article made me curious about the lessons learned in 2000 and how many of those lessons survived to 2020. Which leads me to this article:

In Camden, police and protesters take a different path after George Floyd’s killing - Camden is right across the river from Philly. Camden was America’s Most Dangerous City five years ago. Since then, they’ve had a complete overhaul of the police department, demilitarizing and shifting to a community policing model that rebuilt trust between the community and their officers. The police marched with the protesters in Camden, rather than forming barricades and antagonizing the crowd.

Is it Time to Defund the Police? - Article about the movement to change how money is allocated towards public safety. There’s a bunch of articles on this topic this week.

Police don’t have an easy job; you can get shot or stabbed in an instant. If a person is trying to kick your door down, you want to be able to call someone. You can care about the police and still want to see change. I think about the phrase “a more perfect Union” in the Constitution; you can love something but want to make it better. Progress comes in waves, too, because people learn, then die and the people replacing them need to learn as well. 100% of the important lessons don’t get passed along to 100% of the people and the growing spread of misinformation on-line is REALLY complicating things because everyone has their own set of facts nowadays.

Do you have any articles from this week that you’d like to share here? Curious to see what the rest of you have been reading.

Love you bro!

i love you both but i cant stand this pink links stuff. otherwise first post.

I feel like the pink is refreshing... Gives things a bit of a synthwave vibe.

its too gender reveal im having a daughter look to me.

Well here's another article for you to read then.

On a serious note, it took years, YEARS for that damn Frank Rizzo statue to be relocated from center city, the amount of anger and pain that it represented every day in the middle of the city, i kind of feel like the climax of it was this past week.

Where the city finally showed some common sense and closure and finally moved it last night quietly.

I think it was a turning point for me that 4 days of anger and protesting did in some way move the needle forward, its unfortunate that people in power have a need to push people this much to actually bother to listen to them.

Thanks for the talk Papa Tom.

Maybe it's time for a sprite swap in this game...

This is definitely a charged topic, and it's lovely to hear the Camden police were walking with the protesters. I had unfortunately been avoiding this all because it is such a dividing topic.

I was able to speak with someone from a police force in Texas who was saddened by the situation. We got to talking about how further training could be employed for more peaceful approaches and that there is usually continuous training, and that unfortunately some police departments don't get as much training and checking up on the police force to make sure everyone is ok.

I'd say so! I deleted my pixel art of the rizzo mural. I think the more i started to actually bother to understand his history and stuff i felt like i just couldnt get behind my piece of it, even it was just a dumb pixel loop. sorry!

Yeah here's a bunch:

Doesn’t it seem strange that Floyd and the officer that kneeled on his neck worked security together on the same shift at the El Nuevo Rodeo Club for 17 years?

How come BLM is funded by foreign investors?

Why was a CNN News Crew not only detained but also Arrested? How comes they were not permitted to watch what happened?

Why can't experts agree on the cause of death?

Why is it not odd that both Officers Tou Thao and Derek Chauvin have both previously been investigated for excessive use of force and not charged by State AG Amy Klobuchar? (Additionally, Officer Derek Chauvin is married to his partner's sister Kelli)

Why has the same attorney been hired as with all the other big supposed police killings of blacks? Attorney Benjamin Crump. The same attorney that worked on previous cases that resulted in busses bringing in rioters from outside the city?

This whole thing is fishy

Thanks for speaking out Tom! I hope this moment in history will move not just the US but the whole world forward for the better. Black Lives Matter!

Thanks voicing that here. While I do love NG, it often can feel a little too alt-right edgelord friendly in ways that I don't love.

It's a watch not a read, but this talk by Carol Anderson really hit me yesterday. She really gets into the under-reported long term trends that, to some, seem to have just "shown up out of nowhere" this past week.

Not really. It may add just an extra layer of motive.

Let's not get into the whole George Sores conspiracy, here, with a site known for promoting them.

A lot of reporters are being attacked, or harassed, with the police leading much of it.

They all agree that the actions of the officers involved led to his death.

The Good ol' boy system, and a policy of not giving a shit.

He wins cases over such things.

And really? Bussing in rioters? You need to lay off those far right sites.

You are making this way too complicated, with too many unfounded accusations.

I am glad you are talking about this Tom. Honestly, this situation isn't too new. This kind of protest does happens every coupled of years and once it over, we forget about it until next event happened. Racism is never okay but it cannot go away either. You get this one person who used this as advance to see the world go to the ground (in another word, watch the world burn). I know there are protest everywhere but you can't really call some of these as "protest" if people started to wreak some stuff and killing people.

And I like it when the police try to deescalate this whole thing, by trying to work with the community and sympathize with the peaceful protestors. That can help lead to change.

And bringing up George Sores, and using the term rioters, is what far right sites are promoting.

Thanks Tom. It's been a stressful week. It's been a stressful life. My daughter has been waking up screaming in night terrors because she thinks her mother is going to be killed. Tensions are high right now and there's so much work to be done that it can be draining.

We get just as many claims of the complete opposite.

"duHHH hh every0ne i diSaGrEe wItH gOeS oN fAr rIgHt siTes"

I think the issue with Police is that the barrier of access is so easy. They're plucking failed school bullies who couldn't get a job elsewhere and giving them a badge and told they are now First Class Citizens above the law. If we had a mandatory 2 year training period with extensive psychology classes and de-escalation procedures, making each and every officer get a mental health certification, not as extensive as a social worker of course but having that ability, as well as implement a thorough review board that is federally run and has protections against congressional meddling which certifies officers after a discrimination background report, we would have a much better and well liked police force.

These thugs on the streets macing people in the face aren't cops, they're just that - thugs on the street macing people in the face. Many of them have a superiority complex and wanna "prove themselves" or are otherwise vulnerable to bad decision making, even when they're "just following orders."

Anyhow, Tom, glad to see you're taking a stance on this. I never really thought of NG as a haven from the shitshow, but I've always seen it as a haven from being censored by content police who think that saying things like BLM before they're fashionable (which apparently only happened a couple days ago for the brands) will cause advertisers to pull out. But I think being socially charged is Newgrounds' nature.

The only reason why this shit is happening is because we as a society treat blacks like little children whom always have to be accommodated to. IMO, anyone who thinks this isn't about race and it is about the "injustice of the state" about "oppressed people" is a liar, and a coward, and I'll prove it right now: If the cop had been black, would this be happening right now?

You know the answer to that, I know the answer to that. EVERYONE listening, right now, knows the answer to that. Don’t pretend you don’t know the answer to that. If EVERYTHING ELSE had been EXACTLY the same, and the ONLY difference was that the officer restraining George Floyd, (who was high on psychoactive drugs and meth at the time, by the way, but we’ll get to that later) had been black? Would any of this have happened? The answer, of course, is simply: no. It’s about race. And everyone on the FAKE right (which INCLUDES Donald Trump, by the way), trying to make it sound like it’s about something else, is a liar and a coward.

We as a society treat blacks like a little child that we can't challenge with difficult issues, because if we do, they'll burn down the entire city. The people down there that go and loot? Their lives don't matter to me. You know who's lives matter to me? The small business owners and the poor people who are caught up in the crossfire, whom are caught at the end of their rope because the police won't intervene because "the lives of the officers are too important". These people down there don't care if you're white and you support there cause, most of them probably don't even know the details about George Floyd's case. George Floyd wasn't an honorable, innocent man. He has committed multiple crimes:

https://i.redd.it/2sc99kysho151.jpg

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6933246/Derek-Chauvin-Complaint.pdf

Let's say I'll throw a bone and take a look at this from two perspectives.

1. The police have a right to be defensive around black males, in the past year 8 unarmed black men were killed while 50 police were killed by armed black men. Naturally, a bias will form in areas where cop killers are slum lords. Black men account for 6% of the population but are responsible for 46% of police deaths (these are quoted stats from Charlie Kirk I don't have an actual source).
2. The black community has faced police harassment and brutality for decades. I'd argue it is not nearly as bad as it was 20-40 years ago, but it is still happening. The one group of people nobody should fear, is the police, yet this fear exists and the ingrained fear causes incidents of misunderstanding and miscalculated judgment. Yes, people have the right to be angry about it.

There is a problem but it will not be solved by only holding the police accountable, the black community needs to hold themselves accountable as well for the senseless violence that is rampant in their communities. The evidence for this isn't clearer than now:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/wP4QVciuDpNX/?list=favorites&randomize=false

Again, I'll reiterate. This isn't about "police brutality", it's about race. It's about multiculturalism failing. When white were and are disproportianally killed more than any other figure in the population (even accounting for population size), no one gives or gave a shit. No one would've given a shit if the races of the officer and the suspect were changed. Stop perpetuating this lie that it is our cultures fault and blacks are the poor, poor victim every-single-time. This is an instance where I will not say "Black Lives Matter", because it BLM doesn't condem the needless violence of innocent people, it's pretty indicative that it's something more than BLUE = BAD. Stop perpetuating this lie.

Just like the 2016 election, where our intelligence agencies are in unanimous agreement, foreign countries, like Russia and China, are trying to get involved on social media to help with the chaos, while using it against us.

And you haven't offered facts, just one big conspiracy that you don't know where it leads to.

Camden sounds like a role model for the rest of the nation, please more 'friendly neighbourhood police officer' and less 'militarised super cops'. Thanks for writing this.

Not to mention the Daily Mail has a history of being a race-baiting shitrag...

Treated like children? You mean like how they are twice as likely to be arrested because they fit a certain profile, twice as likely to be convicted by a judge, are 5 times more likely to be killed. And they only make up 13% of the population compared to whites 60%? And, in proportion to their size, 25% of blacks have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, to 10% for whites?

I think you are making up excuses. They are not treated like children at all, It's the self centered attitude by those who hold to that excuse who are the children.

Yes, clearly. :/

I love this post - I think part of making Newgrounds feel welcoming is showing solidarity. Its important to show that you can voice these opinions here and highlight important topics (as well as everything else that happens here!).

Thanks for the links - have been looking to educate myself better on this.

All I want to say is, rather than giving into primal rage or making a case for why you should boycott certain things, we should BE the change we want. No, not by protesting, but by actively joining the industries, government, social situations, etc. with a pure heart and singular, noble purpose. That is what we should all strive for. If we have a victim mentality about making the change ourselves, only the corrupt people will benefit. So rather than just getting frustrated about police brutality, become a policeman. Protect people the way you would want to be protected. Sick of corrupt government officials? Become a duly elected politician, devoting your life's work to benefit your country with good, sound policies. And in my case: Hate social media divisiveness and segregation of interests through algorithms? Code your own social media website, free from algorithms.

No matter what, you can make a change, potentially even by yourself. The world's stability depends on this.

Finallty, somebody fucking said it. The solidarty in this post proves it. Black lives matter....

This might be in bad taste, but play this when looking at the riots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whxcq4I0kAo