is anyone meaningfully following this hush money thing? ooh he fell asleep in the 1000th trial he’s been to ok. obviously his side is lying that’s the strategy.
the second story is both new information and extremely insane
I’m pretty sure Jeff Bezos owns WP, but I can’t speak to how much he intervenes, or if he has pressured WP to suppress stories critical of Amazon.
Bias-wize, it was pretty solidly neoliberal when I last read it consistently (which ended when the paywall became too hard to circumvent, and I switched to AP and Reuters).
That said, protests are commonly not good for business, especially if they’re big and loud. Doubly so if they become a riot.
On the other hand, police brutality almost assures success of the protest in some essential ways, even if its at the expense of protestor life and limb: Bystanders become sympathists. Sympathists become activists. Activists become radicalized (saboteurs and revolutionaries). It shows that the grievance is serious enough that the state needs to suppress it. And when you’re lucky, folk songs get written about how The Man did you wrong. ( Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming… )
This figured largely into the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy in the Civil Rights Movement, which was to become a nuisance enough that the police would get violent. And while some protestors got hurt (or killed), it amplified the message and escalated sympathies for the cause. BLM is trying to do the same thing these days, but with the addition of phone cameras, so recordings of violence from the incident gets leaked to the internet, and people can see for themselves how the police treat their fellow Americans in minority and lower-class neighborhoods, hence the 2020 unrest in the US after the killing of George Floyd.
The thing is law enforcement is supposed to know better, as are elected representatives like the Mayor of New York or the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. When they get hawkish about putting down unrest with force, it is a sign of incompetence and a clear disinterest in good governance, which itself fuels even further grievance and unrest from the public.
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