stars go here

no, just the multiple beatings.

Black People tag...please, please, please

uh, no? There's plenty of pale howler monkeys in these videos and these videos were selectively uploaded, there's white trash behaving poorly in all fifty states.

This clearly needs 'black people' tag and 'white people' tag much more than it doesn't need either.

Black Friday : capitalism :: hajj : Islam

This whole season is terrible for leaving the house. The amount of sirens whipping by my house goes up at least 5x compared to any other average time of year.

also I can't wait until next year when Trump makes this the annual official Capitalism Day Holiday Games, and personally Presides over the Hunger-Games style media confabulation of said games.

Here's more of that clip. It gets even more ridiculous.

https://youtu.be/m7Ro1jFfAuQ

Of course disorder and violence "has a tendency" to break out in these situations. But it often doesn't. So it's instructive to look at the cause for the disorder & violence when they *do* break out.

Oftentimes, it's simple herd dynamics. (e.g. Woodstock or Mecca) Those situations are tragic, but more-or-less blameless.... unless you want to blame the organizers for not anticipating & mitigating crowd dynamics.

But sometimes, the causes are very very different. Sometimes the violence and disorder are caused by assholes being assholes.

In this video, we have examples of both causes. A couple vignettes are tragic "too many people in one spot" situations. But others.... are not. It's those "others" that are worth pointing at & gawping over. Like that one white lady that literally tore a toy out of a black kid's arms. Fuck that lady.

Of course, that's why I included examples of both involuntary herd dynamics (crushes, stampedes) as well as assholes being assholes (Bernie, Vancouver).

But I should point out, even the cases of assholes being assholes are rare. One of the reasons why we get so much material to gawp over every Black Friday is because there are so many videos being taken these days - we've got half-a-continent full of stores and over a hundred million people being filmed, so of course there's going to be some dickery caught on tape. Again, you get crowds of people, and there will be dicks regardless of what the crowd is doing. Some will be dicks involuntarily, some will be dicks on purpose; it's just important to remember that Black Friday is not unique.

Take the white lady stealing that toy, for example. She's being a dick, yes, but I have also seen plenty of videos of, say, baseball fans fighting over a foul ball. I've even had some personal experience with this sort of nonsense: some years ago, while seeing TransSiberian Orchestra live, Jeff Plate threw his drumstick into the crowd. I managed to catch it in midair - but had to immediately crouch down and shield my body, as a number of nearby concertgoers started grabbing at the stick, trying to snatch it away from me. Now, bear in mind, this was a TSO show - a family-friendly, no-moshpits Christmas event, attended largely by middle-aged, middle-classed liberals and their young children. We'd just enjoyed a stirring rendition of "O Holy Night" together, and STILL the balding bastards were willing to fight me dirty over a god-damn drumstick.

I never pretended that.