car on the street full of guys one in the back seat enthusiastically “what’s up, brother?” and I was enthusiastic back and then enthusiastically like “white power, brother!” and I was less

Portland protest twitter abuzz with allegations that a guy behind a “Snack Van” has been sexually predatory and I’m like “The guy handing out free candy from a shitty van? NO WAY”

kontextmaschine:

So tomorrow there’s gonna be a big Proud Boys event in Portland, first big rightist event since a Patriot Prayer guy got killed downtown. It’s in an outlying park and it’s pretty much expected to be a lethal melee, so, heads up

So in bracing for this the (first openly bisexual in the US!) governor convened a joint state/county/local police command (incidentally, not bound by the restrictions Portland put on its own cops), and the US Marshals deputized the riot squad as federal officers (which ?? but might circumvent the local “reform” DA who’s showily not pressing protest charges)

But it was much smaller than feared, like 200 who had cooperated with police in planning and mostly hung out while leftists rallied in two separate locations.

Then as night fell and those day rallies gave way to the regular nightly mob, the fresh, augmented police force just showed up and tooled them up

The governor ended the state of emergency (early!) the next day but apparently the deputization lasts til next year, not clear what that means practically but the cops have been in playtime’s-over mode since.

My speculative read, originally mayor Ted Wheeler, who played up “resistance” stuff to hitch his centrism to gentry and underclass-activist Democratic energy and was staring down re-election, was like “sure, don’t let them set the courthouse on fire, but don’t be the bad guy, let them work out their energy and harness it in a useful way”

So when federal forces came in he went down for a photo op and took tear gas with everyone. But all this time and now it’s down to radicals and the radicalized that couldn’t be accommodated by any viable government, and pressure builds up and there’s now statewide and downtown coalitions behind suppression (and I’m sure Democrats over the non-metro PNW and nationally whispering about how Portland undermines the “elect us and we WON’T empower anarchist mobs!” message).

And if things do go unresty after Election Day, best to have stomped out the “form angry mobs and menace local government buildings” subculture before then.

(Portland is the basis of The Simpsons’ Springfield, and the depictions of “young punks vandalizing civil monuments with spray paint” and “dumb angry mob” were maybe less fictionalized than you thought)

So tomorrow there’s gonna be a big Proud Boys event in Portland, first big rightist event since a Patriot Prayer guy got killed downtown. It’s in an outlying park and it’s pretty much expected to be a lethal melee, so, heads up

Well this AM it looked like Silent Hill, visibility down to like half a block, my eyes, sinuses, and wounds stinging if I got close to a closed window

My vent system is on drawing through a filter, my bathroom and fume hood exhaust are on

Apparently no chance of the fires coming this way, just holding out for early AM rain on Tues

Badger still goes out and acts normally, but when he comes in he seeks me out to stay close to

Realizing part of why LA was such a noir town is air pollution is additive with fog for creating that late night, streetlamps-cast-light-cones look

With the caveat that I’m no longer sure if something fouled my mood or it just did that itself, wow, this apocalyptic palette outside is really bringing the 2020 vibe home

>@slatestarscratchpad said: Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in Portland?

Well I guess I can make one. Imo, it comes down to “Portland is so white the Civil Rights Movement didn’t reorder culture and politics”

• Oregon was born out of the “free soil, free labor” tradition that hated slavery for taking our jerbs, as a white producerist utopia and was really exclusionary
• Perhaps more important, there wasn’t much industry or any direct train lines from the Deep South circa the Great Migration – to leave sharecropping for Portland, you’d have to pass through somewhere with better jobs
• So Portland’s biggest civil rights initiative was busing the small redlined black neighborhood’s kids all over town until they asked for their local Black Power school back and the white establishment said “sure”
• The city’s official narrative is “we ended residential segregation in the 1990s by asking realtors nicely”, the unofficial is “no, that’s just when the ghetto started to gentrify”
• So future “identity” claims didn’t have a confrontational model to go off of, and were welcomed in and co-opted by the establishment
• So politics never repolarized away from lunchbox labor vs. progressive owners, both of which fit in the current Dem party coalition
• So there wasn’t white flight and urban decay, and there’s still an inner-city white working class that identifies as working class, not white
• That’s sure under stress from rising prices now, and has no expectation a continuation of the existing trends would work for them
• That’s combatitive, there’s almost a European-style labor combatitiveness that, Euro style, overlaps with street politics and soccer fandom
• Portland’s been radical, there’s an anarchist axis going from Olympia to Oakland, it got called “Little Beirut” by H.W. Bush, the governor once threw a hippie festival to clear out town for a Nixon visit
• The surrounding suburbs aren’t, though, and the rural exurbs especially aren’t, they’re still free soil/free labor really
• Because of “Urban Growth Boundaries” (cause no white flight!), rural areas aren’t far out from the city
• So because they were never understood as black, an existential threat, “excesses of the 60s-70s” were never really seen as excesses and reigned in.
• Like, Oregon has the most extensive free expression protections in the country, which has been interpreted as protecting the right to give naked lapdances
• And many understand as protecting anything going as “protest”, meaning they see the government as having COMPLETELY delegitimized itself by making ANY effort to suppress crowds menacing government buildings at night
• When I arrived at the start of the 2010s, Portland was very inward-looking. There were around 10 local newspapers but I knew multiple people w/o computers and even TVs
• The elite gatekeepers followed national stuff, but they kept The Conversation Portlandy enough that everything in Portland, even the “opposition” was, definitionally, compatible with Portland
• And propped up a hippie-academic-gentry-downtown business-landlord power system that congealed in the 70s, even as the city’s center of gravity moved east across the river
• Let alone the immigrant, minority, and poor communities on the land east of 82nd
• The smartphone revolution fucked that right up, empowered and connected the lower orders and realigned the whole city with national narratives
• Welp

“Trump Caravan” of like, lifted big trucks flying flags, came through Portland tonight. Included plongtime local rightists like the Vancouver-based “Patriot Prayer” guys who have been skirmishing with antifa downtown for years now, but also just suburban and rural college- and 20-somethings that don’t have boats to parade in I guess

Lot of conflict - counter-protesters, yelling, driving through obstructors, macing, the new thing is apparently rightists shooting hard projectiles out of paintball markers

Anyway ended up with one guy in a Patriot Prayer hat shot to death downtown, so that’s where we’re at now

people with houses adjacent to me have put noticeably more effort into their yards since I started my highly visible anti-broadleaf campaign several years ago and you know what? okay.

hot but fairly humid lately, which is hopefully a good sign against wildfires, only a fringe of grass in the most direct sunlight has gone yellow and the most water-hungry stuff in the yard is growing well

it’s been hottest from like, 1600-0400 lately, which is part of the weird local weather where Portland is on the gorge cutting thru 2 different mountain ranges to the dry inlands and the Pacific and everything is about how air masses from each flow & meet

Okay just like I have had to tell people that no, Portland is not overrun with rioting anarchists, no, it is not overrun with police state fascism

Most of Portland is very chill right now, the conflict involves a fleetingly small share of space and people, and for many of the things you are extrapolating into a terrifying new normal you are probably aware of each individual case

kontextmaschine:

yeah feels like first night in months I didn’t hear 1-6 loud bangs from the other side of the river around 2am to clear them out

I mean to be clear this includes the first month that was just vs. Portland police

They cleared out the permanent encampment yesterday morning *as part of terms for the good girl governor to take back over for Trump*, and it had dragged on enough the yay-morale ribs grill got forcefully couped and the “Wall of Moms” got called out as white

Something maybe not obvious is that outside downtown (and I almost never go west of the river) there’s less signs of leftist presence in Portland than ever since Trump was elected. The fliers are fraying and not being replaced, the triple-arrow antifa graffiti gives way to apolitical tagging

Between the energy sink for the caremad, the fact that so many people have free time and unemployment pay, and the “ah, fuck it” effect of coronavirus fatalism and them not rounding up junkies, I haven’t seen this Portlandia chill in a while

rendakuenthusiast:

kontextmaschine:

The fact that the “insurgent left” campaign to unseat Portland mayor Ted Wheeler in the coming election is itself already split into managerial professional and underclass activist camps is a great synecdoche for why cities are governed by consensus-seeking centrist Democratic machines in the first place

Which one will you, @kontextmaschine​, vote for or otherwise politically support?

Probably Wheeler but I’m not ready to endorse yet. Not Iannarone, that’s for sure. The Portland mayor is mostly a councilmember that gets to assign executive portfolios to the other (elected citywide) members and Jo Ann Hardesty has dispelled some of the fears I had, a Raiford that mostly served to empower her I’d consider.

The fact that the “insurgent left” campaign to unseat Portland mayor Ted Wheeler in the coming election is itself already split into managerial professional and underclass activist camps is a great synecdoche for why cities are governed by consensus-seeking centrist Democratic machines in the first place

kontextmaschine:

Wonder if I should go downtown and try to get abducted by the little green men

I mean that’s only partly a joke, there are literally rented minivans full of unidentified full body camo-tactical federal cops driving around downtown Portland wordlessly grabbing people off the street

They interrogate you for like an hour then drop you off, word has apparently come down from DC that playtime is over and if the local admin won’t roll up the lingering street ruffians they will, and they’re in the preliminary intel-gathering phase

So under Oregon marijuana regulations dispensaries are supposed to check your ID at the door, again before completing the purchase, give you your goods in a childproof bag, and toss in some flyer about making sure your kids don’t ingest it

And every dispensary, it is a total crapshoot which of these practices they’ll follow, I’ve never seen a dispensary doing none but I’ve also never seen all and I’ve seen most of the combinations in between

turns while our mayor was out of town with his dying mother, it was the newly elected black left outer-borough councilor that declared a curfew, cause she was like “I’m not gonna let anyone fuck this up right now”