Flutterby™! : Baltimore Protests

This morning's Baltimore protests round-up: RT Ultra @Loot_Back:

"why do people burn their own payday loan centers, pawn shops, liquor stores, and cop cars?"

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic: The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore notes:

I could go on, but I've long since started to skim past stories like "Baltimore police officer pimps out his own wife" and thinking, meh, I've seen worse from cops there. The cop who shot himself and lied about it to get worker's comp benefits? Meh, at least he didn't shoot someone else and then lie about what happened. ...

and expands on Baltimore Sun: Undue Force, looking at how Baltimore police officers have... well...

Orioles COO John Angelos offers eye-opening perspective on Baltimore protests transcribes a tweet conversation:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

Goddamn if that doesn't make me sympathetic to the beneficiary of a sportsball dynasty.

Finally, some musings on what abuse at a personal level looks like: yesivebeenthere2: Baltimore:

My mother beat the shit out of me from 3 to 13. CRUNCH! There’s no suitable onomatopoeia for the sound of an adult’s hand belting a child across the face. There’s no word that describes what it’s like to feel your cartilage ring. ...

Seriously. Go. Read. It.