and msm and fox was showing mostly the looting and not the protest itself.

My house? My acres of farmland? My acres of forest I own? That property?

Yes, I do own part of a forest on my property.

Also for the record I'm not American. Your definition may vary wildly from mine.

One day the world will come together and form an army of therapists and send you guys the humanitarian aid you deperatly need.

Isn't that why some of you guys worship the 2nd amendment? in case you have to deal with a tyrannical government?

Well your house is personal property, but as for the rest sure. I was wrong. You are a capitalist. Congrats on that I guess.

Ahh yes how could we forget those government-provided taxpayers' bricks that mysteriously overnight appeared on city street corners.

Then after nobody used them to break windows or anything at all, the brick pallets mysteriously disappeared the next night.

You're throwing a lot of words around without knowing the meaning of any of them. How is the government deciding where my property line starts and ends, how the county taxes my property where it starts and ends, makes me a capitalist because I pay into taxes that help people in my community, I don't commercialize my land, I keep my woodlands open for public hunting every year, and let people camp on my property as long as they let me know they're there?

I love how there are multiple comments downplaying the $2 billion number.

It just goes to show how brainwashed people really are when it comes to numbers like $2 billion.

Of course, compare that number to Elon Musk’s wealth, and $2 billion doesn’t seem like all that much. Compare it to what I have, however, and the difference is almost incomprehensible. I make $80,000 a year. Even if I saved every single dollar I earned, it would take me 25,000 years to accumulate $2 billion. Let that sink in for a moment.

$2 billion in insured property damage is an absolutely massive amount of damage caused by the BLM riots. However, that still doesn't change the point I'm making, which is that the meme is misinformation.

Your argument is that memes don't tell the whole story and never can. That's a completely different argument, and it doesn't address my point.

My point is that the meme is deliberately presenting a misleading picture of what happened. The fact that the damage amounted to $2 billion is directly relevant to that discussion.

The meme implies that the BLM riots caused relatively little property damage. They did not. The estimated insured property damage was approximately $2 billion.

Downplaying that figure to make the damage appear insignificant is textbook misinformation, particularly when it's being used to push a very specific political narrative.

And let's be clear about something: my personal opinions on BLM and the riots are probably very different from what most people here assume. In fact, the person I originally responded to would probably disagree with a good deal of what I have to say about both BLM and the riots themselves.

But that's beside the point.

I am specifically and intentionally calling out the propaganda and misinformation presented in this meme. Nothing more, nothing less.

You don't have to agree with my opinions about BLM to acknowledge that a meme misrepresenting the scale of property damage is misleading. Those are two entirely separate issues, and conflating them is exactly how political misinformation gets a free pass.

It's a $32 trillion economy, so I wouldn't consider it a stretch to say that BLM caused the slightest amount of property damage in a meme. The $2 billion figure doesn't seem significant or as relevant.

You're comparing a $2 billion insurance loss to the entire American GDP?

Jesus. Way to lose all context.

Yes, of course. What's $2 billion compared to $32 TRILLION-ILLION-ILLION? Are you kidding me?!

What exactly were you expecting from the protests? For people to scoop up the entire country and toss it in the fucking bin?

I even made a point of comparing that $2 billion to Elon Musk's net worth. Compared to that, it's a tiny loss.

But comparing a $2 billion loss from the BLM protests to the entire American economy is a completely useless comparison. It's like saying the distance to the Sun is tiny compared to the distance to the next galaxy. Technically true, but utterly meaningless without context.

The American economy generates trillions of dollars in economic activity every year. Of course $2 billion is going to look insignificant when you compare it to a number that massive. That doesn't tell us anything meaningful about the actual scale of the losses.

Christ. Calling a $2 billion loss negligible because it's a tiny fraction of America's GDP doesn't prove your point. It just demonstrates that you know how to divide two numbers without understanding what the comparison actually tells you.

Context matters. Scale matters. And a loss doesn't stop being significant just because you can find a bigger number to compare it to.

The context being: insured property damage is probably not a good way to measure the influence of BLM protests when emotionally reacting to a meme.

It is actually and you don't understand the context. It's the largest loss in insurance history. How do you find that to be a meaningless metric.

And again. The point of my response was to illustrate the misinformation. As much as you want to downplay it 2 billion is a noteworthy and significant loss.

Here we had The Umbrella man
https://abcnews.com/amp/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-riots-identified-white/story?id=72051536
And another guy who set fire to a parking lot attendants booth

Insured property damage just wasn't the purpose or intent of BLM. Illustrating it as such works just as much towards misinformation as the offending meme, if not more.

It most certainly does. It demonstrates just how gargantuan these protests were. They resulted in the most costly protest-related property damage in American history.

And no, it is not misinformation. It is an objectively verifiable fact.

If people cannot comprehend the significance of $2 billion, there is not much I can do about that. That is a failure of our educational system, which is an entirely different issue in and of itself.

But downplaying the damage is disingenuous at best and outright pandering at worst.

I've seen this argument parroted a few times online. Unfortunately it just does not hold water whatsoever. We have 50, or closer to 60 now, years of liberal policy in America that flies in the face of this argument 100%. We have decades of anti labor, anti-regulation, Pro corporate, pro Wall Street, anti civil liberties and all around liberal policies to show us otherwise.

It's no coincidence that we are where we are. Because as you alluded to it's not just one party. Republicans are absolutely liberal, or they were before the last 10 years at least. As were Democrats. That's the history of American politics basically since the beginning. Two liberal parties. One leaning slightly more conservative and one leaning slightly more Progressive. Or some might put it, the party of the grand bourgeoisie and the party of the petite bourgeoisie. But both fundamentally liberal. America was the first great liberal Revolution and it is something that gas guided us ever since. But it has not changed.

You mentioned the Old Guard of the Democratic party being "classical liberal" instead of your supposed new definition. However that Old Guard has been just the guard for a very long time. I would argue always. It's not a remnant. It's a feature. With the new arising of the new Democrats in the '80s. Clinton and Gore and their ilk. What did their rise to power bring about? Massive deregulation. The gutting of Labor. With their Republican allies they instituted an extremely liberal policy that tore apart any Progressive advances that had been made in the previous decades. Though it's not like Jimmy Carter didn't put his stamp on it either. Was Obama old guard? I wouldn't argue so certainly, yet there's a very good reason why when he tried to implement his liberal free trade policies he had all of the Republicans and about half the Democrats behind him. Certainly his expansion of their surveillance state and protecting big Banks like Wells Fargo were extremely liberal policies of a classical nature.

We could go on and on. The point is It doesn't hold up. This concept of a new definition of liberal just doesn't coincide with reality. Because the reality of what the Liberals in America vote for what they support what they legislate is the exact same definition of what liberals world over do. So when people tell you that liberalism is a different word in America understand that that's a psyop. Because liberals and conservatives in America would love you to think that liberalism is as far left as you can go. They would love you not to have a actual Progressive Party. Which is what the Democratic party pretends to be but it's actually a liberal party with a few progressives chained up in the bowels of the boat.

Makes me think of the UK:

Extinction Rebellion and just stop oil did a load of stunts that didn't do any real harm and the press treated like they burnt a city down.

Literal Nazis committed programs and riots in the streets and the press said they had "legitimate concerns".

They only have an issue with disruption when it's the left.