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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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A couple points here:

  1. There is a significant chance that this was just methheads doing methhead shit and there's no political motivation at all. This is the most likely, imo.

  2. The next most likely outcome was that this was the local anarchist/black-bloc idiots. So theoretically left aligned, but mostly just retarded agents of chaos. Slightly better organized than the drug-retarded agents of chaos in #1 above, but still not great culture war fodder because basically everyone already hates them.

  3. There's a slim, slim chance that this was anything more meaningful, but what would the purpose possibly be? The local elections are absolute chaos because the city switched to rank choice voting and expanded from a five person city council to a 12 person city council all in one shot, so there's no clear benefit to burning ballots because nobody has any clue how this is going to shake out. For national elections Oregon is as blue as it gets, so pretty much nothing can move the needle there.

Have we considered it might be a right wing extremist? It doesn’t seem like their usual MO but it’s definitely possible.

Devices With ‘Free Gaza’ Messages Found at Ballot Box Fires. Ah yes, the infamous "Free Gaza" right-wing extremists!

Yes, I will admit this was almost certainly some kind of lefty activist, probably antifa. Still think ‘right wing extremists’ should have been on the list of possibilities, albeit not as the #1, before we knew this.

A right wing extremist would have obviously just shot the boxes 5000 times with the ammo he had laying around in his truck, not used a Molotov. It's all about which tool you reach for.

Right. Because setting two mailboxes on fire is going to turn Portland red. Nope, there's nothing to "consider" here, it's not even good as a Disney movie plot. And that's a very low bar.

Something tells me that whoever did this(and I’m not sold of the right wing extremist hypothesis but its categorical exclusion is strange) will not turn out to be a careful planner who gamed out the impacts for maximum political effect.

That's why I'm going with homeless drug addicts or anarchist dipshits, this is definitely not part of some greater plot.

/r/Portland being absolutely 100% convinced it was the proud boys just makes me more sure.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but there's an article that police are looking for the owners of a Volvo S-60 spotted near the box via CCTV.

Yeah, and it looks like both were incendiary devices placed on the exterior of the boxes. That disqualifies criddlers, so now my money is on anarchists.

What's strange? When people consider violent acts done, in the city known by the multitude of violent acts performed by left wing extremists that has been tolerated and encouraged for years, and when there are no base nor numbers nor hope in the area for right wing extremists and they do not gain absolutely anything from it, then people go with most plausible explanation and exclude the least plausible? I think it's the least strange way of doing it.

But by the same token, Portland is already blue, so why bother?

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Portland is where their safe space is.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html

The boxes are about 15 miles apart. The one in Vancouver is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where one of the most competitive House races in the country is taking place.

This seems to point to #2 - this was coordinated across state lines and not some spur-of-the-moment thing. But I can only speculate as to what the local anarchists think they're accomplishing by doing this. Maybe it's a far-left accelerationist thing: "We want Trump to win while Kamala supporters think it's rigged, so that the system will be discredited in the eyes of liberals and they'll realize that since voting D won't change anything, radical action is needed."

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