I heard the MN governor said S. Mpls is 'extremely dangerous' right now and that made intuitive sense to me at a gut level and then I thought about it and I think that's false and I wanna talk about why. I will say first off that I am generally nervous in crowds and at night so I

get why people would react that way. I've never been in a riot but I've been in a lot of demonstrations, some of which got hairy, and I've never had a bad experience in those situations other than being afraid due to police. I also spent a lot of time in S Mpls when I lived out

there so I feel like I know the area a little. I think this kind of 'be afraid!' stuff gets in our heads easily. I think what goes in is that this rhetoric takes a situation which is a relative suspension of the normal social order, and which poses a threat to some private

property, and treats it as pure disorder - when these kinds of events are in fact quite orderly, just the organization of their order has its own logic - and treats it specifically as a disorder that is a threat of violence to ordinary people. That seems false to me. The protests

are full of expressions of positive human values. I'm not saying every person is an angel or whatever, I'm saying that these are events in which large numbers of people are organizing themselves around a set of pro-social and humane values, and I think that promotes safety for

people in the area in a different way. This rhetoric also serves to mask the fact that normal social order is a terribly violent one - George Floyd's murder of course, but also that ppl in S Mpls have an 8-13 year lower life expectancy than ppl just a few miles away. I think the

responses of people like the governor are inseparable from their people forces of the current order, which is an ongoing organization of violence. Those of us on the left should try not to look at these events from their POV and try to notice when they get in our heads.