> Many effective protests do destroy property, and that's mostly the property of large corporations.
The property being destroyed by rioters and looters in the current wave largely belongs to individuals and small businesses, although there have been some large corporations affected (e.g., Macy's in NYC was looted).
> Violence against individual humans is a separate issue.
I agree that it is worse to harm or kill a human directly than to harm or destroy their property. However, since many people's property is essential to their livelihood, harming or destroying property is still a very serious matter and should not be condoned.
> You're free to assume that this has nothing to do with the public health and economic situation (and self-interested voluntary decisions of police) and may be blamed entirely on protests
Rioting and looting is not a valid response to the COVID-19 situation any more than it is a valid response to inequality before the law and corruption on the part of the police (and the local governments that are responsible for police corruption).
Apparently your impression is that most property damage from rioting has affected small business and home owners. My impression, from both mainstream and fringe media and personal observation, is definitely not that. I doubt we'll settle the disagreement on this point through discussion. ISTM one has to conjure up a quite particular "white anarchist" bad guy to support the "small business" theory. What branch of anarchism is more opposed to small business than to giant corporations? Anyway, basically the only reason white people speak up at these demonstrations is to encourage less property destruction.
I'm glad we agree that property owned by large corporations and covered by insurance is not something to worry about.
"Rioting and looting" (since we must constantly distract ourselves from the goals of protests that are manifestly mostly not those things) may not be a "valid" response to disease per se. In USA, we have seen multiple giant "bailout" laws passed in response to this disease, in nearly legislatively unanimous fashion, which have mostly given trillions of dollars to rich people while not changing the public health situation at all. At the same time, smaller expenditures in other nations have solved the problem to much greater extents than we've managed here. As a result, people in our families will die who would not have died if they lived in e.g. New Zealand or China or South Korea or Germany or Cuba. In that context, burning down some wealthy store that already received a giant handout from the government seems about right to me. In addition, we always expect crime to increase somewhat during economic downturns.
Destructive protests are the only thing that has ever moved the needle at all on police brutality. Just look at Ferguson: decades of no action and inexorably worse policy, followed by immediate changes once the burning started. It's almost as if the white power structure doesn't care about the lived experiences of black, brown, and indigenous people, and only responds when it is forced to do so.
> I'm glad we agree that property owned by large corporations and covered by insurance is not something to worry about.
I did not say I agreed with that.
> since we must constantly distract ourselves from the goals of protests that are manifestly mostly not those things
I am doing no such thing. I am simply drawing an important distinction that you appear to be unwilling or unable to draw, between justified protest and unjustified violence.
You're excluding from consideration the category of justified property destruction. "Violence" is a different thing. No one outside the police and a few undercover police want to see kids and old people get injured, maimed, or killed. If police continue to escalate, there will also be violence in the other direction. That's on them.
The property being destroyed by rioters and looters in the current wave largely belongs to individuals and small businesses, although there have been some large corporations affected (e.g., Macy's in NYC was looted).
> Violence against individual humans is a separate issue.
I agree that it is worse to harm or kill a human directly than to harm or destroy their property. However, since many people's property is essential to their livelihood, harming or destroying property is still a very serious matter and should not be condoned.
> You're free to assume that this has nothing to do with the public health and economic situation (and self-interested voluntary decisions of police) and may be blamed entirely on protests
Rioting and looting is not a valid response to the COVID-19 situation any more than it is a valid response to inequality before the law and corruption on the part of the police (and the local governments that are responsible for police corruption).