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Black lives matter, ... or so you say
Radical progressives and law enforcement
Once when I was visiting my brother-in-law in Vietnam, I noticed his six year old son had picked up a stick off the ground and was playing solder with it. The little boy pretended the stick was a pump action shotgun, pointing it at one thing after another: click-clack-BANG... click-clack-BANG. I got his attention and, with my wife as a translator, showed and told him that the correct technique is to cycle the gun while it is in recoil, before acquiring the next target: BANG-click-clack,... BANG-click-clack. He tried it a few times and then looked to me, and I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.
A few minutes later, the boy's father (my brother-in-law) warned me not to teach him things like that -- because if he repeats them at school, his family might get an unpleasant visit from the police. I apologized for the mistake and made sure not to repeat it. A few minutes later, my brother-in-law mentioned that his motorcycle had been stolen the week before. I asked him if he had reported it to the police and he said no; they wouldn't do anything about it. In a Marxist police state, that's not what the police are for.
In the United States today, a black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person, and murder is the leading cause of death among black males under 45. The problem of a high murder rate for blacks in the US is not new, but while it has received little media attention, that rate has skyrocketed over the last ten years. The rate of homicide against blacks increased by around 50% from 2014 to 2020 and has remained near the 2020 level up to the time of this writing. This translates to about 19,000 excess black homicide deaths from 2015 to 2023, over and above what would have occurred if the 2014 rate had continued. That is more than the number of black Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined, in less time than the total duration of those three wars. Something changed in 2015 that is having the effect of a war on black people in America.
The public conversation about the epidemic of killings of blacks in America looks like something this: some researchers, such as Roland Fryer and Heather Macdonald, along with many if not most conservative thinkers on the subject, have argued that the sudden increase in the rate of black homicide is largely a result of the "Ferguson effect" -- in which police officers are reluctant to patrol and intervene in majority-black neighborhoods because of hostility toward police fomented by "Black Lives Matter" activists. Progressives, in response, say that the causal theory of the Ferguson effect is not true. If we step back and look at the debate, no matter which side one takes, what is striking is that it is generally the conservatives who begin the conversation about the problem. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?
What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you demoralize, and in many cases defund, the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.
But where did the ridiculous idea of abolishing the police come from in the first place? In fact, the dismantling of law enforcement by radical progressives is nothing new. In the fourth century BC, Plato described a political faction whose agenda included moral relativism, sexual liberation, open borders, treating aliens like citizens, redistribution of wealth, debt cancellation, silencing dissenting speech, the lax enforcement of criminal laws, and, finally, stripping private citizens of the right to bear arms. Sound familiar? Plato's name for this group was demokratiko ántras (Greek: democratic men), and he wrote that when a state is governed by such men, convicted criminals are free to walk the streets. He also wrote that such a state it is on the precipice of tyranny [The Republic, VIII]. In two previous Substack posts (here and here), I have written in more detail about the correspondence between Plato's narrative and the woke agenda.
The gutting of pre-existing law enforcement structures was also a common theme in the communist revolutions in both Russia and China -- though in China, the focus was on prosecutors and judges rather than police officers. I will discuss the Russian case in more detail below. In any case, it seems that going back to the time Plato, the playbook of leftist tyranny has included the following essential steps:
The secret of the "secret police" is that they are not really police at all, but a gang of thugs who operate by whatever rules they invent as they go, and whose purpose is to terrorize and silence ideological opponents of the ruling party. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia said that on paper, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights that was better than the American bill of rights, adding "I mean it literally. It was much better" [source]. But the Soviet bill of rights didn't matter, because, in the Soviet Union, there was no de facto remedy for the violation of one's de jure rights. Indeed, a state terror organization like the Cheka or KGB cannot possibly operate alongside an organization that actually enforces the law. Thus, if it isn't really black lives that matter, but establishing a one-party police state, then abolishing the (pre-existing) police is not such a stupid idea after all. On the contrary, it is the first step in a proven plan with a long tradition!
Lenin's Abolition of the Police
Recall that in 1902 Lenin wrote,
In a previous post, I discussed how Lenin urged his followers to blame class exploitation for every problem in the world (and also, to view everything as a problem, even if it was never a problem before). In this article, I would draw the reader's attention to Lenin's description of the enemy that is to blame for all these problems, large and small: a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation. For Lenin, the class enemy of the bourgeoisie was intimately tied with the institutions of law enforcement.
The police forces that existed in Russia before the revolution were under the command of the Tsar, and included a repressive political police force as well as ordinary law enforcement. But in his picture of "police violence and capitalist exploitation", Lenin didn't distinguish between the two. In the Marxist view, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression. The revolutionaries further regarded laws against assaulting whomever they wanted to assault as a form of oppression: after all their targets were capitalist bourgeoisie exploiters, or alleged to be as part of the justification of the would-be crime, and murder and theft were just what they had coming.
Lenin had advocated open war on the police for years leading up to the 1917 revolution. For example in 1905 he wrote,
Lenin knew that his regime would not be able to operate as planned alongside the existing system of courts and police. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, he wrote,
But what would function in place the “apparatus of state power”? This would be the subject of a diabolical bait-and-switch. Before coming to power, Lenin called for abolition of the police and their replacement by a collective of armed citizens [Lenin (1917): "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution"]. Lenin's followers probably imagined something along the lines of the CHAZ autonomous zone created by BLM activists in Seattle in 2020. Lenin probably laughed to himself and imagined the Cheka.
As the revolution unfolded, the Bolsheviks initially delivered on their promise to abolish the police, including both the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) and regular law enforcement. Not only were the existing police departments wiped out as government agencies; the 1918 Soviet constitution revoked the right to vote for all former police officers -- along with other alleged class exploiters, including clergymen, former business owners, and anyone deemed "selfish or dishonorable" by the Soviet authorities:
The 1918 Soviet constitution further stipulated that "all workers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized, and the propertied class be disarmed". The collective of armed citizens was off to a good start, at least on paper, but this clause was also the beginning of gun control in the Soviet Union. In the initial phase, the Soviet government only disarmed their intended victims at the time, which consisted of people in categories designated as bourgeois.
Eventually, however, the entire civilian population would be disarmed, and the entire civilian population would also become victims or potential victims -- since anyone, at any time, might do something the authorities deemed "selfish or dishonorable" -- such as say something that the Soviet government did not want other citizens to hear, even if saying it was OK to say and hear the day before. In 1924, all private citizens, bourgeois and proletarian alike, were stripped of the right to own pistols and rifles, and private gun ownership was restricted to shotguns -- which were required to be licensed and registered, and could only be owned for the purpose of hunting. In 1939, the Soviet government confiscated all privately owned firearms. So much for a collective of armed citizens.
The wave of criminal savagery that ensued following the October 1917 revolution was beyond comprehension for most Westerners today. It is difficult to isolate the effect of Lenin's abolition of the police on this crime wave, because a civil war commenced in which atrocities including mass looting and, mass murder, and mass rape were routinely committed on both sides. However, within two months of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka -- the secret police agency of the Soviet Union that would later evolve into the KGB. So much for abolishing the police.
I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such. Probably for tactical reasons (not wanting to give ammo to right wingers), it isn't usually highlighted as a problem-alone. There isn't the angst-for-its-own-sake aspect like there is for some other issues (like income inequality). It does actually come up at least sometimes! It's just usually in a hopeful kind of context, paired with a solution. For example, there are still well-publicized pushes for community violence interventions (I've seen them highlighted several times in national, left news outlets). One dimension of the gun control is exactly this. There's also talk about how this kind of violence is the result of the prison and justice system. And as an aside, indeed I am at least a little sympathetic to the particular argument (of many, some of which are bunk) that once you send someone to prison once, they acquire friends and influences that encourage further lawbreaking in the future, including homicide. In other words, there are actual, plausible mechanisms for these beliefs other than a vague
So yeah, they DO talk about this death/crisis. Just not in isolation (not anymore). One of the things that struck me watching the Malcolm X biopic recently was how up-front he was about problems within the black community and taking ownership of the fix (though still he blamed white people for all of this, at least early on in his life). And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there) which I do find interesting.
So that's for many modern leftists. I find your talk about earlier revolutionary leftists very interesting. You can definitely see the seeds of later problems in some of what they discuss. Such as the perpetual, mob-conducted non-state violence of the Cultural Revolution in China. Or how untenable abolishing so many groups of people from the vote would be, as per the list you quoted which would eliminate a huge percentage of the population. However, modern US progressives still have much more in common with European social democrats (or democratic socialists) than they do with any form of communism, though they sometimes adopt the same language (the goals are very different).
I think if they cared about what they say they care about, they would be discussing, not just "too much gun crime", but the sudden spike starting in 2015 and what might be behind it, and whether the Ferguson contributed to it. They would be the ones starting that conversation if they cared about the lives of black people. They would be discussing that more than they discuss alleged police racism, or at least in the ballpark of as much.
They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives. They can talk about police brutality because black people have raised that as an issue and suggested solutions through the BLM movement et al, (though of course black people not being a monolith the solution space progressives are seeing is a necessarily constrained subset, but that police violence is a problem has more widespread acceptance in black communities than what to do about black on black violence).
Remember progressives just like everyone else have a whole competing stack of interests, and priorities. They have wanting for fewer black people to be killed AND wanting to defer to black voices on black problems. If black communities can agree on a solution to black on black violence and push that up the progressive stack then progressives will start to talk about it.
I think the problem is that your model of progressives is incorrect. They aren't life saving maximizing machines, if they were it would make sense for them to push that conversation. But they aren't so your understanding of WHY they don't do what you think they should do if they hold the values you think they do is incorrect.
Progressives care about lots of things, and those competing desires explain their behaviors. Just like how progressives talk about people who think abortion is murder. "If you really thought that abortion was murder and hundreds of thousands of innocent babies were tortured and killed each year you would do much more about it". And the same answer is the one here. They really do believe that, but they also have a bunch of other things they care about which constrains the solution spaces they can explore. For pro-life people, that might be a belief in law and order, moral precepts that murder is wrong, so killing abortionists is not an acceptable solution, and the belief that the alternatives to democratic options are worse.
For progressives here the answer is that their moral precepts that they should not be enforcing solutions on black communities (that they don't think black communities have asked for) means that is not an acceptable approach to black on black violence.
And part of the problem with that is that black communities are deeply divided themselves, on this. There is wariness about how their communities have been treated in the past, degraded trust levels, and much much more.
TLDR Progressives are not just black life utility maximizing machines, so when they don't do the exact things you think they should do, it doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have a whole stack of other moral precepts and beliefs to balance. Just like how pro-lifers are not all single issue voters.
Some underlying variable took off in 2015, which, as I noted, has caused more excess black deaths than the Vietnam war, the Korean War, and World War II combined, in a shorter amount of total time. This is not a nuance thing that could get lost at the bottom of the stack; it has literally had the effect of a war on black lives. You don't need to be a "utility maximizing machine" to notice that, amplify the issue, and look for an explanation. It would suffice to care, at all, about what they loudly claim to care about.
It's not just that they aren't doing enough (as might be said of pro-life activists); It's not even that they aren't lifting a finger; au contraire, it's that so many of them take to the streets to shout for a policy (defund the police) that predictably harms our community, harms blacks disproportionately, and that is not supported by most blacks -- and practically none of them are complaining about the others doing that.
One is clearly not obligated to be a "utility maximizing machine". One is obligated to exercise due diligence to be intellectually honest and not to do obvious net harm, all things considered. Qualitatively, you could make the same argument about anything, but whether that argument has merit depends on (1) the severity of the harm, (2) the severity of the hypocrisy in ignoring it, and (3) the clarity with which both of these can be discerned by a reasonable observer. In this case I submit that the harm is catastrophic, the hypocrisy outlandish, and the clarity crystal. Here I argue that there must exist cases like that, whether this is one of them or not.
@SSCReader if you want to give a convicting argument, I suggest you point out some of those cases and compare the woke movement to them. For example, you could say "Yes the Nazis were significantly more hypocritical than average (in 1935, before taking power), and yes the Bolsheviks were, too (in 1900, before taking power), but the woke are not -- by quantitative comparison with, say, evangelicals." I won't ask you for evidence; I'd just like to know your opinion of where some ideological groups stand on that continuum. Or do you believe we're all just human and no groups is any more or less hypocritical than any other?
My outgroup does not care about what they claim to care about is pretty much always incorrect. Exactly the same attack is used against pro-life people and it similarly incorrect there. The vast majority of people do not look for explanations for much of anything or weigh their various concerns rationally. That is entirely normal.
Pretty much. But
I think the argument in this case are strong enough to meet the burden of proof.
I don't think you've even justified that 2 is true let alone that progressives are in it. I live in a Red Tribe area but i work mostly with Blue Tribe progressives in academia. My interactions with all of them indicate that they do care about the things they say they care about even when their opponents claim their actions show otherwise.
I think you are simply put wrong. I've given you reasons why they don't behave as you expect they do. I think those are correct and you yourself are hopelessly stuck in 7) Because everyone is tempted to think they are in G and their opponents are in G' their ability to unbiasedly evaluate the evidence is hopelessly confounded, even when they think it is not.
Whereas, I don't think there is a difference between G and G' in this respect at all.
I thought #2 was self-evident. Perhaps I was mistaken. Do you believe it is false?
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I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.
Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.
Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your hands about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.
Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most blacks want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?
The average white progressive doesn't know many, if any people in black urban communities. So they are reliant on what movements like BLM say.
Now there's an internal contradiction as I mentioned. BLM still has 80% support among black people, but the defund the police option is much less popular but you wouldn't necessarily know that if BLM was your source. In other words whatever movement is the one that was riding the zeitgeist at the time is the one that got to set the narrative.
They would know better if they cared more. In fact, they would know better if they cared much at all. This isn't something that a person has to figure out for themselves; you just have to know somebody who knows somebody that heard about it on a podcast (or read it on a message board), and all three of you (you, the person you know, and the person they know) care about it enough to pass it on. And the podcasters and pundits themselves, whose job it is to know this and inform their audience, certainly cannot plead innocent ignorance.
This is an important theorem. It is the convergence theorem for so-called geometric series, and, to a first approximation, it describes how interesting information items spread in a community. Basically, if everyone who hears about the thing, on average, shares it with r other people, and r > 1, then it will spread until the community is saturated and r effectively becomes less than one (because a high proportion of people in the community have already heard it). That geometric growth to saturation is colloquially known as "going viral". The r-value for a certain piece of information, or video, or whatever has in a given community depends on how well that item resonates with the interests of the community. Long story short, what goes viral is what people find interesting. (Thanks for the tip. right?)
If black lives really mattered in woke culture, the discussion about the epidemic of black homicide would go viral faster than "Hands up don't shoot" -- and if they really didn't want to be patriarchal white saviors, so would the fact that white Democrats are the only group that wants to defund the police.
The average person simply does not invest much time in investigating causes beyond what their immediate social circle is doing. If you are using that to say progressives don't care, then pretty much nobody cares about anything. We are the outliers here, not them.
That's right. Hence, what goes viral in a community depends on it being interesting enough to share with an average of at least 1.001 other people in your immediate social circle. What goes viral in a community tells you what really matters to people in that community. SJW's know about "Hands up don't shoot". They know about January 6. They know about Russian collusion. They know about the hockey stick graph of climate change -- but what they don't know about is the hockey stick graph of murder of blacks -- because, even if it comes to the attention of a random SJW in some dark corner of the internet, that is not important enough to share with at least 1 other SJW on average. Look at what they do have bandwidth for, and look at what they don't, and it tells you what they care about.
It is true that the average SJW doesn't know the facts of the matter we are discussing. It is also true that the reason he does not know those facts is that it is a group characteristic of his community not to care about those particular facts. The ones to who are not hypocritical on this issue are the ones who would be amplifying the issue if they knew about it, and of course there are some of those, but they must be a small minority (or else it would actually be getting amplified). You know what happens to those people? They grow up to be Michael Shellenberger, Thomas Sowell, and Amala Ekpunobi.
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Where in this chain of reasoning do you think the progressives who are championing particular solutions, at a national level, get off this train? Do they think that it's okay for them to enforce their national-scale idea on black communities? Do they just not realize that black communities are deeply divided? (Do they just not care?)
Well, when generalizing there will always be exceptions of course. I'm sure there are some who may believe there is more of an agreement than there is, and others who perhaps care less about being seen to be paternalistic. All movements contain variation.
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If you follow a hyper-black social media page you'll see plenty of highly upvoted calls for ownership of problems and despair at intraracial violence.
But then depending on the day you'll also see glee at black-on-white violence or calls to "free X" regardless of who they victimized.
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I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.
Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.
Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?
Start earlier. Remember progressivism started from the very real discrimination faced by black people in the US historically, just as Bolsheviks may too have had a real grievance about conditions. If you have already lost trust in authority (as many black people have) then that makes sense.
Many Catholics to this day distrust the Northern Irish police service due to how it was used back in the day. And that is after disbanding the RUC, renaming it and mandating a Catholic quota in officers.
That is where BLM comes from. Trust once lost is hard to regain. They are not starting with a neutral view. As for black on black violence, white progressives also don't want to be seen to be racist and paternalistic in forcing solutions on black communities that they did not ask for. And black communities are hopelessly divided on that issue. If they (or at last a large majority) could agree a solution, white progressives would be happy to champion it as they did BLM.
I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.
However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.
I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.
Right the BLM movement is spawned from but not controlled by the black communities that are impacted by it one way or the other. I'd agree there.
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Technically, my ass. The only reason Wilson didn't get railroaded by a system that badly wanted to was because it wasn't remotely a close case. Wilson's actions were fully justified by large margins, and he had extensive physical evidence to prove it.
And see, I would agree with all of this, except for the "excessively defending the police" claim in the same post where you seem to present the Michael Brown case as somehow borderline! Police misconduct absolutely exists, and absolutely should be punished, but you need to use valid examples.
I find it amusing that in this thread, I'm being taken to task both for saying that most people shot by cops "had it coming" - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the suspect, and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer. I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!
My actual position is more like, I believe both that there is significant police misconduct and that the vast majority of actual police shootings are fully justified. Misconduct takes place more in the smaller stuff, like excessive force and hostility. Felony car stops for paperwork errors, SWAT raids on houses based on flimsy evidence of minor crimes, raiding the wrong house entirely, destructive searches with flimsy justification, etc.
You're misrepresenting my criticism. My point was that your description of this specific situation was wrong, not the degree of sympathy you showed. It is in fact quite a big deal that people know where the line is between good behavior and bad, and saying that Wilson was "technically" in the clear is simply not true. In order to avoid further unjust treatment, it had to be proved that Wilson was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt--a complete inversion of the standards of criminal law--and he did so, meeting an unjust burden. Again, this was not a close case!
Splitting the difference between the truth and a lie is not admirable.
I largely agree with your second paragraph; one of my biggest meta-problems with BLM at the time was that it would prevent meaningful, productive police reform for a generation. I was wrong in that assessment in my undue optimism--the fallout has been much worse than I anticipated.
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Their behavior is indeed baffling if you assume that they are trying to implement a rational plan to achieve the goals they claim to have. But I don't think that is what is going on. If you ignore what they say and watch what they do, what objective does it point to?
As an aside, I think it's a bit cold blooded to say that the offender "had it coming". I suspect that if you or I had been his shoes, and walked in his shoes a while, we might have acted the same way he did -- or at least understood and empathized with his motives. I think it's more accurate to say that the shooting was justified.
I mean "had it coming" in a more immediate sense. Not that the person as a whole deserved to die in the abstract, regardless of what he had done at any particular moment. More that yeah if you try to beat or choke or stab or shoot a cop, he's probably going to try to shoot you, regardless of what motivated you to do that and to what extent it was understandable.
On the first, it's pretty standard for the leaders of a movement to be disingenuous about their real goals. It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.
When an animal gets rabies, it seems to decide to stop drinking water. That is why it is called "hydrophobia". This causes excess viruses to build up in the animal's mouth instead of being washed down, which would happen if it were drinking normally. The little spit that is left in the mouth is thick with rabies virus, so he is said to "foam at the mouth". Then the animal seems to decide to get mad at the world -- so mad that a skunk will attack a German Shepherd, and a German shepherd will attack its owner. To himself the rabid animal is probably thinking the equivalent, "You called my momma a name and I heard it". But what is really happening is that a rabid animal is not in control of itself; it is carrying out the plan of some other agent that has infected it, and the goal of that plan has evolved to spread the virus that carries it.
The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; [Proverbs 30:27, ESV]
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But I don't think Russia was very industrialized—my impression was that that mostly happened with Stalin? There were many more peasant farmers.
When I read this (especially including low pay), what I hear is that labor was cheap relative to the goods people wanted, unless there's something keeping the markets out. So a large part of what made lives better was labor becoming more expensive relative to the goods it can buy—employers would give more for it.
Overpopulation was one of the reasons why the revolution happened. Cities used to be population sinks, but Russian cities weren't big enough to absorb surplus peasantry. A large supply of industrial workers meant that the price of labor was low, turning the proletariat into literal incels, since the only housing they could afford was not a room, but a single bunk.
Forced land redistribution started even before the Bolsheviks took power, they were the one smart enough to legitimize and endorse it (Decree on Land). The resulting yeomanization of Russia bought them about ten years of goodwill, until peasants started switching to cash crops and fodder from wheat.
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There's at least three groups among modern progressives. The "Resigned" are very liberal but don't really do much about it. They feel betrayed and left behind by the system and this depresses them and leads to apathy and inaction. There's the College Crusader who are usually white and well-educated, and very politically active, and have socialist sympathies. They are usually the stereotype, where they are in favor of equality and equity and want drastic solutions to accomplish it. They typically don't have much sympathy for opposing viewpoints. Economic and racial lenses on many issues are very common views. Then you have the Radicals. They are a bit harder to define, probably because as a demographic group, they aren't very big (Progressives broadly are only like 12% of US adults, using Pew's numbers). These are the people where actual Marxism might start showing up more overtly. And they are the only ones for which, at least in my opinion, Bolshevik comparisons should be made for.
Zooming out, and looking at one actual mass movement, BLM had broad appeal beyond conservatives because some of the core pieces of the message were generic enough for large parts of the liberal coalition to get behind, on top of a few highly-publicized cases of cops actually doing some pretty horrifying things (not all the time, of course as you note, but the cop kneeling on his neck is a pretty powerful image, whether you think drugs were a big factor in his death or not). But notice how ACAB and stuff specifically didn't actually gain much traction beyond Fox News which loved to use it as a very easy boo-outgroup target.
And when you get into the apparent apathy behind Black deaths, you actually do start to see a split, and not a new one -- it dates back to at least the Civil Rights era. You have some people who think that white people should do something about it -- but feel powerless, and thus redirect this energy into anti-gun and so a lesser extent, anti-police crusades. As noted, much of this group is white, and thus this is all they "can" do. You also have the more Malcolm-X style progressives who think the solution has to come from Blacks themselves.... but the problem? Blacks are rarely progressives. Most Blacks are vaguely generic establishment Democrats on the spectrum, or uninvolved in politics. Here you can see that not only are only 10% of Progressives (themselves only 12% of the total population) Black, but the density of Black adults falls much more among other Democratic sub-groups. So basically, white College Crusaders leave the problem to Black true-believers, but there aren't enough of them to make meaningful amounts of noise in the general space.
Ngl guys it’s pretty cringe that this really interesting comment got a bunch of downvotes.
As an aside I wonder if it’s worth subclassifying your Radicals into further groups around eg the “class-reduction” debate with StupidPol/bro socialist types vs the queer Marxists etc. Then again the former has effectively been exiled from mainstream progressivism so maybe they wouldn’t even count.
The asks question -> receives answer -> downvotes response is so bizarre to me. It's like the forum version of the Who killed Hannibal meme. It makes me think that, in aggregate, the "why can't I understand progressives" question is more rhetorical and boo-outgroup than an actual attempt at seeking understanding, which is sad.
Regarding the actual makeup or splits among Progressives, it's hard to know. Progressives are at least somewhat loud by themselves, but they are also signal-boosted by both right wing outlets looking for a boogeyman as well as left wing outlets who don't want to talk back too loudly or they will betray some cause. But my main point was that they aren't actually a very big group! At least according to the best polling data we have. And at some point, attempting to slice and categorize such a small group becomes both statistically and philosophically questionable.
You bring up a great point however. Classifying them all as Radicals is a bit lazy and is also a bit of centrist bias. Maybe I should do a deeper dive and see if there's some good polling data specific to progressives.
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I still see it in women's online dating profiles.
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And not exclusively liberals either. I remember at least one person who's conservative reacting to Floyd dying after being restrained at his neck. Though he wasn't in favor of the riots, of course.
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Basically, all of this is true. In particular, the use of Russian working-class men as cannon fodder in World War I, the inhuman conditions they lived under while at war, and the indifference of the upper classes to any of this, created morbid resentment among the lower classes toward the upper. While the common soldiers had to live under ghastly conditions of privation, cold, lice, disease, and lack of medical care, they witnessed first-hand the relatively cushy lives of the officers, and even more cushy lives of the commanders. It resonates with the American situation in Vietnam, where, because of the college draft deferment, working class and underclass men were often sent abroad to risk their lives for values held more closely by the upper classes. It also resonates with Plato's description of how the working classes lose respect for the rich when they serve side by side in war:
The question is how to move forward from it. The Russians picked the wrong answer. Dead wrong.
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Sometimes, I forget how core and radical this is. Then, I see things like this guy's most recent comic. It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work. What do they really think their life would be like if civilization reverted to essentially the state of nature and nobody was around to care every time a slightly larger hairless ape showed up and decided to take something from them by violence. I know the old joke about pro-capitalist people being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', but what are they actually envisioning? Are they 'temporarily embarrassed gang leaders/warlords'?
The problem with the comic is that the author obviously sympathizes with the wolf, not that the wolf is ipso facto incorrect.
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For what it's worth, this may be a common misquote of John Steinbeck who was originally saying that the American Communists that he knew were temporarily embarrassed capitalists, not that the people who wouldn't support communism saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
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Yeah, why exactly does he think the wolf is the good guy in this tale?
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IMO this is the million dollar question. I think they are spoiled children grown up, and they absolutely take for granted the peace and prosperity "just happen" in an effortless, stable equilibrium. They think the only thing mucking it up is a few bad apples, and that if we can just put bullets in the backs of those people's heads we will get back to the Garden of Eden.
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Well, in actually existing non-state societies people abandon individualism to take advantage of, or form, structures which provide security from external violence. Eg, clans, gangs, etc. I think we can safely say that the far left does not want to live under clan structures, and when asked what they envision they're usually cagey on details, but they talk about everyone living together in harmony and doing whatever it is they find personally fulfilling. When they try to start something, it usually at least attempts to do this before failing horribly because no one in the commune is volunteering to scrub toilets and they can't resolve disputes.
I think we can take their ideas at face value, as stupid as they appear(very). Yes, as a good redneck it seems trivially obvious that some people have to be assigned to do unpleasant work, and someone has to be in charge so you don't have people fighting it out whenever there's a disagreement(often over who has to do that unpleasant work). But I think far leftists have very different backgrounds and life experiences.
I think Crosby, Stills, and Nash crystalized their motivating impetus pretty well:
Song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1sH0uR2u7Hs
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Crosby-stills-nash-and-young-woodstock-lyrics
Which makes me think of the line from This is Spinal Tap: There's such a fine line between clever and... stupid.
Rabbi Raphael Hirsch wrote,
I think Hirsh is right in that the story of Eden captures something that people, or something inside people, longs deeply for; and there are two paths that appear to lead toward it. One path respects our position as servants of a Higher Power, the position of our fellow man as being made in His image, and the constraints of the moral and causal laws of nature and human nature. The other does not -- and was aptly called the unconstrained vision by Thomas Sowell. Both are essentially spiritual in their composition. What does Marx's utopian vision look like? No divisions by class or country, no courts or cops, no private possessions, and plenty for all. Sound familiar? If you want to understand Marxists, you should think of Marx, not as a political philosopher, but as a self-anointed prophet. When Bertrand Russell met with Lenin, he unexpectedly found that Lenin regarded Marx that way:
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South Park nailed it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ywVHF6Lltac?si=4DBzhyjxJT3tvYc3
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Many leaders lacked the pragmatic realism that other visionaries like (IMO) the Founding Fathers had. The practical answer is a lot of people were living in objectively poor conditions and were mad and wanted to throw a bomb at the system. Bomb-throwing has a habit of not stopping nicely and neatly and isn't exactly known for forward thinking. A leader of an angry mob only has so much power. At the time, they felt the existing structure was too strong and deep-rooted for anything other than revolution to fix. And you see this (horseshoe theory anyone?) from other groups, too. At risk of opening a can of worms, you can even see Trumpists use this same exact language today (the justice system needs to be blown up, the deep state is too deep where we need to wholesale fire entire swaths of the civil service, flirting with suspending the Constitution to allegedly save it somehow, etc).
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Eh, the wolf is absolutely right. Either the pig needed sharpshooters, or the wolf would have had to be convinced that if he ate the pig and tried to take his stuff, the people the pig contracted with would kill him. Might may not make right, but it doesn't need to; might is sufficient unto itself.
But quantity has a quality all its own. And with quantity you need coordination, and then we're back where we are only now it's wolves quoting contract law.
And getting killed just the same. Because if the Fraternal Brotherhood of Pigs, Sheep, Deer, Bison, Elk, and Moose decide that wolves need to be trampled (presumably by the bison and moose), any contracts the wolves have are worthless.
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I think there are multiple meanings of "right" in here, and that we have to be pretty careful with the concepts we're using for this topic.
The wolf is factually correct that private property requires force, because Communists (and other thieves and despoilers exist). You cannot trust in the bricks of contract law to willing parties to save you, absent men willing and able to do violence on your behalf.
When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other. If we were talking about pigs, or other people who had signed contracts, then we can discuss if they were right or wrong for how they followed their contracts, and even if contract law is the highest form of morality and if there are some contracts that shouldn't be enforced, but (if I may delve into the spicy takes) the correct response to wolves is not negotiation, not diplomacy, but large amounts of armed men, and probably helicopters.
I sense some ambiguity here as to what entails a "moral actor". Likely, it's not just "an actor that always chooses morally right acts", for that would be a bit weird. Most theories I've encountered have some lower bar for an actor to qualify as a "moral actor", one that allows them to choose morally wrong acts, yet be considered blameworthy for such a choice and possibly subject to morally acceptable punishment. Perhaps this punishment would involve large amounts of armed men and possibly helicopters, but the actors, themselves, are usually still considered to be "moral actors".
Of course, this is all very much complicated if you take what is either a strong minority opinion or possibly a majority opinion in this place, exemplified by @self_made_human and @SSCReader, that this whole morality thing is totally relative, anyway. Who's to say whether the wolves are moral actors? Maybe they're just actors with their own morality, which is I guess just as good as anyone else's. I don't know what else to say here, other than I think that this entire subthread kind of fails to get off the ground back a few steps if this type of thing is adopted.
My opinion is that morality is not relative, but neither is it universally shared. Morality is a way for people willing and capable of positive-sum interactions to interact with each other. If you are not willing and able, you are not a moral actor, and likewise, dealing with you is a matter of pragmatism, not morality. You can have a moral war (or at least a war with moral aspects), if both sides are willing to agree on values like "Killing civilians for no significant military gain is wrong." and formalize combat to keep the fighting out of the fields and towns; when one side violates that agreement, then that is no longer a moral issue.
Again, I agree with the wolf; I agree that the wolf and those who carry water for him can and will disregard both honor and morality, and tear down every house and building to loot the rubble for themselves and their fellow-travelers.
A pretty elementary tenant of morality, or reasoning in general, is that you need to be alive to do it (or at least for other people that share your ideals to continue in your stead). If you choose to lay down and be devoured, because you feel that it's as good for the wolf to enjoy your flesh as a meal as for you to keep living in it, then that's on you. And if you hold to a morality that says that the above is the highest virtue, then that morality will end when it runs out of practitioners.
I honestly don't see this as something that can be meaningfully argued. Either you read the above comic and reach for your gun (or give fervent thanks to those around you who pick up the gun on your behalf), or you don't; if you don't, then you're not likely to share enough values with those who do to make discussing it worthwhile.
Morality is way for people who share values to coordinate and make great things. But it is only that. Absent shared values, there is only the pigs shooting every wolf, or the wolves devouring every pig.
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Two thoughts/questions:
First, how much of this is just venality at play? You're not going to disarm the US population by taking action on a municipal level in blue states. However, you can break apart an institution and redistribute the goods it claims for itself. Taking money from cops - who the progressive laptop class have reasons to disdain, especially in an environment where their value is taken for granted - and giving it to some "security ambassador" scheme. Who gets the money? Not some entrenched police union, who are probably very good at extracting their toll at this point, but someone of your own choosing. Anything you save is a bonus. This is, if I recall correctly, explicitly the point of #Defund, just put in less flattering terms: give it to the social workers (how do they vote?).
Also, how many woke people are just utterly detached from the lives of black people who need police? I certainly was/am. Just as many people are baffled by the white working class (and their abandonment of Democrats) and mainly interact with it through articles and JD Vance books, many see blacks through a lens of ideology and/or allow some black intellectual to tell them how it is. They simply have no skin in the game and, in their spaces, it's dangerous to go the wrong way on this.
You mentioned Roland Fryer. Well, it's been noted many times that Roland Fryer actually grew up in a situation related to his research, which was one motivation for doing and publishing it despite being warned it would hurt him professionally. And who was it that allegedly tried to take him down? Claudine Gay, a child of well-off Haitian migrants who jumped straight into the US black intellectual elite. The exact sort of person for whom "black on black crime" is an embarrassing little inconvenience for her position and goals that would be best ignored. Or, allegedly, put aside to focus on the real roots of Black problems: white supremacy.
My own family background was pretty different, but shit happens to everybody, and I can easily think of a personal story that's kinda funny in a black humor way now, but was nightmare fuel at the time and to most audiences.
Yeah, that's fair.
That last detail is quite the perfect cherry on top of a shit sundae; well (?) played, dramatic irony!
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The absolutely fascinating intersection here is so interestingly captured by the reddit /r/stupidpol, who see the same setup and conclude that current racial thinking is manipulated by the wealthy to distract from the true issue, which is the struggle of the poor vs the elite. The solution? Marxism.
I guess what it comes down to is if you think the "progressive laptop class" have been gaslit and co-opted, or if it's accidental, or it's deliberate by the "true" elite, or it's the Jews all along, or any number of boogeymen. Personally, I think a lot of the movement, if we can speak of it like that, being naive but well-meaning.
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