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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.
Again this is nothing specific to progressives. You can make the same argument about malaria nets, the civil war in Yemen, how many people Putin has disappeared, the benefits of getting us to Mars, outbreaks of cholera in India, and the like.
People simply do not have the bandwith for all the terrible things in the world, so this is largely outsourced to whatever influencers in their community. What my local church talks about is influenced by what the minister talks about.
That is just how people work, and not just progressives. It does mean perhaps they are more worried about church burnings in Canada than flooding in the next state. But that doesn't mean they don't care about the flood victims,it means they can't pay attention to everything and outsourcing that to others is a significant benefit.
What goes viral in a community tells you what goes viral not what they care about. Otherwise we'd be forced to believe people care about the colour of dresses or laurel vs yanny. What goes viral is unpredictable and emergent, it depends who saw it first and decided to share it. The reason BLM went viral was because it was all over black social media first. It had plenty of momentum behind. Black on black violence does not have that in the black community, as it stands. And where it does it is aimed inward quire often because they fear that bringing attention to it would bring more attention from organizations and people that have mixed trust.
Does that mean black people themselves don't care because they don't talk about it as much? Or does it mean these things are complicated and trying to reduce it to "doesn't care" is simply incorrect?
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