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You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
If we didn't have police George Floyd would have likely been killed far earlier by one of the people he had wronged.
If there were no police, and a man pointed a gun at my pregnant wife to rob her, I would kill that man. Not even as a matter of immediate self defense, but as a preventative measure. I can't in good conscience risk his continued existence. Most of all for the safety of my family, but for others as well.
Without police, people take justice into their own hands. A police free existence is not one where everyone lives in harmony free of police oppression, it is one where racialized small communities wage eternal war against the enemy living across the block.
The crips and the bloods are literally the modern ur-example. There was no police to defund, and in that void the racial black utopia of mutual community uplift manifested itself in gangsta rap monies being funneled into West Hollywood real estate.
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Chris has me blocked, so this is more for the record, than anything, but I guess there's things I can't let go of...
Ok, let's try:
On one hand: sure, this isn't fair, Chris has moderated his views since then, and his comment can be read as a warning for us not to make his past mistakes. On the other: it's not like people here are defending riots, like several high-profile progressives used to, so it's just a tiny-bit rich to hear have him try to hold people accountable for what they did or didn't say 5 years ago.
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Yes! In fact I thought of this exact example as I was writing my comment, as well as some other, more hyperbolic ones (imagine saying of the Trail of Tears, "but look at the aggregate economic benefits of forced relocation!").
No, I can't imagine that I would have done, though like you, I do not memorize my own post history. At a guess, I probably posted something critical of the rioting, and BLM specifically seemed to clearly be a grift from the word "go." However while I am not quite an "ACAB" person I am actually pretty negative on policing generally (I am weakly anti-death-penalty, I am firmly opposed to private prisons, I am strongly against militarized police, etc.)--though in cases where greater policing seems clearly called for, I am also unimpressed with extant alternatives. So I probably just didn't say anything about that particular part of the unrest at the time; in general, this space has always been very bad at guessing my politics.
Long story short--if I should have been making this point five years ago, why aren't you agreeing with me now? Or if you are agreeing with me now, why dwell on some past possible disagreement that may not have even occurred?
Not at all! But please do note that I've never deliberately made any statement, in this thread or elsewhere, justifying or excusing or even sympathizing with rioting. I've kept my discussion here strictly to protests and counterprotests (and one very explicit call to violence from a counterprotester with a modicum of clout). I'm against rioting; in fact I do not even particularly care for public protests. I don't attend them, I have sometimes been inconvenienced by them to no positive end. But I do not oppose protests, provided they are peaceful and do not interfere with my commute to work. I just so rarely understand them; the people protesting almost always seem confused and contradictory and self-sabotaging.
I am reminded of something said much, much longer ago than five years:
Perhaps this space is very bad at guessing your politics because what you choose to reveal is inevitably right-coded, modulo my perspective being skewed towards top-level posts as I rarely dig that deeply into the comments.
Would you agree that the majority of opinions on this site regarding BLM and the George Floyd riots were negative? And would you agree that the majority of opinions expressed on this site are positively disposed towards the UK riots? I perceive this as hypocrisy, as I agree with you that black Americans rioting over George Floyd are conceptually similar to white UK citizens rioting over the stabbings. How else can I point out this hypocrisy? I suppose I could make my own top-level post, but I'd inevitably be forced to link to specific examples, and drag you in regardless...
Perhaps it's disseminated hypocrisy, and everyone has internally consistent views, but then...why? I know your answer is that I'm just overly sensitive to right-wing viewpoints after years of coddling, but given that you received only mild pushback to your post (and the back-pushers were immediately dogpiled by multiple people), and I can't remember the last time anyone said anything remotely charitable about BLM (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), where are all these ideologically consistent people? And why do they censor themselves so strictly along partisan lines?
I neither agree nor disagree with you on the object-level. I'm sympathetic towards the people who protest and riot after this kind of violence, but I've also been convinced that the decrease in policing over the last several years has been worse for most of these communities. I just want ideological consistency.
In that case, I anticipate that the median person here would make the argument that the BLM protests were illegitimate because Floyd was a criminal drug addict who died of COVID and Fentanyl, whereas the UK rioters are justified. Do you disagree?
True Republicanism and rule by philosopher kings has never been tried.
That being said, I think my prediction of boomers and millennials dying off is much more likely to come true than a plot involving the kidnapping and brainwashing of a couple thousand Mediterranean slave-children. The argument isn't that the zoomers will be wise philosopher kings, but having been raised in an age of social media and ubiquitous cell phones, will be better adapted to the current environment than we are. In the same way that my generation is much better at using Facebook in a sane way than most Boomers.
Undoubtedly there will be some other future shock involving AI and VR that gen alpha will be better positioned to weather, but one problem at a time.
I don't want you to think I'm ignoring your post; I've read it, I just don't have much more to say about it. I don't really want to get into a lengthy relitigation of the BLM stuff. I do think that I see a ton of hypocrisy from the left right now, and flipping that into accusations of hypocrisy on the right is probably warranted on many of the particulars. But this is something I really hate about politics: the unapologetic and consistently deployed meta-hypocrisy of people being intensely hypocritical in the act of accusing the other side of hypocrisy. Every accusation of ideological hypocrisy carries within it an equal and opposite accusation. If anyone who was openly praising BLM rioting wants to now come forward and openly praise the anti-immigration rioting to demonstrate their ideological consistency, I have yet to meet them. That is why I tried to highlight what I felt was being buried under the bullshit: several children are dead.
I say this with warmth in my voice and a sad smile on my face, but... you should probably get used to disappointment.
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