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I'm not flying the BLM flag here. Pulling back policing to be antiracist and humane to criminals is bad, aggressively preventing and punishing theft and assault and homicides are good, progressive DAs are bad, harsh punishment for crime good, etc. 'BLM increased the murder rate' is not necessary to think BLM is bad, and BLM was not materially correct about anything whatsoever. This isn't a motte and bailey where with a high standard for your causes and a low one for mine.
But how can we exclude that, e.g. the pandemic - or another exogenous factor - caused some shift in the interactions / social dynamics of criminal communities, which then increased the murder rate? Maybe depolicing increased the murder rate by 3%, and the other cause did 45%.
An example of such a phenomena (which I am not claiming is the cause, and I agree there's much less evidence for this as a cause than BLM) is given here - law enforcement crackdowns on large gang structures have made gangs less organized and less effective, but (supposedly) that lack of organization leads to more violence.
Human societies are incredibly complicated. A single person's spiritual revelations changed the direction of the roman empire. There have been dozens of economic recessions, some with much more societal impact than BLM, and each with complicated and contested causes. It'd be very easy to, in 2005, say "there will be a recession soon because of , and it'll be caused by ", and then have both X and Y happen, and be completely wrong. I don't think causation is established here.
I gave some examples, but they were very vague. Understanding complex things is just hard. What "constitutes solid evidence" just depends on the topic.
Most of your argument above is of the form "BLM was very big, and very liberal, and very bad". This paragraph, from your post:
Has one sentence about police and violence with the rest being about how BLM was a big bad. While I think this overemphasizes BLM's importance, in that "progressivism is even more important than that but BLM was one of the ten coats it wore this year", I agree that the broader trends BLM represented are that significant and that bad. But this is not good evidence for BLM's impact on the homicide rate. That's what I meant by vagueness and broadness.
Yeah, correlation doesn't establish causation, two things can happen at the same time, and not cause each other, even if someone predicted said causation beforehand. See any miracle drug that people swear is curing their colds.
Yeah, nobody cares because of the sixty-year-long reign of antiracism, progressivism, universalism, where they care more about the poor impoverished blacks, and where imprisoning criminals is racist. I agree with that! But that doesn't prove causation in this specific scenario. This again doesn't make sense as a reason for causation, just as a way to make a hypothetical enemy look hypocritical.
Your claims:
I don't understand what "social intervention" means here. Intervention implies an intervener. Sure, BLM had small groups of activists and political networks pushing it, and most people following it were just understanding and amplifying. But that's true of almost everything humans do. And we don't call other political movements 'interventions'. And "social" covers basically all human activity. Was BLM a stronger intervention than ... the mobile phone? Kpop? Both of those seem larger-scale, and if BLM was an "intervention", then so were they, given their use was driven by centralized marketing. Again, I agree that BLM is bad, just disagree with the emphasis.
I don't think this is true as a matter of fact, unless "dramatic" means "it happened in the span of a year" - e.g. the increase in drug overdose deaths in the US over the past decade seems larger in scope, despite also being about dead people. And the "happening over the span of a year" restriction does not give it the moral / political weight that "most dramatic change in outcomes" seems to imply.
I'm not sure if this is exactly true or not, but won't contest it. Timing increases in statistics is much prone to error than noting increases.
If "likely" here means "it is plausible and worth looking into", sure. But if likely means "the muder rate increase is due to BLM and they should be blamed for it", that requires more than "likely"!
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