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Epistemic status: cherry-picked predictions for ego stroking.
We are now nearly four years past the beginning of the George Floyd era of BLM activism, so I wanted to check my initial impressions and positions, to see how I'd done in retrospect. This is from the old site, in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, and it was interesting to see how people's concerns and predictions played out. Must have been in a cautious mood that day.....
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/comment/fsbmtje/?context=3
Core here:
On the other hand, some people Bought Large Mansions, and I imagine otherwise benefitted from millions poured into the myriad of BLM-affiliated NGOs. So it's not a total waste, a lot of people got worse off, but a small number of people got much better. That's called "politics". Or "community organizing"? Not sure about the proper terminology here.
oh I see what you did
I didn't invent this of course, it has been around for a while now.
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I've spent a lot of time bashing BLM over the years. I think it's because it was such a waste. A great moment for change and reform was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity. All that energy was spun by the political, corporate and media machines into bizarre ideological idiocy. rather than sober analysis and practical reform efforts. "Defund the police" my ass. Just like Trumpism, just like Occupy, just like Code Pink. By signal boosting the crazies and granting them legitimacy, any chance for reform was pissed away in a fury of "Black Trans Lives Matter" and "Showing up to work on time is white supremacy".
A little prodding and they all promptly delegitimize themselves (at least in the media/popular imagination).
I've been saying it for years, but I'll say it again Id-Pol makes people stupid. Id-Pol destroys relationships and corrodes societies. The combination of Secular Academia and post-moderism is the immunodeficiency disorder that allows the ordinarily benign bacteria of in-group preference to turn into "Dying of AIDs".
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Mission accomplished, then.
So far as the social and political elites are concerned, yes.
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I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
This one is a rounding error, and no rounding error can ever be solved without extreme, ridiculous measures.
This one, however, may be plausible. Just by doing, uh, sort of the opposite of what they've been doing. Every 'explainer' about the disparity starts with schools, only they just get the facts completely wrong. They claim that schools in poor/black areas have less funding, but that hasn't been the case since the 80s. A great moment where they've noticed that there is a problem (schools), but just flatly ignore the data concerning the cause of said problem. Instead, if we break from the woke-crazy teachers unions and give parents the option to choose what schools are suitable for their children, the marketplace is likely to deliver better results.
Then, instead of
we ensure that there are plenty of police, plenty of surveillance, and plenty of places safe to live, study, and work free of crime (like many of the black people in that video actually want). They can go about living, studying, and working successfully in peace. Of course, after they've been able to build skills through education and work, they need to be able to clearly demonstrate, and have it clearly acknowledged, that they do, in fact, have those skills. Unfortunately, if we
then, that chain of reasoning is severed. Instead of seeing their success in education and work and immediately being confident that such success is a product of skills and effort, people might see it as mere DEIBS. You can just give out wealth, to the extent that you can convince others to join you in your project to just give out wealth, but you can't just give out status. There's probably a significant post to be made about how the femininization of society, and the feminization of the woke movement in particular, has a different conception of status than masculine, testosterone-d biology does. But the latter simply rejects the idea that you can just declare high status for some individual/group without significant quantities of hard power backing it up. That level of hard power would require extreme, ridiculous measures, of that type you are concerned about.
Instead of that (doomed to fail) route, just do the above suggestions, and then just stop. Stop imagining that low expectations will magically produce high status. Just see the incredible skills and achievement that people will have once you've gotten out of their way. Some of the most downtrodden people in the world have become some of our highest achievers.
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I think there’s a faulty assumption here. I don’t think many NGOs in the western world are meant to solve problems. They might claim so, but looking at their behavior, their choice of tactics, and the people running them, it’s basically a money laundering and make work project for the children of the elite.
First of all, if you walk into the offices of any of these groups, they are not local, ordinary people. They’re rich people with college degrees. They’re not there because they care about the communities they’re working in. They’re there for the donations they can get and the visibility for their cause. And the stuff they propose they’re proposing because it’s the kind of stuff that makes white liberals clap.
Those solutions don’t work. Low arrest rates means that the people living there get robbed and mugged, that no businesses want to be there because of thefts, and that property values remain in the toilet. Disarming and disbanding the police force makes them more likely to escalate as they know there aren’t enough resources for backup if they need it.
Until you deal with the lack of education and training I don’t see an answer. People who can’t read can’t command a high salary. And if nobody in the areas making money, there’s no way to attract businesses even if you got the thefts down.
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I disagree with that. The problem of warrior police is addressable by other means (and it is obvious that people suffering the most from the warrior police are the poor people, both justifiably - violent crime usually happens around poor people - and not justifiably, as it's safer to victimize poor people, they wouldn't hire an expensive lawyer and the chance of them playing golf with your boss is none). There are many approaches, some (like not prosecuting minor crimes) more stupid than others, but I think there are ways to approach it without destroying the whole society.
The problem of worse social outcomes is harder to solve - but I think there are fruitful ideas how to approach it too. The thing is if black people start to have the same social outcomes as white people, they also start exhibiting same voting patterns as white people. And that's something that would be very bad for some of the current politicians. Granted, not all of them - some very white places are happy to elect very woke politicians - but overall the shift will be pretty noticeable, I think.
Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
Which, of course, directly contradicts the previous sentence - if you get less police, you get more crime. Also, for each specific policeman, each interaction would be more dangerous - both because of more crime and because they can't rely on suppressing the criminals by sheer mass anymore, thus laying the burden on the shoulders of the individual policeman - who would, as expected, by more likely to feel threatened, and thus more likely to respond violently to the perceived threat.
Except of course DIE does not work this way - you can't make a drug-infested ghetto into a middle-class suburb by adding two more VP DIEs to Goldman Sachs roster. You can make those two black persons that are appointed VP DIEs at Goldman Sachs to move out of the ghetto - but there are many many more people in ghetto than VPs in Goldman Sachs, so that approach is obviously not scalable. Also, the opposite of meritocracy is dependence - and I don't think there's any example of hand-outing a populace into prosperity.
Which, again, contradicts the first sentence - and on the other side, makes the lives of non-criminal blacks so much more hell. While subtly suggesting to them that they shouldn't be bothering doing anything socially useful - since meritocracy is dead anyway - but instead should try their hand in something that brings easy money and not prosecuted anymore. Thus completing the circle of societal destruction.
The worst part is not even that, but that the bulk of these costs is borne by the same people they are supposedly "helping". As I noted at the start - they are promoting a tiny minority well beyond what they deserve (those VP DIEs) at the cost of further demoting and destroying the society for all the rest.
Is that obvious? The states with the most violent crime also have very loose gun laws (the top 5 states for murder rate are MS, LA, AL, MO, and AK, for example), while states with strict gun laws tend to have lower murder rates (IL is an obvious counterpoint, but, e.g. contrary to popular perception NY's murder rate is fairly low by American standards). Now, correlation is not causation and it's very probable that some of this is really due to an endemic culture of violence in the South that drives both homicide and weapon ownership (and, perhaps more importantly, weapon carrying), but I don't think you can at all conclude that efforts to curtail violence via gun regulations have failed. People may kill people, but firearms are a lubricant to violence.
Oh that's a fun dodge. Big democratic cities with substantial underclass black communities are the prime driver of murder rates, but let's look specifically at the ones in red states, while blaming the gun laws, at an arbitrary number that cuts off our Counterexamples: The next five states on your list.
Loose gun laws like Maryland and Illinois.
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"State" is big. At least most of US states are big (sorry, WY and RI). Thus, applying whole-state statistics to concentrated and heterogenеic phenomena is very misleading. San Francisco and Oakland are very different from Tahoe City and Napa Valley, despite both being in California. Martha's Vineyard and Springfield, MA are rather different places too. We can't just average them out and pretend gun laws and crime works the same way over all the California, for example.
Also, you may notice that your "objection" does not object to anything I said actually. I say "Decreasing X does not decrease Y, since we can witness data points with low X and high Y". And you say "we can also witness data points with high X and high Y". Well, yeah, OK. You got me. We can. That's not an objection to the lack of correlation between X and Y, you see.
Even more the lack of correlation is not causation. You see, for correlation you need that high X comes with high Y, and low X comes with low Y. We have that high X comes with high Y (let's assume that, I won't for the sake of argument here fight you on that) and low X comes with high Y. That's not even correlation.
Yes I can, if I look at the places where these efforts were effective, as to taking legal guns away, and we still have plenty of violence. That's empiric data - if I change X and Y does not move substantially, then I can conclude the attempt of changing Y by changing X failed. We can debate why it failed, but the failure is plain in the data.
I can refer you to the case of CashApp founder, just recently murdered in SF in a very un-lubricated manner. He is still as dead as any other murder victim.
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It’s funny that this is obvious to you. I think it makes total sense the increasing the likelihood that someone has a gun makes police more jumpy. You might be interested in this graph I made in 2021
/images/1681087903738361.webp
Edit: found the other version of my graph with slightly different axes if it's interesting to anyone: link
In most interactions with the police, they happen in circumstances where a knife is as deadly (or more deadly) than a gun. So if the police are trained to shoot you for twitching wrong, they'd shoot you in any case (also they can't rely on laws to ensure the absence of guns, since they are already dealing with a person that they suspect is a criminal). Of course, there are marginal cases but in the general picture you can't gun control you way out of it unless you disarm the whole nation (good luck doing it to Red states) and Mexico too (because we don't have the Southern border anymore, so guess what would happen if the price of a gun on internal US market shoots up?). You can compare US to Japan as long as you want, but US is not Japan, and never will be.
Obviously every policy only acts on the margins. I'm not arguing it will make police shootings go to zero, or even that it's a good policy. Only that I think your original claim
is wrong.
To be honest I don't like focusing on police shootings. The fact that people whose job is to apprehend dangerous criminals shoot people 20 times more than the national average doesn't strike me as obviously reprehensible, especially since 89% of the time they (the police) were being threatened, attacked, or having a gun pointed at them.
But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.
You're welcome to make conjectures like
I don't really have an RCT to solidly refute you, but so long as the only data I've seen supports the idea that greater gun accessibility correlates strongly with more fatal police shootings, I'm going to go with the data over your personal beliefs on how policies affect police interactions.
If you mean "reducing it to the levels of Japan" - yes, it probably would. Except that's not happening. As I said, US is not Japan, and no amount of magic thinking will turn US into Japan. You just can't do that. What you can do however, is to make gun ownership much more expensive and cumbersome - they'd been trying in California for years - so that for the lawful citizen, it would be almost un-attainable, while for a criminal, whose very life frequently depends on it, it still would be worth it, despite the costs. Which would still require the police to carry guns, since the criminals still have them. Thus, you would keep the problem around, while hurting the very people you have set out to protect - the lawful citizens (since the criminals, being the only people carrying guns, would seek to recover the costs of having them by imposing those costs on the lawful citizens with impunity). You see, you can't just wave a magic wand and transform the society wholesale. It moves in certain ways responding to the certain incentives, and has to move gradually. And any move directed at reducing gun ownership per se, now in US, would make the lawful citizens strictly worse without improving anything. It won't turn US into Japan.
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My prior is that gun ownership by right with proper firearm education increases politeness, and that owning a gun as a flex increases shootings. Make guns less legal, they’ll be owned as a flex more.
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BLM is literally a grift. Occupy at least had legitimate grievances...things like too student loan debt or how Wall St. was seemingly unscathed 2008, and afik money was not wasted to enrich its founders, unlike BLM. So called systemic racism against blacks in policing can be refuted by merely looking at the stats.
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But was it though? I mean, which exactly change and reform we needed that BLM was supposed to usher? If we had the (--true socialism--) Saintly BLM, untainted by all the grift and hate and politicking, what would it do? Until the wokes and DIE grift complex came in, the racism in the US was on its last legs. I mean sure, there are some Nazis hiding around in the forests and mountains, steeping in their hate. BLM wouldn't fix that. All the rest have pretty much moved beyond that in the 2000s. The whole "systemic racism" is an obvious grift and bullshit, there's nothing to fix there - neither can it be fixed, the "systemic" definition prevents any attempt at rational consideration of it. The squalid conditions of some black communities are real, but BLM never tried, or intended, or had any plan, or idea how to fix it (I don't count "defund the police" as a plan because really...).
You say this energy was "wasted". I say that's the whole point of the whole charade - to "waste" this energy, which otherwise could be directed - maybe, don't hold me back here, I'm dreaming - towards figuring out how comes the squalid conditions are there, who is responsible for them continuing for decades and maybe even - that's the most ridiculous part of all - it is time for some accountability for people that held the power there for these decades and presided over it. There was absolutely no indication of any sliver of such ideas anywhere in BLM. It's all "white supremacy that" and "systemic racism this" and the rest is just open grift. The whole thing was created for directing the frustrations of people into a convenient outlet, and harvest them. It's not "waste" - it's how it was supposed to work, and it worked just as it was supposed to. There was no "reform efforts" because the whole thing was meant to prevent any reform (really needed for the police, for example, but impossible in current environment). It's not some "idiocy", it's a clever and careful and effective and very evil design. Of course, not by thugs mostly peacefully setting fire to the businesses of the very people they're supposed to be "supporting", but by those who enable and support and organize all that.
Maybe a general movement against police brutality or the Drug War?
Formulating a movement about police brutality in strictly racially antagonistic terms (remember, "white lives matter" is a Nazi slogan) is about the worst way to approach it one could think of. It automatically loses half of the political spectrum, confuses the message (should we be against brutal cops who are black? What if they are brutal against whites?) and assigns the blame to people which have no control over the problem. The execution of course was way worse - "let's convince people to fight police brutality by setting their city on fire and robbing Amazon trucks, so they'd run screaming to the police and beg them to please save them from this savagery".
As for the Drug War, I don't remember any BLMers ever asking for any legalize or other anti-DW measures. Not even medical marijuana (which is the basic of basics). They pushed for shorter sentences and such, but again strictly on racial grounds - if you are of a correct race, no matter if you are murderer, rapist or just smoked a joint in a wrong company, you need to be released.
Yes, fighting both causes would be a good thing. Unfortunately, BLM by its inception, design and ideology is completely incapable of doing either - not because they were stupid, or lazy, or dishonest, but because it is impossible to do it in a setup like that, like it's impossible to walk to the Moon.
Well, yes. I assume that's why OP said it "was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity."
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