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No. Because what I'm seeing happening on twitter is that these people who are having these revelations are only admitting fault in this one, narrow, blinkered way, and immediately Gell-Mann Amnesia-ing when it comes to everything else the left loves. So the guy who admits "okay, maybe the right were correct that BLM were a scummy group" will still then turn around and support open borders and DEI completely uncritically. One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are". It saves more ego to believe you were deceived by someone else, than to admit actual fault on your part. The right being correct about the issue is treated as a rare fluke, a broken clock moment, instead of a reason to re-examine all your existing beliefs. Because doing that is hard and painful.
Most ideological shifts I've seen - to any direction - have worked by someone first radically changing their views on some particular issue, for whatever reason, which then creates contradictions with their other views, with those contradictions then being dialectically slowly worked through until they lead to other view changes. However, that rarely happens in an instant, and the process might always not be particularly clear (and generally doesn't lead to a complete 180 shift in views). You wouldn't expect it to happen in an instant or for the same way for everyone, and you would probably not witness the results at a societal level expect in retrospect.
A lot of right-wingers seem to simultaneously believe that the right-wing ideals are obviously logically more correct and obvious than left-wing ones, yet are also suspicious that left-wingers would ever actually shed their views due dramatical events, unless it's the instant rare complete "Road to Damascus" conversion to a right-wing cause (which would probably come off as suspicious and opportunistic to me). That's even though we have a well-known historical process to compare to - the slow delegitimization of pro-Soviet Communism, and Communism in general, in the West, and the associated general loss of credibility for state socialism and the general acceptance of (regulated) market economy by almost all corners of Western political thought.
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My first thought when reading the start of this sentence was that this reminds me of the Internet or the Titanic, in the way it has protections against the whole thing catastrophically going down just from one major part going down (the Titanic itself obviously went down, due to more compartments getting breached than it was designed for, but the principle stands). And in the realm of the self-proclaimed progressive left or the "woke" or the SocJus or the like, I think one of the strongest forms of protection it has is its outright rejection of logic, reasoning, and empirical evidence as tools to learn true things about the world as concepts invented by oppressors in order to oppress. By freeing themselves from the constraints of logic, they can observe one part of their ideology getting utterly crushed and then completely ignore that the very same thing that crushed one part will also crush other parts.
Combine that with plain old Gell-Mann Amnesia, and yeah, I think predictions of any sort of "vibe shift" are hugely premature at this point. I mean, it's not out of the question, but I feel like I've observed these sorts of "pre-vibe-shift" signs dozens of times in the past decade, and I'm not sure I can recall it ever leading to anything other than doubling down.
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Yeah. The big BLM organization - Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation - is probably grifting or at least enriching the pocketbooks of its members a good deal more than is customary for nonprofits. It's possible that they might simply be unsophisticated n00bs and thus not all that good at being corrupt and grifting successfully, and you never hear about the really good or even just decent grifter nonprofits. Grifting aside, I still think that BLM is unfortunately too divisive - it stokes racial tension. Of course, Martin Luther King did the same, as did Malcolm X; the difference here is that they managed to effect lasting societal change and had a clear endgame. They also referenced the shared humanity of Black people, rather than painting police brutality as an issue that only or mostly affects Black people...yes, there IS some disproportionate impact. Yes, there IS bias, it's very real, some of it is due to cops being pigs and some of it is due to the vicious cycles that stereotypes enable. On the other hand, I think that painting it as being just a "black problem" is the wrong tactic to take as it stokes racial and political tension in order to resolve a black issue rather than a human issue...I've heard that cops in redneck rural areas are just as much of assholes as cops in the 'hood. It'd be nice if BLM was able to join forces with rednecks against police brutality. Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.
They won't, because police incompetence on that level is actually quite rare. There will be plenty of sympathetic white Boy Scouts that were merely harassed by cops, maybe even roughed up a little, but approximately zero that were actually shot for no reason at all. This is the same pattern that emerges with black people in cities - many have stories of being pointlessly harassed for no good reason and many of these stories are true, fewer have stories of being roughed up for no good reason and some of these are true, but basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business.
Adding to the list, there's Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down's syndrome and suffocated after being forcibly restrained by authorities. His crime was slipping back into a theatre to watch the same movie twice. A pretty similar situation to George Floyd, except one was a career criminal on meth, and one was mentally disabled. But we know which one got the national outrage. (To be clear, both just seem like unfortunate, preventable-in-hindsight accidents to me. It's just the hypocrisy that I hate.)
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Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.
Link, for the curious. There are other swat-related articles in there, but many are about bad warrants of one form or another.
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There have been a number of incidents of police misuse of force in the last few years that have largely dropped out of the public eye. Admittedly not of white Boy Scouts, but not necessarily obvious villains either. There was a couple shot in Houston (the Harding Street Raid in 2019) on what turned out to be a falsified no-knock warrant, or the 2015 biker shootout in Waco that ultimately saw all charges dropped, despite nine deaths (IMO most likely that the police started the shooting). I'm sure there are other examples.
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Wasnt there that white kid who was also kneeled on, died, and then the cops were aquitted? Had an alliterative name, i think.
Tony Timpa. Somewhat similar story, crazy guy that the cops were trying to subdue, they did it too roughly and behaved callously. He died. It's pretty terrible and I think they should face justice (as I thought Floyd's killer should have).
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Yeah. You've got Daniel Shaver's death; he pointed something that looked like a real rifle out of a hotel window, then got shot by a trigger-happy incompetent asshole cop. Same thing's true for police harassment. Maybe in our fathers' or grandfathers' time there were drop guns and people being shot in the back for running from cops. It might still happen now, but not all that often and if it does the police departments are at least competent in covering this up. Asshole cops can definitely make people very clumsy indeed because they "look like criminals" or something like that. Sometimes the cops are beating up people they really think are criminals but can't prove anything.
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Robert Dotson would have a bone to pick with you, but for certain reasons his widow would have to do it for him. And it's not like this is new : Ken Ballew managed to be a short-lived cause celebre among a certain type of gun owner, but Andrew Scott's a good intermediate version that you've never heard of.
Duncan Lemp was floating around the same time that George Floyd was, and tbf he was a bit of a paranoid nutcase (though there is a fun question of whether he was paranoid enough), but so were a number of BLM high-profile examples.
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