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2/2 (Like Sisyphus, I am bound in Hell.)
In the first place, it mostly wasn't black people rioting this last time. The racial resentments of the Black community were employed as a pretext by mostly-white rioters, often over the explicit objection of local blacks, who were then left to deal with the long-term consequences.
In the second place, by the time the video hit, it was too late by years.
Blacks should believe that police help them on net because that is the straight, utterly inescapable truth. Black criminals harm innocent blacks directly and at staggering scale. Black crime rates and other bad outcomes are not the fault of racism or white culture or Red Tribe, at least not in anything like the way the dominant Blue narrative claims, and Blues absolutely do not have any workable, pain-free cure for any of these problems. A brief elaboration and some evidence on this point further below.
White liberals have fucked blacks by humoring, encouraging, and cementing into the general culture the lies Blacks tell themselves collectively about where their problems come from, and by opportunistically adding to and reinforcing those lies in a multitude of ways. White liberals don't have to do this, and in fact have refrained from doing this in the past, notably in the 90s under Clinton, whose tenure coincided with a precipitous drop in violent crime at the cost of lots of incarceration of criminals, including a disproportionate number of Black criminals. They started doing it again in the 2010s, largely in my view for political reasons, and the results have been both immediately obvious and a total disaster.
Blacks need to face the fact that their communities are a mess, and that fixing that mess is going to require them facing a number of extremely painful realities. If they want the results the rest of us get, they have to do the things the rest of us do to get them. They have to write off their criminals, the way the rest of us do. They have to embrace actual law enforcement, the way the rest of us do. They have to enforce standards, the way the rest of us do. They have to accept accountability for their own choices, individually and collectively, the way the rest of us do. Absent a serious commitment to these and other points, all the affirmative action and diversity initiatives and juking of stats is for naught. The violence and the poverty and misery will continue, because they're the ones choosing it. If they are determined to remain in the mire, we simply lack the capacity to drag them out against their will. It's a bitter pill, and while it can perhaps be sugar-coated, the sugar pills Blue Tribe swears by simply won't do the job.
Alternatively, they can continue lying and being lied to, while we burn through what remains of our dwindling supply of social cohesion.
...and here's where I should probably start providing some evidence.
My apologies, I needed a bit more elaboration to grasp what you were saying.
I don't think this is true.
Blue States and areas are, in general, significantly wealthier than Red states. If this were down to policy, though, if Blue policies lead to wealth and Red policies lead to impoverishment, then you need to explain why Blue cities and states contain areas that have been very poor for a very long time. If Blue policies actually eliminate poverty, why is there so much poverty in Blue areas?
I don't think the evidence supports a claim that either party is actually better at managing the general economy, either at the national, state or local levels. I don't see evidence that either side or even both cooperating have can arbitrarily force good outcomes. I have seen some evidence that leaders can, through bad decisions, devastate local economies, but I've seen few to no examples of the reverse. I see no reason to believe that Mississippi can become as rich as California if only it elected Blue leaders, or that California's economy would crater if it elected Red leaders.
In any case, despite their overall wealth, Blue areas have fair-sized black populations, and very large portions of those populations are doing very, very badly, by any reasonable measure, and have been for generations. Red tribe areas have even larger black populations, and near as I can tell, those populations are doing just about exactly as bad by all the same measures. This is one of the insights that really should be discussed more: there is no significant racism gradient between Blue and Red America. Crime, incarceration, educational outcomes, single parenthood, drug use and so on show no clear Red/Blue divide. This fact is occasionally concealed by dishonest blues, by exploiting the fact that blacks are not uniformly distributed. So for example Penn State can get a congressman to sign off on a report claiming that the former confederate states, where a majority of America's blacks still live, have the majority of some bad outcome for blacks. Just neglect to run the calculations per-capita, and bob's your uncle, more evidence of the pernicious effects of racism! Meanwhile, pay no mind to the disastrous effects their solutions cause...
I have seen a few places that seemed to be doing a whole lot better, which then turned out to be cheating by faking the stats in one way or another, but leave that aside: if you could demonstrate a clear pattern where black populations as a whole did significantly better in Blue areas than in Red areas, I would abandon my pessimistic arguments and enthusiastically advocate for copying their methods. I am quite confident that such evidence doesn't exist.
If there is no detectable racism gradient between Blue and Red Tribe domains, the Blue Tribe racism narrative is simply unsupportable. It is not reasonable to argue that one's tribe can solve a problem if and only if they have absolute, unquestioned, unaccountable power; just for starters, such a claim is completely unfalsifiable. It does not seem plausible to me that any lesser claim can salvage the standard racism narrative; California is very large, very rich and very blue, it has no shortage of resources, of ideology, of true-believer theorists to formulate plans, uniformly-captured institutions to carry them out, and ideologically-pure tribals to handle street-level implementation, and it delivers roughly similar results to Deep Red strongholds like Mississippi and Alabama. If there's a way to reconcile that discrepancy between predictions and outcomes, I haven't seen it.
There's plenty-more to the rabbit hole: black culture pretty clearly drives some amount of the violence and other bad outcomes, and that culture is national in its impact. Nor is the black underclass regionally-bound; when I was going through the county murder stats, one of the deep-south rural areas had a note that a lot of its gang violence had apparently been imported from Chicago. Gangs and gang behavior do in fact appear to spread geographically as gang members, many of them still children, are moved around the country by their parents, and there's not much to stop poor kids in rural areas from simply copying inner-city gang behavior from what they read about on the internet, or from distant friends they make online... Etc, etc, you get the idea. Iceberg, soda straw.
So am I, on the theory that said underclass sublimates into the general citizenry. But they haven't. I'd still be willing to go for it on the theory that we're doing our best, and we give them some level of preferential treatment in exchange for them generally playing along with society. But they haven't done that either. The better deal they're demanding isn't "some economic inefficiencies", it's unlimited, unquestioned power for Blue Tribe, with zero responsibility for any actual improvement of outcomes. That is unacceptable.
2/2
And I'm claiming that there are double standards regarding how we discuss and treat drug offenders. By your own admission, opiate users are just less violent criminals, though I can attest that I've never once heard a red triber refer to them as anything other than victims. The party of law and order likes to talk about Chicago because they can blame the democrats; I guess they still like to talk about the opioid crisis because they can blame the globalist-China-sellout-democrats for those problems as well, but they sure don't like to talk about any of the crime you're referring to. Are you truly going to refuse to see any parallels between democrats telling impoverished communities of color that their problems are the fault of racist white nationalists without admitting that the Red tribe has their own victim mythos that they prefer to tell rather than taking responsibility and improving their lots?
There's a kernel of truth in the globalist narrative buried in heaps of salt, just as there is a kernel of truth to the fact that most social programs and redistributionist policies that would alleviate poverty are stymied by republicans in congress (and by extension, republican voters). Moreover, 'free trade' and laissez-faire economics have been the domain of Republicans from the 80s through what, the mid 2000s? Many of the people most upset about globalization happily voted for it for decades. At least on the free trade side, who can even guess at a counterfactual world where America turned inwards after WWII, and condemned condemned as damaging to the middle class and pursued protectionism? For all we know we lost the Cold War, sparked WWIII, or got wrecked economically by an ascendant mercantile Japan. What I am pretty confident in, though, is that TheMotte exists in this world, and it's populated by people absolutely convinced that our government is headed by some of the laziest, most corrupt and least competent politicians in history. Except for the few locals they voted for.
Quite the jump from a nihilistic 'human societies gonna society, the good life comes from God' worldview. But regardless, I'm sure you've gotten the same pushback that 1960s (or whenever the idyllic golden era you long for was) America is an arbitrary date to freeze in amber, and no doubt people have longed to do so in a recognizable way since the French Revolution if not the Greeks if not whatever proto-civilization we lack records of.
I hear replacing Christmas was poorly received, and not even the orgies were enough to keep heads on shoulders. More seriously, there's a reckoning coming for the NIMBY policies that wrecked the housing markets. A true reckoning would probably be someone sitting down and saying 'huh, those libertarians and conservatives might have been onto something 15 years ago...' rather than rebranding free market capitalism (red coded) as YIMBYism.
But then, do you think the modern right have major examples of policies they espoused that they believe have been net-negative, besides allowing the existence of the democratic party? That people and movements are both bad at admitting fault is not a particularly striking criticism.
Moreover, the idea that desiring to transform our society and culture is unique to progressives seems patently false. Was Reagan transforming our polity by espousing free trade rather than the rampant protectionism that carried the day in the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas pro-union democrats were conserving it? Is Moldbug the true conservative because he wants a neo-monarchic-corpo-state? Enough of that, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument.
You know how my answer to that goes.
You neglect to consider widespread unemployment, breakdown of routine and social ties due to the pandemic, so on and so forth. I would push it harder, but it's not clear to me why this pattern didn't hold true in other countries. Too many variables and too many superficial news articles, not really a satisfying answer.
I'm not sure I believe this, or how you would prove it. Say 20% of the black population of LA rioted in the 90s, and the same fraction of black people turned out after George Floyd joined by, say, 5% of the white population that made the protest 50-50. Would you characterize that as a pretext for mostly-white rioters to burn black neighborhoods to the ground, when the same fraction of the black community was turning out? Moreover, any counterfactuals would support your argument in other ways; all black rioters, black people perpetuate violent crime, if they burned white neighborhoods instead of black neighborhoods, blue tribe wants to burn down innocent red tribe homes, etc.
83% of black Americans express some support for BLM. I expect the views you'd get from people living in those neighborhoods would be a bit more nuanced than white rioters just looking to cause trouble burned down my house, we're all living on Joe Biden's plantations as neo-slaves.
There's probably a tradeoff between 'X will grow up fatherless because his dad is serving life in prison for petty theft' and police turning a blind eye towards rampant gang violence. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but blindly optimizing for line goes down for violent crime probably does hit a point of doing more harm than good, which has been the argument of the criminal justice reformers.
Fox news has entered the chat.
Looks like I was poorly informed on this front. I'd always seen stats on the welfare systems being more robust and generous in blue states, which is true, but it's more than [eaten up by the cost of living(https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/measuring-poverty-in-the-united-states-comparing-measurement-methods/) (states colored in red actually have higher poverty levels after accounting for federal programs and some CoL adjustments). It's interesting that welfare is so much more effective at reducing poverty in red states than in blue states (see, for example, the impact of SNAP on poverty is mostly felt in red states, although I can imagine the outcry if they tried to peg aid to the CoL in some way. Debatably, these social programs are largely supported by democrats at the federal level, and 80% of the welfare budget is spent by the feds. Welfare spending at the state level per capita is a bit more varied, although probably less consequential relative to the feds. I'd need to read more, but maybe I should limit the amount of time I waste on things without clear answers...
Mississippi also just kind of sucks.
I think they'd actually be pretty happy with similar representation in congress and some lucrative occupations, along with middle-class opportunities. Maybe some respect too. Sounds a bit like what people around here demand for the rust belt whites, a
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