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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.

If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The system did not "arbitrarily decide to not protect them". The loudest section of the Black Community, and the much louder social groups that blacks allow to speak for them, demanded that police stop protecting them, and enforced these demands with overwhelming social and physical compulsion.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role).

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference. No such system has ever been demonstrated. If such a system were indeed possible, probably it should have been developed and deployed and its efficacy demonstrated, rather than gutting the existing system with no replacement on-deck.

But hey, no rush. As demonstrated in this thread, most people aren't even aware that any of this has happened. The people who believed, falsely, that thousands of unarmed, innocent blacks were being killed by a racist police force are blissfully unaware that the murder rate among blacks is currently a line going straight up, because the people who sold them the former lie have declined to enlighten them to the later reality. After all, it's just thousands of extra dead Black people per year for the indefinite future, the annihilation of three decades of social engineering nation-wide. Obviously more important issues obtain, and will continue to until memories grow foggy enough to allow this entire fracas to be blamed on racist Reds.

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference.

I think the elections since the George Floyd protests show pretty clearly that this isn't a straight-forward Blue vs. Red issue. Portland, about as deep-blue as it gets, re-elected Ted Wheeler, for instance. I recall police reform not going over well in the NYC mayor election either.

While writing "Black Lives Matter" on things may be popular among the Blue Tribe, implementing their policy proposals seems to consistently lose at the ballot box.