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My sense is that we're in a lull right now. A culture war recession. It's hard to even rank them. I would almost say MeToo is the highest right now but only because of the recent Roe decision, but that turned out to be more of a pop than a bang, didn't it? Maybe the affirmative action case decisions in June will stoke the BLM/CRT set.
One theory is that Blue Tribe turns the burner up or down for purposes of tactical or strategic advantage. Given that they're more or less back in control, what advantage is there on turning the burner back to high?
Thousands of extra black people are being killed per year, compared to five years ago, and this rise correlates neatly with the largest social intervention in law enforcement in living memory. But this is an inconvenient correlation to examine, so it simply goes unexamined, and people mention how it seems like things have chilled out lately. Well, sure. The chillness or lack thereof of our collective environment is entirely determined by Blue Tribe social consensus, and is entirely detached from any actual facts of our physical existence.
BLM was a crisis of the cops hunting black people in the street, not because the cops were actually hunting black people in the street, but because the media and other organs of blue-tribe social consensus generated a collective delusion that it was so. Now black people are actually being killed at rates approximating those delusive rates, but no one cares. This is how it works, and in fact how it has always worked. We've collectively outsourced our cognition to a small cadre of radical utopians, and we dance to their whim.
It will remain so until the existing system ruptures badly enough that the problems become undeniably immediate.
I'm sorry, what? Is this supposed to be a COVID thing? If so, "killed" is a rather questionable word choice.
I want to see a source.
He's referring to the recent spike in homicide rate, which happened disproportionately for black victims / offenders. The claim is that BLM -> less police enforcement -> more murders. Dunno how accurate that is, most convincing evidence for it would look like anecdotes from said criminals, or people involved, attesting to it. "Gangs are more active now that the cops are paying less attention"? idk.
I agree with your implication that criminals aren't in their hideaway saying "cops are gone, let's go nuts!"
Fortunately, there's an easier explanation. Most violent crime is committed by a small minority of people. By arresting and prosecuting a small number of offenders you can reduce the crime rate by a huge percentage. The average person will commit zero violent crimes, but the average offender might commit dozens if left unchecked.
Fail to arrest a person the first time they assault someone, and they can continue to victimize more and more people. Here in Seattle, we joke about needing a "10 strikes and you're out" law for that reason.
My point is that, if that's what's happening, because a 50% increase in homicides is a lot, there will be many anecdotes or sorts of evidence of the form 'our group is getting much less police pressure now, and are able to operate in more parts of the city', or jail occupancy rates for specific severe crimes significantly decreasing, or officers reporting seeing - many times - letting someone go for a mid-tier crime and seeing them commit more crimes, at a rate 50% higher than in 2019.
Just staring at a 'blm graph' and a 'homicide graph' and observing they both go up in 2020 isn't enough to prove that. Nor are a dozen or even a hundred articles about 'X was released after arrest crime Y and then committed crime Z later', because those articles also existed in 2019, and the way media reporting works, the numerical effect of media attention and people sharing articles totally overwhelms any signal in frequency relative to a mere 50% increase.
I disagree that "staring at a 'blm graph'" adequately responds to the argument.
BLM was a social movement that took direct and powerful action to alter our society, ranging from mass protests to large-scale violence to widespread social shaming to a whole spectrum of other activities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that its touch was felt in every facet of adult life nation-wide. It directly impacted my personal relationships. It changed the content of the sermons I heard at church. It changed the art I'm paid to make. It changed every show I've watched on stream since. It directly caused and then publicly justified large-scale lawless violence and criminality, and attacked the role of police in our society without a modicum of restraint. It was the largest-scale social intervention of my lifetime, powerful enough to cause obviously-connected harmful effects on the other side of the world for no reason but sheer social inertia.
The law-enforcement systems it was directly and unambiguously aimed at experienced the largest-magnitude change ever recorded, almost immediately after these interventions began.
There is clearer causation between the BLM movement and our current murder rate than there is between any social-science intervention and any given result in living memory. If the causation is not clear enough in this case, it is obviously not clear enough in any other case either, and we should admit that statistics don't work and the very concept of "social science" is invalid.
...For the record, I'm making bold claims here because I think the evidence is overwhelming. Can you point to a stronger intervention, or a greater-magnitude result? A shorter timeframe? A closer linkage?
Unless you are very young, or have no exposure to any kind of religious organization this seems highly unlikely. Religion is an ancient and ongoing social intervention that directly and indirectly impacts some 5 billion (or more!) people around the planet at a conservative estimate just today. Even if we just limit it to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, the social interventions have touched possibly almost every single person on the planet over the last 50 years. Impacting behaviors and laws and more.
BLM is a mere blip in comparison. Even further limiting it to the US in my lifetime (55 years) Religion is pretty clearly the unequivocal winner in social interventions for sheer scale and the behavioral changes it encourages. Just because it's old and is the status quo does not stop it being an intervention.
I think you can even argue neo-liberalism dwarfs BLM given the impacts on the economy and social decisions to put money before the American people (in some ways) and knock on impacts on the Rust Belt through the destruction of social fabric as whole towns and cities just rot away. That's just looking at the negative social impacts. Trillions upon trillions of dollars, countless lives impacted. Then if you look at the additional wealth at the winners of neo-liberalism and the knock on impacts of spending that wealth in a positive way, I can't see any way that BLM can match it either positively or negatively.
Just to be clear I am a supporter of neo-liberalism, I think it overall was a positive thing, but I think there is no doubt that it also impacted many working class Americans in a very negative way over the past 40 years.
This appears to be a language dispute. I would say that religions are social structures, in the same way that, say, the Police system is a structure. They shape society, but they are generally stable long-term, and so one presumes their effects are also stable long-term.
By contrast, a dramatic change in church doctrine or practice, or a dramatic change in police doctrine or practice, would be an intervention, an acute change in how we do things, usually with the goal of improving our results. The civil rights act and the end of segregation are examples of large interventions. The institution of miranda rights, banning of stop and frisk, the passing of major gun control laws and their repeal or sunsetting, the rise of home-manufactured firearms, these are interventions, changes to the system intended to or plausibly suspected of changing the trend of social outcomes.
My claim is not that BLM is the most impactful social system in existence. It was the most impactful intervention, the biggest, most abrupt change of conditions. It was absolutely a blip. If you're looking for explanations for why the murder rate has abruptly gone through the roof, a blip, an abrupt, unprecedented event, is exactly what one would expect to find.
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