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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?
Eh sure, but BLM is just one tiny facet of progressivism. Progressivism/universalism has transformed every facet of adult life, as opposed to touched.
Basically - 'X was very important' and 'Y was very important', together with 'maybe X caused Y', does not prove 'X certainly caused Y'. I agree it's plausible and worth investigating.
why do people make these arguments so much? This is (sort of) true because social science is garbage, not because BLM caused the murder rate. This only works in a sense that it lets you win an argument against some hypothetical interlocutor who likes social science, it doesn't prove anything else.
There's no way BLM was the largest change ever to US law enforcement. Surely something during e.g. the civil war was larger-magnitude. This doesn't address this specific point, but generally your arguments seem to be ... very presentist, making very grand statements about very current politics, instead of understanding things in a way that can be used to affect the systems involved. Yeah, BLM was very significant and not very nice, but what does that tell us about how BLM worked, or why it accomplished what it did, or how we can understand its effects or interact with similar movements in the future? Your claims are quite vague and very nonspecific, compared to the sort of detailed, specific evidence I'd like to see!
Investigating how? What constitutes solid evidence on a question like this one, in your view?
Because people stubbornly persist in treating social science as though it was science. Even here. I maintain that the level of skepticism needed to keep this an open question renders any other discussion of social science or social policy pointless. If you already think such all such arguments are pointless, fine. Others evidently do not.
poorly phrasing on my part. Allow me to clarify: the outcomes of the law enforcement system saw the largest change ever recorded. Literally, the murder rate has never gone up this much in the given time period since the day we began recording statistics. If you're aware of a change in outcomes, I'd be interested to hear about it. Maybe one exists.
[EDIT] - actually, no, I did ask for bigger interventions, and I'd definately agree that the civil war and reconstruction were bigger ones. I did say that this was the biggest intervention in my lifetime, though, and I think the 1960s and desegregation would be the most recent intervention of a similar magnitude. That one had more follow-through, of course, and likewise correlated with a very large increase in the homicide rate... but rather slower than this one.
I have been arguing with people over the American murder rate and the policies designed to minimize it for my entire adult life. We now have the largest increase in that murder rate ever recorded, immediately following a very large and highly controversial attempt aimed specifically at changing the murder rate. I was able to predict this outcome in advance, because I'd seen it happen in a smaller scale previously in Ferguson. I think that's reasonable grounds to state that we actually have some understanding about the systems involved, given that we've now successfully predicted highly significant changes.
All of those are reasonable and interesting questions, ones I've delved into at length elsewhere. But none of those questions are needed for the questions at hand here:
What went wrong with American law enforcement in the summer of 2020? And given the scale and acute nature of the problem, why does no one appear to care? Most tellingly, what do the answers to these questions tell us about the nature and operation of the society we're living in?
My claims are:
BLM was the strongest social intervention of my lifetime.
The murder rate increase is the most dramatic change in social outcomes in my lifetime.
The murder rate increase began immediately after BLM went viral.
There exists a likely chain of causation between BLM's actions and the increase in the murder rate.
What about these claims is vague or non-specific? The increase in the murder rate is exceedingly well documented. So are the actions of BLM: the riots, the demands for diminished policing or the outright abolishment of the police as an institution, the establishment of common knowledge within the police force that any error in policing has the potential to destroy not only an officer's career, but their entire city. The long-term effects of the rioting we saw in 2020 are not a matter of speculation; the long-term civic blight is easily predictable from previous examples in the 60s, 70s, and 90s. The results of BLM's general strategy were well-known from the example of Ferguson. The mechanisms by which BLM was organized and the outrage it harnessed was generated likewise can be tracked quite easily, from methodology to results.
Which of these topics appear vague or non-specific to you?
I'm not flying the BLM flag here. Pulling back policing to be antiracist and humane to criminals is bad, aggressively preventing and punishing theft and assault and homicides are good, progressive DAs are bad, harsh punishment for crime good, etc. 'BLM increased the murder rate' is not necessary to think BLM is bad, and BLM was not materially correct about anything whatsoever. This isn't a motte and bailey where with a high standard for your causes and a low one for mine.
But how can we exclude that, e.g. the pandemic - or another exogenous factor - caused some shift in the interactions / social dynamics of criminal communities, which then increased the murder rate? Maybe depolicing increased the murder rate by 3%, and the other cause did 45%.
An example of such a phenomena (which I am not claiming is the cause, and I agree there's much less evidence for this as a cause than BLM) is given here - law enforcement crackdowns on large gang structures have made gangs less organized and less effective, but (supposedly) that lack of organization leads to more violence.
Human societies are incredibly complicated. A single person's spiritual revelations changed the direction of the roman empire. There have been dozens of economic recessions, some with much more societal impact than BLM, and each with complicated and contested causes. It'd be very easy to, in 2005, say "there will be a recession soon because of , and it'll be caused by ", and then have both X and Y happen, and be completely wrong. I don't think causation is established here.
I gave some examples, but they were very vague. Understanding complex things is just hard. What "constitutes solid evidence" just depends on the topic.
Most of your argument above is of the form "BLM was very big, and very liberal, and very bad". This paragraph, from your post:
Has one sentence about police and violence with the rest being about how BLM was a big bad. While I think this overemphasizes BLM's importance, in that "progressivism is even more important than that but BLM was one of the ten coats it wore this year", I agree that the broader trends BLM represented are that significant and that bad. But this is not good evidence for BLM's impact on the homicide rate. That's what I meant by vagueness and broadness.
Yeah, correlation doesn't establish causation, two things can happen at the same time, and not cause each other, even if someone predicted said causation beforehand. See any miracle drug that people swear is curing their colds.
Yeah, nobody cares because of the sixty-year-long reign of antiracism, progressivism, universalism, where they care more about the poor impoverished blacks, and where imprisoning criminals is racist. I agree with that! But that doesn't prove causation in this specific scenario. This again doesn't make sense as a reason for causation, just as a way to make a hypothetical enemy look hypocritical.
Your claims:
I don't understand what "social intervention" means here. Intervention implies an intervener. Sure, BLM had small groups of activists and political networks pushing it, and most people following it were just understanding and amplifying. But that's true of almost everything humans do. And we don't call other political movements 'interventions'. And "social" covers basically all human activity. Was BLM a stronger intervention than ... the mobile phone? Kpop? Both of those seem larger-scale, and if BLM was an "intervention", then so were they, given their use was driven by centralized marketing. Again, I agree that BLM is bad, just disagree with the emphasis.
I don't think this is true as a matter of fact, unless "dramatic" means "it happened in the span of a year" - e.g. the increase in drug overdose deaths in the US over the past decade seems larger in scope, despite also being about dead people. And the "happening over the span of a year" restriction does not give it the moral / political weight that "most dramatic change in outcomes" seems to imply.
I'm not sure if this is exactly true or not, but won't contest it. Timing increases in statistics is much prone to error than noting increases.
If "likely" here means "it is plausible and worth looking into", sure. But if likely means "the muder rate increase is due to BLM and they should be blamed for it", that requires more than "likely"!
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