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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics.

If we went up at the same rate at roughly 140 cops injured per 40k participants, we would have about 56,000 cop injuries at a 16 million participant Jan 6th. You're correct they aren't perfect comparisons, but real world data hardly is.

  • But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.

The relatively high rates of violence of Jan 6th and BLM, and low rates of any protest nowadays both left (no kings march) and right (now) suggest that the violence was more a product of its time than anything else. A lot of things were weird during 2020 and 2021 from the lockdowns and spastic economy of the time.

Decent chance like a lot of datasets, the 2020-2022 data is just a distortion.

  • -12

no kings march

Interesting choice of protest to bring up since the Salt Lake City No Kings protest involved the official event security opening fire at a protester who was open carrying (but not brandishing), killing a bystander because they're shit shots, and then lying about what happened and trying to blame it on the open carrier they tried to murder until video footage came out showing otherwise.

no kings march

At least locally this has been an almost entirely boomer thing. Not sure how that generalizes.

Yes, lockdowns provoked most of the violent delights of 2020, but there may be other factors re: age, race, culture, motivation.

You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.

I can do bad math too. Hey, we were able to add 37.5k to the total number of participants in a protest without needing to adjust the number of cops being injured, so let's use the rate of 0 cops injured per 37.5k added to scale to 0 cops injured per 16 million to get a final result of 140 cops injured per 16 million participants.

The reason why my bad math is wrong is the same reason why your math is wrong.

I agree that data needs to be taken a look at more closely to get a more accurate picture of the truth, and that outliers happen in data all the time. But you're the one that introduced shoddy analysis of data. I gave a good effort to give the most reasonable comparison, and I even gave criticism of that comparison.

You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.

"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.

I agree with you that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall though, since size is likely to correlate hard with how many normies are joining in.

We can't compare apples to applies with real world events, because the real world is messy. But it doesn't need to be perfect to have some amount of usable information.

  • -10

"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.

The numbers should be self-evident why that assumption should not hold.

I don't understand what you're disputing here.

1/400 is the same rate as 2/800 and 3/1200 and the same as 10/4,000 and 100/40,000 and so on.

If your argument did not have any major flaws, we should've been able to extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5K participants (the most generous assumption that supports your argument) to 40,000K to get 2240 cop injuries.

We didn't get 2240 cop injuries for the 40,000 protestors. Nowhere even close. So we now have real world data that demonstrate how assuming going up at the same rate is an absurdly ignorant assumption to make for this particular scenario, and you should not do that to try to make your point.

Just saying you agree with me that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall does not excuse the extremely poor logic you have used to make your argument.