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Notes -
Epistemic status: cherry-picked predictions for ego stroking.
We are now nearly four years past the beginning of the George Floyd era of BLM activism, so I wanted to check my initial impressions and positions, to see how I'd done in retrospect. This is from the old site, in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, and it was interesting to see how people's concerns and predictions played out. Must have been in a cautious mood that day.....
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/comment/fsbmtje/?context=3
Core here:
On the other hand, some people Bought Large Mansions, and I imagine otherwise benefitted from millions poured into the myriad of BLM-affiliated NGOs. So it's not a total waste, a lot of people got worse off, but a small number of people got much better. That's called "politics". Or "community organizing"? Not sure about the proper terminology here.
I've spent a lot of time bashing BLM over the years. I think it's because it was such a waste. A great moment for change and reform was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity. All that energy was spun by the political, corporate and media machines into bizarre ideological idiocy. rather than sober analysis and practical reform efforts. "Defund the police" my ass. Just like Trumpism, just like Occupy, just like Code Pink. By signal boosting the crazies and granting them legitimacy, any chance for reform was pissed away in a fury of "Black Trans Lives Matter" and "Showing up to work on time is white supremacy".
A little prodding and they all promptly delegitimize themselves (at least in the media/popular imagination).
I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
I disagree with that. The problem of warrior police is addressable by other means (and it is obvious that people suffering the most from the warrior police are the poor people, both justifiably - violent crime usually happens around poor people - and not justifiably, as it's safer to victimize poor people, they wouldn't hire an expensive lawyer and the chance of them playing golf with your boss is none). There are many approaches, some (like not prosecuting minor crimes) more stupid than others, but I think there are ways to approach it without destroying the whole society.
The problem of worse social outcomes is harder to solve - but I think there are fruitful ideas how to approach it too. The thing is if black people start to have the same social outcomes as white people, they also start exhibiting same voting patterns as white people. And that's something that would be very bad for some of the current politicians. Granted, not all of them - some very white places are happy to elect very woke politicians - but overall the shift will be pretty noticeable, I think.
Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
Which, of course, directly contradicts the previous sentence - if you get less police, you get more crime. Also, for each specific policeman, each interaction would be more dangerous - both because of more crime and because they can't rely on suppressing the criminals by sheer mass anymore, thus laying the burden on the shoulders of the individual policeman - who would, as expected, by more likely to feel threatened, and thus more likely to respond violently to the perceived threat.
Except of course DIE does not work this way - you can't make a drug-infested ghetto into a middle-class suburb by adding two more VP DIEs to Goldman Sachs roster. You can make those two black persons that are appointed VP DIEs at Goldman Sachs to move out of the ghetto - but there are many many more people in ghetto than VPs in Goldman Sachs, so that approach is obviously not scalable. Also, the opposite of meritocracy is dependence - and I don't think there's any example of hand-outing a populace into prosperity.
Which, again, contradicts the first sentence - and on the other side, makes the lives of non-criminal blacks so much more hell. While subtly suggesting to them that they shouldn't be bothering doing anything socially useful - since meritocracy is dead anyway - but instead should try their hand in something that brings easy money and not prosecuted anymore. Thus completing the circle of societal destruction.
The worst part is not even that, but that the bulk of these costs is borne by the same people they are supposedly "helping". As I noted at the start - they are promoting a tiny minority well beyond what they deserve (those VP DIEs) at the cost of further demoting and destroying the society for all the rest.
Is that obvious? The states with the most violent crime also have very loose gun laws (the top 5 states for murder rate are MS, LA, AL, MO, and AK, for example), while states with strict gun laws tend to have lower murder rates (IL is an obvious counterpoint, but, e.g. contrary to popular perception NY's murder rate is fairly low by American standards). Now, correlation is not causation and it's very probable that some of this is really due to an endemic culture of violence in the South that drives both homicide and weapon ownership (and, perhaps more importantly, weapon carrying), but I don't think you can at all conclude that efforts to curtail violence via gun regulations have failed. People may kill people, but firearms are a lubricant to violence.
Oh that's a fun dodge. Big democratic cities with substantial underclass black communities are the prime driver of murder rates, but let's look specifically at the ones in red states, while blaming the gun laws, at an arbitrary number that cuts off our Counterexamples: The next five states on your list.
Loose gun laws like Maryland and Illinois.
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