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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?
This one is a rounding error, and no rounding error can ever be solved without extreme, ridiculous measures.
This one, however, may be plausible. Just by doing, uh, sort of the opposite of what they've been doing. Every 'explainer' about the disparity starts with schools, only they just get the facts completely wrong. They claim that schools in poor/black areas have less funding, but that hasn't been the case since the 80s. A great moment where they've noticed that there is a problem (schools), but just flatly ignore the data concerning the cause of said problem. Instead, if we break from the woke-crazy teachers unions and give parents the option to choose what schools are suitable for their children, the marketplace is likely to deliver better results.
Then, instead of
we ensure that there are plenty of police, plenty of surveillance, and plenty of places safe to live, study, and work free of crime (like many of the black people in that video actually want). They can go about living, studying, and working successfully in peace. Of course, after they've been able to build skills through education and work, they need to be able to clearly demonstrate, and have it clearly acknowledged, that they do, in fact, have those skills. Unfortunately, if we
then, that chain of reasoning is severed. Instead of seeing their success in education and work and immediately being confident that such success is a product of skills and effort, people might see it as mere DEIBS. You can just give out wealth, to the extent that you can convince others to join you in your project to just give out wealth, but you can't just give out status. There's probably a significant post to be made about how the femininization of society, and the feminization of the woke movement in particular, has a different conception of status than masculine, testosterone-d biology does. But the latter simply rejects the idea that you can just declare high status for some individual/group without significant quantities of hard power backing it up. That level of hard power would require extreme, ridiculous measures, of that type you are concerned about.
Instead of that (doomed to fail) route, just do the above suggestions, and then just stop. Stop imagining that low expectations will magically produce high status. Just see the incredible skills and achievement that people will have once you've gotten out of their way. Some of the most downtrodden people in the world have become some of our highest achievers.
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