As a Centrist - This is where the far left loses me

Politics & Elections
101

Well i stand corrected, it seems Cousins and Napear have had a less than stellar relationship and Cousins baited him a bit.

Now that Napear has lost two jobs over this, he tells his side in the article (linked below).

https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/nba-voice-grant-napear-opens-up-on-all-lives-matter-firing/

After reading this entire thread, I have come to the conclusion that the “ALM” phrase is more nefarious than I thought (although i maintain that many who have used it were not raging or even closet racists).

I appreciate this thread and feel i have learned from it… which is after all… the purpose of community discussion.

102

Consider how the gay community dealt with AIDS. Gay men are <2% of the population, but have always been the large majority of AIDS cases. And yet, on a per-patient or per-death basis, AIDS research is far better funded than things like cancer or heart disease or diabetes, and has been since the early 90s.

That’s a pretty amazing achievement for gay community to achieve in this supposedly homophobic country. How did they do it? By denying that it was a “gay disease.” By emphasizing that anyone could catch it, by making straight people terrified that it could be their heterosexual kids with HIV. By saying that while yes, gays are disproportionately affected, AIDS was really everyone’s problem. And by figuring out that research funding was their concrete goal, not just “awareness” or any such thing.
In other words, by doing the exact opposite of saying “gay lives matter.”
Police in America shoot and kill people of all races. They do this in rough proportion to the crime rate among the various races, which makes for an easy way to deny any problem exists. Blacks are more likely to be killed by police; they’re also more likely to commit crime, and by a MUCH larger margin. That’s a cold, hard fact that isn’t going away and that ends the argument for a lot of people. Denying that reality or handwaving about “systemic bias” isn’t going to persuade anyone.

What *would *be persuasive is making it everyone’s problem. Emphasizing, rather than downplaying, the fact that most people shot by cops are white. That, population-adjusted, police shootings are just as likely to happen in rural areas as urban ones. If you make that kind of case, then all kinds of people who see police violence as not their problem start changing their minds.

It would be easy to do. There’s cases every couple of weeks, many of them with video. Go watch the video of a cop killing Daniel Shaver. It’s every bit as horrible as George Floyd. Any sane human will be outraged. But he’s white, so his death doesn’t fit the narrative for either right or left, and it gets ignored. Publicize every police shooting, make it everyone’s problem, and a groundswell of support would be easy to build.

Instead, BLM leadership and their allies on the left ignore those killings of nonblacks and seek solutions solely aimed at black communities. They do the exact opposite of what the gay community did with AIDS – they insist it mostly affects them instead of making it everyone’s problem, and focus on vague things like “structural racism” instead of making concrete demands.

Donald Trump, that irredeemable Nazi racist, has already passed a more progressive prison reform bill than anything Barack Obama did. He’s been quite loud about his desire to get black votes in 2020. If BLM had used the George Floyd killing to demand damn near anything, they could have gotten it. Body cams for every cop in America? Done. Laws requiring cops to report misconduct of other cops? Done. Ending qualified immunity for cops and prosecutors … probably not completely done, but you could damn sure make a whack at it.

Instead, they rioted. And while I don’t think most BLM and leftty political leadership in general intended the looting and rioting, they let it happen, and far too many of them excused or minimized it. I’ve seen videos from the streets of BLM protesters beating up Antifa thugs, because they know very well what letting those guys hijack their cause will lead to; unfortunately, the leadership and political class is not as smart.

And as a result, nothing will really get done. Oh, black professors will sell more books, corporations will hire a dozen more diversity consultants, a few more hard-left progressives will unseat moderate Democrats, Ta-Nehisi Coates will make bank, and millions of white liberals will get the dopamine hit that comes from moral superiority. In other words, it will be win for the managerial class, both white and black. But relatively little will positively impact the lives of working-class black folks.

Post-riots, large-scale legislative reform is less likely than it was before, not more. White hiring managers are less likely to hire a black kid from a bad neighborhood, not more. Nonblack conservatives and moderates – you know, 60% of the country – are less sympathetic to black communities, not more. All of the things that should be the common-sense goals for a pro-black movement are winding up father away, not closer.

But hey, at least nobody had to pander to the prejudices of working-class whites. Avoiding that is more important than getting shit done.

103

Gay people fought for gay rights (not just for AIDS research) both by pointing out that AIDS can affect everyone and by asserting the value of gay lives.

We can point out the importance of reining in police brutality against all kinds of people (as the ACLU constantly works to do) without having to silence or discard the specific claim that “Black Lives Matter”.

104

^ (in regards to what furt posted)
Something tells me our overall political perspectives are pretty different, and yet - at least in the first few paragraphs - I think you may actually be onto something here. It’s a very interesting comparison that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up - not only on this board but anywhere - and which wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise.

Just speaking for myself, I’m not going to put my self in the position of being that white guy who tells black people how to handle their shit. I get that they don’t want to hear it. The Black Lives Matter movement seems to have arisen organically and with good intentions and its supporters have a strong emotional connection to that slogan, and I’m not gonna be the one to say “ok guys, you gotta start over and change your whole approach.”

Nevertheless I think you may be right that the message of “this could happen to YOU too!” might ultimately be more effective in achieving the desired outcome. I’d just say then that it’s white, or at least non-black, peoples’ chance to step up with promoting this angle, since, again, I’m not gonna be the white guy who tells black people how to advocate for black issues.

105

Sure, and plenty of non-race-specific organizations, perhaps most notably the ACLU, have been promoting it for years. I urge everybody to check out the ACLU’s ongoing efforts against use of excessive force by police, along with a number of other efforts in policing reform.

But as I already noted, there’s absolutely nothing mutually exclusive about advocating against police brutality as something that can affect everyone, and advocating for the lives and rights of black people specifically, as they’re so disproportionately impacted. Trying to argue that we should replace the latter by the former is just another way to try to avoid the discomfort of openly acknowledging racism.

106

Sincere kudos to you! The portion of us unable to switch sides as a result of a political discussion in Great Debates is about 99%.

107

Might be true. But they are not the audience that matters, the possible allies. That audience is a group of people, a pretty large group of people, who have at most paid peripheral attention to excessive use of force and profiling issues except for the fairly short periods of time that the issues are top of the news cycles, and who usually aren’t paying much attention to them again when it is time to vote. They have their own problems that they care about and they don’t hear “All Lives Matter.” as a rebuttable at all. To these people it is sounds like agreement that all of our lives matter be they Black brown white educated or not and that any way in which people are being treated with inequity is wrong.

Objecting to the idea that all lives matter sounds really bad to them.

Maybe you consider them caring about their own problems as their focus most of the time to be racist. I do not.

Is this specific sportscaster a racist jerk? Don’t know and don’t really care. He’d be just one vote. Do know that provoking a big response of “How dare you say all lives matter?!” is a win for those who lean to Trump and who are in “the police can do no wrong” camps.

Really what do you think that sort of response accomplishes other than that? And its value as part of your own self-righteous posturing?

There are tons of responses to that “All Lives Matter” ploy that would be *more effective *than that. Different ones for different audience targets. All that clarify the basic idea that all lives matter but that America today some seem to matter more than others, are more equal than others. (Apologies to Orwell.) That excessive use of force is disproportionately used against men of color in this country AND that *no one *is free from its possibility or from the impacts it has on us all as a community.

Empathy does not generally just happen. But it can be encouraged.

108

Well, they’re more likely to be arrested and indicted for committing crime, at least. Racial disparity in arrest rates and other aspects of the criminal justice system means that we don’t really know how much more likely black people are than white people to commit crimes.

Making up quantitative claims about reality based on ignoring the existence of systemic bias, on the other hand, is unfortunately very effective in persuading people who are already predisposed to be indifferent or dismissive about the impacts of systemic anti-black racism. However, that doesn’t make it right.

Maybe the right has been ignoring it, but it has certainly been denounced by organizations such as the ACLU that are generally considered part of “the left”. See, for example, this powerful condemnation in December 2017 by the ACLU’s Jeffery Robinson:

Care to guess the race of Jeffery Robinson, by the way? That’s right, Robinson is black. See, furt, just because you imagine black civil rights advocates as clustered in a selfish bubble of self-defeating conscious “victimhood” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate description of reality.

And we should take Trump’s “loud” stump rhetoric as a reliable guide to his actual policy choices because… why, exactly? He’s been spending the last few days egging on police and vigilantes to be more violently “tough” with protestors, so I’m not sure how seriously we should take any passing blurt of his about desiring to win hearts and minds in black communities.

Oh, they could, could they? This sounds to me like just more wishful white conservative rationalization to deflect responsibility for ongoing oppression of black people onto black people themselves. “Well they could have made the situation so much better if they’d just done something differently!” Whatever black people do, they’re going to be told that they should have done it differently (in some vaguely indicated way), and would thereby have achieved miraculous progress that they’ve now foolishly missed out on. Aw, too bad, black people.

How convenient. Whew, another excuse to double down on the unjust status quo because those foolish black folks once again missed an opportunity to do something differently. For a second there I was worried that we might be fresh out of comfortable conservative rationalizations.

109

Well, you can see what the sportscaster himself said about it right in the OP’s linked article:

In other words, the guy who made the ALM response, when he was called out and criticized for it, learned more about it, understood why it was problematic, and apologized for it. Sounds like a win for everybody, right?
So why is the conservative narrative about this incident so unrelentingly negative? Why all the groaning and breast-beating about how anti-racists should be doing something differently?

It looks from the actual story as though anti-racists responded appropriately and some progress was made on the cause of publicly affirming the rights and humanity of black people. Why do you insist on viewing this with such gloom?

110

I agree with all of that. This is primarily an issue that BLM leadership has to figure out, just as it was up to the leadership of the 60s civil rights movements to steer them towards civil disobedience instead of violence and towards emphasizing commonalities instead of difference (e.g., note how often MLK cited the words of slaveowners like Jefferson to bolster his case). Though having said that I guarantee you that BLM and black progressive leadership meet and coordinate with white politicians and strategists. As uncomfortable as criticizing black leaders might be, you should feel free to knock white politicians that encourage counterproductive strategy.

I don’t know where on the political map you are, but if you’re a progressive you can also be Marxist about it, and think about whether the personal and class interests of the kind of black people that get hired as VP of Diversity, get admitted to elite universities, and get safe political seats (common demands of BLM and other groups) are actually all that aligned with the kind of black person that just had his liquor store torched. Marx had a lot to say about the role of the petit bourgeoise in keeping capitalists in power.

111

The guy who has lost his career because he accidentally offended people might not feel like a winner.

112

Re: gay rights. We are entering into Pride month. This month is Pride because it celebrates the birth of the gay rights movement… Due to the Stonewall riots (and they were days of rioting in NYC).

I will say that in spite of the riots, or maybe it helped clarify the anger a lot of people are feeling, there has been some really interesting movement (whether it leads to action remains to be seen). Atlanta’s mayor announced she is going to review the use of force protocols for police (due to Obama’s challenge he issued that day). I have seen just about every organization speak out and quite a few use Black Lives Matter. Multiple NASCAR drivers (!!) did a black out for Floyd on Tuesday. A lot is symbolic, but symbols are important. This seems to be a lot more movement than any other police killing in the last few decades.

Who knows where it will lead, but a lot of people are talking and thinking about changing policing. The property violence doesn’t seem to derailed that at all.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

113

Well, it sounds as though he’s been inspired to some plans for encouraging future progress:

And you know, people get fired for accidentally making stupid mistakes all the time. Construction workers who wreck equipment, office workers who destroy important information, etc. I have sympathy for people who suffer the consquences of a stupid mistake that they didn’t intend to make, but that doesn’t mean that it was necessarily wrong to fire them for making it.

114

And this was my whole point in my OP. I still cannot read that tweet and think that his entire career SHOULD be left in ruin.

In hindsight, after reading more about the whole relationship with Napear and Cousins, it is clear he was baited. And while his response CAN be translated into a covert racist comment, my own personal (and recent) discovery in this thread suggests the man was likely guilty of being tone deaf at worst.

115

That’s how his reactions read to me too. But, a longtime prominent white media personality (especially a sports announcer in a black-dominated sport) making a very public and egregiously tone-deaf statement on the subject of race on social media, even if he didn’t intend any deliberate racist disparagement? That’s a stupid mistake.

And as I noted, people get fired all the time for unintentionally making stupid mistakes. Employers really don’t like it when employees do something dumb that costs them big money and/or makes them look bad, no matter how inadvertent the mistake may have been.

116

Right, but he’s a (1) professional communicator who was tone deaf about (2) racial issues that (3) affect most of the players of the team he communicates for and a large portion of their audience. So, he failed very specifically in communication in a way that was likely to offend his organizations employees and customers.

I don’t think it’s likely that he was just tone deaf. As I mentioned, he happened to pick the exact phrase that racists and other throwbacks happen to use as a retort to BLM. He didn’t say “every life matters”, “all life is important”, “all lives are precious”, “I value all life”, but just happened upon that particular three word phrase? Weird.

Here’s an article about the NBA not afraid to lead on social protests, including BLM, back in 2018: The NBA is not afraid to lead on social justice

It’s very unlikely to me that this guy, who works for an NBA team, would be this clueless on the subject.

117

You make it sound like BLM are the ones rioting.

There is a lot of anger and frustration in communities when the police that are supposed to protect them from danger are revealed to be a danger in and of themselves. BLM channels that anger and frustration in to peaceful protests. Without BLM rioting would be a lot worse.

118

I’ve seen people fired from worse jobs for less. Try being a cashier at McDonald’s sometime, where if you do anything that causes the slightest offense to certain customers, they will demand you get fired. Depending on who you are and who your supervisor is, they may go through with it.

It sounds like he had a pretty nice job with quite a number of perks. Along with the perks comes some sort of responsibility that should be at least as much as that of a MW food service worker.

Is he going to lose his house over this? Are his kids going to go hungry because he didn’t get a paycheck this week?

Ties into a discussion in another thread about how poor people make bad choices, and so everything that is bad in their life is entirely their fault. But, if someone is successful, then we tend to forgive their bad choices and give them another chance.

ETA: apologies for the pile on of ninjas

119

I think this post really nails down why it is clear that the “All lives matter” chant is entirely posturing. If the people who chanted this actually believed that all lives mattered, then they would share the BLM’s opinion that the police need to be reigned in and held accountable. They would be basically wanting all of the same things that the BLM movement wants. But instead this is said in opposition to BLM.

There is nothing stopping the creation of a “stop police violence” group that concentrates primarily in rural states, and so ends up concentrating mostly on violence against innocent whites. It could be an ally with BLM. Using DigtalC’s analogy, there is room enough in the world for both the Sierra club and save the rain forests. But if I start chanting “save every forest” while wearing a pro-Bolsonaro t-shirt my motives should be questioned.

120

Personally I don’t have much of a problem with protests, although I’m not so sure what to think of protesting during an epidemic (haven’t bothered weighing costs and benefits). But the attitude last year, if I remember correctly, was a number of things:
[ul][li]Life is tough and you don’t see me complaining about my job[/li][li]Taking time off to protest means veterans are going without care[/li][li]General hate for unions[/li][li]Protesting is a waste of time and media attention[/li][li]It’s the Dem’s fault somehow[/li][li]Govt. doesn’t care about veterans anyways which is why we elected Trump who will let veterans go to non-VA clinics[/ul][/li]This last one is why I remembered these protests specifically, it came on in the lobby news program and I overheard patients talking about it. I remember because all that day patients had been talking about Brexit as if they were some authority on British politics, and suddenly the conversation turned to the VA.

Our office after all is one of many which participates in the Choice program, and while the vets themselves love VA care (when they can get it), it seems that there are many ignorant blowhards who only pay attention to the horror stories.

~Max