Sure, but that’s the concept that’s inherent in the academic work that informs the movement she’s decrying, and I think their own definition of what they’re speaking about matters way, way more than hers does.
It’s very important to be clear that when informed activists talk about Whiteness or White privilege, we’re talking about something different from just skin colour, or mere ethnicity. We’re talking about the social construct with the same name.
This talk about protests and police violence against black people reminds me of the “White Shield” tactic, where white people protesting with BLM step forwards between the police and the cops, and the cops don’t attack them. So yeah, the racism of the police is so blatant and ingrained that it can be weaponized against them.
Makes sense.
I was just trying to counteract the claim that this was a recent idea as in new around the beginning of the 21st century.
Oops, I noticed after it was too late to edit my post that you did not do the word frequency search yourself, but were citing some articles.
No, because I’m not disputing that black Americans are more likely to be killed by the police. But as a group they also commit more crime and are thus more likely to have (adverse) contact with police, so that does not in itself imply police prejudice is a major factor. Population percentages are not the right comparator here.
I think people do not get their beliefs from looking at studies and statistics - rather they see something in the media, or on social media, or form views based on their own experience, and statistics and studies are merely used to validate them - if they are used at all.
This is why Fox news is so good at influencing people, yes? Showing similar stories again and again is viscerally convincing. But all media does this to some extent:
The Washington Post police shooting database records 1,073 police shootings so far in 2024, of which 26 victims were unarmed. The point of media is to sell subscriptions and ads; they show what shocks and interests people, and the latter is self-reinforcing, too.
This is the reason US police are so paranoid and trigger-happy, surely? Every traffic stop could turn into a shootout, because anybody could be armed. That’s why they shoot before realising the object the man is reaching for is a phone. With fewer guns the stakes would be much lower and the police more relaxed and willing to give benefit of the doubt. However, it’s kind of moot because Americans will not give up their weapons.
I didn’t pick the words. If you actually look at the article I linked, you can see them listed along with charts showing their rise. They cover a variety of progressive causes.
Yes, I’m sure it’s not a coincidence. Social media has been instrumental in spreading social justice ideas, but if exposure to them is driven by algorithms (somewhat plausible and does not require any sinister motive), it does not mean supporters believe them any less. Social media was presumably also responsible for the spread of alt-right ideas, and again it does not mean supporters do not genuinely believe them - the two movements even have a parallel appeal as claiming to reveal hidden and truths about society.
Do you think the alt-right is a phenomenon worthy of being named and talked about, by the way? Despite including various groups who don’t all agree on everything, and having rather amorphous boundaries?
I think it’s the real world results that I mostly find objectionable. I want people with power to have accurate views about the world, and support policies that will make it better, not worse. However, anyone who spends their time arguing about politics on social media (this forum NOT excepted) is likely to have more extreme views than average, which probably does give a false impression of what the average subscriber to any ideology thinks.
I miss it too. It was a more innocent time when I was sure of my own rightness, generally in the majority, and the good and bad sides clear. And it was much easier to find interesting conversation and congenial people. Social media has paradoxically made me feel more isolated - lost in the crowd.
Do they?
Or do they more often get accused of crimes, and/or more often get convicted of crimes? And how are your statistics going to tell the difference?
If police are likely to let a white person off with a warning, but to arrest a black person for the same behavior – which is indeed one of the claims made against some police forces – then any set of statistics is going to say that black people commit more crimes.
I would argue that this has nothing to do with the general population being “heavily armed”. I would argue that criminals are more likely to be carrying guns than the average citizen.
I disagree that it is the reason. If you could provide any kind of facts to back up that claim, we would all appreciate it.
Unless they are an idiot or suicidal, every cop should always be prepared for violence and an armed response. Just as anybody who knows anything about guns will tell you ‘never assume any gun is unloaded’.
Once again, do you have any kinds of facts to back that up? Or is that assumption just your opinion?
I STRONGLY disagree that police violence is due to a “heavily armed citizenry”. It is due to inadequate training, poor screening of applicants and a variety of other causes. Here in Philly, the ‘stop and frisk’ program only ended a few years ago. As the name suggests, it allowed cops to stop random people on the street and search them. It was ended when it was proven that black people were being disproportionately stopped and frisked. The police didn’t taget black people because they were “heavily armed”. They targeted them for being black.
Does Switzerland have a problem with police violence? Do Israeli police shoot a lot of Israelis? Those are both heavily armed populations.
If you want people to think you are operating in good faith, this is not the way to do it. Good faith is actually looking at the things people cite when you respond to them about those things. Not doing so is very bad form, and it is disrespectful of the time and effort of others.
I think I’m done here.
Not to mention framing black men (it’s usually men, which is why a third of black men have a felony record) for a crime committed by somebody else. Or that never happened in the first place.
I find US homicide statistics a convincing indication that there are real differences. The number of homicide victims who are black (especially young black men) is stunningly disproportional. The difference is actually shocking. No one is claiming they aren’t mostly killed by other black people (a large majority also by young black men). It would be completely infeasible for these stats to be faked - other crimes may not be reported, but a body is hard to ignore, and the race of the victim is known regardless of conviction of the offender.
I
The fact you think this is normal really illustrates my point. British police stopping a car for having a broken headlight are not expecting to get shot. I see the issue as primarily a police violence problem, not primarily a racism problem, and the biggest reason for it is that both criminals and non-criminals in the US routinely carry guns. It is also a training issue, since US police do not seem to be trained on how to de-escalate situations and indeed frequently seem to escalate them unnecessarily.
Having a military issued rifle stored in your home as is common in Switzerland is far different to civilians routinely carrying handguns on their person or in the glovebox. I just googled Israeli firearms ownership, and it suggests they are not heavily armed compared to Americans. I also found articles saying some have started carrying firearms after last year’s attack. It doesn’t sound like a comparable situation to the US.
I think it is extremely unreasonable to get upset over someone not looking at a cite for something you both already agree is true. And for the record I did look at your cite before responding yesterday, and it was indeed something I already agreed with.
That’s your choice. I am more and more convinced that it is impossible to have a constructive conversation with people on the left: simultaneously in this thread I am expected to take absurd strawmanning of non-woke beliefs seriously, while someone else objects to me saying ‘woke’ people ‘believe X’ rather than ‘are aware of X’. I have a bunch of people seriously denying that there has been any change in progressivism since the 90s, meanwhile most of them happily admit they have become aware of all kinds of racial/gender etc problems they weren’t aware of before, and do endorse most of the ideas I listed as ways to ameliorate them. It’s absurd. Now you are going off in a huff because I didn’t check a cite for a fact I already knew and wasn’t disagreeing with.
I wasn’t expecting to change any minds in this thread, or to change my mind on any of the actual issues. I was merely hoping to reach a greater understanding of other people’s beliefs on this subject and vice versa, but even that appears impossible. It’s unpleasant to have a bunch of people all disagreeing with you, with many giving snarky replies, and extremely invalidating when they deny your experiences and perceptions.
And I don’t have the time to regularly respond to 6 or 10 people at once. The imbalance of opinions in itself significantly hinders communication. Sorry to the people who did put in effort replying whose posts I didn’t get around to replying to. If you still want a reply @thorny_locust I’ll try to do it, but I’m not sure there’s much point continuing with this thread.
I have also observed the difficulty you experience with engaging in a constructive conversation with people on the left. But plenty of other people have constructive conversations with the left every day. Occam’s razor suggests a different cause from the one you’ve selected.
I notice you using “leftist-speak” on occasions like this–but I haven’t seen anyone denying your experiences. Who, specifically, has done that? I’ve seen people disagreeing with your analysis of those experiences. That’s how conversations go.
And yeah, sometimes those “perceptions” are analyses that are invalid. And it doesn’t necessarily feel good to have an analysis challenged. If your analyses are bad, though, it’s much better to have them challenged than to continue with poor analysis.
It didn’t help that you poisoned the well, as @DocCathode pointed out early on. If you had started with more neutral descriptions like
You might have had a more constructive argument. And there would have been more focus replies about victors virtue, and the results of various strategies (see footnote) than about straw men. Because you started out by setting up a lot of straw men that no one could take seriously.
This is a footnote because i don’t want to detail the thread with a discussion of trans issues. This is meant as just one example.
In the other thread you seemed surprised that my woke trans friends were not offended that i discussed the conflict between the feminism of my youth, that held that “women” might act in arbitrarily “masculine” ways and the newer concept of gender that can look like as requiring certain performative gender expressions to identify with a gender. But I’ve had respectful discussions of this topic, and got a pretty solid answer, which is that, “we tried that, and it didn’t work”. Now, you might say that it did bring about significant advanced in the status of women, both legal and social, and that’s certainly true. But it also led to an acceptance of a certain degree of oppression in the grounds that “feminine people just aren’t trying”. There is also the matter of those who have profound gender dysphoria.
And of course, the progress that women weren’t making has certain similarities to the progress that black people weren’t making. And i think the understanding of that, and the dynamics of that, may be entwined with what you identify as “woke”. But as i said in my main response, your false framing of that understanding poisoned the well and led to a lot of no-doubt unpleasant-to-you reactions to your op.
OK, I know I said I was done, but … why? Why is it unreasonable to expect someone who is supposedly operating in good faith to take a good faith look at cite that they are responding to? I think it’s extremely weird that you think that’s unreasonable.
No, no it does not. A cite of facts and evidence would prove your claim. I asked for one. You still have not provided one.
Please do.
Cites, please, for both parts of that claim? In particular that one can accurately deduce the race of the offender from the race of the victim.
And, if granting it for purposes of discussion, two things:
One is that, evn if true, that seems to me far more likely to be determined by their living situations than by anything else; and their current living situations are affected by hundreds of years of prejudice.
The other is that you said, not that Black people are more likely to commit homicide in particular, but that Black people are more likely to commit crimes in general. That’s not remotely the same thing.
I really don’t think the problem is on our end.
You appear to have granted that I’m trying to have a constructive conversation with you; but you’re not responding to it.
True. It can, however, often be constructive.
A “constructive conversation” doesn’t necessarily mean “one in which everyone’s agreeing with each other.” Often it’s one in which people are disagreeing. And if you’re going to ask a batch of questions on a subject on which you know that the people you’re asking disagree with you – why would you not expect disagreement?
Wait until she starts telling you she’s a minority…
I mean, almost everyone is a monkey in some dimension.
Autoincorrect?
I love it!