Comment by rayiner
5 years ago
What is “the overall message?” Is it just the plain meaning of the words? Is the idea that we need to reform the police so they stop murdering Black people?
Or is it the New York Times’ claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery?” https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/116140196616729805....
Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as BLM’s website claims? https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Or is it that “institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism” are all equivalent evils that must be “abolished,” as BLM’s DC chapter proclaims? https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an...
Or is it—as the 1619 project claims and which is now being taught in schools—the supposed historical fact that capitalism is an outgrowth of plantation slavery? https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory
Or is it applied Marxism?
> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.
Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-... (“Students in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”
I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument building that happened during the KKK era.
But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.
Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as BLM’s website claims? https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Why is this problematic for you? They're not saying children don't need caregivers, or that families are bad. They're saying the American nuclear family has downsides compared to other models, notably the extended family model common in African and Asian cultures. What makes a nuclear family "nuclear" is that it's self-contained; it's practically by definition not intergenerational, the way many effective non-American families are. It's an especially resonant point given the amount of effort American culture put into making sure black nuclear families couldn't succeed.
I feel like criticism of the American nuclear family has been pretty much fair game for decades; it's not like BLM invented that concern.
"They're saying the American nuclear family"
Not the 'American' -> 'Western'. And that's just way of making the 'family' consistent with 'Colonialism' and 'White People' because it suits their bigotry. The nuclear family is pretty closely similar around the world, outside of mostly aboriginal communities. Obviously it's somewhat different in different places, with multi-generations under the same roof.
I view this as fundamentally antagonistic - it's 'making stuff up' to find supposedly powerful and inspiring words, 'defining the enemy' ever more as 'White People'.
It defines their struggle as not one to 'finish school and gain competence' but as merely against the forces of 'White people'.
Of course by most objective measures, nuclear families are good for society.
This is the inherent problem when we mix radicalism with 'good intentions' - they end up mestastisizing the 'grain of truth' (ie racism exists) into everything (ie everything is racist).
No, pretty much none of this is true. The English/American model of isolated "nuclear" families isn't even the norm throughout Europe (see, for instance, Italy), let alone throughout the world. I decline to take the rest of the argument you're making seriously, since your foundational premise isn't even accurate. Anything else I'd say would just be restating my previous comment.
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> I feel like criticism of the American nuclear family has been pretty much fair game for decades; it's not like BLM invented that concern.
Question: can you see how mixing this into BLM is a problem? I can take an unpaid day off to protest police brutality but this very quickly escalated into something completely different.
FTR, my stance on this:
- I'm not happy to support anything that wants to remove police. More training: yes. Tougher penalties for people abusing police power: yes. But removing one of most effective stabilizers in the society: no. For all its warts, the police is important.
- While I grew up in the same house as my grandparents until I was 6 or so and while my mothers parents and other relatives walked freely in and out of the house as long as they could walk I do not want to support a movement that had any opinion on how I or anyone organize our family life
- I'm kind of a socialist at heart but sadly could never vote that way as a every socialist party around here pulls in ugly dependencies, so for now and for the foreseeable future, the second best option: support anyone who wants to leave people alone.
- As this movement had started to try to tear down Churchill - not the bravest ot noblest man - but arguably one of those whose actions mattered most to reduce police brutality (Gestapo) and racism in Europe and no one is stopping them I've concluded that this movement is beyond repair. (Anyone should feel free to prove me wrong here by turning that movement around.)
Edit:
- some clarification
- also, based on the feedback so far: am I misunderstanding something (I had a misunderstanding a few days ago where someone meant nazi but used an euphemisms that I didn't catch in that context.)
> I do not want to support a movement that had any opinion on how I or anyone organize our family life
You belong to a culture and a nation which already enforces strong opinions on how its members organize our family lives. Therefore, it's a fair question to ask how effective those opinions are, and whether different opinions might be more effective.
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What has it to do with racism though?
What is the other extended familiy model? family clans? What would be the practical difference? Are the no disadvantages?
Exactly these political issues, which I have no strong opinion on, are randomly added to issues of police violence that makes the whole movement look very dishonest.
Where in the western world are people that tell you how to structure your family?
The American nuclear family was supported by the state, notably through housing policy; for instance, the best neighborhoods in the country have "single family zoning", which literally prohibit extended families in suburban neighborhoods. In fact: even after redlining, which persisted in many forms into our own lifetimes, many areas are still single-family zoned. These zoning ordinances are all turn-of-the-20th-century racist devices.
The movement isn't dishonest. Its critics are simply ignorant. That's not surprising; they've been kept in ignorance deliberately.
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Edits, ahh you confuse the western family as being just a non extended family.
The criticism is against all families, extended or not. The idea from Marxism is that tribalism starts in the family unit. The aim is to get the village to raise the child, not just allow the grandmother to lend a hand.
The western family includes the European models, it doesn't only contain the Protestant isolated family structure.
Your question should therefore be re written as "why does advocating for having a family to be made up of people not related to the child be seen as problematic"?
It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota.
And it's become a distraction from that. The US has a serious problem with police brutality and quality control. US cops killed 1,112 people in 2019. That's over 10x the rate for EU countries. The odds are worse if you're black, but more whites are killed by cops than blacks.
That's the problem. Statues don't kill. Flags don't kill. Cops kill.
Yea... but let’s dive into the statistics. 1,200 deaths from cops - some unknown number justified (a shootout or whatever) and quite literally millions or tens of millions of interactions.
I think we need police reform. As a military veteran I think there is no reason that an MRAP should be on American streets, but I also think the police have pretty large responsibilities and need more training too.
We also (and I’ll say that I am a 2nd Amendment proponent - within reason) have police who have to enter into situations where the other person may be armed, which adds to the stress level.
Frankly, if you look at the stats I’m not even sure we have a police brutality problem; instead we have more of a police abuse of power problem.
Solutions that come to mind:
More training
More pay
More strict hiring requirements
Abolition of police unions
Requiring police to carry insurance
No-hire once fired or terminated from a department (generally but there are specifics here to be discussed)
Sell off and no more spending on war equipment (MRAPs, assault rifles, smoke grenades, whatever)
Mandatory body cams, lack of use results in immediate suspension without pay while an investigation takes place, and if the camera is intentionally turned off immediate termination and no ability to be rehired anywhere in the country
That’s what I would start with
Police reform stopped during the current administration as the Department of Justice backed off from enforcing various court orders on some truly inept police departments. It will probably start up shortly after the current administration departs. How well it will be done remains to be seen.
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There's a whole host of tasks given to the police that they're completely unsuitable for. People keep getting shot when armed police attend wellness checks. Same with traffic stops. A lot of police interactions are with homeless, mentally ill people and/or addicts in need of care, not a damned bullet. The rare cases of active shooters do justify an armed response, but let's be honest, cops rarely respond quickly enough to make a difference in many of those situations.
> no reason that an MRAP should be on American streets
It's not _on_ American streets. I lived in the US for 20 years and I've never seen one. Likely some SWAT teams purchased them for pennies on the dollar, but I'd argue SWAT teams need them, to reduce casualties when getting close to violent action.
> assault rifles
To the best of my knowledge assault rifles are not in use by US police. AR15 is not an assault rifle.
I saw plenty in London though.
But that's nuance - people younger than, say, 35, won't understand any of it. Literally nobody is interested in the actual reform at the moment. If they were, we'd see some serious proposals by now.
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"That's the problem. Statues don't kill. Flags don't kill. Cops kill."
And Americans shoot at each other and Cops at a rate >10x than Europe.
The misrepresentation in your comment, is that it doesn't account for the differing conditions the cops face.
'Cops kill' -> 'People who shoot at cops get killed'.
This isn't to say police violence is not a problem, but it's misrepresented by all of this narrative.
If Americans were not carrying guns everywhere, this would be an entirely different conversation.
Most of the US, including the most heavily armed parts, have the homicide rate of Switzerland.
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> US cops killed 1,112 people in 2019.
You probably already know this, but that number is a bit of a guess and almost certainly on the low side, since local police aren't required to report these numbers to the public or to any central authority.
>that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions
I think that's a false dichotomy; there's plenty of amazing Marxist literature, academic journals, etc. from well-meaning people. It's one thing to say that Marxists are misguided, but it's another thing to describe them in a situation as if they're against well-meaning moderates. It's possible for everyone to be well-meaning, and rather than assuming malice, perhaps it's a better idea to examine their point of view and arguments. I know I've taken the time to do that with right-libertarians and right-wingers online a few times.
Why do these intelligent people (tenured philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, even economists) think Marxism isn't a recipe for suffering? What do they have to say about capitalism, its advantages, and disadvantages? It's worth asking them and reading their modern point of views, which in the past fifteen years have changed a great deal already.
It is a dichotomy: you either believe that police brutality and inequality can be fixed within the basic structure of our society and economy, or you don't.
I'm a regular reader of Jacobin, so I have some idea of what modern Marxists think. (Though I won't say I'm well read on the subject.) But that's besides the point--I have no objection to Marxists participating in solving police brutality and inequality. I'm addressing the practice of socially coercing people to say "black lives matter." What ideas are you actually asking people to endorse? I think many, many people are happy to endorse that idea insofar as it means "the police shouldn't murder black people because of the color of their skin," or "black people shouldn't get the short end of the economic stick."
But the eponymous organization behind the slogan happens to be led by Marxists and has a Marxist and anti-Western platform. I think people are quite reasonably hesitant that what they're actually being asked to endorse is the platform and ideology of the organization. And I think it's perverse to insist on such endorsement under the banner of anti-racism.
I don't read Jacobin and find American socialism tiresome and unmoored from reality. But the "What We Believe" statement you cited earlier espouses none of the economic justice positions of Jacobin or the DSA, nor do either of their petitions.
There is a strain of socialist activism in BLM (you saw it with the ridiculous "property crime isn't violence" stuff). But those were voices in a larger crowd, and the movement doesn't seem to endorse them explicitly.
There are BLM signs all over Oak Park and, I assure you, very few of these people actually want to defund the Oak Park Police Department. I think BLM supporters have more clarity on the issues than you give them credit for: they're standing in solidarity with black people who have been targeted for generations by a policing culture we all know to be fucked up. They're not looking to seize the means of production.
> I'm addressing the practice of socially coercing people to say "black lives matter." What ideas are you actually asking people to endorse? I think many, many people are happy to endorse that idea insofar as it means "the police shouldn't murder black people because of the color of their skin," or "black people shouldn't get the short end of the economic stick."
I think you're quite severely overestimating both the number of people who are asking others to endorse Marxism when pressuring them to support their side in the current moment, and more to the point, the number of people who perceive themselves as being pressured to endorse Marxism in the current moment. There is some tangible benefit to both the far left and to the right for there to be a perception that that is what is going on, but I'm just not seeing it much IRL.
My extended social circle might not be representative of anything, but people are talking about cops murdering people, the behavior and misbehavior of protesters, whether vandalism during a protest is bad or somehow actually good for some reason (sigh), whether protesters deserve to suffer brutality at the hands of police (double sigh), whether racism is even a thing and whether whites are the REAL victims of racism (facepalm), whether events that are happening and are clearly documented on widely distributed video are really happening or whether that's just what "they" want us to think, and some other crazy stuff that I bet would sound familiar to you as well.
I think I'd actually feel a lot better about things if I were witnessing an argument about fringe political beliefs coming to the fore, rather than finding out how many people I know are overtly or covertly racist. That sounds a little negative but some demonstrably good things are happening as well, so... you take the bad with the good, I guess.
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> there's plenty of amazing Marxist literature, academic journals, etc. from well-meaning people.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions, clearly. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I want absolutely no part of that shit here in the US. None whatsoever, "well meaning" or not
> What is “the overall message?” Is it just the plain meaning of the words? Is the idea that we need to reform the police so they stop murdering Black people?
The overall message (the theme, if you prefer) of Sarah Downey's article that Carmack linked to was a defense of freedom of speech. I thought the stuff she wrote about racism was flawed enough - to be charitable, perhaps it was flawed because it wasn't the main topic of the piece and it wasn't getting sufficient space - that it took away from a potentially strong defense of freedom of speech.
> The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet.
That is a humorous image and it is an accurate summary of some people's thinking, but I don't know quite what to say about it without giving it more credence than I believe it deserves. If we side with the Marxists in opposing the murder of innocent people we will be living in a Communist state by Thursday is not a train of thought I would have a lot of sympathy for, even if Marxism were a force in American politics.
"They're Marxists!". You couldn't make it up. "We want peace"-America will always go down this route it seems.
Haven't you seen the amount of people that are participating in these demonstrations? Of course you're gonna find self-described "Marxists" among them. Doesn't mean that the average protestor is some sort of Stalinist relic from the 1960ths. That's just absurd.
I didn't say the average protester was a Marxist. I said exactly the opposite: BLM contains a "majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality."
But several of the BLM founders are, by their own description, Marxists, and that is a very different thing from happening to "find self-described 'Marxists' among" the protesters. People with lots of different views can happen to find themselves on the same side of any issue. I do think it's different when you're talking about the founders of an organization that is the de facto figurehead of the movement.
No it's not. There's no "founders" in the sense that you are trying to present. There's no organization that you join. You're pretty obviously implying that these protests are somehow linked to Marxism, otherwise that entire posts make little sense. I realize that conservatives always want to find some "leaders" to argue with rather than accept that it's a massmovement, not some top-down movement that has some sort of charter that most must directly or indirectly accept.
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>It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota
This is revisionist, though, isn't it? And in a way that specifically eliminates the meaning of the protests. The protests started before the officers were charged, I believe. And while it may not be reasonable to expect the arrests to happen instantly, it's also reasonable that people doubted it would happen at all.
Assuming you mean well and all, this specific wording could nevertheless be interpreted as a dog whistle. It triggers some peoples' political immune system.
ELI5: What is the dog whistle in the quoted sentence? And how is it a dog whistle?
"started out...universal"
Those two words seem to express what I think is a crucial falsehood, and it works for selective communication (dog whistling) if some people get cognitive dissonance for it and others don't. We have me as an example of the former and you as an example of the latter.
I'm not saying it's intentional, but it raises hackles for me.
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> Assuming you mean well and all, this specific wording could nevertheless be interpreted as a dog whistle. It triggers some peoples' political immune system.
It never occurred to me that that rayiner might have been using some kind of dog whistle in his reply to me. It would be rather out of character, and yours seems like a needlessly uncharitable interpretation of his comment.
That's why I used the qualifiers and suggested it was unintentional, in order to scrupulously follow HN guidelines. No response seems forthcoming.
(Moved up in the thread)
I wish you wouldn't respond to my comment and only engage with what I quoted. Why not reply to the parent?
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