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Comment by AI_WAIFU

5 years ago

No, it's always been a valid response to BLM. BLM puts the focus on race and race alone. Effectively excluding every other major source of causation and axis of variation. You know, things like extreme poverty, heart disease, malaria, etc.(All of which kill 100,000s every year and very disproportionately affect black people, but you never hear a peep about it from BLM) By making it a race issue (especially without solid evidence), you deliberately antagonize people who are either disproportionally affected by the other factors of variation who belong to the "privileged" race or who care about other issues that can be convincingly argued to be far more serious.

To extend the house analogy, there aren't 2 houses, there are 7 billion and you're saying we should focus our attention on the black ones rather than the ones that are on fire because they are more likely to be black.

Unfortunately, you can't quite capture that logic with a catchy jingle like BLM, so your left saying ALM and crossing your fingers hoping racial tensions don't escalate.

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AI_WAIFU

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shadowgovt  5 years ago

It's more that they're saying people just believe black houses are likelier to catch fire innately and that's acceptable, when they're not and it's not.

  • AI_WAIFU  5 years ago

    You could replace, "black" in that sentence with a whole bunch of other things. There's nothing special about race, and their shouldn't be. Again, multiple factors of variation. If someone is focused on "poverty" it's not that they find black people being disproportionately affected acceptable, it's that they have exercised their judgement and don't see it as a priority. And (IMO) rightly so.

    Now you can make the argument that 99% of people don't give a shit, and only care about themselves. But that leads you more down the path of effective alturism than BLM, again because the former doesn't ignore the other factors of variation.

    For those who genuinely care about the state of the world, and have identified issues that in their judgement that are more pressing, or those who do care but are currently busy keeping their own heads above the water for whatever reason, the accusations that they believe the current situation is acceptable are at best tone deaf and at worst downright insulting.