Comment by MengerSponge
18 hours ago
It's naive or foolish to think that the problem with "Black Lives Matter" was insufficient specificity.
People who are not operating in good faith won't operate in good faith. There were thousands of words written on the phenomenon protested by BLM, but those are easily ignored. Three words are twisted and co-opted by propagandists. Consider a function that describes "comprehension by bigots" as a function of word count. We know that 0 words yields 0 comprehension. Evidence suggests that 10k words also yields 0 comprehension. There is no evidence that this Laffer curve will ever achieve anything other than zero.
It's possible to reach and change bigots' minds, but it requires human connections. Not sloganeering, prose, or reels.
I agree.
I wasn’t making a hard argument.
Words are not everything. Still, they matter.
To the degree that pushback against anti-minority mistreatment can be framed as pro-universal (reciprocal) respect, I think it helps. Given the latter is in fact the real, most general, and most relevant principle.
That avoids the framing created and imposed by biases. I.e. that somehow, race or other category is the question, instead of (logically and morally) irrelevant to the value of reciprocal respect. Not forgetting the point of it all, avoids actual or perceived reverse biasing. Minority rights and equality being interpreted by either side as anti-majority, or being at the expense of anyone.
Some shrill minority defenders do manage to imply that, as well the people having trouble respecting some group.
This are just thoughts based on what I find works better in personal encounters with people I know or ran into, who had/have difficulty seeing the world without in-group, out-group filters of various kinds.
Keep the simple, general, most important thing clear and center.
Avoid letting the conversation be artificially narrowed by exactly the destructive framing we want to push back on. The narrower the framing the more people forget, ignore, and successfully distract from the main principle. The more people get bogged down in narrower and narrower arguments, the less people understand each other.