Current US riot situation

As the AG William Barr has moved into the spotlight a bit for his part in the response to the protests I'd like to draw some attention to what he wrote in 1992 when he had his first stint as AG:

PDF warning
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/139583NCJRS.pdf

I'm not going to debunk it point by point but he pretty much based the whole report on the outrageously racist notion that "the only way to protect black people is to lock them up and throw the key away".

 

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IDK if repost but I am mashed on pills.

https://nypost.com/2020/06/01/4-cop...-sTga2Atd9EA_GR84Xa7_bsIcXovCsM8X2V6n6jDsyHto

F**K YEAH.

 

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Blackwater is working as Barr's private army. Their logo was on the shirt of the sniper in Jasper, AL, a town of about 35,000. Why? Why are people accountable to no one and already responsible for one documented massacre now enforcing Trump's will?

 

Trump will be happy...

 

Because some adviser told Mr Grab em by the p*ssy that showing strength would be an election winning strategy and bullying States into allowing it was the only way Bunker Bitch could think of to project strength.

 

Because the Eric Prince, the plank behind them is a big GOP donor and his sister [Betsy DeVos] is the Secretary of Education.

 

This kind of language and attitude - the "careful how you phrase that, we might get the wrong idea about your ideas" - is grotesque. I am reminded of nothing so much as the Stasi. If you find someone's phraseology reminds you a bit of someone racist you heard once, that's a 'you' problem. I'm not going to sanitize my language and walk on eggshells to avoid reminding you of bigots. If you suspect I'm a bigot, ask me directly. If I were one, I'd happily admit it and open myself to scrutiny. As it happens, I'm not.

Dogwhistles are a disgusting concept in practise. In theory, it makes sense: bigoted people do use common recycled phrases to test the waters of whether other bigots are in the conversation, so they can 'find' each other. By definition, though, many of these phrases and ideas are harmless and not bigoted in themselves. By characterizing them as dogwhistles, you essentially stifle a large swathe of the opposition's arguments as "sounds a bit like bigotry, so you can't say it".

And lastly, saying "yes but" is the cornerstone of critical thinking. The idea that questioning a trending opinion could be harmful or objectionable is, frankly, absurd. I shall question everything, twice as forcefully when people start telling me I'm asking dangerous questions.

Yes. Because the available evidence is poor. My rubric for deciding if something exists or not is a sufficiently large body of converging evidence from proper sources. I'm old-fashioned like that.

I'm still digging into the question of systemic racism in the US police. Where I'm at so far is: I still have no idea if it's real or not. It's hard to find good statistical analyses that support Black Lives Matter's narrative. If it sounds like I'm anti-BLM, I'm only against them insofar as I feel they've jumped the gun, pushing a nation to riots and social unrest without establishing a convincing argument first. Their momentum is based on emotion, not facts.

What does concern me is that this isn't a problem for anyone else. Across the US, across the UK and Europe, it is immediately, unquestioningly taken as clear and apparent that the US police have a problem with systemic racism. This may be true, and it may not; facts will illuminate the way. But it's a terrible, worldview-changing charge, it alleges a terrible and gigantic problem that would require huge amounts of action to fix. It implicates thousands of people who do one of the most dangerous and vital jobs, in one of the most dangerous societies to do that particular job. For that reason, I'm shocked people don't have a higher burden of proof.

So far, the bar seems to be set at "this vaguely reminds me of racism, and it could plausibly be racism, and I'm upset by this recent tragedy, so I think it's racism".

There are entirely plausible explanations of the entire situation to date which do not involve the US police having any institutional racial biases in their treatment and profiling of civilians. They may be true, they may not. But the activists, the organisers of the protests, the BLM movement's key figures, and progressively minded people all over the US have made a grave omission in not properly putting together a factual argument. If the truth is there, it can be illustrated with facts and statistics. And we should require any radical movement to do exactly that before we let them dictate the narrative of how we upheave a society.

As a rule, any time a large group of people with a common political vision is trying to upheave society, one should examine their claims and motives very carefully, I feel.

Here's one plausible socioeconomic non-racial explanation based on my limited knowledge and insight so far (I am still researching):

Due to a convergence of socioeconomic factors, black communities have very little mobility, physical or economic. They don't diversify over time, they don't gentrify over time. They remain poor, they struggle to access good career opportunities, and for these and other reasons, as in all poor communities with no mobility, crime flourishes.

Crime being more likely in these areas, combined with America's rampant gun violence, makes police hypervigilant and cagey. Militant tactics become the norm. Black culture emphasizes a hostile and combative attitude towards the police and characterizes them as an enemy of the people.

Black people in these areas now represent a disproportionate chunk of all violent crime and homicide, both as perpetrators and as victims. At this point, we must assume that some individual officers are developing racist stereotypes and profiling based on race, because they encounter a disproportionate amount of crime and threat from black suspects.

Encounters between young black men who have bought into the anti-police narrative and the police are doomed to be extremely fraught and confrontational at this point. Both sides approach these encounters with exaggerated defensiveness and hostility.

The interesting thing about this narrative is that it's not really very controversial. It doesn't depend upon any racist ideas. It's underpinned solely by sociology and behaviourism. You can swap any ethnic or religious group into the place of black people, rerun this sequence, and the result would look the same - a disproportionate amount of deaths of members of that group at the hands of police.

This narrative also does not point to a systemic problem with the police. It points to a systemic problem with the society and the way that society keeps those communities stuck with low mobility.

Personally I feel the economics are the bigger part of all this. My bias has always been economic; I think people see social classes far more readily than skin colour. My suspicion so far is that police in the US are prejudiced against the poor. Poor neighbourhoods always give police the most trouble, anywhere you go, regardless of race; police quickly develop cultural stereotypes and profiles that target poor people from specific neighbourhoods, because they really are much more likely suspects.

The actual issue that activists should be angry about is the fact that black Americans are so disproportionately likely to be poor and to stay poor, but of course, that's harder to sell because the solution is not obvious.

More generally, I think it's interesting that the reaction to Floyd's death has been so huge and explosive, given that such injustices happen fairly regularly, as noted:

This is precisely why the protests, the riots, and the global outpouring of anger seems suspicious to me. Why are we all so angry about the racial component? There is very little evidence of a racial component at all. The officer who killed him worked at the same night club as him previously and may have known him, and seems generally like a bit of a nutjob. This could just as plausibly be a case of one guy abusing the powers of his job to kill a particular guy he didn't like.

Why can't we get this angry about the simple fact that the police kill people, without involving race? Why is our threshold for believing in a racially charged narrative so low? Why are people so ready to assume that race is a factor with no real evidence?

I'm sure I'll get piled on for this post with false accusations of racism, bigotry, internalized this and that, and that most loathesome phrase, 'dogwhistles'. That will upset me, a lot, but I'll weather it anyway. The reality is, I'm just earnestly trying to get to the bottom of what's actually true. If that seems like a covert racist agenda to you...well, it shouldn't. Asking questions and speculating about the causality of problems is the most natural, healthy and constructive process we can engage in.

I'll also leave this article here, it's behind a subscription wall on Washington Street Journal so I've copy-pasted it, apologies if this is prohibited by forum rules, admins, feel free to remove it if necessary.

Bawjaws, you asked if anyone was seriously questioning the narrative of systemic police racism. I haven't factchecked this article yet, but some of its claims are interesting:

 

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The instant jump from zero to "you're just like the SS, you want to oppress my speech" means I have to change my assessment: you have definitely be hanging around at least one white supremacist recruitment site (or as is becoming common, an area on a social media site where white supremacists have staked out a nice little safe space to recruit from) and have picked up on both their phraseology and mannerisms.
It's an effective recruitment tactic: planting the concept that 'if somebody points out that you are verging towards a racist viewpoint they must be trying to oppress you and limit your speech, and therefore you should cut them off and spend more time with us who do not'. It works extremely well to isolate those who have been infected by that meme and encourage them to spend more time immersed in more extreme environments.

See the paper I posted earlier that when controlled for race there is a distinct lack of correlation between poverty/wealth and black American crime rates, whereas there is a very strong correlation between poverty/wealth and white American crime rates.
But there is also a logical argument against that stream of though: it presupposes that the socio-economic disparity amongst black Americans is 'natural' and not itself a result of systematic racism.There is also the historical fact that attempts to change that socioeconomic status are met with wholescale slaughter.

 

Nope. I mostly talk to leftists, because my peer group is about 90% politically left. My source for the Stasi comparison is the film The Lives of Others, one of my all-time favourites and literally the first thing I was reminded of when you insinuated that my language was problematic.

Let's talk about how ready you are to conclude that I'm a nazi in disguise, shall we?

Edit - actually, let's not, because it's a McCarthyist hellhole that doesn't deserve to be delved into. Suffice to say, you and I haven't interacted much, but I can assure you, you're making comically off-target assumptions about me and about my gullibility, my capacity for independent thought, and my succeptibility to extremist brainwashing. I'm very much familiar with the echo chambers and positive feedback loops of indoctrination you describe, and this ain't that. Sorry.

See the article I quoted a minute ago:

So if it isn't the socioeconomic conditions, which is my running theory, what is it? Why is crime in America disproportionately black? We don't see trends like that in other countries and cultures, as far as I know. If anything, this just makes the situation more confusing.

 

I was trying to point out that 'yeah but' style phrases have been and are used to undermine and minimise issues but moving the emphasis, wasn't suggesting you were actively trying to do that, simply that it is done. Just because you didn't mean it that way doesn't suddenly mean others won't read it that way. I think jumping from that to the Stasi is a little extreme personally.

 

Sorry for that comparison, it was over the top. I get very triggered by insinuations that my language or thinking is "problematic", and as edzieba partially correctly diagnosed, I'm hypervigilant about free speech concerns and silencing tactics.

His misdiagnosis that I am on the cusp of white supremacist indoctrination has really pissed me off, frankly, and I'm going to have an offline evening to calm down. It shouldn't annoy me so much, but being wilfully misinterpreted is very frustrating, and being labelled an extremist for being a contrarian, even more so.

 

Again, that is not what I've said. I've said you're using the same talking points and debating tactics that racists use, which means that is extremely likely you have been interacting, knowingly or not, with racists attempting to spread those memes, or have acquired them from sites (or potentially offline) they are using for recruitment.

We do see those trends, to greater and lesser degrees in all nations with a predominantly white population and a history of mass black slavery (which is pretty much all nations with a predominantly white population). None to the degree as in the US, but the US is unique in both having kept slavery legalised until much more recently than any other nation, having an entirely ethic approach to the slave population (unlike say Britain where enslavement of foreign nations included Indians, Chinese, etc), and the civil war leading to a cessation of slavery in name only (with the legal structure of southern states whose agricultural economy relied on slave labour being designed around practically inescapable indentured servitude barely distinguishable from enslavement).

 

My feeling is that this will end when another big thing happens... like mass deaths from corona.

 

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That's exactly what a bigot would say!!11!!!

In all serious though, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Statistics are not the whole story, and the narrative you're deriving from it is the narrative of the oppressor. For example, you could make exactly the same argument about the Catholic community in Northern Ireland - Generationally poor, suspicious of police, prone to civil rights marches - but that's not the whole story. The statistics could also be warped to reflect this false narrative, but statistics don't account for RUC/Loyalist collusion, or in America's case Police/White supremacist collusion.

Certainly there is an economic component, but you're not asking why there is an economic component - Is it that black people just can't handle money on a genetic level? Or is it that systemic racism, born of slavery and segregation, exists and presumably exists everywhere except in police departments? Think it though...

 

Cool, come back to me when you have fact-checked it. Maybe you could start by considering who the author is, what her biases are and what agenda she's trying to push. Hint: she's a vocal critic of Black Lives Matter. What sort of person might feel compelled to position themselves contrary to a group that campaign against systemic racism towards black people?

This isn't intended as a personal criticism, but you seem to be presenting yourself as some hyper-rational, fact-driven critical thinking contrarian, which is fine, but you're also acting wounded because some people on here are reacting negatively to your posts. If you're going to try and explain this as a socioeconomic problem rather than a racial one, then you're either entirely missing the point or are choosing to miss it - you can't separate the two here because there is systemic racism throughout society which acts to disadvantage black Americans (and beyond the USA too, but we're focusing on America for now) and is set up to maintain that status quo. That is what systemic racism is. If you don't want to confront that thought, I can understand it - it's difficult and unpleasant to realise that white people benefit from this systemic racism, consciously or unconsciously, but hiding behind the need for statistical "proof" will get people's backs up. And those stats are meaningless without context, which you seem to be ignoring.

Ultimately, when people are scared, hurting and angry, someone coming along and saying "Well, actually, I'm going to need some more proof that you have a case" is going to piss some people off. You must realise that. Saying that you find the reactions to this tragedy "suspicious" and denying that there's a racial element to it is tone-deaf at best, and that is being extremely charitable.