The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

“Privilege” Mostly Isn’t, It Is What Everyone Should Have

This is hilarious:

Rather than increasing the pay of female staff the BBC has decided to slash the salaries of the top male earners, in a belated attempt to tackle the broadcaster’s gender pay gap crisis…

…It is understood that under new plans being rolled out to fight off the gender pay row the that has recently dogged the broadcaster, the BBC’s male stars will see their six-figure salaries slashed by up to 30 percent.

There are a few problems with the use of the word “privilege.” The main one is that much of what is called “privilege” isn’t actually “privilege,” it’s actually what everyone should have.

Let’s make a comparison: In the US, it is often noted that a black or brown person is far more likely to be killed than a white; the police go far out of their way not to kill whites in comparison.

But that doesn’t mean that the police should treat everyone like they do African-Americans, say, it means they should treat everyone like they do whites.

As for the pay gap, the idea is that everyone should earn what white males do for the same work, not that white males should earn less. (Well, I don’t actually care how much rich, white, male presenters make, but…in the general sense.)

Most of what white males have is what everyone should have because white males are generally treated better, even well, and that’s how we should treat everyone.

It isn’t a privilege to not be shot out-of-hand by cops, or to earn the same (good) pay for the same work, it’s decent and fair.


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116 Comments

  1. It’s a bit more complicated than that. I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that there is no fully positive path to equality. The more privileged, in “identity” terms, must necessarily experience a psychological loss, and probably even a material loss in relative term, in order to eradicate the underlying substructure of privilege. The alternative is just a “surface”, fair-weather equality that does not endure when times are tough.

  2. The implication being that racially-equal police treatment, insofar as we are to have police, must likely pass through a phase where police treatment of whites worsens, before an egalitarian improvement can be achieved.

  3. Jib Halyard

    When someone tells you that what you have is a “privilege”, what they are really saying is that they want to take that thing away from you. Otherwise, they would call it a “right”.

  4. And there are many things that privileged communities do not deserve, again in relative terms, such as more favorable starting conditions from birth, on average.

  5. This post is going to presage a COMMENTS EXPLOSION, probably.

    You are manifestly, self-evidently correct, of course. The problem here is that SJWs (for lack of a better term) (as such), are disproportionately undergraduate college students. They appropriated the language of the classroom for the #resistance, and thus created a lot of tension that was superfluous — or not “superfluous,” exactly, but it allowed bigots to masquerade as truth-warriors fighting the Industrial Politically-Correct Vocabulary Complex. It permitted the bigots to class themselves with the people who think Huckleberry Finn is still a worthwhile work of literature despite its use of the word “n*gger,” when in reality the bigots just want to use the word (ideally to a “thug” who’s trying to steal their talking television set, right before they shoot him). When you hear these things discussed by actual black Americans, you don’t come across the word “privilege” as much as you do on Twitter. When women talk about the way we’re treated by men, few of us speak of “oppression” like they do on BuzzFeed. This is an injustice-based popular subculture, which only overlaps occasionally with the voiceless Others it tries so faithfully to represent.

    This is actually one of the things that drives me out of my mind about leftists/liberals/whatever — their distancing instance on academicalizing everything. They even refer to de facto racist behaviors as “problematic,” which is how you describe a disputed source in a term paper. Jesus Christ.

    Having said that, this story literally looks like the bigots’ worst nightmare — not just that they have to pretend to treat the subhumans as equals, but that they themselves will be demoted to subhuman status in the great leveling of the future. Probably the UK will Brexit twice as hard and fast, now. I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest. If there were a way to protect the innocent from the consequences, I’d be all for letting the erstwhile conquerors founder on the immovable rock of their own stupidity.

  6. Dean Flemming

    On the other hand certain careers because of supply and demand necessitate higher salaries for men than women: acting for example. Studios have a smaller pool of male actors to choose from and those actors can therefore demand higher salaries. (I speak from the experience of being paid more as a foreign teacher in Korea than my Korean counterparts: my experience and qualifications are scarcer and therefore more in demand than theirs, unfortunately perhaps for them. On the other hand they do not have to worry about any change in government policy which might expel them form the country.)

  7. Hugh

    If we commit to provide for each other the basics for a good and decent life: good food, shelter, healthcare, education, meaningful work at a living wage, and retirement, we would eliminate most of the rationales for privilege.

    What privilege is about is the creation of a group which identifies its interests as the general good and then seeks to perpetuate and make hereditary its unequal claims on power and society’s resources and wealth on that basis.

  8. tony

    Action movies also have a lot more demand for men than women. You are unlikely to see a movie where the hero kills and maims scores of women in his quest for glory.

  9. Hugh

    This is why Jennifer Lawrence was paid less than her male counterparts for the Hunger Games movie series because without her the series would have been mediocre or a flop and her male costars could have been replaced by a hundred others. Oh wait…

    Since literature, especially great literature, never conforms to what is politically correct, if you were really political correct, you would end up with no literature or unmitigated pap. Look at the wishy-washy women in Hamlet. Throw it out. Slavery, incest, murder, women treated as chattel all over the Bible. Dump it.

  10. highrpm

    outlaw unearned income. that eliminates investor-owned companies. we’re all equals, working our fingers for our livings.. the best we can do is employee-owned cooperatives. pretty good for starters.

  11. Agreed in principle, but the problem is most of these top salaries are set by headhunters and remuneration committees behind closed doors on a comparison merry-go-round. There is no reference to supply and demand. They should probably all earn less, but the viewers demand fame. It becomes self-perpetuating. Perhaps a rule requiring 50% new faces would help?

  12. V. Arnold

    Co-operative business, such as; Fagor, in Spain. Their products are of excellent quality (I have a food processor and a bread machine).
    Otherwise, even benevolent companies, such as Patagonia, work until they don’t…

  13. Hugh

    De Gaulle said the cemeteries are filled with indispensable people. That is lots of people think they are indispensable but aren’t. Most of the rich and powerful are evil people who lead absurd lives. Their lives are divorced from ours. They have no skin in our game. They treat us like we aren’t even the same species. We need to keep them close enough to us that their fate is tied to ours. You do that by a 100% estate tax on estates over a few million, wealth taxes on wealth above a million, and 95-100% marginal income tax rates on incomes above $1 million, plus regular rates 50-70% on income in the $500,000-$1,000,000 range. The idea is take a maximum wealth and maximum income target, as I said, to keep these people nearer to us while rewarding them for any contributions they make to our society, –and then adjust our tax structure to keep them there. If our elites have to use our healthcare, our schools, our pensions. If they have to live among us. If their children aren’t born with a silver spoon, or silver set, in their mouths, then maybe they will start wanting for the rest of us what they currently keep to themselves, because they will be the rest of us.

  14. Note that wage demands today are all based on what the worker wants, needs, or is entitled to. No pretense is made that the wage should be based on what the work is worth, the level of performance, or the degree of difficulty of the job. The employer is supposed to hand the worker money based on how the worker wants him to, with no ability to say what value he receives for that money.

    I stopped for late breakfast yesterday. The waitress brought me coffee. I finished my coffee and left, telling the cashier that if anyone had come to take my order I would have had breakfast, but that after I was brought coffee, no one ever came back to take my order. I guess I could have created a disturbance to get someone’s attention and place an order, but that’s not how “customer service” is supposed to work. Everybody wants to make $15/hr, but nobody wants to deliver performance that is worth even half that.

    In all probability the male wages needed to be slashed.

  15. A1

    Bill H – the important question is “did you leave a tip?”

  16. realitychecker

    I think maybe the important thing to consider is how insidious and destructive the very process of comparing to others is. It rarely leads to a good result, and the post just illustrates just one way that works. It is easier to pull someone down than to raise them up, n’est-ce pas?

    But if such comparisons are to become the rule of the day, then why not lament the beautiful looks privilege? Or the perfect healthy body privilege? I never had the benefit of either one of those. Or a lot of other good ‘privilege-type’ things that I never had to feel guilty about.

    Folks would have to settle for hating me because of my superior brain privilege lol. (Just kidding, nobody really values intelligence as much as good looks or a great physique.) 🙂

    This is what madness looks like. Whole lotta reality-checking is in order these days.

    But we won’t be getting it.

  17. Tom W Harris

    “Note that wage demands today are all based on what the worker wants, needs, or is entitled to”

    Lying feudalist rubbish.

  18. different clue

    @BillH,

    When I go into a restaurant, I am hungry. On the rare occasions I discover myself to have been forgotten, I get someone’s attention because I went in there to eat.

    You clearly were not hungry. You clearly went in there to make some kind of a point. You must be very proud of yourself.

  19. Willy

    Everybody wants to make $15/hr, but nobody wants to deliver performance that is worth even half that.

    WTF? Where the hell do you live?

  20. Willy

    I get it, that the clan’s best hunters should have first dibs on the food, sleeping furs, and the women, because they’re bringing home the meat for everybody else. Plus wooly rhinos and aurochs are pretty dangerous so they’re risking their asses too. Not to mention being relied on to fight off the cave bears.

    But today’s ‘best hunters’ aren’t tied to anything so tangible. Nothing limits the damage they can do to the rest of the tribe with any excessive greed, incompetency, or outright moral insanity.

  21. The Stephen Miller Band

    In all probability the male wages needed to be slashed.

    Elon, is that you?

  22. The Stephen Miller Band

    Most people are going to interpret a better life, or a raising of living standard, with material possessions. As such, the discussion in the last post is instructive, especially and specifically the discussion about Elon Musk and the Oligarchs and Concentration of Wealth and Excess and Disparity of Wealth.

    Think about Donald Trump. When’s the last time, or when is a time ever, he made a meal for his family. A real meal made from scratch. With love. And then cleaned the dishes up afterwards. When’s the last time Donald Trump did anything HANDS ON for anyone, even himself. He has always outsourced ALL OF THAT. And yet he’s a Billionaire.

    This fucked up System allows for that. It engenders that. It encourages it.

    Why? Why do we stand for it? How did it come to be? How can it be undone and a new, more Egalitarian System be put in its place? Is it even possible?

  23. bruce wilder

    I care about the magnitude of “star” salaries. The relative magnitude of “star” salaries is actually an important driver of increasing inequality and many of inequality’s onerous side-effects.

    We live in an economic system dominated by hierarchical control (not “markets”). “Markets” establish (or suggest to mind) essentially horizontal relationships, but we live vertical relationships.

    Competition in markets suggests choice, variety, etc, but competition in vertical relationships is likely to mean tournaments that favor ruthless opportunism and massively rewards small differences. Feeding the star and star power will often mean starving the little people, leading to risk taking and a general decline in resilience in an organization.

  24. nihil obstet

    Everyone wants to make $15/hour? Well, I want them to have at least that. In a rich society, everyone should have access to decent housing, good food, medical care, and a long list of other things that enable them to participate fully in the society. I consider it being human.

    For those who think money trumps humanity, I would think that they would object to companies including how to apply for food stamps and Medicaid in their orientation for new employees, since the company has no intentions of paying a salary adequate to feed and care for the worker. I don’t hear the same howling about how trucks cost so much that the user should get them with someone else paying the maintenance and replacement cost, but the user thinks labor should cost less than replacement. I object to everything in this line of thinking.

  25. StewartM

    Willy

    I get it, that the clan’s best hunters should have first dibs on the food, sleeping furs, and the women, because they’re bringing home the meat for everybody else.

    Actually, hunter-gatherers are quite the opposite, which makes our elites grabbing everything in sight and pretense of adding value even more outrageous. A headman amongst hunter-gatherers leads by respect, not by force. A headman earns that respect because a) he has consistently shown he knows what he’s talking about; and b) he has a track record of always doing the right and ethical thing. The latter usually involves putting the welfare of everyone else above himself, which in turn means although he might be the best hunter, he just quips that he was lucky once again to kill the dinner and eats only after everyone else has eaten.

  26. StewartM

    A1

    Bill H – the important question is “did you leave a tip?”

    Speaking for myself, I always tip, and tip well, even if I didn’t get great service. Because the next time I show up, I nearly always do get treated very well.

    Funny, this is obvious–providing the right incentives gets you the behaviors you want, which leads me to conclude that the people who gripe about this most want the behaviors without paying the incentives.

  27. capelin

    @willy, did you watch a lot of wild kingdom and disney as a kid or something?

    “clan” power dynamics and survival generally involves more than non-stop killing of tasty animals and fighting off ones that consider you and yours tasty.

    however i agree with your larger point:

    “But today’s ‘best hunters’ aren’t tied to anything so tangible. Nothing limits the damage they can do to the rest of the tribe with any excessive greed, incompetency, or outright moral insanity.”

    i wondered about the “male star” pay drop decision as apposed to raising the women’s pay. i suppose it’s a no brainer, why pay more money when you can save money? the guy employees aren’t in a position to publicly fuss much. not that i feel sorry for them or nuthin.

    but i also wondered if there could be some political gain to be had in the sowing of resentment amongst one’s employees, and amongst the watching populace.

  28. You know, if they initiated a pay system based on a rate level (“Level One”, “Level Two”, etc.), and each level was based on merit and achievement, there would never BE that discrepancy between the income of men and women in the first place.
    But the concept of equitable is obviously not in the human genome.

  29. The authorities are also not very nice to outcasts, social misfits, or “social lepers” either.

  30. Brian

    Police officers don’t go far out of their way to not kill white people. That’s so ignorant of the facts. In a police stop or arrest whites are more likely to get killed then black. That’s facts. Black males commit more of the crime proportionally to their demographic representations. That’s a fact. Black males also get arrested and stopped more proportionally. That’s a fact. If you take these into account it looks like police go out of their way not to kill black people. I would hypothesize because it’s to not look racist. Your statement that black peoples are targeted to be killed by police is so beyond facts, statistics, and reality – it’s disappointing.

  31. realitychecker

    @ Brian

    Word.

    But you better duck, anyway lol.

  32. Peter

    @Brian

    Thanks for opening this can of worms because this misuse of one unexamined statistic about very different populations is being used for a dangerous agenda. The SJW’s want this to be viewed as a racist class war useful for their larger NWO agendas. We have already seen some bloody killings because of this incitement but most people seem to understand they are being manipulated. The SJW’s aren’t giving up as we see here even though their target audience has mostly rejected their claims and agenda.

    One account of police killings showed 50 each of unarmed Black and White subjects killed out of under 2000 total mostly armed people. Most of those unarmed people’s deaths were determined to be justified leaving a handful of cases where racism or mental breakdown by the cops might be factors. While everything possible should be done to eliminate these deaths portraying this small number of killings as rascist class war is agitprop and intentionally misleading.

  33. StewartM

    Brian

    Black males commit more of the crime proportionally to their demographic representations. That’s a fact.

    What’s a ‘fact’ is that black males get *arrested* and *convicted* and *jailed* for crimes at a higher proportion to their demographics. Whether or not they actually *commit* crimes at a higher proportion, especially when the data is corrected for income (and when one considers white collar crimes, maybe with not even that qualifier) is an unanswered question.

    This is a case of “what you find is determined by where you look”.

    But it is indeed a fact that the police do shoot black male suspects at disproportionately higher rates than they do whites:

    https://www.snopes.com/do-police-kill-more-whites-than-black-people/

    https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops

    https://www.vox.com/cards/police-brutality-shootings-us/us-police-racism

    Note that even in video game training exercises, police are more likely to shoot the black male.

    And

    The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian. Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.

    Police kill unarmed minority suspects at higher rates (62.7 %) than they kill armed white suspects (44.5 %). How’s that for a fact for ya?

  34. nihil obstet

    I’m more likely to be convinced if one gives a legitimate source for one’s assertions rather than saying, “That’s a fact”. However, if you disagree, I would point out that unicorns stampede across our beaches at the spring equinox. That’s a fact.

    If you disagree, there are some interesting examinations of how race plays in oppression. Class is much more correlated with incarceration than is race alone. Police stop poor people. However, there’s still a racial disparity.

  35. Willy

    @willy, did you watch a lot of wild kingdom and disney as a kid or something?

    Actually, I saw it in a cartoon once. I’m trying to better relate to the conservatives in this crowd.

    It’s somewhat well known that in most corporations, those who advance are rarely the best performers. That’s naive wishful thinking. They’re usually political insiders who their immediate bosses have deemed are the best at helping their own careers. It’s the way DC works now. The same is true in smaller companies where the owners/bosses are able to directly observe who best fattens their wallets. Since I’d rather perform than kiss ass, I preferred the smaller company.

  36. Willy

    @ StewartM

    Actually, hunter-gatherers are quite the opposite, which makes our elites grabbing everything in sight and pretense of adding value even more outrageous.

    I think you were elaborating on agreeing with me. I’m no anthropologist, but my point was that humans appear to be wired for far smaller organizations than the global corporation. Giving CEOs so much power that they can (and often do) influence national policy is increasingly damaging our culture and society.

  37. realitychecker

    FBI website is best source for all the important facts. Even those well known ones. 🙂

  38. I know of one police officer who seemed to “specialize” in nothing BUT stopping people.
    Officer Terrance Stop was his name …

  39. different clue

    Perhaps we can expand the discussion of “police racism against black people” to “police cop-ism against citizen people.”

    Civilian Lives Matter.

  40. escher

    So now the BBC is slashing wages in the name of Social Justice, eh? I expect to see a LOT more of this kind of thing.

    A certain brand of self-described leftist idiot will even cheer it on.

  41. escher

    We need a term akin to “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” but for Social Justice (TM) generally.

  42. different clue

    @escher,

    How about . . . “wokewashing”?

  43. escher

    @different clue
    I like it!

  44. different clue

    @escher,

    Feel free to use it, then. I hereby give it away.

  45. realitychecker

    @ dc

    “Civilian Lives Matter”

    Indeed, good sir.

    As soon as I first heard Black Lives Matter used as a slogan, I immediately began speaking against it as being obviously divisive. Of course, I was called a racist, bigot, etc. for it, but I thought that result was an obvious one to predict, and I don’t think any sentient person could disagree today.

    I think that women have similarly ‘jumped the shark’ with the metoo# movement, and will pay an increasingly obvious and costly price for the long-term divisiveness that will result. IMO, it’s not a great idea to position yourself in direct opposition to the concept of due process itself.

    Bottom line: The Masters love it when we lesser folk use our energy to fight each other. Divide and conquer was never a more trenchant concept than it is today, when technology has made it so easy to segment the population for propaganda/talking point targeting.

    The dumber the population gets, the more effective this tactic becomes. So, the future is not bright.

  46. MojaveWolf

    I agree with and applaud the general sentiment of Ian’s post, and I was too busy when it came out to mention the one innaccuracy, as much as it annoyed me and I thought it worth correcting. Thankfully, other people did it for me while I was away. Gratzi. I still don’t have time to do this right, but to quote something I wrote elsewhere that I was able to find fairly quickly:

    “Speaking of popular delusions, no, cops are not gunning down unarmed blacks willy nilly in the street. Not your fault for believing this, it’s the fault of media reporting designed to keep people at each other’s throats and outraged about the wrong problems while igonoring the real ones. Blacks make up a quarter of the people shot by cops each year (and most of those shootings are of armed people, and most are justified, which isn’t to say some aren’t and that there isn’t a huge problem w/an overly militarized police force, both in recruiting and training), which is substantially more than their percentage of the population but substantially less than the percentage of their encounters w/police or involvement in violent crime. Poor people are most likely to get screwed in all of this, and black people are disproportionately poor, but police are actually less likely to do something awful to you if you’re black, on a percentage encounter. And most cops are actually decent people, and most arrests/traffic stops are not any more problematic than they need to be. Again, there are problems, (frequently, truly horrific make you want to scream or cry problems) but they are not what people think they are.”

    Like a number of other people, I believed the conventional wisdom until I looked up both stats and vids of actual shootings to argue w/someone, and then was forced to change my mind.

    On Naked Capitalism, long ago, there was a post about this issue where I tried to make the above point w/a bunch of links and it stayed in moderation till all attention on the post (other than mine, checking to see if the comment got out of moderation, which it did after several days) had long passed. I might try to find this comment and repost it here later.

    In the meantime, here is a frequently retweeted in my twitter timeline example of how people get misled about this sort of thing:
    “Holly Figueroa O’Reilly @AynRandPaulRyan
    4d

    And they wonder why we kneel.

    Tennessee sheriff taped saying ‘I love this shit’ after ordering suspect’s killing

    theguardian.com/us-news/2018/f…
    #WednesdayWisdom
    #blacklivesmatter”

    Now, like everyone else, the way this was reported led me to believe the sheriff was saying this about the killing of a black suspect. No. It wasn’t. White guy dead.

    (and before some dipshit comes on here to go on about “omg look at the evil racists!”, possibly in conjunction “omg it’s probably a Russian!”, I have frequently spent the majority of my time around people not of my racial/ethnic makeup, frequently being the only white guy there, and no, this is not the thing idiots like to go “look, he’s saying I have a black friend!” about, this is me saying, at various points of my life, MOST of my friends were black or hispanic, and if you really don’t think that’s relevant you’re a friggin idiot, just as the fact that you can find black scholars making the same arguments, but you know what’s not relevant? the personal qualities of me or anyone else making the arguments. Either the argument and the facts are true and accurate and not misleading, or they are false/misleading. Sorry for the rant, but, past history of the way these arguments go leads me to launch a pre-emptive counter, even tho the need for one isn’t here yet.)

  47. MojaveWolf

    At the risk of doubling down on what is arguably a derailment from the main point of the post (which, again, I wholeheartedly agree with), here is a nicer, more temperate, and more detailed version of what I just said. And thank you to different clue and others for pointing out that \”All Lives Matter\” is actually a good saying, not a bad one.

    Also, I apologize for the ill-tempered rant above. I am angry about a number of things in general, but no reason to go ahead and escalate the tone before anyone else does, past experience notwithstanding. Mea culpa.

    MojaveWolf
    July 17, 2016 at 1:50 pm

    Peter Moskos is a left of center former cop who has been covering this issue extensively for a while. His most recent post on the subject is here:

    http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/07/reducing-police-involved-shooting.html

    The general gist of his coverage(which goes back years) is that there is a problem w/police shootings, but the truly egregious cases are spread around. Off the top of my head and from memory, there’s the guy shot for no reason while climbing out of a wrecked car (official reason: “trying to escape”), the woman shot in the side of the head while supposedly trying to run over over police, the 70 yr old guy whose cane was supposedly mistaken for a rifle, the man shot for twitching while being tased, the guy who got out of the car and lay on the ground at request of cops and was then shot for non compliance because they said he wasn’t showing his hands even tho you could clearly see his hands, the guy who was forced to crawl across the ground of a parking lot of a hotel on his belly and whose pants were coming off and was shot when he reached back to pull them up, the guy who was beaten to death because cops told him to put his hands in the air and on the steering wheel and he refused to comply with both sets of instruction at once, and the mentally ill homeless guy guilty of “illegal camping” in the New Mexico desert who was surrounded by what looked like a full on swat team w/dogs and was shot multiple times both while backing up and agreeing to leave and while on the ground and almost certainly after he was already dead (which was also when he was handcuffed, iirc) (of all the you tube videos I have seen, this is the one I have the most trouble getting out of my head and I am not wanting to watch it again to check for accuracy, tho you can make an argument that many of the others were as bad or worse).

    Most of these are on YouTube.

    There are a lot of good people who are cops and heaven knows, I don’t think anyone who’s really thought about it for very long really wants the cops to go away (and if you think you do, as many left/anarchists seem to, really, think about this a bit, for real). But. There’s clearly a problem w/training or hiring practices in many departments. And we are moving more and more toward a full on police state, if we’re not already there. But the problems really aren’t primarily race-based, and I’d say focusing only on that angle or trying to portray that as the only or overwhelmingly predominant angle plays into the same narrative as trying to say everything is just fine for all white people and the only ones who aren’t prospering are the lazy malcontents, and if we just had adequate diversity everything would be fine.

    More poor people interact w/the cops and the cops are on higher alert around poor people. Black people are disproportionately likely to be poor, and thus you have a disproportionately high # of shootings of black people (tho you can be a well off white kid and die too, like the kid who saw the officer driving down the rd w/his lights on bright and did what people usually do in this situation and quickly flashed his brights to let the officer know; he was the 3rd or 4th person to do this and the officer had had enough and pulled the kid over. Sadly, the kid had accidentally left his license at home. He tried to get out of admitting this by refusing to show his ID because he had done nothing wrong. This did not work out well)

    The idea that black people are being murdered willy nilly and other races are getting a free pass while they do awful stuff is just wrong. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, there are multiple and huge problems, but the dominant media narrative gets it wrong and perpetuates a false narrative that isn’t helping things get better.

  48. MojaveWolf

    And I tried to repost said comment here and was again thrown into moderation, despite (I think correctly) answering the “are you a spambot?” question. What the heck is up w/this one? It has ONE LINK.

    Here, w/out the link, again:

    At the risk of doubling down on what is arguably a derailment from the main point of the post (which, again, I wholeheartedly agree with), here is a nicer, more temperate, and more detailed version of what I just said. And thank you to different clue and others for pointing out that \”All Lives Matter\” is actually a good saying, not a bad one.

    Also, I apologize for the ill-tempered rant above. I am angry about a number of things in general, but no reason to go ahead and escalate the tone before anyone else does, past experience notwithstanding. Mea culpa.

    MojaveWolf
    July 17, 2016 at 1:50 pm

    Peter Moskos is a left of center former cop who has been covering this issue extensively for a while. His most recent post on the subject is here:

    (link removed because I assume it is causing the problem?)(now that I think about it, the original post had youtube links which I removed, back in the day, trying to get around moderation filters)

    The general gist of his coverage(which goes back years) is that there is a problem w/police shootings, but the truly egregious cases are spread around. Off the top of my head and from memory, there’s the guy shot for no reason while climbing out of a wrecked car (official reason: “trying to escape”), the woman shot in the side of the head while supposedly trying to run over over police, the 70 yr old guy whose cane was supposedly mistaken for a rifle, the man shot for twitching while being tased, the guy who got out of the car and lay on the ground at request of cops and was then shot for non compliance because they said he wasn’t showing his hands even tho you could clearly see his hands, the guy who was forced to crawl across the ground of a parking lot of a hotel on his belly and whose pants were coming off and was shot when he reached back to pull them up, the guy who was beaten to death because cops told him to put his hands in the air and on the steering wheel and he refused to comply with both sets of instruction at once, and the mentally ill homeless guy guilty of “illegal camping” in the New Mexico desert who was surrounded by what looked like a full on swat team w/dogs and was shot multiple times both while backing up and agreeing to leave and while on the ground and almost certainly after he was already dead (which was also when he was handcuffed, iirc) (of all the you tube videos I have seen, this is the one I have the most trouble getting out of my head and I am not wanting to watch it again to check for accuracy, tho you can make an argument that many of the others were as bad or worse).

    Most of these are on YouTube.

    There are a lot of good people who are cops and heaven knows, I don’t think anyone who’s really thought about it for very long really wants the cops to go away (and if you think you do, as many left/anarchists seem to, really, think about this a bit, for real). But. There’s clearly a problem w/training or hiring practices in many departments. And we are moving more and more toward a full on police state, if we’re not already there. But the problems really aren’t primarily race-based, and I’d say focusing only on that angle or trying to portray that as the only or overwhelmingly predominant angle plays into the same narrative as trying to say everything is just fine for all white people and the only ones who aren’t prospering are the lazy malcontents, and if we just had adequate diversity everything would be fine.

    More poor people interact w/the cops and the cops are on higher alert around poor people. Black people are disproportionately likely to be poor, and thus you have a disproportionately high # of shootings of black people (tho you can be a well off white kid and die too, like the kid who saw the officer driving down the rd w/his lights on bright and did what people usually do in this situation and quickly flashed his brights to let the officer know; he was the 3rd or 4th person to do this and the officer had had enough and pulled the kid over. Sadly, the kid had accidentally left his license at home. He tried to get out of admitting this by refusing to show his ID because he had done nothing wrong. This did not work out well)

    The idea that black people are being murdered willy nilly and other races are getting a free pass while they do awful stuff is just wrong. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, there are multiple and huge problems, but the dominant media narrative gets it wrong and perpetuates a false narrative that isn’t helping things get better.

  49. different clue

    ” A rotten barrel spoils all the apples.”

    Most police officers would not/ do not commit pleasure-torture and pleasure-murder of “civilians”. But if any do, in how many such cases does their entire department protect and shelter them for as long as possible? As with Pantaleone in State Island? Just how far does the Blue Wall of Silence . . . or “Bluemerta” or whatever we want to call it . . . go?

    And how much of this is really due to the deliberate training that officers get? And how much of this is due to deliberate quotas set for numbers of countable arrests for this and that as set by higher command levels?

    It begins to seem as though officers are given much looser rules of engagement ( shoot first and fastest if y0u feel scared) than soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is that perception incorrect?

  50. different clue

    Digby at Hullabaloo spent some years logging incidents of recreational taser-torture by police against citizens. But there are zero archives of any of these blogposts. Clearly Digby felt she was too good to maintain an archive or make things the least bit findable . . . about when she decided she had better things to do than to permit dissident commenters to make dissenting comments.

    Perhaps if someone had endless days and hours, someone could look up Digby posts as frozen in amber over at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

  51. Mojave Wolf

    @DC (& anyone else interested in police training etc)– I STRONGLY recommend Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood blog and looking back through the old posts.

    He’s been studying relative police shooting statistics for years now. One that that becomes clear is that training and culture do matter, and different departments vary wildly in this regard. I seem to recall that Albequerque and several Cali cities are among the places you don’t want to run afoul of the cops, and that Albequerque has a tendency to hire people who got kicked off of other forces (not able to look this up at the moment but feel fairly sure of my memory, wherever I read it).

    And agreed that departments who protect the asshole contingent among them don’t deserve a pass. I wrote my original screed above when I was VERY cranky about the left’s increasing tendency toward groupthink on certain issues, and was pushing back against a tendency to see all cops as power mad racist monsters.

    I do think it’s worth looking at what different places that get different outcomes do differently. And no argument at all against the idea that the US is becoming ever more excessively authoritarian and closer to a police state that will be bad for everyone of all ethnicities. That’s absolutely true.

  52. Jib Halyard

    Then you go on, Mandos, and persuade those “privileged communities” (as defined by you) to give up these things you have decided they do not deserve. And if that doesn’t open up a smooth path to the sunlit upland of true equality (again, as defined by you, of course), then there’s always brute force. Your self-professed inability of conceive of a non-zero-sum situation will give you no other options.

  53. nihil obstet

    I didn’t know that “Black Lives Matter” really means “White lives don’t matter.” Having thought about it for a few minutes, I’ve decided that it doesn’t really mean that, despite the assurances of commenters.

    There’s a problem with militarized police. There’s a problem with governmental sanction being given to any person to use violence against others when that violence is misused. It’s official terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is that you don’t need to hurt many people. You hurt a few just to let everyone know that you can and will, so that they will stay in line.

    As a result of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, more attention is being paid to police violence against civilians. The minimization response (“All lives matter” “Civilian lives matter” and the like) works to justify police behavior. Don’t get mad because Eric Garner was choked to death by a policeman; the same thing would have happened to a white guy.???

    I agree with Ian that everyone should have what we usually refer to as privilege. Not being killed by the police is kind of minimal to me as not a privilege. So why are we getting hung up in “Well, a white woman reaching for her pocketbook to get her license would have gotten shot too, so there’s no privilege there, instead of demanding justice for police misbehavior and reform of police recruitment, oversight, and procedures?

  54. StewartM

    Just my additional two cents.

    People I think are missing part of the reason for our problems with the police. Some of that too is a consequence of neoliberalism.

    Poor neighborhoods, and minority and black neighborhoods especially, are both simultaneously the most over-policed and under-policed places in America. What do I mean by this? By what I mean is that the police there, in numbers, to be sure, but are not there so much to answer calls to protect the public, but to service as a sort of tax collecting/revenue-gathering service.

    See a crime next door? See burglars robbing a home or apartment? Be a good citizen and call the police? Oh, they’ll show up, late, long after the suspects have made off the with loot. Then they’ll start looking what they can nab *YOU* for, for moola. “Hey, I noticed your car inspection sticker has expired…why, that’s a $100 fine”. So instead of them taking actions other than collecting a police report to nab the crooks, you end up having to pay a fine. Why are there poor relations with these people and the police? There’s your answer.

    This in turn is a consequence of us not taxing rich people (i.e., the “job creators”) anymore, so local governments turn to the police to up their revenues and poor people are the ones least likely and able to fight back against these “tax collectors”, so to speak. There are fixes for this, of course, we need to tax the rich again for revenues and moreover we need to forbid police departments or local governments the ability to keep any money the get from fines (let ’em donate it to charity). Part of a full judicial reform movement would be this, and much more (like no court costs, no unreasonable bail, and if you are held without bail then the government has to pay your bills until you are released nor can you lose your job…as it stands now, merely being arrested and detained if you’re poor can mean you lose everything–job, home, furnishing, all–even if you’re later released because the authorities determined you didn’t do it). In a fair and just world, the police would no financial reason to find you guilty and if anything financial reasons not to unnecessarily detain you.

  55. Peter

    Nihil shows how easily the SJW can hype the small number of police killings, usually involving armed and dangerous criminals, into an organized police state making war on a minority group. It’s telling thst they have to go back three years to dig up an example of this supposedly widespread behavior.

  56. StewartM

    Peter

    Nihil shows how easily the SJW can hype the small number of police killings, usually involving armed and dangerous criminals,

    Now, now. How do you know exactly how many were ‘armed and dangerous’? Now, in the era of cell phone cameras, we now have video evidence of instances where police planted a weapon after shooting someone who was unarmed to claim that they were ‘armed and dangerous?” How many times were more such instances *not* captured because there wasn’t a bystander with a cell phone nearby?

    I recall the 1990s, with the Rodney King video, which brought into the TV screens of middle class people a facet of police behavior that poor and/or minority communities had known had been going on for decades. Then there was the black/white divide about the OJ Simpson trial, with more comfortable whites mocking as inconceivable that the police would actually plant evidence to ‘assist’ a case along.

    But now we have video evidence that some police actually *do* just that.

    Taking all this into perspective, the statistic of 20 % of the people being killed by police has to be regarded as a bare minimum. It’s almost certainly higher.

    Baltimore Cops carried BB guns to plant on any unarmed victims they shot:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/baltimore-police-carried-bb-guns-plant-unarmed-suspects-shooting-victims-corruption-maurice-ward-a8189731.html

    Georgia Officer plants gun on victim after shooting them:

    http://wgxa.tv/news/local/indictment-jackson-police-officer-who-lied-about-being-shot-planted-false-evidence

    St. Louis officer ‘executed’ suspect, planted gun in his car

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/st-louis-officer-executed-suspect-planted-gun-his-car-prosecutor-n788626

    Again, these are the only ones that got caught. How many more were uncaught?

  57. realitychecker

    @ nihil

    “I didn’t know that “Black Lives Matter” really means “White lives don’t matter.” Having thought about it for a few minutes, I’ve decided that it doesn’t really mean that, despite the assurances of commenters.”

    Gee, did anybody really say that Black Lives Matter actually means White Lives Don’t Matter? I know I didn’t. I know I didn’t, because that would be pretty stupid, extra sloppy paraphrasing of saying that the slogan was easily predicted to be divisive in its effect.

    QUERY: Do you think the slogan has NOT been divisive? (Sure hate to put you on the spot to be specific about anything, but we can’t always settle for snide and ambiguous negative insinuations, with zero accountability, can we?)

  58. escher

    American law has approached near-total deference to the police in cases of alleged wrongdoing. I’m sure this has only increased the sense of impunity among those officers inclined to abuse their power.

  59. escher

    @Jib Halyard
    I believe Mandos’s position as stated above is that Justice requires that people belonging to “privileged” identity categories should be not only materially deprived but intentionally psychologically damaged.

    Let’s be fair, though, lest you think we’ve ventured into Pol Pot territory at this point, for Mandos has reached this view only “reluctantly.”

  60. Peter

    @RC

    BLM was too simple, if well intended, a bromide to survive Marxist dialectic and taking sides as happens with many things today. It may have avoided some of the fuss if it had been ‘Black Lives Matter Too’ to disconnect it from the identity stigma somewhat.

    Any good that could come from showing respect for the majority of hard working honest Black Americans was lost in the battles that followed. More radical elements adopted it’s brand, promoted class war and some even preached violence in its name. The Clintonite party coopted it somewhat and that put it on the republican’s shit-list permanently.

  61. MojaveWolf

    @StewartM–absolutely agreed. And to the extent I seemed not to get this, my bad for lack of clarity. All sorts of reform is needed. I do, otoh, still think that just as people on the right frequently are willing to excuse any amount of police misconduct, people on the left tend to forget that it’s not ALL misconduct, and that is part of what I was getting at in the things I copied and pasted (I was in a mad rush this morning and had no time to write something new). I live in a poor area myself, and when I was poor and walking/taking the bus, was EXTREMELY unhappy at being stopped and frisked because, well, I was poor and walking, and subject to driver’s license checks to make sure I wasn’t wanted for anything while sitting at the bus stop (twice). The cops were, at least, nice and polite about it, but stuff like that shouldn’t happen–whether it’s technically legal doesn’t even matter, since, if you protest at the bus stop on the way to work and refuse to show your ID, you miss work, and if you’re poor, that’s a REAL problem only slightly behind jail, and if you refuse the stop & frisk, ummmu, I have no idea how long that would take to get sorted out, but I’m pretty sure it’s several hours of life wasted that you will never get back, and those several hours trumped principle (tho in both base cases, after I turned up clean, the cop was nice enough to give me a ride part or all of the way home. Possibly only so they could have me in the back of the car while they ran my license to make really sure I wasn’t a criminal , but, hey, for my instant case, no blood, no foul. That said, in general, this should never, ever happen and doesn’t happen to people who aren’t poor. In all the years when I’ve been driving, this stuff? not happening. That’s a pure class distinction. I also recall hearing about a local case where stolen property was recovered after a house to house sweep for the stolen property. Yay that it was recovered, but seriously, house to house sweeps? This being a real thing scares me way more than theft. I may not have sounded like it up there, but I’m entirely with the rest of you on the civil liberties and anti-authoritarianism here.

    @Nihil — This part I will agree with: There’s a problem with militarized police. There’s a problem with governmental sanction being given to any person to use violence against others when that violence is misused. It’s official terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is that you don’t need to hurt many people. You hurt a few just to let everyone know that you can and will, so that they will stay in line.

    Otherwise, gotta disagree w/your take (other than the disingenuous bit about “white lives don’t matter”, as in, presumably, “don’t matter at all”–we can all agree that very few people are saying that). And I most definitely wasn’t trying to minimize anything–specifically said we had a real problem and were moving towards a police state, and listed a whole bunch of really horrible shootings. I’m actually genuinely angry that anyone could think that list was minimizing anything. That anyone COULD think this list was minimizing things simply because the people were white indicates a serious problem w/the entire paradigm (and would, in fact, indicate someone thinks white people don’t matter so much, now that I think on it).

    And unlike you, I don’t think the BLM movement has accomplished anything positive, even though there are a ton of well-intentioned people involved in it (the majority, I’d say). Mostly, it has increased the toxic fetishization of race and obsession w/racial difference that the neolib crowd thrives on. It’s probably doing as much or more damage than Trump in this regard.

    Also, there’s the whole thing about it generally being a good idea to base discourse and policy in truth and reality, while making crap up and acting as if it is real generally leads to bad outcomes (see: Iraq invasion, for a worst-case scenario, or, in an individual case, the poor cop who shot Mike Brown. We have a dude rob a store, walk down the middle of the the street, start a confrontration w/the cop who tells him to get out of the middle of the street, try to take the cops gun away, then refuse to stop while walking back towards the cop, gets shot. He basically did everything he could to get shot, for reasons unknown. This? Not an atrocity. Of all the stupid things for people to riot over and make a cause celebre, this is . . . up there. Meanwhile, cop, who, basically, did nothing at all wrong, unless you think he should have ran, or handed over his gun, or something. His life? Totally fucked.)

    And truth generally has some intrinsic value, simply by virtue of being the truth, imo, so that one should generally try to promote it unless one has some compelling reason not to.

    One can be anti-racist w/out having to jump on every anti-racist narrative, regardless of truth or falsehood. I would even argue that this would put your anti-racist activity on much firmer ground, thus accomplishing more.

  62. nihil obstet

    Do Black Lives matter? If yes, end of subject.

    Looking for a reason for it to be bad? You can always find one. But you are dismissing as “divisive” a protest to police militarization. Now protests may have been going on for a while, but I didn’t see them get any footing until BLM. And so of course BLM has to be bad.

    Mohave Wolf, you acknowledge that the majority of people involved in BLM are well-intentioned, but then say the movement “has increased the toxic fetishization of race and obsession w/racial difference that the neolib crowd thrives on.” Inviting people to blame the victim and/or to side with the bully is an effective tool in oppression. Review some history of the civil rights movement in the South in the 1960s and 70s; you’ll learn that it was blacks enforcing race hatred on sweet, well-mannered whites, according to conservative newspaper columnists at least.

    And absolutely, accuracy in facts is crucial to good thought. BLM came out of more than just the Michael Brown shooting, where Wilson seems to have acted correctly, although I have a little difficulty with his shooting Brown six times, including twice in the head. For whatever reason, a number of videos surfaced showing police using highly questionable force on black civilians about the same time, and that sparked a movement. I wish that the Digby blogs on use of Tasers by police that different clue cites above and done the same, but I’ll take what I can get.

  63. realitychecker

    @ nihil

    Your devotion to straw man arguments is impressive, I guess, but it keeps leading you to wrong conclusions, so you might want to think about that a little bit. E.g., though white, I have been aggressively against police overreach in all its forms for a very long time. I have had cop guns pointed in my face several times for no good reason, and I know that every time I was ever in court for anything against a cop, the cop lied egregiously. And I did my legal internship with the co-founder of the Innocence Project. So, your effort to frame me as being pro-cop is totally off the mark.

    I just won’t restrict myself to either/or absolutes the way you seem so determined to do. E.g., You say, “Do Black Lives matter? If yes, end of subject.”

    You call that a sound reasoning process? I call it borderline retarded.

    Mojave Wolf has a much more reasonable and reality-respecting approach laid out in his last comment, particularly, and I am pretty much exactly where he is. So, please adjust yourself, nihil. And stop indulging in these obvious exercises in being passive aggressive and disingenuous that you seem to be so fond of, if you can. They demean you. And I will call you out on them every time.

  64. realitychecker

    @ Peter

    Black Lives Matter, Too! would have been fine with me.

    And a united front of regular citizens against ALL overly violent police actions would have presented a much more politically effective front, IMO. And that has always been the basis of my objection to the slogan that actually got used.

  65. highrpm

    BLM. a joke. start with the resnick’s, taking more than their fair share of central valley water to fuel their kingdoms. hey, western capitalism. the idea of sharing the commons? who the hell ever heard of such. grab what one can, and don’t leave anything behind. greed, greed and more greed. lawyers, guns and money.

  66. Willy

    Where I live the local neighborhood cop took the time to give free seminars about better securing property, on his own time, in our suddenly crime ridden neighborhood.

    But then… he later led the mobbing of an innocent neighbor whose dog had been mistaken for another dog that had been running loose attacking pets. Even after the courts rendered a sane verdict based on the evidence, many neighbors either continued to love the cop as a saint, or vilified him as a bully hiding behind a badge. Most of the rest didn’t want to get involved.

    Classic case of stressed humans needing to come quickly to cognitive closure, instead of doing the (mostly emotionally) harder work of trying to find the sanest position. I was one who didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t know how to lead any discussions, since most would probably walk away once I started lecturing Arie Kruglanski. Many people need their snap judgments, and finding comfort with their tribal cohorts.

    We need more people who are good at the art of “Lets take the time to get to the bottom of this”.

  67. highrpm

    lets try to get to the bottom of this, …shoots down israeli drone…. for starters, who are the threators and who are the threatees? (one, i forgot. holo…. says it all.)

  68. highrpm

    religion trumps rational.

  69. hvd

    Strangely I agree with Nihil, RC and Mojave. Seen from the black perspective BLM is not meant to exclude everyone else – it is simply a statement that the black community feels the harshness of an increasingly militarized police and the extraordinary war waged on their community through the medium of the drug wars. As a white person I would have no problem joining with the black community in that even though factually it might be a little skewed particularly with respect to the police violence part. Nihil is arguing I think that the white community should be willing to share in this perspective, note the factual imbalance that Mojave points out and not join with the racist minority of the white community in taking umbrage at a close parsing of the name. Racists wouldn’t have liked BLMT any better than BLM even though it would have satisfied close parsers like RC. And no I am not passive aggressively accusing RC of being a racist. I don’t think he is.

    MLK started by being a civil rights activist focused on equality for the black community but worked his way to an understanding that race was only a device in the deeper class wars at hand. I think we would do better to explain both to them and to the majority of the white community that BLM is not meant to be exclusionary but is a statement from a particular position of the greater class war, police militarization, drug war attack on all of our civil liberties truth.

  70. Tom W Harris

    @highrpm,

    And Nazi filth trumps everything.

  71. MojaveWolf

    I am going to agree entirely w/hvd, RC & Willy here.

    And nihil, seriously, wtf? I don’t object (nor do I think anyone particularly objects) to the concept of black lives matter. I do object to the idea, which I think most people who are fond of this hashtag are promoting, that most non-blacks think black lives don’t matter, and I object to the promotion of a false narrative about police statistics which has thus far accomplished absolutely nothing except screwing up people’s sense of what is actually happening, and causing dumb ass arguments like this one instead of getting us all together to try to promote better policing policies (where we’d probably still be arguing but at least hopefully have common frames of reference and not be making up crap about the other people in the argument) . Instead you get crap like this, also from my twitter feed (actual website not listed coz half of you probably think this is a great idea and would want to sign up:
    #confrontwhitewomanhood has an official website! Check us out and sign up for our next workshop to learn more about the ways that white women and constructions of white womanhood cause real harm and violence.”

    You otoh clearly are fine with and in fact enthusiastically approve of lying and false narratives and don’t care about the consequences of these things no matter how negative, as long as they let you make the appropriate virtue signals, and likewise you clearly object to anyone who isn’t willing to lie for the sake of tribalism and virtue signalling.

    See? I can do it too. That isn’t exactly what you said, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t what you meant to say, but I’d say it’s way closer to the mark than what you are trying to impute to me. And hell, it may even be true. I’m seriously starting to wonder at this point. (another option I can see, which you will probably find just as insulting, is that you simply don’t want to actually think about this subject because you’re happy w/the narrative and don’t really care if it’s true or false.)

    I grew up in the south and am probably more aware of the history than you are. I used to go to a friggin bible study every Sunday back in Alabama where I was the only regular white attendee. I never said or implied anything like the garbage you are trying to put on me. There is no way you reasonably get victim blaming or making excuses for any of the bad cop activities from anything I said. You get on NC for just cussing people out, but this sort of crap is waaaay more insulting and malicious.

    This reminds me, speaking of the South, back when I was in college, I was hanging out w/a black guy and this other white guy I’m friends with comes over, and, upon me introducing them, the white guy spends the next 20 minutes talking about how he’s not racist, on and on and on, while me and the black kid look at each other and roll our eyes. If this was in certain online nowadays, it would result in about 50 people yelling at the other kid for being insufficiently deferential and not adequately ashamed of himself for his various privileges. Which, again, not helping anything.

    Which leads me to wonder, how do all of y’all who think racial differences must always be at the forefront of every discussion fucking talk to people of different ethnicities? I tried this one time w/a friend from Guyana, something like “Hello, my brave dark skinned immigrant female friend who I’m so proud of for being able to persevere in the face of massive oppression and constant microagressions. How are you?” After she quit laughing she said something like “I now identify as a 16 year old so according to Tumblr you’re a pedo for talking to me.” (she’s in here 30’s) & we talked about people w/no real problems inventing them so they’ll have something to go on about (her theory, no mine)(she is not a conservative; tho definitely deeply misguided in that she voted for Hillary).

    The thing is though, there are lots of real problems, so why not address them instead of making up fake ones?

    & @RC — totally off topic– did you go to Cardozo?

  72. highrpm

    @th,
    where did the nazis enter this dialog?

  73. realitychecker

    @ MW

    Once again, I am good with letting you speak for me. 🙂

    My attitude about race was fully formed by age 9, when I had the thought that
    no white dog would be stupid enough to refuse to play with a black dog. Never had any reason to adjust my thinking after that moment lol.

    Yes to Cardozo, 81-84.

  74. realitychecker

    @ hvd

    When speaking of political slogans, I focus on what the effect/result of using the slogan will be. I never know for sure what is in anybody else’s head, and that is obviously a common problem because folks online constantly misconstrue what I am about.

    I thought the BLM slogan was bad tactically, that it would tend to separate groups that should be fighting the same evils but in a united way. I have not seen any reason to question that prediction.

  75. Hvd

    Rc

    I understand what you are saying tactically and don’t disagree however assuming that the BLM movement was not intending by the use of that term to exclude everyone else and that if asked would be as likely as MLK to join in common purpose with other class members equally victimized by the increasingly militarized police engaged in endless drug wars against undesirables of every shade and hue it seems wrong to adopt the reasoning that these are merely snowflakes whining about poor me to the exclusion of others. I join you in hating the victim culture of the left (and right) but I don’t think the movement qualifies as that.

    Strangely there are echoes of Mandos in your position that a not clearly thought out choice of label is as meaningful as the broader intent and actions.

    Better to join in common cause with those with whom you fundamentally agree error correcting along the way then adopting the frame of those who would find fault no matter what.

  76. MojaveWolf

    @RC — neat. I saw “innocence project” & figured. I was in high school back then! I did later in life apply to Cardozo and get a partial scholarship offer but went somewhere else that was, shall we say, much less of an idealogical fit because was basically tagging along w/someone who wound up going to Georgetown coz I figured I should be all financially responsible even tho I didn’t want to be a lawyer; I aced my LSATs–I eat standardized tests alive–but had extremely mediocre undergrad grades and the DC schools tend (or tended) to lean more towards grades and less towards test scores and I hadn’t heard from anyone yay or nay so I wrote all the DC places explaining the sitch and saying “if you’re the first to say yes, I’m there, promise, word of honor” and the first DC place who said yay was, umm, a very conservative law & econ place which used to have a name I would be totally okay claiming but not anymore (that said, lots of the people there at that time were cool, including a lot of the instructors, though even a lot of the conservative kids thought the overall atmosphere was a little oppressive and overly attempting to indoctrinate a particular worldview). I looked up some of my friends from back then and they still have the old name in their bio, but they’re practicing so they have to; I never really wanted to be a lawyer and wound up doing a whole bunch of completely different things, made a lot less money but probably much happier as a human being most of the time.

  77. MojaveWolf

    Okay, I must depart from complete agreement w/hvd, in that I have a much lower opinion of most BLM types in terms of their actual practice. Yah, I think most people supporting the hashtag absolutely believe the false narrative they are pushing, so it’s not like an auto “I think you suck for supporting this” (Nina Turner supports it and I would be stoked if she ran for President next time), but I really do think it is pushing a genuinely bad for everyone way of looking at things, based on a false precept. If if it was just what you’re saying, then yeah, I’m there. I sadly don’t see it that way at all.

  78. nihil obstet

    @Mojave Wolf

    We have different experiences. In my city, the BLM movement resulted in more efforts to improve police-community relations in minority neighborhoods. I see more awareness of a conversation being carried on on the national level about police use of excessive violence than I saw before. Have all the problems been solved? No, that takes years. It’s like all the people who say that the Occupied movement failed. I don’t think so. It got people involved — again, my experience, since I’ve been in several groups where the younger crowd came out because they had first gotten involved in Occupied. A movement takes years, in waves, sometimes in dead ends and even counterproductive efforts. But without those waves, nothing will change for the better. You’ve experienced things that convince you that the BLM movement cut off an opportunity for solving the prolblems. My experience has been that it’s been a wave forward.

    As to this:

    You otoh clearly are fine with and in fact enthusiastically approve of lying and false narratives and don’t care about the consequences of these things no matter how negative, as long as they let you make the appropriate virtue signals, and likewise you clearly object to anyone who isn’t willing to lie for the sake of tribalism and virtue signalling.

    See? I can do it too. That isn’t exactly what you said, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t what you meant to say, but I’d say it’s way closer to the mark than what you are trying to impute to me. And hell, it may even be true. I’m seriously starting to wonder at this point. (another option I can see, which you will probably find just as insulting, is that you simply don’t want to actually think about this subject because you’re happy w/the narrative and don’t really care if it’s true or false.)

    Two observations: one is that analysis beyond what the person says is legitimate. Otherwise, we all believe that Republicans are opposed to deficits because they say so. You can use context, effects, and lots of other things. What you can’t use is personal abuse, unless you can back it up with facts. If you’ve found me lying, I’m a liar. If not, don’t call me one. Which brings me to the second point. I don’t deal with personal attacks. If that’s your approach, don’t expect any more responses from me.

    And multiple choice question: Do black lives matter?
    A) Yes
    B) Yes, but . . . .

  79. MojaveWolf

    The constructive part–I’m also a fan of Occupy, tho I think it went to hell and did fail. Maybe it laid the groundwork for something further down the road, maybe not. We’ll see.

    The other part:

    If you don’t deal in personal attacks, don’t make them. My inference was no more off base than yours and unlike you I specifically stated mine was purely retaliatory to make a point; I’d normally give people more benefit of the doubt than that (even if I thought you likely did think somesuch, I’d need more to go on before I said, except, well, you did it to me so why not?) Believe it or not, I had actually come back here to think, “maybe I was being too harsh and should give more benefit of the doubt” and say something to that effect. Never mind on that. At this point I’d say you are clearly a person who likes to make slams at other people and can’t handle it when they say something back. As far as being a liar? I have no idea if you’re a liar or just delusional about thoe quality of your own rhetoric. But you wanna do some sort of mutual ignore thing? Fine. My world will somehow go on.

    All lives matter. Black and white and asian and however you want to break it down lives matter exactly the same. We are all brothers and sisters, of a sort (except for the individual people we don’t like and don’t want to claim, which has nothing to do w/ethnicity, and even then, can you unclaim a brother or sister? Well, yeah, sure.)

  80. highrpm

    all these #labels do is set us underpriviledged at each others’ throats while the uppers live their well-fleshed out lives behind their locked gates. i’ll believe in change when beverly hills is 28% black. (how many bh mansions does little boy elon have to add to his collection before the rest of us wise up to his antics of knowing how to dip his hands in the till?)

  81. Attempting to deracialize police violence is essentially shutting your eyes to what motivated the establishment of mass police surveillance in the first place.

    And yes, there is a zero-sum game of privilege. It’s about who gets priority when the chips are down.

  82. nihil obstet

    Mojave Wolf,

    Disagreeing with a point you’ve made is different from a personal attack. “You’re absolutely wrong because. . . .” is about the argument. “You’re fine with lying”, isn’t. I tried to figure out what you thought was a personal attack in what I wrote. Was it “Inviting people to blame the victim and/or to side with the bully is an effective tool in oppression”? Did you take that to mean that I thought you were inviting people to blame the victim? If so, let me clarify. You wrote that BLM “has increased the toxic fetishization of race. . . .” I think that any toxic effects of BLM come from the people who want to dismiss the oversight of police use of violence, and this is a technique long used in racism and other oppressions. Your appropriate response would be to argue that objections to BLM do not constitute such a dismissal, with supporting logic and facts.

    The argument threads in blog comment sections may deal with very complex issues where there are a large range of people and approaches on a number of sides. There is a context. Many commenters layer in different contexts. And we’re not writing books or even articles, so the whole discussion is taking place in a misleadingly empty forum. I would again suggest that people go to the archives of this blog and read a few of the comment sections on old blogs. We used to be able to discuss interesting and complex issues from a range of perspectives without making it all about the hominem that’s being ad’ed.

  83. realitychecker

    Nobody’s skirts are totslly clean, anyone who pretends to have totslly clean skirts should just go away, for you are the liar. Those who stay, we can all do better if we want statues erected to our memories, OK?

    Bernie got skunked. Somehow Trump overcame all odds and is the President. I think BLM gets some credit for that. I think “divisive” captures the dynamic. I’m done talking about it.

  84. realitychecker

    Aaaargh, “totally clean” not “totslly clean” where’s my glasses?

  85. Mojave Wolf

    @nihil — on my phone,so can’t copy & paste, but see the first,v3rdv& 4th paragraphs of your first response to me. Especially those last two.

    The idea that I would not care about what happened to Eric Garner had nothing whatsoever and was flatly contradicted by what I said and honestly that’s way more infuriating and insulting than if you’d called me a lying sack of s*** between those two I’d rather be called a lying sack of s*** any day.

    Likewise the idea that I’m trying to minimize any of this by saying that it matters that it’s happening to freaking everybody and we can make more progress against it if we don’t focus on a completely false narrative that one group of people is getting targeted in a way that’s simply not happening. Yes it was happening in the past and yes those people are still being unfairly targeted but so is everybody else. There is no minimization whatsoever. All these things are freaking awful and I am again deeply insulted that you’re implying I said anything vaguely resembling if these things aren’t that bad. That is about a thousand times worse than anything I said to you.

    I got no problem with people disagreeing with my actual views even though of course I am right and you are wrong but that’s fine I have friends who voted for Trump and for Hillary. My friend from Guyana actually voted for Hillary in the primary now I’m not joking when I say I’m right and she’s wrong. Obviously I got no problem disagreeing with people. I do have a huge problem with people implying that I don’t care about people getting choked to death when they did nothing wrong and in fact I believe they were actually trying to be a Good Samaritan and that’s what got him killed in this case by some asswipe who couldn’t stand anybody standing up to him.

    Just to reiterate yes anytime anybody says that I don’t give a s*** about stuff like that I’m taking it as a deadly f****** personal insult. I actually like you most of the time and you’re usually one of my favorite posters here I’ve said that before and I will say it again but I’m not in the best of moods right now and even if I was in a great mood I would go off on you for saying that I I don’t care about either Eric Garner or the various things I listed. I was actually relatively restrained. I think there was some more stuff you said later on but I hope at least for that part that’s clear because that’s more than enough all by itself.

    And if you don’t see how that’s a personal insult I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you. That was not a disagreement on an issue that was you putting words in my mouth and feelings in my head that didn’t vaguely resembling anything I said or thought or would ever think. Or has reality Checker (being the nice one this time) said it’s a straw man argument but it was a particularly insulting straw man argument which grossly distorted what I said and implied things to my thinking that again we’re about as insulting as you can get.

    You also made some little snide insinuations that were kinda sorta implying that just maybe the people disagreeing with you were doing so on the basis of racism. Those weren’t quite upfront obvious enough for me to flat out say that you absolutely meant that but it certainly came across that way.

    Now if you want to both own and back off those things I’m good with that as far as I’m concerned we’re totally good going forward and it was all a misunderstanding but if you don’t then f*** off.

    Last but not least I will entirely agree with you that I prefer more high toned discussions but you’re the one that started this one. And if you don’t have any problem with what you said or I don’t see why I have a problem with it then we have no common ground to go forward and we can just ignore each other in the future. You do frquently say some good things otherwise and good on you on that but but don’t be saying I’m thinking and saying things I ain’t saying and thinking. And especially don’t do it and then complain when I do the same thing back at you and deny ever having done it in the first place. At least when I’m insulting somebody I own it.

    (To the board as a whole sorry and do apologize if you find this unduly distracting. If anyone reading this far can recall me saying in the past that I was really the wrong person to be playing Peacemaker Now you kind of have an idea why)

  86. Mojave Wolf

    @rc — agreed. I thought about mentioning that earlier and then I started going back and forth on whether it was fair to blame the whole movement for these two freaking idiots who jumped on Bernie stage and for the general completely evil and lying narrative that somehow Hillary was the champion of black people and Bernie was somehow racist. And I will again call that entire narrative evil. It’s worth highlighting. Evil. But I could not decide whether it was fair to blame any of that on black lives matter. The two idiots? Probably. The other? Probably would have happened anyway, tho probably less effective.

    I also think there’s a very good chance a lot of the “OMG white people suck!” Types annoyed enough people that it could have made a difference between Trump and Hillary in some of the close states but from my point of view it’s hard to say that was a bad thing much as I really really do hate Trump. Also, it was just one of a whole bunch of things that tilted it it’s hard to say which individual one made the difference cuz it was so close.

    And now I’m out for the next few hours at least y’all have fun.

  87. nihil obstet

    I echo the apologies to other commenters who come hoping for good content and find our squabbling. My sincere sorrow over it will not, however, prevent me from a final squabble.

    Mohave Wolf,

    Have neo-liberals used race and gender to divide the working class and frustrate progressive policies? Yes, they have. When, in a discussion about race, I’m arguing that race does matter, do I feel personally insulted when someone else argues to me that it’s just a neo-liberal tactic to stop progress? No. I think the someone is wrong. If I understand what they’re doing, I’ll usually argue it at the time if I think it’s relevant. On the other hand, if someone calls me a “lying sack of shit”, I walk away. I can’t even say I’m insulted because what someone I’ve never met, will never meet, and know nothing about other than what they’ve written doesn’t matter that much to me. But I will usually withdraw from the conversation which is no longer meeting any of my goals of interest, enlightenment, spreading the word.

    On this issue, I did not accuse you of not caring about Eric Garner. I used a particularly egregious example of police malfeasance specifically because I assumed you would care. The thought process was “I know MW will care about this, so perhaps he will understand why others form an organization of caring about these examples.” All of what you’re saying was an accusation against you was meant as a platform for understanding.

    No one has yet explained to me why “Black Lives Matter” is a divisive statement. Some Black Lives Matter people have done some stupid things, the assault on Bernie Sanders being one of them. Condemn every organization when someone associated with it is stupid, and you won’t have many organizations. At the risk of being insulting, I’d say it would rule out any organizations that you belong to, but that’s just because I’m an arrogant so-and-so who knows that it would sure rule out any organization I belong to! But then I’ve been involved in lefty action for a long time, and the one sure thing we can always count on is lots of self-described lefties explaining why we’re doing it wrong.

    I remember the police driving armored vehicles down Ferguson streets, wearing full-scale combat gear. I remember the police patrolling in camos — I was tempted at the gym one day when two cops on mats next to me had a long rant about people not waiting to get the facts to ask the cops when we’d learn if there was a rain forest in Ferguson to justify the camouflage. Yes, Ferguson was very divisive. But it wasn’t black residents driving down the streets in armored vehicles, wearing tear gas masks, and carrying sniper rifles. Nor were you, MW, in those vehicles or carrying sniper rifle. The divisiveness was created on the authorities’ side, and in my view is maintained on the authorities’ side.

  88. Ché Pasa

    “Divisive” is a matter of power relationships. Those who do not agree and refuse to submit to the prevailing power structure are by definition “divisive.” For example, blacks who assert their own, if limited, power in contrast to rather than in concert with the police or whomever would exercise power over them are by definition “divisive.” It’s a tried and true and often successful tactic to isolate troublesome dissenters.

    Declaring group X, Y, or Z to be “divisive” primarily because they are somehow different and refuse to submit to the prevailing power and authority is itself a means of targeting and dividing dissenters and The Other from the Body, the better to suppress or extinguish it.

    There are many reasons to criticize activist groups like Black Lives Matter but “failure to accomplish anything” is not one of them. They’ve accomplished a great deal in highlighting and responding productively to the pervasive problems of injustice and police abuse, violence and murder, particularly — but not exclusively — as it affects individuals and communities of color.

    Many police departments, for example, have instituted reforms (voluntarily or under court supervision) that have significantly reduced incidents of police brutality and/or killings, reforms which have had a positive effect on community relations. These are the same reforms which the current regime in DC seeks to undo on the theory that better community relations and lower rates of police brutality and killing result in higher crime rates.

    Nevertheless, many police departments are refusing to go back to their former uses of violence and homicide — which makes them “divisive,” eh?

  89. realitychecker

    Several years after the birth of Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump is President.

    Some just can’t process the various aspects of that fact.

    Eh?

  90. hvd

    Sorry RC but I don’t see a straight line or even any connection between the two facts. Trump was elected because of a sorely disaffected Democratic polity left with only a choice between two shit sandwiches. There was no sign in that election that BLM drove people to vote for Trump or to abandon the Democratic Party. Focus should be on the rightly named snowflakes of the left enforcing too, too nice politically correct talk, on the Democrats abandonment of working class America, on Hillary Clinton for simply being herself, rather than on the righteously indignant BLM movement (again I recognize its shortcomings and the statistical problems but also the fact that the black community has been under siege for a very long time and is not helped by its abandonment because of a poor choice of words).

  91. realitychecker

    @ hvd

    I’m just giving my personal opinion/judgment on something that has not been and cannot be measured with precision by anybody.

    If others don’t (yet?) see all the connections that I see, well, that’s par for my course. We’re all just doing the best we can, I would want to assume.

    It’s not my job to either help or hurt the BLM movement. I wish only good to all people of good heart and good faith. My personal mission is to cut through all the bullshit that we are continually drowned in, and to try and see reality as clearly as possible. So that my ensuing decisions will be good ones. I share my thoughts in good faith and in the spirit of comradeship, but I am not on any political team.

    I find it interesting to examine the areas that others work too hard too ignore, though. 🙂

  92. Mongo

    Just to comment on the original post: Hilarious; it is. Just. Incredible.

    Somewhere, the gods look down on us and laugh, fit to bust.

  93. MojaveWolf

    @Nihil — see, I don’t even see that as a squabble. I’ll take you at your word that you meant this and the next statement about me trying to say “this stuff was no big deal just because it happened to white people too” in a completely different way than I took it, go w/the misunderstanding on that at least and let it drop (not happy w/a couple of other references but you made but not at the same level & those may also have been misunderstandings, so again, willing to let it drop).

    As a general principle though, I will ALWAYS get ticked off if I think people are deliberately misrepresenting my or other’s arguments to make them something they weren’t, especially if it’s done to insult the other side rather than engage in argument about their actual point, which kinda was what I thought you were doing, and I think I got every right to get mad when I see that happening. That’s where civility goes bye bye & I really do consider that a personal attack. Again, since you normally *don’t* do that I’m happy to say this one was a misunderstanding and call it a day. We’re normally on the same side of things and honestly, I figured everyone but RC would disagree w/me on the cop stuff, but I do think it’s important to put the actual statistics out there and discuss them.

    A black professor, I think from Harvard but it doesn’t really matter except for googling purposes, was doing a study NOT for the purpose of finding this out, found out something similar, and was generally pilloried on the left when he published his findings. It’s like a huge chunk of the left has become wedded to a narrative of horrible atrocities happening to their fave victim group of the week, and it’s much more important to them to validate this than whether or not such is actually happening in the way they think it is. I am frustrated w/this tendency in general, and it makes me despair of us ever finding real solutions, as it makes people ridiculously easy to propagandize and manipulate. (someone told me last night that a conservative writer named Heather McDonald published a book relating similar, and that people on the left universally condemned her research on the ground of her being an evil conservative who has bad opinions, rather than actually engaging her work. I haven’t read the work or seen the condemnation, but this would not surprise me. My fellow leftists have put me in the position of having to defend Jordan Peterson numerous times over the past year, which is really not something I want to do. I think he’s mostly pretty terrible. But the way he’s been attacked has generally not been fair critique of his arguments, but rather, “he is an evil bigot, and here’s a complete distortion of what he said for you to pillory him with, and meanwhile he should be no-platformed everywhere.” This is is not how you get anywhere. Likewise, I think acting as if we’re back in the pre-MLK era (or hell, even the era when I was growing up, which we have moved on from leaps and bounds as far as racial attitudes) rather than where we are today is not helpful, and I do perceive most of my fellow leftists as doing something like that.

    (and, as an anecdote in case someone wishes to say I think racism no longer exists, I was in the position about a month ago of texting my wife and my best friend something like “I just did a very SJW thing today. It’s embarrassing.” What happened was this black guy and an old white guy were arguing at the gas pump about something, and I have no idea how it started or who was right or wrong, but as he drove off, the white guy yelled out the window “F— You N—-!” Everyone looked around at each other very uncomfortably for a minute, and I’m like awwwww crap I feel stupid doing this but just in case why not err on the side of opening my mouth. And I said something “I’m sorry man. I know this probably sounds stupid but in case you’re not from here, most of us are not like that and I really apologize for that idiot on behalf of the entire area.” I honestly felt like a moron saying it, but he just laughed and said “Don’t worry about it man. I’m half white anyway.” His girlfriend was laughing her head off, probably at me, but everyone relaxed and the world was an easier place after. So yeah, I get, we ain’t all the way there yet.)(if you’re wondering why I was embarassed, well, it should go w/out saying that other people are not that one dumbass, and I have no business representing the entire area in my apology, but, well, I winged it and it worked out okay so . . .)

  94. MojaveWolf

    & absolutely to RC’s last comment.

    (w/an addendum about people’s need to feel on one team or the other being a big part of what makes it so easy to keep us yelling at each other these days instead of trying to find real solutions. I don’t care about electing Democrats who are going to suck just because they aren’t Republicans, even if I do think the Republicans are usually worse. It’s like asking me to get behind Tywin Lannister because he’s not Cersei,. I’d rather hold out for the wolves or the dragons.)

  95. realitychecker

    @ MW

    “I never really wanted to be a lawyer and wound up doing a whole bunch of completely different things, made a lot less money but probably much happier as a human being most of the time.”

    Me too, I quit practicing when I moved to Atlanta in 1989. Couldn’t stand dealing with liars all the time lol.

    Hope you’re doing OK, Wolf.

  96. MojaveWolf

    Eh, life or death (or at least, potentially life or death, thereby, I guess, making them actually life or death so never mind the parenthetical) battles on multiple fronts. One front would be enough. No such fronts would be preferable.

    But still plenty of wonder and joy in the world.

    & yes–many, many things about the practice of law infuriate me. It’s possible to do a lot of good but just not comfortable w/our adversarial system or the way everything is reduced to a game (I only had interest in litigation; this may not apply in other areas)

  97. realitychecker

    @ MW

    I also was only interested in litigation–specifically, acting as a gladiator to fight for little guys against abusive big guys. But the system is flawed in every aspect, and everybody lies with impunity, so I knew I would turn into someone I did not like if I stuck with it. I’ve spent the last thirty years learning to do what used to be considered impossible, predicting the short term trading moves that used to be considered purely random.

    We seem to have a lot in common lol.

    Hang in there and remember that there are always good things available in life while we still breathe. You have a mind that can negotiate the nuanced areas between the polar absolutes–that is a very good, rare, and valuable thing. ((MW))

  98. different clue

    I don’t remember Black Lives Matter playing any role . . positive or negative . . in Trump’s defeat of Clinton. Michael Moore predicted the Trump victory aHEAD of time and his little talk has been recorded on You Tube. He also nowhere mentions anything about Black Lives Matter affecting the outcome in the states which surprised the pundits by going to Trump. Here is the link.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKeYbEOSqYc

    I do remember wondering whether some of the “Black Lives Matter” activists were secret agent
    Clintonite ratfuckers. Like the filthy little shit-heels who disrupted Sanders.

    And multiple choice question: do Deplorable lives matter?

    A ) Yes
    B ) Yes, but . . . .

  99. nihil obstet

    I know! I know! It’s A!!!

    Both have lower than average life expectancy and for Deplorables it’s falling. And both are things we should do something about, but don’t. And both would benefit from universal programs, so we won’t.

  100. different clue

    @nihil obstet,

    I like your answer. Since you answered A for Deplorable Lives Matter, I answer A for Black Lives Matter.

    The first step towards co-helping eachother co-solve eachothers’ problems is accepting the fact that every eachother has its own very own problems. A good second step would be us-eachother helping the other eachothers who are willing to help us solve our own eachothers problems at the same time. If we accept that we live in a rude suspicious age, and we are prepared to give up on the vain quest for “the beloved society”, then we can all cynically help eachother in a spirit of ” Each back scratches the other”. Another such watchword might be . . .
    “something for everyone or nothing for anyone.”

    Just because we presently don’t doesn’t mean we futurely can’t. The Mass Mindmolding Media work very hard to foster a spirit of weary resignation and hopeless defeat. We don’t necessarily have to adopt the CFP MSM narrative in that regard.

  101. realitychecker

    @ dc

    Do you really think nothing happens unless somebody famous says it happened lol? Don’t you have your own mind?

    I think a lot of white folks who would have been happy to fight police violence side-by-side with the BLM activists saw the way they acted, from lying about Michael Brown and onward, and all the police ambush assassinations, and realized they had deliberately picked a slogan that excluded the interests of non-blacks, and they were just fed up with what they saw. They saw that the BLM people chose to ally themselves with Clinton and the Dems, and so they voted for Trump to show their displeasure.

    All we keep hearing from the left since the election is that many different factors were big enough to be blamed for the Clinton loss. So, I don’t know how anyone can say with certainty that this BLM backlash dynamic was not equally responsible for the Clinton defeat. How anyone can say with certainty that the Russian $100,000 spent on Facebook ads made the difference, but simultaneously argue that white disgust with BLM could not possibly have made the difference, is really amusing to me.

    Anyway, nobody can prove it either way. It’s just my opinion.

  102. different clue

    @reality checker,

    My own mind leads me to discount your theory. I myself here in Michigan didn’t hear anyone talking about Black Lives Matter. Whereas I heard any number of people talking about Free Trade Treason and the Clintons.

    Also, the truth-value of a theory is reflected in the accuracy of the predictions the theory-holder is able to make. I noted that Michael Moore made his prediction on how the election WOULD come out beFORE it happened. That to me says that his theory was evidence-based and reality-based. His fame has nothing to do with it. His predictional accuracy has something to do with it. After all, many other more-famous-than-Moore people were predicting a Clinton victory and their analytical frameworks have been proven worthless by the failure of their prediction. Moore’s analytical framework has been proven correct based on the accuracy of his prediction.

    If you can produce someone famous or obscure who predicted Trump’s victory based on voter-displeasure with Black Lives Matter, then that someone clearly had an analytical framework worth considering. But a retro-opinion after the fact is not the same as a real prediction beFORE the fact, and does not indicate any predictive value to the framework of the person offering the retro-opinion.

    Now . . . if the normally-Democratic-voting Michiganders who told Michael Moore they were voting for Trump also told him they were doing it because of Black Lives Matter, and if Moore is concealing that from us, then Moore would be lying about what his framework and knowledge-base really was. Against such a lie, I would be helpless, because how could I know? If some of Michael Moore’s respondents step forward to say they told him that Black Lives Matter was part of their decision to vote for Trump, then I will lower my opinion of the stated honesty of Michael Moore’s framework, and I will have to allow for distaste for BLM in the particular states of MI, PENN, WIS, OH being a co-deciding factor in getting a critical election-swinging margin of 2-time-Obama voters to vote for Trump.

  103. different clue

    @reality checker,

    Also, since your good opinion of my mind matters to me, I will offer further evidence of having had my own mind all along.

    Michael Moore is just as famous while calling Trump “illegitimate” and agitating for his removal somehow from office as he was while correctly predicting the Trump election without mentioning BLM once in his analysis of the 4 Brexit states. And even though he is famous, my own mind leads me to reject his dismissal of Trump as “illegitimate” and to refuse his invitation to people to ” work for removing Trump”.

    So there you go. Sufficient evidence of me having and having had my own mind all along.

  104. realitychecker

    @ dc

    I have no interest in denigrating your mind. I respect anyone who has rejected the Clinton machine the way you have.

    I’ll just tell you that I predicted Trump would win the same day he hired Kelly Anne Conway, and I backed up that prediction by casting my only Republican vote ever for any person in any office for Trump on November 8. I knew Trump did not need my vote here in Georgia, but I wanted to take a stand against the duopoly, even if it meant risking being called for jury duty lol.

    So, may I submit that, according to your logic, my cred as a predictor is just as good as that fat fuck that used to be Michael Moore. I can’t imagine why you’d consider him a more reliable political weather vane than moi, but chacun a son gout. 🙂

    I know a lot of people that were really turned off by BLM’s antics, and I can certainly understand why. I’m comfortable with my opinion.

  105. Tom W Harris

    Speaking of gout, I had an attack of it once. So I gave up shrimp.

  106. realitychecker

    @ Tom

    Ouch! I had to give up more than shrimp lol. Don’t get me started . . .

  107. different clue

    @realitychecker,

    Well! You should have told me about your before-the-fact prediction of Trump’s victory based on Kelly Anne Conway’s hiring into the Trump Campaign. (Unless you did post your prediction on the Internet and I missed it . . . which is certainly possible given my limited computer screen time and limited thoroughness of reading).

    Therefore, your analytical framework has been proven at least as correct as fat fuck ex-Michael Moore’s framework, and perhaps at a deeper level given that yours far predated his. And if his prediction about the 4 Brexit states was “political weathervaning” rather than political analysis, still . . . he did tell us which way the wind was blowing and was going to blow in those 4 states. So if I hear any other Michael Moore predictions, I will watch to see if the events occur as predicted. And I will certainly watch your predictions with seriously respectful attention as well.

  108. different clue

    While random-walking the Internet, I stumbled across this little post which contains an embedded clickable 10-minute self-taken video by a Clinton-supporter. If this was passed around to enough thousands of people in key crucial razor’s-edge makes-a-difference voter zones, this could also have recruited voters to the Trump side. Here is the link. ( And notice how implicitly confident the Clinton-supporter is in her white privilege to interact with the police officer the way she does. And given his extreme patience with her, she might be correct to be confident. Then again, the officer might just be extremely patient and humane). I can see how such utter filth as the person self-starring in this video could recruit a lot of undecideds to the Cause of Trump. Or at least decruit them away from the Cause of Clinton.

    Anyway, here is the link.
    https://crayfisher.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/monday-crazy-bitch-post/

  109. realitychecker

    @dc

    Well, many thanks for not calling me a liar, as so many others on the Internet would have found it easier to do lol.

    Predicting is what I do, mostly about the markets, but that inevitably involves predicting specific events, outcomes, and effects of things that can affect markets. I do this by drawing on my background experiences in business, psychology, media, law, trading stock index futures for 30 years, and growing up streetwise in Brooklyn. 🙂

    But not to claim too much credit, my call based on Conway was simply based on seeing the raw populist energy of Trump, and knowing that she was a very savvy political operative who would have a good chance of channeling and harnessing that energy into efficient campaign management.

    The prediction was not based on BLM, nor was Moore’s, iirc. I would submit that the reasoning process you applied to Moore is not a sound one; to be sound, it would have needed more data on Moore’s thought and reasoning process, not just that he got the result right (broken clock thingy?).

    But re BLM, I am puzzled to see how many fail to perceive that there was obviously a lot of white resentment against BLM for seeming to exclude whites in order to push blacks to the front of the squeaky wheel line, so to speak. Call it a bridge too far, jumping the shark, the straw that broke the camel’s back, whatever you prefer, but it was clear to me that the sentiment was as I perceived it. A united front would have been preferable IMO, what they did instead was inherently divisive, and I wonder at those who refuse to see that.

  110. realitychecker

    @ dc

    Please forgive me if I don’t click on the link you provided–as computer-limited as I am, I have learned to limit opportunities for bad thingies to get into my computer and render me totally helpless and frustrated lol. (Nothing personal, I already seem to have demons buzzing around inside the damn thing.)

    To make an additional observation, Bill Maher was also cautioning his decidedly pro-Hillary audience not to take a Trump defeat for granted, in the couple of months leading up to Election Day. He also did not refer to a BLM effect in doing that.

    FYI, Maher used to be a hero of mine, back in his Politically Incorrect days, and even up until the Obama years. But when he started making million dollar donations to Obama and Hillary, he lost me, because he has since become so unbalanced, so reckless, and so low-class in his anti-Trump, pro-Dem rhetoric that I really don’t know how he can look himself in the mirror anymore.

    Which is just to illustrate, from a slightly different angle, that getting the result of a prediction right is good, but much less so if the prediction was not based on a sound reasoning process.

    I’ve always thought myself to be a really good progressive, but life moves like pendulum swings, and I was very aware that political correctness and identity politics had both reached an unreasonable crescendo, and needed to be pruned and trimmed to get back closer to reality and reason.

    The interplay between Trump and the various Establishment players and interests presents great educational opportunities for all of us, IMO, if we will just observe carefully all the cross-currents and logical contradictions that get revealed. This is not a good time to be cheering any ‘team’ IMO, this is a time to understand the extent to which regular folks like us don’t really have a team that is FOR us.

  111. highrpm

    politics in this country has degen’ed to all spectacle. the playground of sociopaths. hollyworld. i get suicidal thinking about it.

    but hey, the disproportion of elites to slaves is what fueled the growth of christianity in its infancy in rome. its magical thinking gave hope to the hopeless. when the 99% couldn’t afford the animal sacrifices of the many and various popular gods, christianity offered, “only believe.” the rest is free. free grace. pax judaica. onwards and upwards.

  112. different clue

    @realitychecker,

    Your comments deserve more better careful thought and reply than what I have right now in the 15 minutes before I have to sign in and get to work.

    So I will just respond to the very last item and paraphrase Gandhi in saying that we will have to be the “team on our side” we wish to see in the world.

  113. MojaveWolf

    Mostly, this comment is not going to be about the election, but all I will say on that front:

    (1) I absolutely think Russian influence had zero to do w/it. I can’t prove a negative, but I confess to automatically lowering my respect for anyone who thinks this (while admittedly still respecting quite a few, since they seem otherwise mostly sane).

    (2) Single biggest reason for the Trump victory in the close states, imo (and totally unprovable): the failure of HRC and the non-Bernie wing of the Dems to admit that the economy wasn’t good and that a lot of people were suffering due to policies that had been perpetuated by the Dems as well as the Rs for a long time (which would not have mattered if the econ was really as good as the pundits keep saying it is, yet, strangely, the idiot American voter insisted on believing their personal experience over what the TV was telling them, thus calling into question whether Democracy is still a viable strategy)

    This lack of focus on the economy (or, rather, delusion about the economy, or, collaboration in making up an imaginary economy to report on) is one of the three biggest reasons the Republicans are still a viable political party, even though most people really don’t like what they are advocating.

    Another, going back sort of to what we are talking about, is the leftist obsession with divvying everyone up into competing identities. I think here’s where we get into some of the disagreements about BLM. To what extent are they a part of the whole nutjob SJW thing? (I’m talking about current arguments here in this thread between people who I think would agree w/my “nutjob SJW” reference, but clearly disagree on the utility of BLM) Certain parts of the left are doing identity politics (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and *can* be a good thing) in a way that alienates people who should be allies (see: me, if you want an example, and say whatever you want to about me, hate on me if you will, think I’m awful if you will, but honestly guys, if you’re pissing off me on this subject on multiple fronts, I’m pretty sure you’re doing it to a lot of other people a lot worse, just most of them aren’t going to speak up) (for examples, see the entire Evergreen college fiasco, the youtube of the girl at another Cali college trying to insist that the white guy wearing dreadlocks HAD to stop and listen to her berate him and HAD to agree w/her that he was doing something wrong, or the YouTube of the girl at another Cali college who stole this guy’s MAGA hat and then was genuinely perplexed that she was in trouble for taking his hat off his head and not giving it back rather than him being in trouble for wearing the hat, which in her mind was a call to genocide, or the prof at the New England college who said white people were responsible for every instance of slavery in history and in fact invented it, or, well, the mere existence of websites like “Everyday Feminism”, which I haven’t looked at in a very long time but is probably still there and probably just as hilarious as ever)(note: I consider myself a feminist; many other feminists mock everyday feminism, I actually thought it was a parody site making fun of certain types of lefties when I first followed a link there). There are about five million other examples of this sort of thing. Possibly five million on a daily basis. I’m not even sure I’m exaggerating, though probably a little with that last stat.

    And lastly, the whole idea that various narratives on the left are beyond criticism, or discussion, or analysis, and anyone who attempts to question these narratives are evil genocidal and probably stupid bigots who should be either silenced or shunned because, ummm, I’m never quite clear on the “because” part, but I think it has something to do with bad words and thoughts being worse than actual physical violence if they are coming from unapproved people, or something like that. This will do a great job of shutting down arguments on blogs or in large groups where people don’t want to be shunned or mobbed, but it also does a great job of getting people to think they might be more at home on the other side. This, again, is an SJW thing, which used to be only in obscure circles but has become mainstreamed. So we are in a position where the right wing invites D candidates to Liberty College, and the left no platforms damn near everyone they don’t 100% agree with on college campuses.

    (oh, wait, I forgot, fourth reason for keeping the Rs viable–that the Ds just plain suck, and cheated in the primary to make sure they kept sucking so they could suck up rich donor dollars, and have since continued to put more effort into backing Rs who just changed parties without changing policies, while actively funding candidates against anyone who might be progressive; I don’t agree w/Down with Tyranny on everything or many things and have mostly quit reading them cause they really pissed me off w/their utterly pointless and reprehensible “Melania is a whore” posts back in the day, but they’ve done a great job of covering who the D leadership chooses to back and still do, when I occasionally check back there. They also publish Gaius Publius’ posts on the environment and global warming, which are some of the best going; tho I usually read the Naked Capitalism reposts instead)

    Anyway, while I personally think BLM is pushing a false narrative with (in most but far from all cases) the best of intentions (because they actually believe the false narrative, as do the people here who are defending them, who almost certainly think *I’m* the one who has the narrative wrong), all I’m going to say is check the facts and look at them honestly, if you have the time. If you come to a different conclusion than me, so be it. I personally think this false narrative is a part of the whole lefty groupthink tribalism that is most likely being pushed by a bunch of rich fucks to help keep the rest of us arguing with each other instead of addressing the actual problems and yeah, that sounds all conspiracy theory, as does pointing out no one shot Malcolm X when he was talking about the evil white people but he got shot when he wanted whites and blacks to work together, and likewise MLK didn’t get shot until he started really pushing for a unity of the white and black working class against the rich power structures. Narratives that keep pushing groups apart instead of bringing them together help keep Jeff Bezos and Dick Cheney and their fellows rolling. If you’re going to push one of those narratives, at least make sure it’s well grounded in reality (the issue of women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom is one that certainly causes division, and I’m not backing down an inch on that one, so obviously, I’m not advocating backing down from a position just because it causes dissension; if you’re right, you’re right and some things are worth the fight).

    In general, though, I’d say, as MLK did, that the working classes of all races have more in common with each other than any of us do with the corporate powers that be or the people who are comfy schmoozing each other up in their ladder climbing offices (I have made a number of career decisions that seem deranged to most people simply because I’m not comfy w/this, in fact I view most of these people rather like I view Logan in Westworld, who I think kind of was supposed to be a stand in for such), and we need to be looking for ways to appreciate that commonality and to work together to get people into power who will help all of us, instead of help almost no one while insisting to poor whites that ethnic others are taking your rights on one side while telling the ethnic others that evil whites are keeping you down. It’s more like a bunch of evil fucks are keeping us all down, and doing their very best to keep us all at odds w/everyone who doesn’t fit our particular group.

  114. MojaveWolf

    @RC — yes, we do have a lot in common. I twice bailed on a career in law where I could have had smooth sailing to a comfy life because I wasn’t comfortable taking some cases and you can’t pick and choose at the beginning, became a partner in a talent & literary agency and sold my part out because I genuinely hated the necessary schmoozing and networking–it was genuinely painful to me, and passed on what most people would have considered an absolutely golden opportunity to be in politics because I just couldn’t stand the thought of spending every day hanging out with these people and acting like them (one reason I give so much credit to Bernie–I don’t think most people have any idea how hard it would be to spend so many years in that environment and still be true to a completely different set of values while still remaining relevant; mad props to that man). I went more the razor’s edge path, which has been great for my personal enlightenment and development as a human being and horrible for my bank account. Congrats on the successful trading. As much as I’m fine with what my choices (extreme dislike of well over a decade and a half of being poor or struggling notwithstanding) I confess to thinking I should have been more financially conscious for the sake of my family. They would have all been better off if I’d chosen a more conventional career track. I may deserve a fair amount of guilt there. Probably deserve a fair amount of guilt there. Also on that front, my god, I should have gone the political route, even if I would have made no difference in the world at least I would have been in a place to try, but by all powers that be I had no idea they were going to fuck things up so badly.

  115. realitychecker

    @ MW

    Excellent next to last comment, I agree completely with your take.

    Re your last comment-we should talk sometime. It would be interesting.

  116. realitychecker

    @ dc

    I don’t know if you intend to continue this dialogue, but let me just point something out to you, which is that Moore and Maher are so totally and openly pro-black in every way that it would be an extraordinary moment of political honesty for either of them to EVER attribute Trump’s success to anything related to BLM or black people generally.

    That’s just normal team politics, IMO, and does NOT constitute what I would ever consider to be probative evidence that they don’t think BLM had anything to do with it. They are just choosing not to cast shade upon their friends. Typical modern political dynamic.

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