If you want to argue that this kind of violence affects certain races more, that's fine. But why downplay the fact that it affects all races? The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1]. If people actually cared about creating a broad coalition to address this, they would want to highlight both facts, not hide the latter fact.

You actually see the a similar attitude when racists attack social programs. If members of a minority group are more likely to benefit from a program, they treat it as a program for minorities, even if the majority of beneficiaries are non-minorities.

It's also interesting to see how people divide the demographic information. If you look at the breakdown by sex, you'll find that the divide between men and women when when it comes to these shootings is much, much greater than the divide between races. Yet the latter is talked about a lot all over the media, and while I don't think I've ever seen the latter treated as an issue. My guess is that we'd also see another large divide if we divided the numbers by wealth (and this article is a good example of that).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

People fighting for black lives aren't hiding bad things that happen to white people. The reason Duncan Lemp doesn't have posters up about him isn't because black activists against police violence haven't fought for him, it's because both black and white activists against police violence haven't fought for him. And as white people still make up the majority of people shot by police[1], far more white people than black failed Duncan Lemp.

I find it to be a fantasy that somehow, if people fighting for black lives would emphasize the suffering of white people, it would suddenly turn the white people who are hostile or ambivalent about this stuff into supporters. Again: you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner who was surprised and shot in his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant that wasn't for him. The NRA supported gun control to criminalize the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers were an absolutely straightforward open carry movement, with one important difference.

edit: I meant to exclude Reason-style libertarians from this. They're scrupulously consistent.

That's patently false at the very least. Everyone I've talked to said it was a horrible act and those officers deserve legal charges.

Make no mistake, the government's job, first and foremost is to protect itself. This means state, local and federal. The only reason we're even seeing any resolution on this sort of thing is they see it as a systemic problem. "Defund the police," and some local government's willingness to put it to a vote put a lot of fear into police departments. Over time, they will revert back to their normal behavior, so it's something we have to be diligent about.

Yes, I wrote my mayor, city councilman, senators, the president and congressman. Nothing really happened until defund the police became nationalized and the state / local / federal governments were forced to act out of pure self interest and self preservation. Bad, murderous cops got away Scott free for decades before that.

One of the saddest parts is good people become police to actually do good for the community, then they are met with this sort of nastiness from their departments and bosses. It's gotta be a real gut punch.

Here's a recent example of a cop trying to pull a sergeant off of a perp. Sergeant was threatening to pepper spray a guy handcuffed in the back of a squad car. Other cop pulls on sergeant's belt to stop what he was doing. Sergeant freaks out and puts his hand around other cop's (female by the way) throat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUX25CO6hhE

I protested, donated, wrote letters to voters, and contacted a local politician.

But that isn't relevant to the original comment, which was a person claiming that "everyone I talked to said it was horrible" is equivalent to gun rights activism.

> Again: you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner who was surprised and shot in his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant that wasn't for him.

Which is first, an absolute, and absolutes are rarely true. Second, you said defend. "...you can't get white activist gun owners to defend a licensed gun owner..." Defining a police shooting as a bad shooting (illegal) is defending the victim of the shooting. To defend the police and not the victim would be to justify it the shooting as a good shooting (valid/legal). Based on what he said, he points to everyone he knows defended the victim claiming it was a bad shooting, therefore, everyone he knew defended the victim and not the police.

It sounds like you might want to slow down a bit and give people the benefit of the doubt, maybe take the time to read and understand what people write. I have the same affliction myself sometimes.

Thanks for the advice, but I re-read everything and verified that I understood. It's possible that we just disagree, or maybe your quoted comment removes all context from the discussion.

> Did you do any of those things, or are you just pointing fingers at people for not doing the same things you did't do?

Was this an example of you giving me the benefit of the doubt?

Hah, good point, it was not. I told you I have that affliction sometimes as well. That's the problem when a discussion becomes emotional, it usually ceases to be a discussion.

Yes I never understood this tactic. If you really want citizen support (which is required), you need to show that all citizens are subject to this type of injustice. If leaders just say one group is affected and don't show that all citizens are affected, you won't get change as fast, if at all.

It's almost as if there is an ulterior motive to actually solving the problem, or perhaps the leadership just won't look past their own environment. Either way, the shiz is way out of hand and everyone should be afraid of it.

I remember reading an article where police were serving a warrant and they straight up shot the guy next to his pregnant girlfriend through the window while they were sleeping. They justified it by saying the room was boobytrapped. The guy was staying at his parents house when this occurred. It was very suspect, but I never saw national media attention it deserved, and I find it highly unlikely a kid living with his parents would place a active, lethal booby trap in his bedroom inside his parent's house. It was an actual murder squad. Pretty crazy. I wish I could find the article (it was local.)

It's hard to believe that anyone who's actively downplaying the way an issue affects the majority of the population is actually interested in solving the issue.

It all makes sense if you start from a cynical assumption that the real point of most political activism is exclusively to acquire political capital, then spend it on acquiring power, rather than fixing the issue. In fact fixing the issue would be counterproductive, as that stops power accumulation and requires finding some new issue.

Of course, you have to plausibly pretend to actually care about fixing the issue. What's the solution? Demand unworkable and absurd fixes, like 'defund the police'. The social engineering in it was remarkable - its planned ineffectiveness relied on extremist demanding complete abolition of the police to make it unworkable and scare people away, while at the same gaslighting opponents of the absurd extreme it's _really_ only about small redirection of funds to health services and similar.

What would a real solution look like? It would try to solve the root of the issue rather than symptoms. One major current cause is that new meth is significantly neurotoxic due to unknown impurities from currently dominating synthesis methods. Good article about the issue:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

The most effective solution would be to legalize meth and ensure only pure, pharmaceutical grade is being sold. Pure meth isn't especially neurotoxic - and in small doses it's actually neuroprotective due to hormesis. Amount of people with damaged brains would plummet, fewer people would be homeless, fewer people would be violent. Which is exactly the reason it's never going to happen - nobody would gain politically.

Same logic for fentanyl and heroin deaths - cheap, pure (consistent purity = much lower risk of accidental overdoses) heroin would reduce fentanyl deaths to near zero, virtually eliminate health damage (pure heroin is relatively safe and can be used for decades) and reduce crimes committed by addicts to near zero (by virtue of being cheap).

Our medium town spends $500 million on police and barely a fraction of that on drug rehab, mental health, etc. It certainly seems misappropriated.

I don't know much about meth, but concerning the opioid crisis, our solution was to "crack down," on prescriptions, which sounds good to someone who doesn't give it much thought. The actual outcome was people went from using a drug with a dosage printed on the side to stuff made in people's bathrooms and kitchens including god knows what which resulted in many, many more deaths.

If you decriminalize, you do make drugs more approachable. You also make treatments more approachable, and health research actually possible.

Besides, there are other ways to fight the use of something than sending the police to lock people down with other addicts. And well, all that police involvement does put money on the drug sellers hands, to use on their marketing.

Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. So I'm quite for taking that involvement away. But there are other damages, and I have never seen anybody with a believable enough model of what will happen to those after drugs are legalized. (And, of course, it will certainly depend on all the details, so any "yes or no" answer is guaranteed to be bullshit.)

Most of the damage done to a cancer survivor was done by chemo, but that's not an argument against the treatment. The right level to stop at is where adding one more unit of police damage would stop less than one unit of drug damage but like you say nobody knows where that is.

Not only did we worsen the problem we were trying to solve (drug use), but we created two new ones with increased potency of the drugs leading to more deaths, and booming prison population, the largest in the world. It boggles the mind that any rational person would think that to continue going down this path will lead to some sort of improvement. I suspect it's just poor justification for the institution to preserve themselves. Cops gotta have their pensions.

What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

I suspect that's the case. I mean at least Huey Long got things done for his constituents while lining his pockets. It seems today's political class just want to line their pockets and ignore their constituents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Numbers are cool and all, but they can't be divorced from context: intergenerational poverty, police brutality and surveillance, the prison industrial complex. And so on.

What is the attempted statement here? To imply that black people are inherently violent? What are you getting at?

The way i see it, those numbers reflect the state of racially focused stunted development in many communities.

It's like when people throw single-parent household statistics around with blacks. What do we think is the root cause here? That their skin color inherently made them do this? Or maybe, just maybe, the living conditions are not prone to healthy structured families and healthy individuals.

So why don’t you apply the same logic to OP’s statement above? The data shows that there is no difference in police killings by race on a per incident basis: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-.... Blaming police racism is like blaming teachers. Maybe some are racist, but to a large extent you’re blaming them for problems in the communities they’re serving that are outside their control. Note that there is a five factor difference in incarceration rates between white people in Oregon and white people in Massachusetts. Reducing disparities in criminal justice to race blinds you to the myriad factors involved.

This is an instance of what I call the “liberal conflict of interest” with respect to racial justice. Liberals have taken up racial justice as their cause, but like everyone have strong incentives to view the facts on the ground as vindicating their own ideologies. Liberals don’t like law and order, and they do like teachers, so for disparities involving police they blame “racist police” but for disparities affecting education they don’t reach for “racist teachers.” In the long run this liberal conflict of interest hurts minorities, by obscuring the “root causes.”

Your comment about “single parent household” statistics is another example of a liberal conflict of interest. Let’s stipulate that the “cause” of disparities in single parenthood is generations of slavery and segregation destroying the social structure of these communities. But what about the effect? Countries all over the world with high levels of fatherlessness suffer from high levels of violence by young men. Conversely, the single parenthood rates among white people in Appalachia would be cause for alarm and panic in a number of African countries. But liberals don’t want to explore that avenue (which could lead to solutions) because they’re invested in social theories that reject patriarchy and the importance of fathers in socializing boys. Hence liberals bankrolling outfits like BLM that push not to shore up, but to deconstruct notions of traditional families.

I believe children are better off being raised by two parents than by one.

I might also bristle in a discussion about crime and poverty if someone parachuted in and said that the real problem was single-parent families. I'd perceive it as an instance of the just-world fallacy. Things are much more complicated than that.

If I tried to express that by arguing that two parents were not in fact valuable for children, I'd be overplaying my hand. I'd be wrong. But I'd be wrong in the service of pushing back against the just-world fallacy, not in valorizing single parenthood.

I think you'd have a hard time finding a lot of liberals who, outside of charged discussions about crime and poverty, would argue that children don't benefit from having two parents in their lives.

For posterity, the previous iteration:

It's not hard to find situations where people will push back on two-parent households, because many of these discussions boil down (or are perceived to boiling down) to a just-world argument in which the fact that, holding income equal, a randomly selected Black family will live in a neighborhood with people making many tens of thousands of dollars left than a white family at the same income level. They're not right when they make those arguments; they're overstating their claim, fathers are important, two parents are beneficial, &c. But that's not really what they're arguing.

And then there are people who believe, I don't know, fathers are somehow malign? A single parent is better than two? But that's a fringe belief.

In academia, public policy, and political messaging, yes. With a few exceptions.

> Are you sure you're not getting this stuff from Youtube, and kind of winding yourself up?

I don’t watch YouTube. It doesn’t even really come up in right-wing media, because much of the Trump right is itself a product of the post-family values 1990s. It comes from my own observations of “stuff my liberal parents take as axiomatic that I can’t say among my friends with graduate degrees.”

> Stable two-parent households, high education, and liberalism are all correlated.

That’s true. You have lots of people who preach permissiveness and self fulfillment in public and practice rigid conformity in their own lives. Growing up I reconciled this as the way my parents did: “things it’s okay for Americans to do versus but not for us to do.” I find that suboptimal now.

Are you the product of an immigrant family? Because it sounds quite like something many immigrant parents would say.

Not only that, I'm one of those immigrant kids who thinks my parents were wise and correct, instead of rebelling.

I suspect that what's happening here is that you've mistaken the notion that people have itchy trigger fingers about people trash-talking single moms (they do) with the idea that people widely believe "single mom" is an optimal child rearing arrangement (they do not). I live in the People's Republic of Oak Park, and you'd be run out on a rail from the Oak Park Progressives group for writing a post about how dads are overrated.

Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality.

Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it.

I think they are so afraid of being accused of "trash-talking single moms," or alienating the academics and activists, that they won't advocate in the culture and politics for two-parent families. The functional result is similar: When was the last time you heard a Democrat talking about the importance of two-parent households? What major Democrat-aligned think tank or advocacy organization is pushing policies to promote two-parent households and decrease out-of-wedlock child births? Where are the Hollywood movies addressing the social upheaval caused by divorce?

> Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality.

My problem is that the right-wing outrage bait originates where I am: the high school I attended, the law school I attended, my kids's school, etc. On this particular issue, I got shouted down on my high school's facebook page for pointing out that poverty rates are vastly lower among two-parent families. Do those folks represent the liberal mainstream? I think that's besides the point. If those folks shout down enough people, everyone else will stick to points that don't incur their wrath.

> Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it.

This is true, but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. Economic success today is strongly tied to success in academic institutions. People with high levels of social capital go to those institutions, learn a bunch of wacky ideas, but live in their own lives the way people with their class always have. But everyone else downstream suffers the consequences. E.g. corporate lawyer posts "sex work is work" but she doesn't mean it for her kid. And she doesn't live in a community where being pressured into sex work is a real threat facing young women. But destroying that taboo has consequences that flow down into lower class communities where those pressures do exist.

Meanwhile, those downstream communities have less ability to resist harmful cultural changes. They're not going to college where they learn what to say while being able to observe that the successful people are doing. They often lack the social capital that insulates them from the broader culture. The social institutions they relied on to transmit values and enforce norms, like churches, have often been weakened by decades of attacks. Folks in those communities will get divorced and have kids out of wedlock--because the taboos have been destroyed in the broader culture--but they'll unsurprisingly be mad about the consequences.

It's harder to find Democrats extolling the virtues of two-parent families. But that's no surprise: "two-parent family" is coded right-wing, and politically involves not just the importance of kids having two parents, but also of pushing back on equity in the workplace for women, or benefits for single parents (and, if you go far enough back, say to the 1970s and 1980s, towards liberalized divorce laws).

So I think the claim that liberals avoid talking about family values fails. They use different language than conservatives, but that's just how politics works. You can exploit the semiotics of political messaging to paint either side any way you want, but the idea that liberals are opposed to two-parent households is inconsistent with what liberals advocate for.

An appeal to what gets shouted down on Facebook groups† also isn't persuasive. First, note that you didn't get shouted down for saying that fathers are important (which is how you'd code an appeal to two-parent child-rearing --- single-parent households in the US are overwhelmingly, like >85%, led by mothers). But also: Facebook groups are cliques. There are popular Facebook groups in Oak Park that would ban you for arguing against abolishing the police. But defunding the police failed on our last ballot by something like 70-30. Biden carried our precincts overwhelmingly; by a far higher margin than Cook County as a whole.

Finally, for all you're saying about the downwind effects of elite liberal take-havers saying it's OK to pursue single parenthood, in context what you're trying to say is "violent crime statistics that prominently feature Black people is a natural consequence of liberals de-emphasizing two-parent households". I'm sorry, that's plainly false. None of the circumstances this thread talks about have anything to do with BLM talking about people being raised in part by aunties and grandmas, or anything said on Twitter.

I said upthread and I'll say it again: it wouldn't be fair for me to try to paint conservative thought by what Sohrab Ahmari believes, let alone Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that's effectively what you're doing when you suggest that BLM-Facebook-thought defines liberalism. Liberals overwhelmingly believe in the importance of two-parent child-rearing.

† (As someone somewhat active in local politics, I'll add that Facebook is deeply problematic --- it stands in for public comment and discussion, but provides none of the safeguards of open meetings laws. There's also a trend towards municipalities outsourcing this kind of discussion to platforms like Granicus, with the same problems: private entities can control public speech, which is fine until they become the government's own formal mechanism for collecting feedback. It's a whole can of worms.)

Since you want hard poll evidence, I browsed Gallup and found a poll:

41% of Republicans vs. 61% of Democrats think having kids outside of marriage is "morally acceptable". [1]

61% of Republicans vs. 73% of Democrats think divorce is acceptable. [1]

Interestingly, you can look at [2] and see that these issues fall pretty neatly into OP's argument about "luxury beliefs". For instance, on the "having kids outside of marriage" issue, only 38% of black Democrats think it is morally acceptable, but 64% of non-black Democrats think it is morally acceptable. The black vs. non-black numbers for sex outside of marriage are 46% to 68%. Given the prevalence of exactly these behaviors in the black community relative to the white community, I think that this constitutes pretty hard evidence that OP's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis has a lot going for it.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/137357/Four-Moral-Issues-Sharpl...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/Blacks-Conservative-Repu...

> divorce is acceptable

is not evidence for

> views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion

68% of democrats find embryonic stem cell research morally acceptable...clearly they view "traditional procreation" with extreme suspicion!

A non sequitur does not change the onus here. I don't need data to point out that what you're stating doesn't follow.

What he’s referring to is the BLM website stating “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement” that it looks like they’ve since removed.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/aug/28/ask-politifac...

I fully believe that these differences in family structure are the product of cultural and economic destruction caused by slavery, Jim Crow, etc. So what’s the solution? For decades it’s been more social liberalism: easier divorce, easier single parenthood, cultural changes to normalize unstable families. At the end of the day the bus that is the Democratic Party is driven by social liberals, and more individual freedom and less collective norm enforcement is the main solution they have in stock.

Why would the racial gains made since the Civil Rights movement lead to fewer stable married households raising children?

I fully believe that these differences in family structure are the product of cultural and economic destruction caused by slavery, Jim Crow, etc. So what’s the solution? For decades it’s been more social liberalism: easier divorce, easier single parenthood, cultural changes to normalize unstable families. At the end of the day the bus that is the Democratic Party is driven by social liberals, and more individual freedom and less collective norm enforcement is their solution to everything.

And you've skated right past the more important part of my argument, which is that nobody with a BLM sign on their lawn even knows about this "nuclear family" thing. You'd have to go dig it up for them.

They are arguing that "historical travesties" -> "current situation for Black Americans" -> "increased risks of criminality and violence" -> "more interactions with cops" -> "more deaths by police".

Which requires different tools to solve than "cops are racist" -> "cops shoot more Black Americans".

And if our goal is to actually help Black Americans than we need to be clear eyed about the causes even if that makes us uncomfortable.

The intention of pointing that out was in response to a specific comment. Context matters.

I want police violence to stop. Period. I want them to be held accountable for their actions. But when an article talks about the way law enforcement treats people of different classes with two different standards, and someone starts complaining that black people are getting more media attention, I feel obligated to reference the reason why, without dismissing anyone's hardship. Again, context.

In the case of race you can't just ignore that black people do roughly 50% of violent crimes (just look at arson, don't even try to excuse it) and make up 25% of the lethal shootings with police.

It's also obvious why the racism is the other way around than some people make it out to be. Every police officer thinks twice to shoot on someone with dark skin because of the media coverage that can and often does take place. With killing white people, even if unjust this is rarely if ever a headline (except you can spin it, like when he helped a PoC).

I don't introduce new standards for them. If you want to mitigate racism, hold them accountable for their actions and don't act like people with a different skin tone can take no responsibility.

Thank you for this information. So do you support the fact that police in this country are working as a judge, jury and executor?

I am sorry, but if I were you, I'd be ashamed to use such justification for people's killings.

Let's focus on the issue at hand, policing violence is a problem that needs to be addressed, putting the blame on one side or the other because "they're more violent" is not a good start to any serious discussion except to shield police from their actions.

It's a statistic, that is more relevant than plain population share.