Focusing on the "cancel culture" is, IMHO, putting the cart in front of the horse. It is a by-product of a society where a cop can murder an African American in broad daylight and (in most cases) suffer no consequences. If you can't trust the society to not murder you, why would you refrain from tearing down anything you don't like?
When the society doesn't serve justice, people will implement "justice" with their own hands, with often bloody consequences. Thousands lost their heads during the French revolution: I'm sure many of them didn't deserve it. People died and lost their homes during the American Revolution, and during the Civil War: I'm sure many of them didn't deserve it, either.
I'm no big fan of the so-called "cancel culture", but justice is the only way I see that can rein it in.
The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that.
There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.
It might be worth considering that murdered-on-tape-in-broad-daylight is at the extreme end of the spectrum of violence - both direct and indirect - that minorities experience throughout their lives. Otherwise you might end up with the belief that a black person's experience of the USA is only 0.0005% different to that of a white one's.
I think the point is that, though police violence is terrible and should absolutely be corrected, trying to summarize the United States with it is incredibly reductionist.
Maybe. Or maybe the point is that for some people systemic racism isn't just another abstract problem that doesn't really affect them every single day of their lives.
It seems to me that's what's happening in this thread is privileged people with no experience of systemic racism telling Filipino veterans how they ought to feel about the country they fought for. The people with the concrete experience are speaking, and HN commenters are telling them they're bad and wrong and should be more mad. Seems strange, in light of the prevalence of the word 'listen' of late.
Seems like an odd place to put this comment. Nobody's talking about Filipino vets on this sub-thread, much less how they should feel or who is bad or wrong or should be mad. Am I missing subtext?
It seems to me that the thrust of this sub-thread is a debate over narratives. One narrative is "America is basically good, but it has serious problems, and we're working on fixing them". Another narrative is "America is basically bad, we should burn it to the ground and start over". Neither of these narratives are right or wrong, because all narratives are false. But I think one of them is more useful than the other.
And can I argue against your strawman as well, or will that disrupt your momentum?
This subthread started with "Well, ACTUALLY, if you look at the statistics, state sponsored/condoned violence against black people in the US barely exists and all this kerfuffle is an overreaction"
That's not admitting a serious problem, and calling it out as revisionist BS is not saying we should burn the country to the ground.
Oh, OK - I misspoke. It was the sub-subthread that started off cherrypicking statistics.
But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
To put it another way, calling for the razing of America is totally unreasonable. But such calls are in actual fact extremely uncommon.
Using statistics directly responsive to the claim is cherrypicking?
It seems like your issue is with the claim, not the statistics. Being murdered by the police is not a central example of the problems of black people and holding it up as such will only cause people to address what you claim is the problem rather than what the actual problems are.
> But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
When "things you don't like" consists of the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that's pretty hard to distinguish from burning the American system to the ground.
That's your conception of your country? I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but they're all dead now. All of the slave owners and all of the slaves are dead. Their children are dead. Their children's children are dead. It has been seven generations.
Or are we cherrypicking the past for things that mean something today as well?
> Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson is dead. Independence is not.
So, even though his children are dead and their children are dead, it's almost as if what he did in his life had ramifications through the ages and still shapes society today. I'd never considered that possibility. I wonder if there are other situations where that applies?
The obvious difference being that "all men are created equal" is something we should want to preserve whereas slavery is something we should want to destroy forever.
The point of his use of those statistics was to say that this phenomenon, while bad, is a small part of what the United States is. I didn't read it as minimizing the issue, as such. It's certainly one of the biggest issues we face today. And that's a great thing - that one of our biggest issues is such a small statistic. It certainly hasn't always been that way. Our biggest issues used to be much larger statistics. Slaves were more than half the population in some states. The point wasn't a dismissal of police violence as a non-issue, the point was that a reduction of the US to that fact is not a useful framing. Not for the victims, or for anyone else.
Hubris and the unwillingness to comprehend real problems and the desire to cover them up with "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" won't go down well.
What I'm seeing is more apologism for wrongful historical actions, perhaps in RESPONSE to what you described, but at this point it's become an "AMERICA IS GREAT SO SHUT UP"
Nobody is saying "America is great shut up". America has very serious problems, both currently and historically. The point of this piece and the other commenters in this thread in defending America is not that we should ignore the problems. It's that we should work towards fixing them in a positive way, not a "fuck America" sort of way.
It's not "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" so much as pointing out specifically why the claim that it isn't great is wrong, to which the responses were a moving of the goalposts to some other, generic wrongs against black people that haven't actually been specified and so can't be addressed.
Patriotism is just as absurd as any other dogma to a person who doesn't share it. I think the US has done some great things as have most countries. It's when you start blindly believing it's perfect that it seems less than rational.
> generic wrongs against black people that haven't actually been specified
> It's when you start blindly believing it's perfect that it seems less than rational.
Who said it was perfect?
> Surely you don't need to hear the list again?
Is there somewhere they keep this list? I keep getting partial versions.
There's the ones where we list bad laws that haven't been on the books in many years, the ones (like police murders) that do literally happen but are dramatically less common than the level of attention would lead you to believe, the thing where people try to claim things with aggregate statistics without adjusting for confounders...
I'm sure there are some legitimate ones, what I can't understand is why the focus is regularly on all these ones that evaporate upon examination.
Maybe it's the toxoplasma thing, which I can't link to because SSC is gone. :(
It's nothing personal, merely an observation of the phenomena that it's hard/ uncomfortable to see the unfairness of a system of which you are clearly a benefactor.
The idea that everybody's equal starting... now! is lovely if you can ignore the fact that some people have a 500 year head start.
So if you understand how historic injustice leads to present day disadvantage then there's no point distracting from the discussion by claiming to be bewildered by the fundamentals.
I agree that class distinctions are becoming less useful except if you define class in terms of opportunity in which case it's hard to argue that it and race live in two completely separate petri dishes.
The point is that, for largely existing political coalition reasons, people are trying to make a class problem be about race because it makes it align with the base of a particular political party. Police unions lean Republican, so Republicans have a political need to defend them, so if you can pit black people against the police then you can get them to vote the way you want without actually giving them anything. And then you don't have to worry about them getting together with poor white people to ask why housing costs so much and there isn't more economic opportunity for non-megacorps.
What’s the probability of being killed in a terrorist attack?
It happened a handful of times before in the US, then in 2001 reaction one attack spawned whole new agencies, onerous airport security changes, etc.—not to mention the longest running war in the country’s history. And for the most part, Americans were cheering about it.
Why is 9/11 revered as a national tragedy while ongoing murders by racist police are being downplayed?
Imagine a gang running your neighborhood that has a 0.0005% of murdering you (but if they do they'll get away with it) and an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder (don't forget that gangs exist for protection as much as power projection) , but is likely to beat, coerce and steal from you with total impunity.
The gang is well stocked with small arms, helicopters, tanks, missiles and even anti aircraft weapons.
They view you as threat to be pacifier although they're unlikely to murder you specifically.
> an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder
Considering how much murder is happening there already, I wouldn't guess that the amount there would be if the police stopped investigating them would be smaller than the existing rate of murders by police.
Also, as already mentioned, 0.0005% is the approximate rate at which the police kill black people, not the rate at which they murder them. What do you propose the cops do when someone draws a weapon on them?
> What's to be done with that gang?
You're talking about the local police, in black neighborhoods, in cities with Democrats already in elected office. They've been able to pass whatever changes they want this whole time, so what's stopping them?
Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case. The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.
> Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case.
That's kind of my point. The black vote has gone disproportionately to Democrats for many years and what they get for it is not the change they're promised even when their party controls the government, it's lip service and rage propaganda like "police murders" which can't possibly be the most significant problem faced by black families, because it gets them to go out and vote for the same party again even as they don't fix the real problems -- because if they fixed the real problems they couldn't run on it again next time.
Why are cities burning over "police murders" and not the War on Drugs or school choice? Why are we de-funding the police and not de-funding the zoning board? A cynic could answer.
> The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.
I think this is a trope. Democrats are desperate to paint Republicans as racists because they're so reliant on the black vote. Then we get many stories about "dog whistles" and comments taken out of context and maximally uncharitable interpretations of any linguistic ambiguity, meanwhile the biggest actual reason Republicans don't much court black people is that they don't vote for them regardless, because Democrats will spend all day telling everyone they're nothing but racists no matter what they do.
Republican President signs criminal justice reform into law and then a cop commits murder in a city controlled by Democrats and it's the Republicans who are down in the polls.
I don't care about dog whistles. I do care that many Republicans have gone to great lengths to prevent black people from voting. That they have dressed up their racist disenfranchisement efforts with concerns about nonexistent problems impresses me not at all.
Of course Democrats are also implicated in another source of disenfranchisement, inadequate facilities provisioning and maintenance. Even on that topic, Republicans are more to blame in e.g. Wisconsin.
We hear this all the time too, but then you look and the black voter turnout in any given election is the highest or second highest of any racial group. So if there is some widespread conspiracy to suppress the black vote it apparently isn't very effective.
It's also doesn't seem reasonable to characterize asking for ineligible voters to be removed from the rolls as voter suppression. There is a consistent narrative that voter fraud doesn't happen, as if that's a result of nobody having any incentive to do it instead of a result of groups constantly fighting against it, as though we could just stop taking any measures to try to prevent it and there still wouldn't be any.
If a demand to remove ineligible voters is also removing eligible voters then the problem is the people processing the request removing eligible voters, not the people making the request to remove ineligible voters.
They're also being incredibly disingenuous in claiming that proposed measures to detect voter fraud are unneeded because we haven't detected much voter fraud -- as if you can justify not replacing a bad smoke detector because it isn't detecting smoke.
I'm sure you believe what you've written here, but that belief comes from prejudice (or perhaps more accurately a shortage of empathy) not from a clear view of the present. You even admit in your last paragraph that we have little credible evidence of widespread vote fraud. In that context, with tens of thousands of people kicked off the voter rolls, concentrated in areas with higher minority populations, then of course the effects of these efforts are racist. Do we not need "smoke detectors" in white communities?
> You even admit in your last paragraph that we have little credible evidence of widespread vote fraud.
But then where is the credible evidence of widespread black voter suppression? Shouldn't it be resulting in lower black voter turnout if it was actually prevalent? By the numbers we have a bigger problem with Asian voter suppression.
> Do we not need "smoke detectors" in white communities?
So go demand that ineligible voters be removed from the rolls in white communities. That's not an unreasonable request. Let the Republicans do it in the places that vote for Democrats and the Democrats do it in the places that vote for Republicans.
Voting rights are absolute. If Alice has lost her ability to vote, it doesn't help her to learn that lots of people who look like her or live near her have turned out this year. Maybe she doesn't share her neighbors' politics. (If we even believe this "minorities vote more" proposition for which you've provided no evidence.) It is a fact (click through the links provided above) that lots of voters have been kicked off the rolls in minority-majority communities. That would suppress votes, even if everyone who remained on the rolls voted.
So go demand that ineligible voters be removed from the rolls in white communities. That's not an unreasonable request.
First, that is absolutely an unreasonable request. We lead busy lives; when are we going to improve law enforcement in e.g. Kansas? Second, here you've given up the game entirely. Since a universal concern for vote fraud would also include a concern for vote fraud in one's own community, which concern you admit you don't have, your goal is thus not to curb fraud but rather to suppress votes in communities other than your own. You've now agreed with every accusation I've made. QED.
> Voting rights are absolute. If Alice has lost her ability to vote, it doesn't help her to learn that lots of people who look like her or live near her have turned out this year.
But it does provide evidence that there couldn't have been very many Alices.
> If we even believe this "minorities vote more" proposition for which you've provided no evidence.
The black voter turnout line is right next to the white voter turnout line and significantly above the other two:
And even that's underselling it because the black population is younger and, as you can see from the other graph on that page, younger populations vote less, so black voters are actually over-represented for their age groups.
> It is a fact (click through the links provided above) that lots of voters have been kicked off the rolls in minority-majority communities.
And so that's a problem. But the problem is election officials taking eligible voters off the rolls, not the request to remove ineligible voters.
> We lead busy lives
You don't do it personally, the Democratic party apparatus should do it.
> Since a universal concern for vote fraud would also include a concern for vote fraud in one's own community, which concern you admit you don't have, your goal is thus not to curb fraud but rather to suppress votes in communities other than your own.
You're missing the third option, which is that Republicans are concerned about actual voter fraud against Republicans. If a Democrat is registered in two districts because they moved and are still registered where they used to live, and then votes in both, Republicans have a legitimate interest in preventing that.
It's also voter fraud if a Republican does the same thing, but then it's the Democrats with a legitimate interest in preventing it. Which is why we have an adversarial court system. The interested parties each pursue their interests and that makes it harder for either of them to commit voter fraud.
Also notice how you wouldn't even expect to be able to detect this if nobody is ever reviewing the voter rolls. Bob votes twice because he's registered in two places and neither place sees it as an anomaly because he's a registered voter there.
You seem quite invested in the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Normal humans are not so invested. We don't care whether a particular face of the status quo party is elected; we just want our votes to lead to policies we support. This has been a rough year for that: during a health emergency Congress has given the rich trillions of dollars in nearly unanimous fashion but hasn't found a way to improve health care. One difference I see is that Republicans have built a national machine that has worked for decades to disenfranchise as many minorities as possible, and Democrats have only disenfranchised citizens through apathy and poor prioritization. Neither face of the status quo party owns my vote, and that may be why neither have any interest in policies that would appeal to me in any way. In any event, neither of them are going to "defend" my vote in the way you seem to imagine above. When only people who toe one of the two strikingly similar party lines are allowed to vote, we'll see even less innovation in government than we see now.
>Why are cities burning over "police murders" and not the War on Drugs or school choice?
Probably because it was the most visible and potent symbol of injustice.
If you're the underdog and you need some sympathy it's a little easier to get it by saying "please stop murdering me in my sleep when I've done nothing wrong" than "please stop putting me in jail just because I like to inject a bit of heroin".
In terms of your broader point, it's not like the two wings of the business party have ever represented the underdog.
When the society doesn't serve justice, people will implement "justice" with their own hands, with often bloody consequences. Thousands lost their heads during the French revolution: I'm sure many of them didn't deserve it. People died and lost their homes during the American Revolution, and during the Civil War: I'm sure many of them didn't deserve it, either.
I'm no big fan of the so-called "cancel culture", but justice is the only way I see that can rein it in.