06-08-2020, 10:28 PM
(06-08-2020, 08:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(06-08-2020, 09:42 AM)Camz Wrote: I had a cringy phase back in 6th grade where I agreed that all lives mattered and BLM wasn't as big of a deal as people made it out to be.
I'm so glad I've grown since then.
Where "grown" means you've conformed to what you're told, yes.
If the burning house analogy were to hold, an appropriate phrase would be, "black lives matter too". The left, however, rejects that, making it clear they want to movement to stand for black lives being the only ones that matter.
BLM is a political weapon, not a mechanism to help blacks. People who really care about black lives worry more about the tens of thousands of blacks that are murdered in the inner cities due to inadequate policing more than the few that are directly killed by police.
It is easy to think that the answer to cities that are riddled with crime is more police. Even I might have thought so. But New Orleans and Detroit, I have heard today, are reducing crime by bringing back the programs slashed by Reaganomics.
Under Bill Clinton, 100,000 more police were hired. That was a big deal for him. I don't know if that was why, but crime was reduced as the millennial generation came of age. That infusion of police and prisons, so that we have by far more people in prison than any country, is adequate enough. What is inadequate is asking the police to do all the work that used to be done by social services before Reaganomics cut them all to satisfy the neo-liberal, free-market, social-darwinist, trickle-down economics ideology that says government is the problem and that taxes are theft from what people earn it in order to create dependency and welfare cheats. That ideology was also veiled racism, as well as tempting libertarian pablum. Guys like you fell for it, and that's why we have the problems we have today.
"Black Lives Matter" is the slogan because the police and other authorities do not believe that black lives matter, so people need to say so. "Black Lives Matter too" would be fine, but the 3 words is a more compelling slogan in this case.
Murders and other crimes in inner cities is a problem. The problem now is not that there isn't enough policing. Maybe it never was. There are too many guns. There is too much poverty, and not enough education or social services. There is way too much racial profiling and fear of blacks by police, and too much reliance on prisons and punishment to solve family and medical problems. There is the drug war, which only makes drug addition a profitable underground business.