5 ms·

I wish he'd gone a little further in condemning the rioting. It would have been the courageous thing to do. The rioting is a mistake. It will not change hearts

I wish he'd gone a little further in condemning the rioting. It would have been the courageous thing to do. The rioting is a mistake. It will not change hearts and minds. It will not undo the problems endemic to police forces. In fact, it may very well exacerbate them. The problematic archetype is the bigoted cop who's drunk with power and behaves more like an animal operating on instinct than a thinking human. These people, in the collective, are irrational, aggressive, and reactionary. They also hide behind authority and a convenient veneer in the "rule of law". We also are now seeing that there may be many of more of them (and many more enablers of them still) than we thought. And it is exactly these people who will feel vindicated and emboldened in the face of the rioting currently underway. If we're not careful, it may also give them a pretext to resort to even more horrible tactics in the future. Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'. The current trajectory is not the way. We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal.

glangdale 6y ago
Maybe with only a finite amount of attention at his disposal, he opted to focus on the cause of the rioting? I know there's a whole bunch of galaxy-brain takes on this about how counterproductive the rioting is, but it's not like cops have needed any pretext to resort to "more horrible tactics" already.
- realtalk_sp 6y ago
  Virtue signaling the obvious is a poor "return on attention", to borrow your way of looking at it. My point at the top was that it's the easy thing to do.
  - glangdale 6y ago
    Perhaps; it's not clear to me that making a statement of "the obvious" is necessarily an "easy" thing to do from the heights of corporate America. Incidentally, the overuse of "virtue signalling" to describe other people taking positions that they presumably sincerely believe in and wish to share with each other is incredibly snide, and if you don't want to come off like an asshole, you should stop. It's become one of those phrases that seems more like a pointless tribal "tic" (like "political correctness").
wpietri 6y ago
From reports across the country, it's definitely unclear who is responsible for most of the rioting. Some people are clearly outsiders, provocateurs. In other places, it's clear that the cops are the ones escalating and provoking. There's a fair bit of evidence that protest organizers worked hard to stop rioting. Moreover, I think focusing too much on the property destruction is missing the point. As MLK says, "Riot is the language of the unheard." White people have had a couple hundred years to "use the system of governance" to fix this. We haven't. I get why you'd want to call for patience, for peaceful pursuit through the law and courts. But you should read "A Call for Unity", an open letter 8 pastors wrote to MLK in 1963: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.tiu.edu/pluginfile.php/57183/mod_resource/content/1/StatementAndResponseKingBirmingham1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.ti... his response to this is the famous Letter From Birmingham Jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail Like you, the white pastors wanted patience, wanted people to trust the system to eventually provide justice. MLK eloquently explained why that was wrong. And little in the nearly 60 years since makes the case any more persuasive.
- realtalk_sp 6y ago
  I never said violent revolution isn't a possibly effective means of enacting political change. History in fact demonstrates that quite vividly. But violent revolution is also not, in the aggregate, a net benefit in the immediate term. Not even for black people. Believing otherwise represents a failure to anticipate 2nd/3rd order consequences and beyond. In the best case, you might experience a lot of suffering today to benefit people in the far future. I don't think we'll see that best case play out with the current rioting. We've been here before, many times (e.g. Rodney King). It doesn't work. Take a look at Hong Kong. They got rid of Carrie Lam and just a few days ago lost their special trading status with the United States. Stay tuned for more consequences. The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions (where do stereotypes come from? vivid, sticky ideas that trigger fear, like violent crime; where does violent crime come from? economic disenfranchisment) and the glacial pace of cultural change (relatedly, the 'hearts and minds problem'; sometimes you just need to wait for enough bigots to be better educated, achieve empathy by actually knowing black people personally, or die out).
klyrs 6y ago
Rioting is not a tactic, it's a pretty understandable reaction to powerlessness within the system, and also murderous violence from the system. There's no reason to condemn it.
happytoexplain 6y ago
>We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It is not working. People are being murdered by our government, and the murderers are not punished. There could not be a stronger argument against your position.
scarface74 6y ago
How did that whole peacefully kneeling thing work out? But yes rioting does change things. It forces people to pay attention. Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'. Because those types of things never happened in during the peaceful marches in the 60s... We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal. We don’t have that system at our disposal when the majority prioritizes the life of a fetus (or for that matter a dog) over the life of minorities.
- Taurenking 6y ago
  And that's why we as black people need to step up and get into those positions of governance with the help of good white people who are already benefitting from their privilege. We don't need more rappers, we need more politicians, doctors, engineers. People in positions of power so that the status quo can change. Until then nothing's going to change, and IMHO that would take more than a couple generations
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Politicians like the Black mayor who got the police called on him - in his own city? https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-mayor-in-his-own-city/ https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-ma... The Black doctor who got shot by a policeman while helping his patient? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey A title doesn’t give you power in America if you are a minority. You will still be seen as a threat. I live in the most affluent county in my state, and our household is above the median household income, my son and his (Black) friend still gets stares walking around unless they are hanging out with their larger group of White friends.

glangdale 6y ago

Maybe with only a finite amount of attention at his disposal, he opted to focus on the cause of the rioting? I know there's a whole bunch of galaxy-brain takes on this about how counterproductive the rioting is, but it's not like cops have needed any pretext to resort to "more horrible tactics" already.

realtalk_sp 6y ago
Virtue signaling the obvious is a poor "return on attention", to borrow your way of looking at it. My point at the top was that it's the easy thing to do.
- glangdale 6y ago
  Perhaps; it's not clear to me that making a statement of "the obvious" is necessarily an "easy" thing to do from the heights of corporate America. Incidentally, the overuse of "virtue signalling" to describe other people taking positions that they presumably sincerely believe in and wish to share with each other is incredibly snide, and if you don't want to come off like an asshole, you should stop. It's become one of those phrases that seems more like a pointless tribal "tic" (like "political correctness").

wpietri 6y ago

From reports across the country, it's definitely unclear who is responsible for most of the rioting. Some people are clearly outsiders, provocateurs. In other places, it's clear that the cops are the ones escalating and provoking. There's a fair bit of evidence that protest organizers worked hard to stop rioting. Moreover, I think focusing too much on the property destruction is missing the point. As MLK says, "Riot is the language of the unheard." White people have had a couple hundred years to "use the system of governance" to fix this. We haven't. I get why you'd want to call for patience, for peaceful pursuit through the law and courts. But you should read "A Call for Unity", an open letter 8 pastors wrote to MLK in 1963: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.tiu.edu/pluginfile.php/57183/mod_resource/content/1/StatementAndResponseKingBirmingham1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.ti... his response to this is the famous Letter From Birmingham Jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail Like you, the white pastors wanted patience, wanted people to trust the system to eventually provide justice. MLK eloquently explained why that was wrong. And little in the nearly 60 years since makes the case any more persuasive.

realtalk_sp 6y ago
I never said violent revolution isn't a possibly effective means of enacting political change. History in fact demonstrates that quite vividly. But violent revolution is also not, in the aggregate, a net benefit in the immediate term. Not even for black people. Believing otherwise represents a failure to anticipate 2nd/3rd order consequences and beyond. In the best case, you might experience a lot of suffering today to benefit people in the far future. I don't think we'll see that best case play out with the current rioting. We've been here before, many times (e.g. Rodney King). It doesn't work. Take a look at Hong Kong. They got rid of Carrie Lam and just a few days ago lost their special trading status with the United States. Stay tuned for more consequences. The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions (where do stereotypes come from? vivid, sticky ideas that trigger fear, like violent crime; where does violent crime come from? economic disenfranchisment) and the glacial pace of cultural change (relatedly, the 'hearts and minds problem'; sometimes you just need to wait for enough bigots to be better educated, achieve empathy by actually knowing black people personally, or die out).

klyrs 6y ago

Rioting is not a tactic, it's a pretty understandable reaction to powerlessness within the system, and also murderous violence from the system. There's no reason to condemn it.

happytoexplain 6y ago

>We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It is not working. People are being murdered by our government, and the murderers are not punished. There could not be a stronger argument against your position.

scarface74 6y ago

How did that whole peacefully kneeling thing work out? But yes rioting does change things. It forces people to pay attention. Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'. Because those types of things never happened in during the peaceful marches in the 60s... We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal. We don’t have that system at our disposal when the majority prioritizes the life of a fetus (or for that matter a dog) over the life of minorities.

Taurenking 6y ago
And that's why we as black people need to step up and get into those positions of governance with the help of good white people who are already benefitting from their privilege. We don't need more rappers, we need more politicians, doctors, engineers. People in positions of power so that the status quo can change. Until then nothing's going to change, and IMHO that would take more than a couple generations
- scarface74 6y ago
  Politicians like the Black mayor who got the police called on him - in his own city? https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-mayor-in-his-own-city/ https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-ma... The Black doctor who got shot by a policeman while helping his patient? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey A title doesn’t give you power in America if you are a minority. You will still be seen as a threat. I live in the most affluent county in my state, and our household is above the median household income, my son and his (Black) friend still gets stares walking around unless they are hanging out with their larger group of White friends.