11 ms·

Where'd they "tell us there is no risk from these protests"? The letter you linked explicitly advises us to "prepare for an increased number of infections in th

Where'd they "tell us there is no risk from these protests"? The letter you linked explicitly advises us to "prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest [and] provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests." They just seem to think protesting America's rampant institutionalized police brutality is more worthy than protesting the lockdowns themselves, and I can't say I disagree, but even if I did I wouldn't be able to say they're being inconsistent, because they aren't. They just haven't stuck their heads in the sand of relativism.

manfredo 6y ago
On average the police kill ~80 unarmed people each year, of any race [1]. By comparison, 40 million people are unemployed as a result of the pandemic and lockdown. Certainly, the impact of someone unjustly killed is vastly larger than that of someone laid off or furloughed. But is it 500,000 times greater? These are different issues. They aren't equivalent, but they're comparable at least. Pointing out the inconsistency here isn't "sticking one's head in the sand of relativism." 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
- Kevin_S 6y ago
  They are not only protesting the killing of unarmed black people, but all aspects of the structural bias of American police and the justice system against blacks. These biases affect much more than the extreme cases of the killing of unarmed black people.
- kadoban 6y ago
  There is _far_ more harm in unjust policing than is counted in deaths per year.
  - empthought 6y ago
    Same for coronavirus and for economic hardship.
    - vore 6y ago
      Who do you think the economic hardship of coronavirus affects the most? https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/865413079/what-do-coronavirus-racial-disparities-look-like-state-by-state https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/8654130...
  - wpietri 6y ago
    And far more harm than just one year's worth. We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The USA has had more than 240 years to fix that. If people are finding the timing of the current protest inconvenient, well, they've had their whole lives to fix the problem. They shouldn't blame the protesters for their own lack of action. I'll note that in 1964, people were calling civil rights protests "unwise and untimely". [1] Somehow it's never the right moment for justice. Anybody suggesting an indefinite delay should be aware that their arguments are indistinguishable from those of people for whom "later" actually means "never". If people really want to end these protests now, instead of arguing for delay they should quickly enact deep structural changes. [1]https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
    - zarathustreal 6y ago
      >We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The idea that 400 years of structural racism can be proven seems highly doubtful to me. Do you really have 400 years worth of evidence of literal outright racism? How can we hope to inspire change with rhetoric like this? This is the equivalent of simply screaming louder to get a point across. Highly ineffective unless annoying them into submission is your goal.
      - oh_sigh 6y ago
- statguy 6y ago
  Where are you getting 80 from? The link says 1,043 in the past year. Did you mean 80 per month?
  - manfredo 6y ago
    1,000+ includes all people killed by police, most of them armed. You need to filter for unarmed killings. Hover over "weapon" and click unarmed. It's 350 from 2015 to the present.
    - sdenton4 6y ago
      The time I was arrested at a protest, I was charged with carrying a sharpened stick (aka, protest sign). I didn't even have that, though... It was a lie in the report. The police regularly distort their reporting. There is no centralized collecting of police violence statistics, in large part because they have organized against the collection of those statistics. The 1,000+ number will be far less subject to manipulation. Here's some additional reporting. The 2014 Tampa Bay Times project to track police violence found 827 people shot in a year. In Florida alone. They spent a huge amount of effort on the reporting because the statistics were sometimes not collected and usually not trustworthy where they were. https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/f...
  - brent_noorda 6y ago
    They said 80 unarmed, meaning the rest of the 1043 were armed.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      another ~140 were armed with "toy weapons", such as the infamous shooting of Tamir Rice. But it's unclear whether that should go into the category of "unarmed" since this is still a threat perceived by police. Here is an image of Rice's toy gun: https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_DlhE=/1280x0/smart/advancelocal-adapter-image-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/image.cleveland.com/home/cleve-media/width2048/img/open_impact/photo/tamir-rice-toy-gunjpg-1a072b85ec91573c.jpg https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_Dlh...
- mannykannot 6y ago
  If these were random accidents, you might just have a point, but they are neither random, nor accidental in the cases in question.
calidreaming 6y ago
There are so many double standards occurring right now 1.) It's ok for BLM protests to be allowed, but not religious congregation or quarantine protests 2.) It's ok defund police in California or New York because a racist event took place in Minneapolis, a few thousand miles away, because it isn't racist. Nevermind the lower income minorities who live in high crime neighborhoods who do need police protections. 3.) It's not ok to criticize Chinese government for their role in the outbreak, hong kong, uighur, etc (because it's racist!). but it's always ok to criticize nazi Germany. 4.) It's ok to protest and destroy properties and livelihood of American small businesses, yet it's crickets when it comes to protesting against Chinese government.
- Anther 6y ago
  Sadly there are many such irregularities in today’s socially acceptable right think. A lot of logic is being replaced by emotion.
  - tootie 6y ago
    "Everyone is entitle to their opinions, but not their own facts" You absolutely positively cannot equate protesting against the murder of George Floyd and destroying 5G towers because they are spreading coronavirus. There absolutely is "right think" as much as there is "wrong think" on many topics. And a lot of these argument are pure straw men. Criticizing China is perfectly acceptable. Saying the engineered Coronavirus is stupid. Saying they are running a concentration camp for Uighurs is urgent and is openly discussed online and in the MSM. It is only being ignored by governments because they know they can't do anything about it. Absolutely no one was giving a free pass to looters. They were only upset when the president declared the BLM protests as antifa terrorists because he needed an excuse to attack. Donald Trump may have a first amendment right to his opinion, but citizens are obligated to call his bullshit. Especially when his opinions are factually unfounded and result the gross misuse of public resources.
    - gwright 6y ago
      > Especially when his opinions are factually unfounded and result the gross misuse of public resources. Factually unfounded? It is pretty clear that opportunists and provacateurs have used the legitimate protests as a shield for their illegal activities. Protection of property and safety of citizens is "gross misuse of public resources"? Do you think the people living above the stores being vandalized and lit on fire would agree with you? > Absolutely no one was giving a free pass to looters. I call shenanigans on this one. The mainstream press has downplayed the looting and violence very consistently conflating criticism of the illegal activities as criticism of the legitimate protests efforts. And there is a vocal minority of voices actually legitimizing the violent activities as an appropriate and necessary extension of the peaceful protests.
tw000001 6y ago
>>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission This post is pretty double speaky because these doctors can't quite come out and say stay home because the virus is still here and dangerous. So they say things which are self contradictory and therefore ultimately meaningless but allow themselves to signal their support for the cause. It's what happens when your institutions become explicitly partisan.
twblalock 6y ago
> They just seem to think protesting America's rampant institutionalized police brutality is more worthy than protesting the lockdowns themselves That can’t possibly be a valid scientific opinion on the basis of public health data — until recently the virus was killing more people per day than the police kill in an entire year. It’s a political opinion and this was a political letter. From now on, when public health experts give advice, we must all wonder if it is based on science, or if it is just political messaging which has no more claim to truth than any other political messaging. That’s dangerous ground to be on if you want science to be taken seriously by the public.
- vore 6y ago
  It is important to keep in mind that this is not about protesting just police brutality: police brutality is just one part of systemic inequality affecting POCs, especially black people, in the US. With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - philwelch 6y ago
    For instance, black Americans are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Protesting that “Black Lives Matter” during a pandemic that takes black lives seems self-defeating to me.
    - tuna-piano 6y ago
      It's unjust that black people are more affected by Covid! What are we going to do!? Gather in large groups while screaming in close proximity to each other!
- s3cur3 6y ago
  I don’t have a particularly strong opinion here either way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that all medical advice is (or at least should be) sensitive to the broader context of a person’s life. Consider: is it safe to take morphine? If I’m a healthy 20-something looking for escape, absolutely not. On the other hand, if I’m an 85 year old hospice patient, anything harm morphine causes is vastly outweighed by the good it does. It doesn’t seem an irresponsible or unprecedented extension of that principle to say that if your country is rocked by civil unrest, dealing with that is more important than preventing the spread of disease.
metrokoi 6y ago
>Where'd they "tell us there is no risk from these protests"? In this quotation: "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission". "As risky" seems like a very specific choice of words because they could have said "we do not condemn these gatherings because of the risk" but did not. Similar to how a judge might say "I condemn you to death" is designating the sentence of death to a subject, "condemning a gathering as risky" is designating the attribute of risk to a gathering. They do not condemn the gathering as risky, so they consciously decide to not designate or apply the attribute of risk to the gathering. Of course, it could have simply been a mistake to word the sentence in this way, but "as risky" does not seem like the obvious choice of words, "because of the risk" does. And yes, they do later go on to say to prepare for an increased number of infections and do recognize that protestors can and likely will spread the disease, but that just goes to show that the statement is contradicting itself. They are specifically being inconsistent in the earlier mentioned sentence.
- caconym_ 6y ago
  It's certainly not how I'd word it, but if you read the whole letter they clearly and unambiguously acknowledge and restate the risk. That's the beginning and end of it for me.

manfredo 6y ago

On average the police kill ~80 unarmed people each year, of any race [1]. By comparison, 40 million people are unemployed as a result of the pandemic and lockdown. Certainly, the impact of someone unjustly killed is vastly larger than that of someone laid off or furloughed. But is it 500,000 times greater? These are different issues. They aren't equivalent, but they're comparable at least. Pointing out the inconsistency here isn't "sticking one's head in the sand of relativism." 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Kevin_S 6y ago
They are not only protesting the killing of unarmed black people, but all aspects of the structural bias of American police and the justice system against blacks. These biases affect much more than the extreme cases of the killing of unarmed black people.
kadoban 6y ago
There is _far_ more harm in unjust policing than is counted in deaths per year.
- empthought 6y ago
  Same for coronavirus and for economic hardship.
  - vore 6y ago
    Who do you think the economic hardship of coronavirus affects the most? https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/865413079/what-do-coronavirus-racial-disparities-look-like-state-by-state https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/8654130...
- wpietri 6y ago
  And far more harm than just one year's worth. We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The USA has had more than 240 years to fix that. If people are finding the timing of the current protest inconvenient, well, they've had their whole lives to fix the problem. They shouldn't blame the protesters for their own lack of action. I'll note that in 1964, people were calling civil rights protests "unwise and untimely". [1] Somehow it's never the right moment for justice. Anybody suggesting an indefinite delay should be aware that their arguments are indistinguishable from those of people for whom "later" actually means "never". If people really want to end these protests now, instead of arguing for delay they should quickly enact deep structural changes. [1]https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
  - zarathustreal 6y ago
    >We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The idea that 400 years of structural racism can be proven seems highly doubtful to me. Do you really have 400 years worth of evidence of literal outright racism? How can we hope to inspire change with rhetoric like this? This is the equivalent of simply screaming louder to get a point across. Highly ineffective unless annoying them into submission is your goal.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
statguy 6y ago
Where are you getting 80 from? The link says 1,043 in the past year. Did you mean 80 per month?
- manfredo 6y ago
  1,000+ includes all people killed by police, most of them armed. You need to filter for unarmed killings. Hover over "weapon" and click unarmed. It's 350 from 2015 to the present.
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    The time I was arrested at a protest, I was charged with carrying a sharpened stick (aka, protest sign). I didn't even have that, though... It was a lie in the report. The police regularly distort their reporting. There is no centralized collecting of police violence statistics, in large part because they have organized against the collection of those statistics. The 1,000+ number will be far less subject to manipulation. Here's some additional reporting. The 2014 Tampa Bay Times project to track police violence found 827 people shot in a year. In Florida alone. They spent a huge amount of effort on the reporting because the statistics were sometimes not collected and usually not trustworthy where they were. https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/f...
- brent_noorda 6y ago
  They said 80 unarmed, meaning the rest of the 1043 were armed.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    another ~140 were armed with "toy weapons", such as the infamous shooting of Tamir Rice. But it's unclear whether that should go into the category of "unarmed" since this is still a threat perceived by police. Here is an image of Rice's toy gun: https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_DlhE=/1280x0/smart/advancelocal-adapter-image-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/image.cleveland.com/home/cleve-media/width2048/img/open_impact/photo/tamir-rice-toy-gunjpg-1a072b85ec91573c.jpg https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_Dlh...
mannykannot 6y ago
If these were random accidents, you might just have a point, but they are neither random, nor accidental in the cases in question.

calidreaming 6y ago

There are so many double standards occurring right now 1.) It's ok for BLM protests to be allowed, but not religious congregation or quarantine protests 2.) It's ok defund police in California or New York because a racist event took place in Minneapolis, a few thousand miles away, because it isn't racist. Nevermind the lower income minorities who live in high crime neighborhoods who do need police protections. 3.) It's not ok to criticize Chinese government for their role in the outbreak, hong kong, uighur, etc (because it's racist!). but it's always ok to criticize nazi Germany. 4.) It's ok to protest and destroy properties and livelihood of American small businesses, yet it's crickets when it comes to protesting against Chinese government.

Anther 6y ago
Sadly there are many such irregularities in today’s socially acceptable right think. A lot of logic is being replaced by emotion.
- tootie 6y ago
  "Everyone is entitle to their opinions, but not their own facts" You absolutely positively cannot equate protesting against the murder of George Floyd and destroying 5G towers because they are spreading coronavirus. There absolutely is "right think" as much as there is "wrong think" on many topics. And a lot of these argument are pure straw men. Criticizing China is perfectly acceptable. Saying the engineered Coronavirus is stupid. Saying they are running a concentration camp for Uighurs is urgent and is openly discussed online and in the MSM. It is only being ignored by governments because they know they can't do anything about it. Absolutely no one was giving a free pass to looters. They were only upset when the president declared the BLM protests as antifa terrorists because he needed an excuse to attack. Donald Trump may have a first amendment right to his opinion, but citizens are obligated to call his bullshit. Especially when his opinions are factually unfounded and result the gross misuse of public resources.
  - gwright 6y ago
    > Especially when his opinions are factually unfounded and result the gross misuse of public resources. Factually unfounded? It is pretty clear that opportunists and provacateurs have used the legitimate protests as a shield for their illegal activities. Protection of property and safety of citizens is "gross misuse of public resources"? Do you think the people living above the stores being vandalized and lit on fire would agree with you? > Absolutely no one was giving a free pass to looters. I call shenanigans on this one. The mainstream press has downplayed the looting and violence very consistently conflating criticism of the illegal activities as criticism of the legitimate protests efforts. And there is a vocal minority of voices actually legitimizing the violent activities as an appropriate and necessary extension of the peaceful protests.

tw000001 6y ago

>>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission This post is pretty double speaky because these doctors can't quite come out and say stay home because the virus is still here and dangerous. So they say things which are self contradictory and therefore ultimately meaningless but allow themselves to signal their support for the cause. It's what happens when your institutions become explicitly partisan.

twblalock 6y ago

> They just seem to think protesting America's rampant institutionalized police brutality is more worthy than protesting the lockdowns themselves That can’t possibly be a valid scientific opinion on the basis of public health data — until recently the virus was killing more people per day than the police kill in an entire year. It’s a political opinion and this was a political letter. From now on, when public health experts give advice, we must all wonder if it is based on science, or if it is just political messaging which has no more claim to truth than any other political messaging. That’s dangerous ground to be on if you want science to be taken seriously by the public.

vore 6y ago
It is important to keep in mind that this is not about protesting just police brutality: police brutality is just one part of systemic inequality affecting POCs, especially black people, in the US. With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- philwelch 6y ago
  For instance, black Americans are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Protesting that “Black Lives Matter” during a pandemic that takes black lives seems self-defeating to me.
  - tuna-piano 6y ago
    It's unjust that black people are more affected by Covid! What are we going to do!? Gather in large groups while screaming in close proximity to each other!
s3cur3 6y ago
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion here either way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that all medical advice is (or at least should be) sensitive to the broader context of a person’s life. Consider: is it safe to take morphine? If I’m a healthy 20-something looking for escape, absolutely not. On the other hand, if I’m an 85 year old hospice patient, anything harm morphine causes is vastly outweighed by the good it does. It doesn’t seem an irresponsible or unprecedented extension of that principle to say that if your country is rocked by civil unrest, dealing with that is more important than preventing the spread of disease.

metrokoi 6y ago

>Where'd they "tell us there is no risk from these protests"? In this quotation: "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission". "As risky" seems like a very specific choice of words because they could have said "we do not condemn these gatherings because of the risk" but did not. Similar to how a judge might say "I condemn you to death" is designating the sentence of death to a subject, "condemning a gathering as risky" is designating the attribute of risk to a gathering. They do not condemn the gathering as risky, so they consciously decide to not designate or apply the attribute of risk to the gathering. Of course, it could have simply been a mistake to word the sentence in this way, but "as risky" does not seem like the obvious choice of words, "because of the risk" does. And yes, they do later go on to say to prepare for an increased number of infections and do recognize that protestors can and likely will spread the disease, but that just goes to show that the statement is contradicting itself. They are specifically being inconsistent in the earlier mentioned sentence.

caconym_ 6y ago
It's certainly not how I'd word it, but if you read the whole letter they clearly and unambiguously acknowledge and restate the risk. That's the beginning and end of it for me.