Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What

Only some people actually believe that themselves, most of the signers are simply going along with the perceived group consensus. The false induction of outlying opinions into group consensus and especially perceived other-group consensus is one of the fundamental problems of social media amplification that we're dealing with.

Another example is the "terminology debate". Black Lives Matter is protesting deadly violence against Black people. Companies and opportunistic individuals engage with the topic for self-promotion via virtual gestures. And then the whole movement becomes easier to pigeonhole as ridiculous meddlers telling others they can't use various words.

Two sides of the same coin. They are the same as the highly vocal opposition who use the same tactics. These are people who can't think for themselves and are comfortable with herd mentality. They love the concept of teams and beating the other team is the only goal, even if it means murder. They are easily manipulated and social media has enabled these "teams" to get their tentacles right into the pocket of every person on this planet. And you wonder why we have a political cesspool.

> Am I alone on this, or do we really believe everyone that doesn't agree with one side is secretly just trying to bring back Jim Crow?

Watching a video of a black man being choked to death by a police officer, on camera, certainly makes me feel that we haven't completely eliminated Jim Crow.

> If people can gather in the tens of thousands with masks on for a cause, then why couldn't we celebrate July 4th with our masks on? Why does the state get to sponsor a political movement? How dangerous can this virus be if we're willing to allow mass protests, looting, and "autonomous" zones? All it can take is <1% of a crowd to pull down their masks to sneeze to spread the virus and kill more people.

Don't forget how people have to attend funerals via Zoom, but George Floyd had multiple indoor funerals with thousands attending in person for his golden casket!

> So racism has been killing more than the 130,430 people who have purportedly died from COVID-19 in the United States?

Well, yeah.

> Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate with approximately 1.2–2.4 million dying during the voyage and millions more died in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival to the New World. Millions of slaves also died as a result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.

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

> So racism has been killing more than the 130,430 people who have purportedly died from COVID-19 in the United States? I really doubt that, and I'm seeing why a lot of people don't take public health experts seriously anymore.

It's genuinely unclear to me why you think the quoted speaker is saying that racism is killing more people than COVID-19.

That quote says “killing people a lot longer” not “more than”.

I’m not a sociologist, but how would you measure the number of deaths caused by racism in a fair and unbiased way? I assume it’s something along the lines of the difference between disability-adjusted life expectancy of different ethnic groups, but even then you have a question of are things like poverty and education levels confounding variables or examples of systemic racism?

Likewise, are the healthy life years lost to genetic disorders like sickle-cell anaemia the fault of society for not treating them or the fault of the genes for being adapted to (in this case) malaria when there isn’t any malaria around to protect against?

And even if everyone agrees on the same answer to the above, the fact that racism hasn’t been constant over time makes it unclear what you are integrating over and when you are integrating between — The absolute racism since the Declaration of Independence or the estimated difference between actual history and a hypothetical counterfactual that nothing changed since the race-segregated toilets were drawn into the original design of the Pentagon?

I mean, if you count all the racism in post-Columbus Northern American history, you’d also have to count the literal genocide of how many native Americans tribes, and I’d also argue the slaves. I can even see a way the non-slave deaths during the American Civil War could count.

What I can’t see is a way to be totally clear in advance what the question is even supposed to answer. They’d all be true, but they’d mean different things. If I had to guess, these are all big numbers, but they vary by more than two orders of magnitude.

Like the saying says: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The american civil war killed 750,000. If covid-19 sticks around for 3 years like the spanish flu of 1918, we could reach that number.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up...

> How are everyday people supposed to interpret this?

I’m just gonna laser focus on this because I think this is the sentiment that the rest derives from. I don’t think most people are supposed to interpret this. It’s a complex multi-actor system with legal entanglements and public health issues at play. Decisions like this are made by teams of dozens with hundreds of years of collective experience. As a person who delegated through taxes to people with this experience, my job is to hear the advice, not to try to pick flaws towards a predetermined world view.

People haggle more with public health people than they would a roofer and I can damn right guarantee you that 99% of people know way more about roofing than these complex issues. The other 1% work in these government/ngo positions.

Don't forget that many of the anti-lockdown protests were also indoors.

Isn't that demonstrably wrong as well as a gross oversimplification? Freedom of assembly is not an absolute right; that would be absurd. No 1st amendment right is absolute.

Are you trying to argue that there are no legal exceptions to freedom of assembly? If so, try protesting in the middle of your nearest freeway without a permit and explain your stance to the police who'd show up to ask you to move along.

From the government’s perspective, maybe. People still need to decide whether they want to take on the risk of attending a protest, and they should be informed (by experts) when doing so.

Politics have become religion.

I suggest that you review the U.S. presidential election of 1800.

It would be interesting to see the drama of that event replay in our next election.

Our current partisanship would likely be far more destructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_presidentia...