I’ve found that most people I speak to can’t accept that most issues are complex shades of gray. It’s all our team or their team based on whatever news channel they subscribe to. No one takes time to dig below the surface and think for themselves.
>"Do you think it's alright that police are getting killed?"
> "Well, let's think about the details, as the situation can be complex or even gray..."
You might say this is a stupid and sparse example, but well, let's think about it... for many people instinctual morality is their primary way of relating to the world. If you suggest you have an intellectual and distinctive approach to morality, what does that mean? Does that moral distinction mean moral superiority, arrogance, or moral alienation?
- could it have been prevented? At what cost?
- what are the other options? I wish, but often the alternative to people suffering is even more people suffering
- once the shit happened, how do we mitigate the situation?
They are 'well-actually'-ing your question, which proves that they don't have don't have an instinctive 'of course it is wrong that police are being killed' reaction, which now eliminates credibility with the group they're hoping to influence.
I think MLK would have said "of course it's not alright that police are getting killed." He would have followed up with a salient point about police brutality, of course.
What’s best for me? What’s best for my family? What’s best for my community? What’s best for my country? What’s best for the planet?
Often these questions have contradicting answers. However once I think through them, I can at least begin to structure an opinion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_poli...
It's simply impossible to be definitive with incomplete information, reductionist and I can't see the merit in basing a position in the presumption that all actions are of the whole.
A self identifying Christian who kills people in the name of Christianity is vocally condemned by other self identifying Christians and many would rush to say that they were mentally ill.
If BLM wants to not be lumped in with extremists then supporters of Black Lives Matter need to vocally and unequivocally condemn extremist and their acts that do not align with a supporter’s views of the group’s objectives. I have never seen a BLM supporter credibly call Micah Xavier Johnson mentally ill or an extremist. Extremist actions by BLM supporters are never condemned but rather excused by pointing to police brutality or institutional racism as being the root cause of the bad actor’s actions. While external forces may shape an extremist, it is the extremist who pulls the trigger. Personal responsibility means something and if the group won’t cast out the extremist then the group condones the actions.
Additionally, there is a key problem with your analogy: Christianity does not purport to be an organic, grass roots, and headless organization. Christianity flows from the church and it has a defined organization. It has spokespeople. It has explicit leadership.
The key problem you highlight with my analogy is not quite correct (although most if not all analogies have some flaws). There are various attempts at organisation and leadership in the Church, but there are also thousands of splits, sub-groups and even violence that has not always been universally condemned (such as in Northern Ireland where I'm from), as well as sanctioned in the Crusades.
An organisation that can have condemned violence while having encouraged crusades, and have members like the IRA does certainly seem like the kind of varied decentralised (or at least multi-centred) organisation that can have internally conflicting beliefs yet frequently be considered as a single entity externally. That was more my point. If you think BLM isn't a broad church, my guess is you don't know that many BLM supporters? My experience has been that a wide range of people support BLM, and most of them do not support murderous rampages, even if they can comprehend why the anger that manifested might have existed in the first place.
My experience in Northern Ireland also makes me extremely cautious about the mistake of retaliatory violence, but anyway. I'm still unconvinced that you could call BLM a singular organisations with all actions done by association attributable directly to it.
I do know many Black Lives Matter supporters. I also know that many of them no longer support BLM (note that I put BLM, not Black Lives Matter) because the movement has been co-opted by extremists. The second group includes me. While your experience may be distinct and real to you, I urge you to consider the impact that extremists have on the overall movement and how continuing to try to split hairs about who is and who is not a member of BLM while not vocally condemning and ostracizing extremists from what you view as the movement galvanizes not just BLM opponents but also neutral parties who agree with Black Lives Matter. Actions have consequences.
I'm certainly not sure everyone who has funded BLM the organisation fully agrees or understands the difference either!
Thanks for clarifying what you mean.
> "I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight" crowd cheers
I'm not naïve to movements being co-opted. I have witnessed that first hand numerous times.
I mean, isn't this literally because you didn't do a Google search? https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/dall...
I worry you are letting your philosophy shape your reality. It happens to us all. No judgement. I would just urge you to reconsider whether you have factual data to support your argument.
Also this is true in reverse with people seeking to group people who are not actually acting as groups.
That kind of deliberate distortion only makes it harder to comprehend what is really happening often, but there's still a burden of proof.
Obviously organised criminals have been attempting to hide coordinated activity for the longest time too, I understand that bad actors exist who seek to pretend actions are not coordinated. But again, there are times when members of such organisations commit crimes off their own backs, which were not part of any conspiracy.
As numerous people have stated, it's not clear-cut. I support Black Lives Matter and protests supporting them; I also condemn rioting and property destruction, as I think it hurts the cause and innocent bystanders (like small business owners). I'm in favor of having a police department, however I think policing in America is fundamentally unjust and needs serious reform.
There will always be murder, unfortunately, just as there will always be dingalings from all points of the political spectrum running around telling people in public spaces “You can't film here!” We have to condemn those actions regardless of whether it's coming from someone whose political ideology we agree with.
But if BLM is not responsible, then it does poke holes in the ACAB and maybe even "Defund the Police" positions. If protestors can dissociate from rogue actors, can police? If not, what's the clear difference beyond political tribalism?
There has always been police violence, but what cell phones have done is reveal how widespread it may have always been, rejecting the rouge actor narrative.
Have we seen anything in particular that strongly suggests the Dallas shooting was not a rogue agent?
I would expect some similar test to be applied to BLM. Is the person who shoot up people talked about positively and promoted as role model to BLM fans? Is that person instead pushed away?
Imo, it is actions of leadership and generally of culture of the organization that determines whether dissociation from bad member is real or an not real. E.g. whether member is rogue or standard.
But this is a thread about BLM, so I'm bringing up an issue related to that.
For a personal take, I avoid any tribe where I see this forgetfullness and will point it out. This behaviour is gaslighting and can be a traumatic experience
People generally don't want to go into the conflict. But when they are cornered they begin so seek cover within their flock.
So when an average Joe is told that silence is violence and he is guilty beyond any repair just because he's drinking beer in his backyard instead of fighting for the good cause, the Joe becomes defensive. And since he's not a master of rhetorics, he just takes the "fuck you all" attitude and goes back to his beer - now all wound up and grumpy.
EDIT: punctuation fixes
A wonderful thing about nuance is that this is often ok.
Sometimes, their actual earlier position and new position are consistent. But will anyone listen if they try to explain why? Usually not.
My own speculation on that. Shades of gray take effort to understand, and may not have clean simple answers. People may be too lazy, or not confident in dealing with complexity, or not smart enough, or something else so they refuse to engage with it. What I find odd is that so many who avoid the subtlety and complexity are really eager to tout their lame one-sided opinions, even as the world is falling apart and demands better than that... or maybe because its falling apart?
Most people remember the winners and losers of history, but many don’t dig into the nuance of it for various reasons. It’s easier for those who support the winners to ignore the finer details because said winners aren’t perfect.
Abraham Lincoln is a perfect example of this. While he was instrumental in freeing the slaves, he also believed that they were not as intellectually capable as whites and made that pretty clear in some of his speeches. One could argue that his position was the more progressive of his time, but still falls very, very short of what we consider to be acceptable thinking today.
There’s always shades of gray in history. Every good president did things that many would find appalling. Most movies depict very clear good and evil, and we enjoy them because they’re easy to consume.
That’s why some people say “it’s all gray” and right wingers try to pull it into “there is crime and innocence with a clear line in between, there is male and female, there is good and bad.” Right wing also tries to show the end-game, which passes as complete nutcrack conspiracy theory (remember the supposed “grand remplacement” in Europe), until one day: “We (Muslims) are more numerous than Christians, leave the country if you don’t like it” (again, not fantasizing here, it’s a real speech from this week in Lyon) or more clearly: “Whites, this dirty race” (chapter president of a student union, Lille, France).
I tend to view ideologies as evolutionary: Those that survived today win by either being extremely complex and good at being insidious, others win by being simple and blunt. But what we’d all like is, no ideology. Which is difficult when 1/3 of the world would happily fund billions to destroy America.
American politics is more just crony wealth transfers to vying corporate factions. We’re all victims to an undefined enemy but we’re fighting ourselves.
I think what has been slowly changing and coming to a head is that the checks and balances in the American system have been eroded and calcified. When everything is all or nothing and mechanisms for compromise stop being used (i.e. legislation, policy diversity across states), then everything is a Big Deal.