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Comment by cfltlayoffs | Hacker News Reader

This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.

Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.

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If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.

imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho

> People don’t try to fake having low cultural status.

They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.

Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?

That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.

> it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore

The very opposite.

I don't think it's a "no-true-scotsman" to say that they would need to support the core goals of the movement in a meaningful way.

"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski

Based and Ted-pilled

Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).

It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.

I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.

I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear. It very much feels like they cut policing in the name of black Americans and then lost interest when policing drove up crime rates, particularly in black communities.

> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).

That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.

> killings by police are way down

[citation needed]

> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.

You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

> [citation needed]

Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097

> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.

This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.

Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.

Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.

Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.

Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”

Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.

Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.

These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.

Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.

The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.

This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.

If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.

edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.

Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.

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