heterodoxxed

The vast majority of Americans understand that Black Lives Matter is an inclusive statement, not an exclusive one.

Those who make hay out of the name and have ignored the movement itself for almost a decade now are a small, ineffective minority.

The largest civil rights protest movement in American history doesn't need to spend its time focus-grouping and hand-wringing about people like that.

The reason we just had the largest civil rights protests in American history this summer has as much or more to do with the everyday experience with the police as it does the extraordinary events such as deaths. Deaths were the spark, not the fuel.

The grinding oppression of every day life in terms of policing has been shown in study after study. It is disproportionately felt by black people, mostly men, but it has been steadily expanding to all demographics for decades now.

| Plenty of poor and middle class whites

Yeah and a lot of poor and middle class white people were out supporting the protests because of their own experiences too.

Daniel Shaver's death is not argument against BLM's goals, it's an argument in favor of them.

| neomarxism

Well at least you dropped the laughably contradictory post-modern part.

| Far left activism abandoned in the practice most worker issues

No it didn't. The people you're talking about are not far left.

| farm votes strategically.

If you think the far left would construct their entire strategy around electoralism, you are miseducated.

| influenced by far left activism

If that were even remotely true, they would be supporting unions.

You're right, it is social conditioning; like a warm December in Australia.

And we're sure that this is statistically different than any other period of time and that the policies of the DA are behind it?

Despite this being Hacker News, I see a lot of people here reacting to sensationalist single data points and not a whole lot of discussion about trends on this issue.

Sex work and pugilism I think can be strongly equated. Both involve using ones body and adult consent. One for sex, the other for violence.

We don't outlaw boxing or MMA. But we put regulations on it. We shut down illegal basement fights. And we hope people going into it aren't coerced and have recourse if something goes wrong. We accept that if an adult wants to get punched in the face for money that's something society can accommodate with reasonable expectations.

But there's no world where we would see a boss getting in the ring with his employees to fight for money as something acceptable.

| I bet there's a cottage industry of porn

There is. But like with all markets, it's more expensive and will always have less mass appeal than the lowest common denominator. That downward pressure is felt in that industry just like in all others.

| Fiction drives home unrealistic standards or extremes.

Strongly depends on the fiction.

500 Days of Summer or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance.

Exactly.

"I tried to help some cancer patients by giving them jobs and the occasional free meal, but a lot of them just ended up dying of cancer anyways."

The day America stops treating addiction as an individual moral failing and starts treating it as a lifelong disease and a collective social failing is the day we finally start to address these issues.

The US model only seems better because we're much, much wealthier than India. If you compare our model with other first world countries, it's a different story.

In fact, some of the countries with the best education outcomes outlaw private schools entirely. This forces the wealthy to send their children to public schools, which means they become powerful advocates for improving the education of ALL students.

What is the American Dream? The ability to work hard and be rewarded.

That dream has a name and it is class/social mobility. That's something we can measure and the US does not come out well in that measurement.

There are many countries that are much better for class/social mobility than the US. We may be better than the poor (often exploited third world) country that immigrants come here from, but we are not the best by far.

We're not even in the top 20. The World Economic Forum puts us at 27, between Lithuania and Spain.

http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...

40 years ago, Finland was a backwater nothing of a country and by actual investing in their children and education and teachers equally across the board, they went from that backwater to #1 in education.

We in the US have never even tried that for anyone but our wealthiest, let alone our poorest.

If we took this problem seriously on a federal level, and put all our options on the table, we absolutely could fix it.

| works three jobs.

I wonder why.

| some might even get hired as teachers

What? How would you extrapolate that? The university system, for all its flaws, is very different from public high schools in a poor city.

| But those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Ha! Right back atcha, kid.

| people who haven't been displaced?

Displacement far enough that they are outside of the local political jurisdiction is specific to there. In places like Peoria, it's just further economic immiseration within Peoria. Most of America is not being gentrified, rents are just rising. There's a difference.

| (a) there isn't much evidence for

There is plenty of evidence for that. You might just have a recency bias.

| negates your earlier argument about assuming rational actors

I don't put people mobilizing into the ideological framework of "the market". I don't put much faith into the ideological framework of markets generally. I find it only slightly more useful of a tool of understanding social forces than, say, astrology.

Importantly, I'm not talking about what will happen by virtue of some outside force or guarantee of history. I'm talking about we need to make happen by force of will.

| after all, they're still here!

This is a very SFBA thing to say.

| Look who overwhelmingly applies pressure

Yeah, I'm not talking about those people.

Poor and working people have mobilized plenty of times before. That's been constant throughout modern history and only in the past few decades have we had an ahistorical low period of organizing activity. I expect that lull to end in the coming years. In many ways it already has.

| a bunch of individuals the system serves well-enough

Again, are you talking about SFBA? Because I thought we addressed that.

| the less sense of individual agency we give ourselves

In aggregate, the population is at the mercy of material forces. Turning a social problem into an individual moral failing has never managed to solve anything at scale.

Imagine how different social media would look if it were subscription based and required much, much less investment and revenue could grow linearly with the userbase.

The incentive of an ad-supported, vc-funded social media is to addict you.

The incentive of a subscription service is to be useful enough that you stay subscribed. If you log in once a week but never cancel, that's the ideal situation for a subscription service.

What I wrestle with is whether consumers will ever accept a small subscription fee (and I mean VERY small) after they've been given everything for free, even if it meant less psychological manipulation, no ads and strong privacy.

It seems to me that it's a speculative investment for almost everyone, because the case for anything else is extraordinarily weak. And the case for it as a speculative investment is based on the other cases.

I'm of the mind that markets may be rational *given* (and here's the key) a long enough time period.

However, human needs have an expiration date and often cannot wait for the market to make sense.

| That assumes rational actors in local government

No it doesn't, if you can build enough power you can force local governments to enact these kinds of reforms.

All politicians can be pressured if you know where to push.

So is it a speculative investment or is it a currency or is it a groundbreaking technology with uses apart from either?

What use is a deflationary distributed ledger to anyone? We've had 12 years of Bitcoin and no killer app for a reason. It's simply not a useful technology.

That assumes the market is rational and the actors within are rational.

That seems extremely niche.

But I was asking how much you specifically spend per month in this way.

Both are bad. Log off.

| people aren't really making the rent control argument about Peoria, IL.

We are more than you think. Rising rents due to speculation or just plain landlord greed have become an issue country-wide. Even in places like Peoria. Especially in relation to stagnant wages.

I advocate a combination of strong rent control, aggressively subsidized housing and consistent growth (especially vertically) where possible.