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Do Black Lives Matter?

/ jconner927

This is perhaps the biggest topic of public discourse at the moment (with the possible exception of COVID-19). So, I ought to write about it. It is also a subject with highly charged emotions, so that writing about it invites angry or highly critical responses. Please be gentle.

First, in the spirit of this blog, let’s acknowledge some truth on the other side of most of what i will be writing. Blacks (i’m going to use that term here instead of ‘African-Americans’ since the term is used in ‘Black Lives Matter’) have indeed come a long way in America since the 1950s. We have the Civil Rights Act, school desegregation, affirmative action, blacks on the Supreme Court and in many lower level judicial seats, blacks who are wealthy, blacks in all the professions, blacks and whites living together in integrated neighborhoods, and the first black president. There are plenty of white people who have seen hard times, pulled prison time, been murdered, gone hungry. Plenty of homeless people are white. There are many, many black people who are better off financially than the whites who are the poorest.

Now that we have acknowledged those things, let’s also acknowledge that all of those things merely describe black people catching up, partially, with white people in some ways. Nothing more.

Black Lives Matter arose at least in part from videotaped killings of black people by police. There was huge institutional resistance to doing anything about those killings, to bringing the cops to justice, always some excuse. It seemed like the loss of black life just did not matter to the people whose decisions matter. Hence, a movement arose to say clearly and loudly that black lives do matter.

Many people have trouble seeing how anyone could be against a movement that simply says Black Lives Matter. If you have a reason to be against the idea that Black Lives Matter, please write a comment below explaining, without insults or crude language, why.

But, don’t all lives matter? Of course they do.

Here are some reasons there is legitimacy to saying Black Lives Matter, instead of the just the obvious truth that all lives matter. These are not all the reasons.

  • Slavery, in which people were kidnapped by force from their homes–men, women, and children–forced into the cargo holds of sailing ships where many died, transported to America where they were sold like cattle and were beaten, raped, and worked at the master’s pleasure. This went on for more than 300 years. For longer than there has been a USA.
  • Jim Crow, in which black people were treated as inferior and prohibited from having schooling, homes, jobs, or peace like white people. These were not just racist practices by a few bad people. These were the laws. These laws were in force until 1965, well after many people living today were born.
  • Murderous race riots by white people whenever black people were able to put together some money and power. The two with which i am familiar from reading are Wilmington NC and Tulsa OK. In these events, organized white supremacists overthrew duly elected governments that included black elected leaders, murdered black people, chased others out of town, burned down the offices of black-owned newspapers and other atrocities. Wikipedia has decent articles on these. For depth, i would recommend Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, edited by David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson.
  • A long history of racial terrorism organizations in the United States. Some are well known, by name at least, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). But there are many other. Wikipedia has articles on 62 different groups. These groups are not a thing of the past. They are alive and well.
  • Membership by cops, including officers, in racist groups. The true depth of this cannot be known, because these groups attempt to keep membership secret. But this passage from justsecurity.com gives a bit of the flavor of it: “The Plain View Project, a database of public Facebook comments made by nearly 2,900 current and former police officers in eight cities, suggested that nearly 1 in 5 of the current officers identified in the study made public posts or comments that appear “to endorse violence, racism and bigotry,” as reported by Buzzfeed News and Injustice Watch in a study of the database. For example, there are 1269 identified problematic posts from active duty Philadelphia police officers on the site. Of the 1073 Philadelphia police officers identified by the Plain View Project, 327 of them posted public content endorsing violence, racism and bigotry. Of those 327, at least 64 hold leadership roles within the force, serving as corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, or inspectors.” https://www.justsecurity.org/70507/white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-forces-fact-checking-national-security-advisor-obrien/ as of June 28, 2020.
  • And, of course, the police killings of black people. Killing we never see of white people by the police.

So, does it not seem reasonable to want to shout “Black Lives Matter!” ? Even if you do not want to join in that movement, can you think of a good reason to oppose it?

It ain’t about being smart.

/ jconner927

I am really tired of liberals and lefties posting and writing about how stupid Trump is, or how stupid the right wingers or conservatives are.

Or, more recently, and more intelligently, a high IQ Libertarian friend in responding to the latest intelligent conservative (George Will) severely criticizing Trump and the elected officials who support him, saying “The right has fractured cleanly along IQ lines.”

There are three things wrong with this analysis. First, neither Trump nor his supporters are uniformly low IQ. And, aside from pure IQ, they are clearly very intelligent with regard to how to get and maintain money and power. So, it’s not true that they are stupid.

Second, it is lousy strategy for folks who want to remove Trump and those like him from power to yack about their stupidity. Half the people in the country have below average IQs, by definition. Many, if not all, of those folks have been told they are stupid–as children in school and perhaps also as adults. It is a wound, a felt inadequacy. At the same time, those folks, despite those insults, really feel that they are smart and that they get things the pointy heads do not get. (Check out the first verse of Todd Snider’s “Statistician’s Blues” on this subject). So when a group that is roundly criticized for being stupid (Trump’s cadre) rises ‘above’ it all and gets power, that is a beacon for that large group of Americans to feel vindicated and to get behind someone who understands them and wants them and seems to be in some important way, like them.

Third, and most important, it is simply beside the point. The problem with Trump, and the danger of Trump, is not about IQ, or hand size, or skin tone, or silly hair. The problem is lack of integrity and principles. Immorality. Complete lack of appreciation for the principles of democracy (for example, that we need the press, not matter how obnoxious they seem to the powerful, to balance that power, to critique it, and to keep the rest of us informed; that there are three branches of government that were built by our founders as a system of checks and balances, etc.).

Trump and his people did not tear gas peaceful protesters in a church yard–including one of the ministers of that church–so that Trump could get a ‘religious’ photo op because they are stupid. They did it because they are immoral, because they have no principles as we generally understand that term (is it a ‘principle’ to stand for nothing but money and power?). Trump does not rail against the free press, calling it the ‘enemy of the people’, because he is stupid. He does it because his immoral calculus tells him that he can push his followers away from the press. If he keeps them away from the press, he keeps them away from valid criticism of his policies and thereby keep them enthralled. He does it with an evil intelligence; his tactics work. They are against everything this country stands for. But they work.

So let’s work, whether we are conservative, liberal, or leftie, to remove Trump and his sycophants from office and replace them with people who have integrity and intend to uphold the principles of democracy.

And stop worrying about, and talking about, who is “stupid”.

Making Sense of COVID-19. Prologue.

/ jconner927

PLEASE NOTE: I wrote this post March 29, 2020. I did not post it until the date shown above, because i wanted to have several posts ready before going live and, well, i am just getting started with this blog and work, family and other things got in the way. But, please be kind–this was not written with the perspective that we have now, two months further in.

The COVID-19 pandemic is happening as I write. It has been happening for some months now.

I see social media posts ranging from railing against people who dare to leave their homes–one FB friend offering to drive around shooting those who leave their homes–to advising folks that this is just a hoax–by the Dems, the Russians, the Chinese, take your pick. News coverage tends to be breathless and designed to scare people.

So, let’s start out with some simple reality checks:

  • COVID-19, the novel corona virus, is real. Not a hoax.
  • People are getting sick all over the world, some very sick, and some are dying
  • The numbers are large in some areas
  • Hospitals are not equipped to deal with such an influx of patients in severe respiratory distress. They do not have enough ventilators, for one thing. Without ventilators, they cannot keep the sickest patients alive long enough for the patients to recover.
  • It is critical that we slow the spread of the virus by social distancing, hand washing, and staying in place. This does two related things: it spreads the new cases over a longer period of time (see discussion below), and because there are fewer new cases than there would be if we had done nothing, it gives hospitals a chance to catch up by buying more ventilators, masks, gloves and other necessities.
  • However, because of these efforts, and because the virus started in one place and needed time to spread to other places, the number of people who have died from COVID-19 is insignificant SO FAR when compared to the total number of worldwide deaths. In 2017, the last year with readily available figures, 56 million people died. Assuming similar figures for 2020, while the current COVID-19 death toll of 33,908 was occurring, 14,000,000 people died of other things. Math says COVID-19 deaths were 0.2 per cent of total worldwide deaths in the first three months of 2020.
  • Does that mean COVID-19 is itself insignificant? That the worry is just a result of media hype? No. Absolutely not. Deaths are indeed increasing every day, due mostly to geographic spread and local transmission. On March 28, 2020, the worldwide deaths were 3,508. On average, 153,424 people die worldwide every day, so the COVID-19 percentage of that total has already increased to 2.3 percent on the worst individual day so far, ten times the overall share during these past three months.
  • In sum, COVID-19 is NOT at this time the apocalypse nor a horror story. It is, so far, a tiny sliver of worldwide deaths. It IS, however, a new, widespread infectious disease that carries building and increasing danger.

Next: putting COVID-19 risks, deaths, and economic impacts into perspective

Then: what happens longer term?