Words to Remember

[Karha of Honor]

Oh I get it. I don't really remember anyone lionizing him save for that whole adultery business.

My respect for him grew after that. i don't look up to saints. I much prefer flesh and blood.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

He's not really condemning moderates that much as voicing personal disdain for them. It's like he's talking about incompetent coworkers almost.

He's talking about the people that when presented with injustice being brought to light would rather politically attack those that are showing injustice and restoring a previous status quo instead of working to fix the issue. I think a fine example of this are people that say BLM should stop acting like thugs and act like the Civil Rights Movement as BLM acts like the Civil Rights movement.

Except that one snippet about believing in one's cause but not the methods. Pretty much all opposition to BLM that I noticed were people dismissing the movement as an appropriation to disorder. I never got the sense that any of those people saw it as anything but a racist self-serving political agenda.

I remember people bringing up the Civil Rights Movement, but I thought that was more derivative of the issue. After things calmed down a bit, people stopped arguing this way or that and comparisons to the Civil Rights Movements were more detached and hindsight speculative.

[Draco Dracul]

He's not really condemning moderates that much as voicing personal disdain for them. It's like he's talking about incompetent coworkers almost.

He's talking about the people that when presented with injustice being brought to light would rather politically attack those that are showing injustice and restoring a previous status quo instead of working to fix the issue. I think a fine example of this are people that say BLM should stop acting like thugs and act like the Civil Rights Movement as BLM acts like the Civil Rights movement.

Except that one snippet about believing in one's cause but not the methods. Pretty much all opposition to BLM that I noticed were people dismissing the movement as an appropriation to disorder. I never got the sense that any of those people saw it as anything but a racist self-serving political agenda.

I remember people bringing up the Civil Rights Movement, but I thought that was more derivative of the issue. After things calmed down a bit, people stopped arguing this way or that and comparisons to the Civil Rights Movements were more detached and hindsight speculative.

The view of how the Civil Rights movement operated and how they were percieved at the time is distorted, at least in part to use as a cudgel against those that want to try to use their methods again:

[Darth Wedgius]

He's not really condemning moderates that much as voicing personal disdain for them. It's like he's talking about incompetent coworkers almost.

He's talking about the people that when presented with injustice being brought to light would rather politically attack those that are showing injustice and restoring a previous status quo instead of working to fix the issue. I think a fine example of this are people that say BLM should stop acting like thugs and act like the Civil Rights Movement as BLM acts like the Civil Rights movement.

Except that one snippet about believing in one's cause but not the methods. Pretty much all opposition to BLM that I noticed were people dismissing the movement as an appropriation to disorder. I never got the sense that any of those people saw it as anything but a racist self-serving political agenda.

I remember people bringing up the Civil Rights Movement, but I thought that was more derivative of the issue. After things calmed down a bit, people stopped arguing this way or that and comparisons to the Civil Rights Movements were more detached and hindsight speculative.

The criticism of BLM I saw and can remember fell into four categories:
(1) Claims that it was by its nature racist by only attributing value to black lives.
(2) Calls for violence, such as the murder of police.
(3) The demands made by BLM.
(4) BLM's reaction tot he Pulse nightclub shootings

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

He's not really condemning moderates that much as voicing personal disdain for them. It's like he's talking about incompetent coworkers almost.

He's talking about the people that when presented with injustice being brought to light would rather politically attack those that are showing injustice and restoring a previous status quo instead of working to fix the issue. I think a fine example of this are people that say BLM should stop acting like thugs and act like the Civil Rights Movement as BLM acts like the Civil Rights movement.

Except that one snippet about believing in one's cause but not the methods. Pretty much all opposition to BLM that I noticed were people dismissing the movement as an appropriation to disorder. I never got the sense that any of those people saw it as anything but a racist self-serving political agenda.

I remember people bringing up the Civil Rights Movement, but I thought that was more derivative of the issue. After things calmed down a bit, people stopped arguing this way or that and comparisons to the Civil Rights Movements were more detached and hindsight speculative.

The criticism of BLM I saw and can remember fell into four categories:
(1) Claims that it was by its nature racist by only attributing value to black lives.
(2) Calls for violence, such as the murder of police.
(3) The demands made by BLM.
(4) BLM's reaction tot he Pulse nightclub shootings

I agree, particularly about the first two. Not certain what the commotion was about the demands, but just from what I remember it mostly came from (1). Otherwise the African American community's agenda for awareness is seen as excessive by some types of people. And all I remember about the nightclub shooting was that the shooter was an Islamic extremist set out to punish homosexuals.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

He's not really condemning moderates that much as voicing personal disdain for them. It's like he's talking about incompetent coworkers almost.

He's talking about the people that when presented with injustice being brought to light would rather politically attack those that are showing injustice and restoring a previous status quo instead of working to fix the issue. I think a fine example of this are people that say BLM should stop acting like thugs and act like the Civil Rights Movement as BLM acts like the Civil Rights movement.

Except that one snippet about believing in one's cause but not the methods. Pretty much all opposition to BLM that I noticed were people dismissing the movement as an appropriation to disorder. I never got the sense that any of those people saw it as anything but a racist self-serving political agenda.

I remember people bringing up the Civil Rights Movement, but I thought that was more derivative of the issue. After things calmed down a bit, people stopped arguing this way or that and comparisons to the Civil Rights Movements were more detached and hindsight speculative.

The view of how the Civil Rights movement operated and how they were percieved at the time is distorted, at least in part to use as a cudgel against those that want to try to use their methods again:

That doesn't seem too unsimilar to the issue of BLM. Though this letter of his while he was in jail was addressing concerns of even the nonviolent aspects of his protests coming off as untimely and unnecessary. As he's talking about in the letter, he contrasts the appeal to negotiations by Christian and Jewish moderates with him going out of his way coming from Atlanta, collectivizing, then carrying out a planned demonstration in attempts to put economic pressure on the segregating businesses.

A similar moment in history comes to mind with NWA playing Fuck the Police at a concert in Texas despite the FBI warning of a pending arrest if they proceed to do so. Though being in more modern times, that actually was a concern of unrest provoked by the group, though coming even further to today and the situation might be handled differently by the government, if at all.

[G-Man]

Or perhaps the War on Drugs was started as a way to put dangerous criminals away. Violent crimes such as murder can be very hard to solve, as the best witness is dead (at least before the mid-90s or so when forensics managed to get ahold of DNA). And all sorts of crime against other people can be kept from punishment through intimidation of witnesses. But drug dealing tends to correlate with the most violent people, so punishing drug crimes harshly is a good way to get the most likely to be violent people off the streets. People tend to forget how much crime rates increased after ~1965, not going down again until the 1990s.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/usc ... nwards.png

This ignores the historical context. 1961-1972 is also a period that saw violent crime rates (see earlier link) increase 150% (158.1 per 100,000 to 401.0 per 100,000) and murders increase 84% (4.8 to 9.0 per 100,000).

That people would react by thinking that they had been "soft on crime" and deciding to go in the other direction seems a much more plausible explanation than that it was simply a desire to oppress black people.

I mean personally I think a least one factor in the drop in crime rates was that people were no longer being born to mothers that had been breathing in lead while pregnant nor growing up breathing lead filled air.

Quite possibly. And I am not saying that I know to what extent mass incarceration affected crime rates. Murder did not peak until 1981, 9 years after incarcerations started going back up, and did not really start decreasing sustainably until the mid-1990s. Violent crime peaked in 1991. Nonetheless, "lock 'em up" does seem to me to be the visceral reaction to exploding crime rates.

I would think that this reaction explains the War on Drugs and "Tough on Crime" in general much better than the idea that it was driven by racial resentment of blacks.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I've heard that one of Nixon's guys explicitly said that it was to suppress black movements.

[Admiral X]

The "war on drugs" was literally the only way the Federal Government could pander to the "Git Tough on Crime" crowd that was prevalent in the '70s. Drug related crimes was one of the few things that fell under their purview, as the majority of crimes fell under state or local jurisdictions. So basically it was political pandering that has turned into an industrial complex.

[Darth Wedgius]

I've heard that one of Nixon's guys explicitly said that it was to suppress black movements.

Maybe. It was a quote heard by one person, and then published after the alleged speaker was dead. That's evidence, but it's really not very good evidence.