I intend to share this with the people teaching my kids, along with my neighbors, friends and church members, here in our affluent, woke, educated, solid blue-state community, where everyone has a BLM sign on the property, but their kids won't play with the poor kids on the other side of town. This is the crucial passage I want them to h…
I intend to share this with the people teaching my kids, along with my neighbors, friends and church members, here in our affluent, woke, educated, solid blue-state community, where everyone has a BLM sign on the property, but their kids won't play with the poor kids on the other side of town. This is the crucial passage I want them to hear:
"It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
Still, progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them."
(And by the way, Harry and Meghan, you two need to hear it as well.)
I think this passage applies to the neo-liberal left far more than it does to the actual left. All of these articles that Persuasion publishes pushing back against wokeness (and there are so many of them that it makes me wonder if this magazine has any other intellectual curiosity), seem to group the neo-libs in with actual socialists, communists, marxists, etc. They never make distinctions between Black Marxism and Marxism as a class analysis. The actual leftists I’ve encountered - Michael Brooks, Adolph Reed, Ben Burgis, Noam Chomsky, etc. - reject wokeness, but they get no attention from Persuasion or other critics of wokeness.
To add to that, conflating BLM with CRT is disingenuous. BLM is a movement to radically reform, or in some people’s opinion abolish, policing in this country. These actual policy proposal seems to get completely ignored in conversations like these. Your neighbors who have BLM signs in their yard probably do so because they actually want police to stop murdering black people, and BLM is the ONLY movement who is addressing that problem. Could they do more and support politicians who support these policy proposals? Probably yes. But articles like this, and others on persuasion, never seem to acknowledge that BLM and CRT are two different things and can co-exist without destroying American ideals like freedom, equality and democracy.
Tim, some of your criticism is legit, but as someone who reads Persuasion often they take on many subjects. Probably only 20% of their catalog is about woke topics. And I think the publishers understand quite well the toll of inequality. They are filling a rare role of taking on these issues as opposed to the big media outlets and so perhaps they devote more time to them because no one else is really. Take a look!
HI Tim, Are you familiar with database in Washington Post of police shootings of unarmed people, including black people? Make an estimate of number shot, then take a look.
"The ongoing Post project has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI. Of those killed, 231, or 7 percent, were not armed with guns, knives or other objects that could be used as weapons at the time of the shootings, according to the data.
A review of the shootings of unarmed people shows that officers were reported to be under physical attack in about 40 percent of the cases. The remaining 60 percent involved a variety of circumstances, including individuals’ making provocative movements or verbal threats (31 percent) or fleeing, or being shot unintentionally or in undetermined circumstances, according to a review of news reports and video of the incidents. The news accounts cited in the Post database are typically summaries based on information provided by police at the time of each event."
Go to the part called "Search the Database" toward the bottom and there are filters.
For example, I see that in 2020, 39 unarmed men and 4 women were shot and killed by the police. Of these, 17 listed as black, 16 White, 5 Hispanic. No specific Asians. Several not classified.
6,129 fatally shot in total in 2020. So, under 1% unarmed.
BTW, there is another database which is more comprehensive than only shootings...includes other methods. I can't seem to google right search string, so maybe another reader is familiar with it.
I intend to share this with the people teaching my kids, along with my neighbors, friends and church members, here in our affluent, woke, educated, solid blue-state community, where everyone has a BLM sign on the property, but their kids won't play with the poor kids on the other side of town. This is the crucial passage I want them to hear:
"It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
Still, progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them."
(And by the way, Harry and Meghan, you two need to hear it as well.)
I think this passage applies to the neo-liberal left far more than it does to the actual left. All of these articles that Persuasion publishes pushing back against wokeness (and there are so many of them that it makes me wonder if this magazine has any other intellectual curiosity), seem to group the neo-libs in with actual socialists, communists, marxists, etc. They never make distinctions between Black Marxism and Marxism as a class analysis. The actual leftists I’ve encountered - Michael Brooks, Adolph Reed, Ben Burgis, Noam Chomsky, etc. - reject wokeness, but they get no attention from Persuasion or other critics of wokeness.
To add to that, conflating BLM with CRT is disingenuous. BLM is a movement to radically reform, or in some people’s opinion abolish, policing in this country. These actual policy proposal seems to get completely ignored in conversations like these. Your neighbors who have BLM signs in their yard probably do so because they actually want police to stop murdering black people, and BLM is the ONLY movement who is addressing that problem. Could they do more and support politicians who support these policy proposals? Probably yes. But articles like this, and others on persuasion, never seem to acknowledge that BLM and CRT are two different things and can co-exist without destroying American ideals like freedom, equality and democracy.
Tim, some of your criticism is legit, but as someone who reads Persuasion often they take on many subjects. Probably only 20% of their catalog is about woke topics. And I think the publishers understand quite well the toll of inequality. They are filling a rare role of taking on these issues as opposed to the big media outlets and so perhaps they devote more time to them because no one else is really. Take a look!
HI Tim, Are you familiar with database in Washington Post of police shootings of unarmed people, including black people? Make an estimate of number shot, then take a look.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
Where does this list the shooting of unarmed people? It appears to be fatal police shootings, period. There is a linked article that does cover that data (2015 through 2018): https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-shootings-of-unarmed-people-have-significantly-declined-experts-say/2018/05/03/d5eab374-4349-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html
The relevant bit:
"The ongoing Post project has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI. Of those killed, 231, or 7 percent, were not armed with guns, knives or other objects that could be used as weapons at the time of the shootings, according to the data.
A review of the shootings of unarmed people shows that officers were reported to be under physical attack in about 40 percent of the cases. The remaining 60 percent involved a variety of circumstances, including individuals’ making provocative movements or verbal threats (31 percent) or fleeing, or being shot unintentionally or in undetermined circumstances, according to a review of news reports and video of the incidents. The news accounts cited in the Post database are typically summaries based on information provided by police at the time of each event."
Go to the part called "Search the Database" toward the bottom and there are filters.
For example, I see that in 2020, 39 unarmed men and 4 women were shot and killed by the police. Of these, 17 listed as black, 16 White, 5 Hispanic. No specific Asians. Several not classified.
6,129 fatally shot in total in 2020. So, under 1% unarmed.
I wasn’t aware of that, thanks for the resource.
BTW, there is another database which is more comprehensive than only shootings...includes other methods. I can't seem to google right search string, so maybe another reader is familiar with it.