12 Comments
4 hrs ago·edited 4 hrs agoLiked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Well, this should prove to be a popular article... 🤣🤣🤣

> if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments.

Pokemon Fever?

Expand full comment
4 hrs agoLiked by Handwaving Freakoutery

I suspect for a certain amount of BLM "supporters" this was a positive outcome.

Expand full comment

Since I live in the city where the police station was burned down, it is hard to disagree with this article.

Expand full comment

The people who were responsible for all of those excess deaths will never admit to it, and in truth, will never even reflect on their own part in that travesty of “doing the right thing.” They will just call you a racist for even suggesting their actions had this effect, because as you know, math is racist.

Expand full comment

> For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average.

Oooof. Yeah, nobody is going to look in the mirror and admit that.

I mean, they *should*. But they're not gonna.

Expand full comment

I’d be curious to see some other factors too, I know unemployment went way up after 2020 and I’m not sure how fast it got back to normal, same thing with education getting disrupted and inflation getting worse. I think it’s possible those things also contributed to the increase in crime but there’s a reason HWFO’s the one doing the math and not me, I’m sure he considered those factors, kinda surprised to see him highlighting a positive impact of cops though

Expand full comment

Why don't you attribute these extra lives lost to police malfeasance? Without a deliberate murder by police in front of many witnesses and a camera, there would have been no protests. Some think it was also the surge in guns.

https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus

Why aren't you counting all of the lowering of future abuse & murder by police, and the massively larger reduction in fear & lack of agency in the greater population? That was the goal of the protests, and of more clear news & court coverage of common police practices: That seems to have been very affective. Most of the protesters would believe that trade off was worth it, even if those were extra black deaths. However, looking at the graph above, the excess murders that year were fairly evenly distributed throughout the US, not just where there are higher concentrations of black people. The BLM protests were not everywhere, and did not have large effects everywhere.

Expand full comment

People could have chosen any number of ways to protest police brutality, and they chose to do it by destroying neighborhoods and empowering criminals. Zero police officers were involved in that decision.

There are 8,682 black people that I would love to ask if they thought the consciences of a bunch of white protesters was worth their deaths, but they're, y'know, dead.

Expand full comment

"Founding of an anarchist autonomous zone" is awfully clunky. Why not just call it an insurrection?

Expand full comment

Because neither the goal nor the effect of it was to threaten to subvert or replace the leadership of the country.

Expand full comment

In order to lead, the leadership of the country (at all levels, not just federal) needs some kind of police force to enforce the laws they enact. Burning down a police station is absolutely, unequivocally subverting the ability of elected leaders to lead.

Expand full comment

Oh, is that the standard?

Expand full comment