BLM and Protesting

[Farm Boy]

I had to explain to a bitter RCMP retiree that that average "Defunder" would be perfectly fine with police getting a payraise (given certain improvements) and that because he didn't understand that, he couldn't really understand that the fuss what about. 'Defund' is another weird one where something like 40% of people understood the major goals as soon as it was said and 30% of people just cannot seem to grasp it.

I don't know if the messaging is to blame. I might have said it in another thread, but we live in a society where a certain fraction of people just don't think water expands as it warms ... when the messaging is super-intuitive to some, but not to others, it's hard to apportion blame. Now, I think there's value in trying to explain, or recraft the messaging, because the person wanting the change should use every tool in the toolkit. But, it's frustrating when the reticence is overwhelming.

Defund and abolish is another doublethink situation where you sort of have to lie about what the words mean to get the "mainstream progressive" orthodoxy out of the terms. Cops generally would love better mental health response. Like full throttle. But when they see a police headquarter burnt down(merit aside), and "abolish the police" rise to use on practically the same night, if they aren't attending little grammatical doublethink powwows, they draw a sensible conclusion from the verbiage and then run afoul of... you guessed it, dickfaces.

 

[Commodore]

Yes, no question about that. He was trying to show that blatant, strident, conscious racism still exists. And he did show a number of people saying other things. One guy shouted something about Jesus. The Walmart employees were trying to keep it in the realm of corporate policy. Several people gave him a middle-finger, which could mean any number of things. It seemed like several people were of the sort we were talking about earlier, who think "Black Lives Matter" means "[Only] Black Lives Matter", and I guess it's open to interpretation why they insist on thinking that. Nevertheless, it still shows a bunch of people saying some [stuff] that sounds straight out of a Hollywood movie about how racist America was in, like, 1930, and I have no reason to think it's some kind of "deep fake" video.

I watched about half of it before I was interrupted at work. It just reminded me too much of those "look how stupid people are" skits they do on late night talk shows where they only show the people that have stupid answers and don't say anything about the 100 people they talked to that gave smart answers before they found the one stupid one.

 

[amadeus]

Stupid work, always getting in the way of important things like YouTube videos and CFC-OT arguments!

 

[Traitorfish]

This guy from L.A. stood outside a Walmart in Harrison, Arkansas, with a Black Lives Matter sign and filmed the reactions.

NSFW, for language.

Not everybody in this video is a pimple on the [backside] of humanity - I think the kid who warned the guy about being around after dark was trying to be helpful and wasn't threatening him, for instance - and of course the people who just drove on by without saying anything aren't included in the video. Still, after watching this, an episode of The Walking Dead might cheer me up. Incidentally, this is the same guy who did the video of a woman minding her own business on the streets of New York City several years ago (about which I could say more, but this is the wrong thread for that).

That's kind of the trick with this sort of video, it's fishing for hostile responses. I wouldn't say trolling, because it's done with an intent beyond simply prompting those responses, but it doesn't provide an insight into any larger part of humanity than those people who chose to offer that negative response.

If he had erected a sign that said "honk if black lives matter" and counted the responses, the takeaway might be different.

 

[El_Machinae]

I’m looking at it from the standpoint of reticence mitigation. I would say that the messaging is somewhat unclear, and by result you end up unintentionally misleading people.

“Defund the police!” Are most people going to take the time to listen to what that entails? That is if you get that far, because there are people (as you pointed out in a way) that will immediately draw the conclusion that defunding the police means a lawless, chaotic society.

Nearly most people immediately understood what it meant, though. But yeah, I do think the message-crafting needs work. And I think there's an onus on every single person who can communicate do so. Every social movement has a wing-nut version that its allies need to coral and get in front of.

Looking even at my conservative friends, a reasonable number of them understood 'defund' within the first couple of days. And then there's another portion that cannot properly even voice the concerns of the BLM movement and can only strawman them. And yeah, I think it's "on me" to get them to figure out how they're wrong.

 

[amadeus]

Nearly most people immediately understood what it meant, though.

What convinces you of that? I don't mean that as a snark retort, but I don't see how it would be immediately understood by most people.

 

[Syno]

That's kind of the trick with this sort of video, it's fishing for hostile responses. I wouldn't say trolling, because it's done with an intent beyond simply prompting those responses, but it doesn't provide an insight into any larger part of humanity than those people who chose to offer that negative response.

If he had erected a sign that said "honk if black lives matter" and counted the responses, the takeaway might be different.

It's not really much of a trick. It claims there are people hostile towards BLM, and the video demonstrates exactly that. You can claim manipulation if he's like Joey "I peed on myself and now I simp for Trump" Salads and has paid actors, but there's enough videos like this to prove that it's not a falsehood. Yes, there are people who support BLM, many people, but that's not what the video is for. This is meant to drum up more active support for protesting and legislation, and showing people being all "Yeah, BLM is cool" doesn't do that.

 

[Farm Boy]

The only thing that's worked for me is explaining that they mean reform, but they're tired of saying reform because they're young and they want thier own word whether it makes sense or not to use that word.

Attacking things is for the young and sexy. Fixing things is for boring people who read instruction manuals. Vaguely.

 

[El_Machinae]

What convinces you of that? I don't mean that as a snark retort, but I don't see how it would be immediately understood by most people.

Anecdotal: but just at the spread of people who basically supported the idea immediately. There's no way there would have been such broad support if the strawman or evil versions of the idea were assumed.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...nding-the-police-more-than-the-slogan-itself/

I'll admit that I was remembering the '39%' and I should be saying "one-third of people understood".

And nowadays, Canadians are polling at about 50%, so the messaging is ineffective (I'll grant), but still intuitive to some.

 

[Syno]

The only thing that's worked for me is explaining that they mean reform, but they're tired of saying reform because they're young and they want thier own word whether it makes sense or not to use that word.

Attacking things is for the young and sexy. Fixing things is for boring people who read instruction manuals. Vaguely.

It's bad branding, like global warming for climate change. You get an idea on the ground floor, people there take it and start running, but then the unexposed are confused. It's technically true (global warming is integral to climate change), but it misses the whole picture in a way that comes as a sizable obstacle to the skeptic or uneducated. Defund the police is technically true (less money to weapons of war and quotas), but misses the whole picture (reallocating resources and providing better training).

 

[Farm Boy]

Total agree. But now we're back to multi flavored dickfaces that just thrive in the type of misunderstanding this brews. The malicious pick the low hanging fruit because the malice is the point.

 

[Berzerker]

I never liked climate change as a brand, global warming was accurate

 

[Crezth]

We could have cell phone footage of Jews being herded onto trains and there’d be people saying “This footage is all edited to support the JLM agenda, there’s no context given for this. Maybe these people are just going to visit friends or maybe they’re lawbreakers. Convenient how the video cuts away just before some hypothetical event that would justify it to me.”

 

[Estebonrober]

Abolish DHS. I mean it quite quite literally.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/30/dismantle-homeland-security/

Eighteen years later, the Department of Homeland Security has ballooned into the third largest agency in the U.S. government, employing 240,000 people, including more than 60,000 law enforcement agents — nearly half the total number of federal law enforcement agents. DHS oversees two dozen subagencies and offices and has an annual budget of $50 billion. Since its founding, in 2002, the department has run agencies as different in scope as the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while also largely replicating, through dozens of regional law enforcement hubs known as fusion centers, the counterterrorism mission that premised its founding but remains the primary responsibility of other agencies.

 

[Bugfatty300]

If only somebody had the foresight to see that such a agency would be turned against us.

 

[Berzerker]

and thats why we'll never win the war on terror


...or drugs...

 

[Kyriakos]

If only somebody had the foresight to see that such a agency would be turned against us.

Speaking of Fortnite ^_^

Not sure why Fortnite left fruit near the screens with the BLM news - the end result was those 12-year olds just throwing tomatoes etc to the screen.

Blade seems confused there.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Speaking of Fortnite ^_^

Not sure why Fortnite left fruit near the screens with the BLM news - the end result was those 12-year olds just throwing tomatoes etc to the screen.

Blade seems confused there.

Never again accuse me of speaking of video games published post 2003. Don't know what a "Fortnite" is (I'm not 13 years old) is and if it ain't Wesley Snipes then I don't know what a "Blade" is either.

 

[Kyriakos]

I haven't played it either but know it is a very popular MMO. Even nba stars play it.
And that is Wesley Snipes' Blade. Or at least I think it is.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Stop it. Get some help.
-the NBA star.