Or maybe the fact that everyone is suddenly all for mass protests suggests that police brutality is a horrible forever unaddressed injustice that doesn't care if there's a pandemic or not?
I think that 'forcibly' is a bad choice of words for a legal order that people could, and some did, ignore without serious consequence, and definitely without response by force—witness the 'liberate' protests—when compared to the literal and illegal use of force that the current protests are addressing, which have themselves been met in many places with force (as, for example, this very article discusses).
And the defiance cost them fines, sometimes, not their lives. The protests are addressing compliance resulting in death for a select portion of the population that has been systematically singled out for centuries because of the pigment of their skin.
I think the point is that addressing police brutality is more important than stopping COVID-19 spread which is more important than going to work and visiting families.
I'm not sure if you mean "they can't join the protests when sick" or "they can't protest getting sick from doing this". For the former, I imagine those that are technically can if they really want to. For the latter, those that aren't are seemingly willing to take the risk of getting sick in order to help address this.
> it means many people will be hospitalized or worse.
And that's a value judgement they can make. The issue is that ordering was different for millions of people and they didn't get a choice in the matter.
Good luck disobeying if you are small business owner who was told you can no longer legally do business.
On a more personal note, my 98 year old Grandma has been confined to her room at the nursing home for three months. Good luck to her civil disobeying orders.
> Good luck disobeying if you are small business owner who was told you can no longer legally do business.
Exactly. The fact that you can't effectively do a sizeable protest around that so goes to show how the population in general prioritizes these issues.
> On a more personal note, my 98 year old Grandma has been confined to her room at the nursing home for three months. Good luck to her civil disobeying orders.
Yeah, public support for your grandma risking getting sick is going to be even less.
> Except you're still killing grandma which is just as bad as police brutality.
It's not clear to me that these are equivalent, nor do I see why they necessarily should be. The impact to the average life expectancy of a few young people dying could be as large or larger than several times more old people dying.
With regard to an individual going out and protesting, it is the same. If I choose to do something that I know will result in the unjust death of another I would be morally culpable of murder.
I agree that when determining the best public policy. One has to weigh the risks and rewards. And the difference in life expectancy is relevant to that discussion.
In a democracy I don't think there's a clear demarcation line between determining the best public policy and individuals determining the proper actions for themselves. Individuals may choose to protest, despite their belief that doing so will spread the pandemic, because they also believe that protesting will make it less likely for other people to die for other reasons. Spreading the pandemic by protesting might make them morally culpable of murder in some sense, but failure to protest might similarly make them morally culpable of murder in some sense.
These individuals are making public policy decisions when they weigh one of these concerns against the other. As participants in a democracy, there's no way to avoid making such decisions.
I agree that it is a less-than-ideal time to protest police brutality and racial injustice. However, I'd argue still - when is? Minorities are also disproportionately impacted by the pandemic which is highly relevant to both addressing the health crisis and racial injustice. Again, when should all this be addressed?
The people protesting the lock-downs appeared to largely be protesting lifestyle inconvenience. Whether that was the actual case or not, I don't know and I'd love to learn more from any sources you could share.
> I agree that it is a less-than-ideal time to protest police brutality and racial injustice. However, I'd argue still - when is?
I'm not trying to say that people shouldn't protest. I'm only pointing out that a lot of people who are very pro police brutality protests right now were 5 minutes ago saying that protesting lock downs and going out is tantamount to murdering grandma.
> Minorities are also disproportionately impacted by the pandemic...
Is there any evidence that this is a result of racism? We are seeing the same elevated impact on blacks in other countries.
> The people protesting the lock-downs appeared to largely be protesting lifestyle inconvenience
It's more of protesting the government destroying peoples' livelihoods by driving their small businesses into the ground. Moreover, it is an unconstitutional overreach.
Actually, in general we support the protest insofar as we agree that there are problems with certain police incentive structures. We heavily disagree with the rioting and looting.
Where we disagree with some people is the generalized notion that the principles of America are inherently evil and racist and that Americans society now in general is racist.
I thought news outlets had established that the looting was done by opportunists that are independent of the protesters. The rioting might also be independent of the protesters, perhaps to distract enforcement units away from the looting. Some of the looting does seem to be organized to a degree.
> looting was done by opportunists that are independent of the protesters
That seems right, although I think there is probably a small degree of overlap. Unfortunately, I'm still seeing multitudes of people online defending the rioting and looting.
That's my theory too. Floyd was a catalyst but not the full reason for the riots.
Total aside: Also what's our country's obsession with masks that are designed to make people look creepy - like a dead skeleton. And same truck window art, like skulls with bullets for teeth or something. I don't understand are these people just murdering thousands of people daily or something?
Forcibly is being used rather hyperbolically here, don't you think? Some business owners that opened in defiance of local public health orders received fines or license suspensions, that's not equivalent.
It's hyperbolic in one sense, but not in another. Consider the fact that every law is backed by an implicit threat of force. For example, it's easy to say "I'm just asking for everyone to pay their fair share" when referring to taxes. But what happens when you don't pay your taxes? You can be arrested and jailed. That is underlying threat of force. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
An implicit threat of force is very different from an explicit application of it. Feeling disgruntled (perhaps by proxy) over a small fine is not the same as being actually beaten, gassed, or jailed.
You're not teaching me anything I don't already know, so what point are you attempting to make here?
They are different, but it's not clear to me that the distinction is significant in the context of OP I was addressing which is the exact point I was making. Not every difference is relevant in every context.
As for me not teaching you anything you don't already know, I can't possibly have any idea what you do or don't already know and I think it'd be more productive to leave that kind of snark out of the discussion here.
Of course you can have such an idea, by thinking about the context of the thread in which this discussion is taking place and the fact that I acknowledged two examples of state-imposed sanctions that business owners might have been pissed off about. Offering explanations of elementary concepts in the middle of a more advanced discussion is patronizing and unhelpful. Your point that the distinction is not significant speaks to a lack of experience on your part so I will assume your behavior was unintentional.
To quote arguments that were thrown at people who wanted to do things like hold funerals for loved ones, visit dying relatives, protest against destroying the life's work of small business owners, etc:
- You can do this over Zoom / online
- Just because this is important to YOU does NOT give you the right to sacrifice the lives of the others who will be denied hospital care because of your selfishness
- You really can't wait a couple months until this LITERAL PANDEMIC is over?
The pandemic won't go away in a few months, but cases are trending significantly downwards. I think it's fair to predict that mass gatherings will be much safer in August than they are today.
I don't mean to nitpick, as I wish to uphold the high community standards here, but this is false when compared to the worldwide data in aggregate. New cases are actually spiking, higher than during the lockdown. See [1] , at the bottom right, "daily cases" tab. The record for 'total daily new cases' of ~130k was set 2 days ago, on 3 June.
Making individual (or collective) decisions based on the false premise of "cases are trending significantly downwards" is very dangerous.
Yes, sorry, I was imprecise. Cases in the US are trending downwards and deaths are trending even further down, but there are many sub-areas of the US and other areas in the world where this isn't true.
As far as I'm aware, and I'd certainly welcome any information otherwise, super-spreader events are unpredictably random. Coupled with the incubation period, that still sounds like another wave.
110k Americans cannot be understated. That is a stupidly huge number in a year. For comparison: the entire Vietnam war saw the loss of ~70k, 9/11 saw the loss of 3500 which was enough loss of life to give justification for a nearly 20 year war, and the LAPD killed 12 people last year (1).
The sentiment is absolutely correct and any loss of life is too much, but we have to put this pandemic first until it burns out or there is a vaccine, then we can talk about mass gatherings again. This energy is much better spent crafting ballot initiatives that are capable of enacting real change, gathering signatures, registering voters, and getting people to the polls. Protesting alone doesn't solve anything. We saw the further militarization of police after Rodney King, and we saw nothing change after occupy wall street.
Protests give people an outlet to vent but they don't enact real change. Laws and votes do. I worry too that even if people vote in the presidential election, they will continue to leave their local elections by the wayside and these races are what really decides how your community is governed and policed, and have a far more real affect on your life than whoever sits in the white house.
"Give me Liberty, or Give me death" - Patrick Henry
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Ben Franklin
Everyone falls on one of two sides of this coin, and its startlingly difficult to understand the thought process behind those on the other side: That people are willing to, gladly, risk their lives and die in the cause of something greater.
My parents wanted me to travel home a month or so ago. They're about 80 years old. I told them it was too risky; that its not about me, its about them, I could have the virus and not know it, they're incredibly high risk, I live in a dense metropolitan area with roommates... They didn't care. Seeing me was more important to them. That's not being stupid: Its being Human.
There's no cause worth fighting for greater than human liberty, and that's what the black community, and along with them many Americans, are fighting for right now.
We're all going to die one day. Sacrificing your life, and ability to live without freely, without fear, to delay your death is never a trade one should make.
If ever you struggle to understand the mass killings of the 20th century, read this comment right here. This is how it works. Once you identify an abstraction that's more important that human life, anything is permitted.
People were busy with their lives. Now that there's mass unemployment (=time and anger), a generally hated administration, and even more videos of police brutality all over the place it's all bubbling up.
Are you suggesting we shouldn't protest now because we haven't protested at such a scale in a while?
There have been protest since King, though not at this scale, no. The current circumstances are Political with a capital P, the class of things that can reshuffle a society. If this isn't the time to protest for redress of grievances, then there is no time.
And I disagree if you're arguing that protesting is not essential.
I am suggesting that the our reaction to the issue very much depends on whether there is a pandemic or not, and that the vigor of these protests is not despite the pandemic but because of it.
I can respect and admire the decision that you personally dying of COVID-19 is worth it in order to express this grievance, but the nature of infectious disease is it's not just yourself that you're sacrificing here.
>Police Brutality isn't a new problem. They should have waited until covid-19 was gone.
This wouldn't be happening in a world with 4% unemployment. But 20 million Americans are now out of work, stuck at home, and pissed off. Not to mention without the usual distractions of sports or live entertainment. When the bread and circuses break down, this is the result.
Since I'm gathering you're more open than your initial post gave on, I'll try give feedback on the difference here. Your posts seemed to blame lockdowns as the issue, minimizing the unavoidable impacts of the pandemic.
aphextron references a breakdown in supply chains & social support, something the american government has failed to step in for, preferring corporate bail outs
ie there's not an implication that these riots were avoidable by not having lockdowns
This is the first time I’ve heard this obvious point. There are riots now because people just don’t have the energy left to protest while surviving in hyper capitalism. They’ve got plenty of entertainment at home. This is bout energy and time. Employment supresses protest because it takes time and saps energy.
Some people, particularly introverts, may be able to satiate themselves indefinitely with television or the internet. But a lot of people get antsy if they're made to spend even just a single weekend inside at home.
There are lootings because police resources are tied up showing force against protestors, and people with bad intentions see an opportunity. The violence and property destruction is a separate event from the protest marches with different people engaging in these practices entirely. If I was one of the 70k people living on the street in LA, this would be a great time to stock up on essentials from a CVS on Capital's dime. However, I don't condone the looting of small businesses where owners have very little savings. Many of these immigrant run businesses that make LA unique don't have insurance, and many will fold after this inventory loss coming on the heels of two months of no income.
Big chains can also move right back in when the economics are right with their deeper pockets and other revenue. People with little savings aren't able to ride it out nor buy back in.
Yes, although I would argue that it's amplified by foreign and internal actors. It is their election year after all and 99% of US media has spend the last 4 years doing its best to destabilize the country.
The other alarming aspect for other countries should be that this is quite likely a preview of what other countries will see. The unemployment numbers are awful everywhere and as the programs enacted come to a halt things are probably not going to get better.
> It is their election year after all and 99% of US media has spend the last 4 years doing its best to destabilize the country.
Why blame it just on the media? The current federal administration has done a fantastic job at destabilizing the country with no plans of deceleration in sight.
People are angry, rightfully so, about the recent heinous police brutality. You certainly can't tell them "hey, you can be angry but maybe next year": as I said, police brutality and systemic injustice at large don't care about the pandemic.
And yes, there's probably going to be profound effects on disease control: but let's not also forget that it is also black community bearing the brunt of the pandemic, because of widespread systemic injustices. Let's not let talking about coronavirus distract from what's behind the anger.
It's not like you can postpone protests. It either happens now directly after Floyd's death, or another injustice goes ignored by basically everybody and police brutality as people know it continues unabated. I'm not really sure what you're saying here. It sounds like you're against protests and you believe Covid19 was totally exaggerated.
> The fact that everyone is suddenly all for mass protests suggests we got the severity of Coronavirus wrong and people are using this as a convenient out for backing off shelter in place orders without losing face.
Wait a minute, who is suddenly for mass protests? Well, the protestors are, obviously, at least in the sense that they think that they are necessary, but they're not the ones who issued the shelter-in-place orders or who can repeal them. Those orders (now lifted in many places) were issued by governors and mayors, and I have not heard any statement from those officials indicating support for the act of the protests. I have heard support for the cause of the protest, and I have heard them urging people to use masks and respect social distancing as much as possible while protesting, but those seem to fall short of being 'for' the protests themselves.
Not sure about public officials, but here's an open letter explicitly supporting the protests by nearly 1300 various public health and infectious disease professionals ("We support them (protests) as vital
to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States."):
For example, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been very strictly enforcing the shutdown and social distancing in her State, but yesterday was out with protestors in dense crowds.
She has been quite strict in policies and enforcement overall. As far as denouncing protesters, this is what she was saying on May 13th about the shutdown protesters, and yet was herself participating in densely populated BLM protests yesterday [2];
> Question: Governor, you said this morning in The View that the protests that we’ve been seeing at the capital could be potentially adding to the spread of COVID-19 as people not listen to the stay at home orders and congregate. What proof do you have to show that that’s happening? And as well as … have to show that that’s happening and as well as COVID-19 spreading into rural areas because of that.
> Governor Gretchen Whitmer: Yeah. So I think that I saw one report. I don’t have proof. I’m not following everybody home and taking their temperatures and watching them for two weeks. But here’s what we know. When COVID-19, the way that it spreads is person-to-person contact, that it can stay in the air for a while, that it is when you’re closer than six feet, not wearing masks, it is when you’re touching one another. We saw a lot of that at these protests at the Capitol. That’s how COVID-19 spreads. We know it’s incredibly contagious and there are a lot of people who get COVID-19 who are asymptomatic and so they’re conducting life as though they’re healthy because they honestly think they’re healthy, but they’re carrying it and spreading it. That’s the insidious nature of this virus.
> So that is always been a concern. When people congregate, they take it back to their communities. We’ve seen that over and over again. There was a group that did a report that they had put up a geo fence around the Capitol and then monitored cell phone data and that it translates where we are seeing hotspots in rural parts of Michigan. I don’t know the group, I have not vetted the data. I can’t vouch for it, but I think that that would not be a surprising outcome if that was the case.
> That’s why I think it’s so important that, if people are determined to protest, I ask that they do right on their own, by themselves, by their own health, by everyone who lives in their household, everyone that they are around and take precautions to protect themselves, wear the mask, stay six feet away from other people. And that they do it on behalf of our first responders too, the police that are onsite, the nurses and doctors who are stressed out because they’re treating COVID patients, their local hospitals, which if they are from a more rural community do not have capacity to meet the need of an outbreak.
Now that she agrees with the aims of the protestors, she not only does not denounce them for violating social distancing orders, she actively participates.
This is not to say anything about the relative merits of the individual protests themselves, which I think should be irrelevant when it comes to public health orders that claim to be necessary to control the spread of a dangerous pathogen.
If mandatory health orders can be suspended, or in fact actively defied by the head politician who has enacted them, based on the particular cause being deemed worthy or not, I think this is a breach of the public trust, which sacrificed 40 million jobs and trillions of dollars in the name of these shutdown orders.
I don't think the warnings about the nature of COVID are wrong the pandemic is just unevenly distributed and people have a hard time contextualizing their personal risk when they aren't directly effected. 110,000 Americans have died in only 4 months. If this continues it will easily be the number 3 cause of death and has a chance at eclipsing cancer at number 2. There are reports of second waves in some place that have lifted restrictions [0] Media reporting is one way to get people to focus on an issue and right now something else has taken priority in the news cycle.
COVID is still dangerous and protesting during a pandemic is still equally dangerous as well. It's just that in a cost benefit analysis the public has collectively decided that risking their own health is less important than the prolonged abuses of an unhinged police system.
>From a people placement perspective, a parade and a protest are pretty equivalent.
Correct. Regardless of which one is more important, the effects will be long lasting. You won't be able to use public health as a justification for forcing Americans to stay home or shutter businesses in the future. You have a constitutional right to assemble.
It hardly suggest we got the corona virus response wrong. That borders on deliberate obtuseness. First-- it doesn't me we got it wrong, it simply means that some levels of outrage are sufficient to override the fear of getting infects. Second, it will be a few weeks before we see the impact these gatherings have on infection rates.
While I don't think it's a conspiracy, I am convinced that the civil unrest was directly tied to the lockdowns.
Floyd's death is the acute cause for the protests, but we've had these protests before and they were much milder.
Add mass unemployment, economic uncertainty, closed bars, closed parks, shelter-in-place orders, zero entertainment, no sports, etc., and you suddenly have an explosive situation.
It also means a lot of people don't have to worry about missing work to attend protests. In a way, we may be seeing the actual, truthful level of outrage that has always been inflamed by such events, when the expression of that outrage is not held back economic concerns.
I agree. That isn't to diminish the protests at all or say they're unnecessary, but I think COVID has added to the fervor. People feel cooped up and on edge right now
Now it's stay-at-home time. People think: I wish to go visit my friend, but no, it's not allowsd due the quarantine. I fish I attended a concert, a meetup, a conference, etc — no luck. The tiredness and tension grows.
Now there is a case when a lot of people say: No, I can't miss this! I must be there and show my support! IG there is one case when i'm willing to break the social distancing rules, it's this one.
So more people who have accumulated the desire to be out now have a good cause to go out and demonstrate.
At this point we need herd immunity so young people gathering and getting infected is probably a net gain. More people will die due to economic damage than the virus if we maintained quarantine until vaccination.
