Thank you for the first legitimate critique of the Black Lives Matter organization that I've seen.
I don't think it invalidates all of the points of the platform of BLM, but it does make me question the sanity and legitimacy of the organization's leadership.
I don't mean this unkindly, but your information diet has incredibly serious problems if you haven't come across any legitimate criticisms of the BLM org in the past. As someone whose pet issue has been police and justice system violence for a really, really long time, I really wish BLM wasn't the organization/movement representing this particular struggle[1]. The 2020 iteration is a little more connected to reality and a little less hateful than the 2015 one, so I'd count myself as a supporter in a way that I didn't in 2015, but if you've not come across _any_ valid criticism of them before now, I suggest sitting down and taking a hard look at your media diet.
By far the scariest facet of the modern moment to me is all the people sneering at Trumpists detachment from reality while happily wallowing in their own post-truth bubble. The average person has always been horribly un- and misinformed, but the shift in the last couple of years in my white-collar, coastal social group legitimately terrifies me.
[1] Though I'm well-aware that getting attention and support is probably the most important part of driving social change, and they've obviously done very well there.
This is such a spot on comment. I think the trouble is that you can’t pick the way that opposition to very bad things finds it’s moment. We have had decades of horrible abuses and creeping police state totalitarianism. It affects everyone. It permeates life everywhere. I wish the current zeitgeist around changing that was less identitarian, but I will take what I can get and happily support it.
Yes, I agree, and tried to capture this sentiment in my edit. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower and sniff about how the masses don't agree with you, and it's much harder to find an intersection point that fires up the masses while also doing some good. The latter is how change actually happens, so I give a lot of leeway to activist or policy groups when it comes to not having perfect policy goals.
BLM 2015 didn't quite meet this tradeoff, and was in some cases explicitly against race-blind solutions to police violence and in favor of pseudoscience like IATs (at which point their detachment from reality points them in the opposite direction from managing to do good). BLM 2020 is pretty different in character, and while it still has its stupidities, I reckon that it's a decent enough direction that it may lead to some positive change.
Thank you for the courteous response to a comment that could easily have been taken as an insult!
I don't think it's about individually high-quality sources as much as it is about how you take in information. Don't consider yourself to understand an issue until you've heard a compelling argument on both sides, or have thoroughly convinced yourself that you've adequately searched through diverse enough fora. Don't read anything, from Alex Jones's Facebook page to the frontpage of the NYT, without spot-checking sources, reading studies, etc. There's no filter that ensures that journalists are the best humanity has to offer: just like all humans, plenty of them are incompetent or dishonest, and beyond that groupthink exists in cultures that get as insular and self-aggrandizing as journalism's. Correctly combine a variety of low-quality signals and you can get a really high-quality signal.
That being said, some general recommendations for individual sources are (in ascending order of obscurity) The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Marginal Revolution (economist Tyler Cowen's blog). I find they do a better job than most of:
1) representing different opinions intellectually honestly
In addition to wutbrodo, I find that Wikipedia is actually a great starting point to find out more information for yourself.
For example, take the comment that you originally replied to, which asserted "Susan Rosenberg literally bombed the Capitol in 1983 and now serves as vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a "non-profit foundation that sponsors the fundraising and does administrative work for the Black Lives Matter global network, among other clients.""
That is obviously a great soundbite that seems tailor made for the "the left ignores the terrorism on their side" argument. But on the Wikipedia page for Susan Rosenberg, you can see what her level of involvement was, see how she was punished (she served 16 years), see what she's been doing since she was released from prison, and follow lots of links to original sources, like the tax return for Thousand Currents.
Snopes is also a great source for stuff like this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/. Again, you don't have to agree with the simple "true/false/mixture" checkbox Snopes puts on their stories. Just read the article, which always has tons of well-researched factual info, and make up your mind for yourself.
My main point is that whenever you see some soundbite or statistic on Twitter, Facebook or HN, it was often taken out of context in order to make an argument. It's usually pretty easy to use Wikipedia as a starting point to find out more about that context.
And to be clear, while I obviously have a point of view, my main point is that you shouldn't take anyone's opinions at face value - the Internet actually makes it pretty easy to find original sources.
> I don't mean this unkindly, but your information diet has incredibly serious problems if you haven't come across any legitimate criticisms of the BLM org in the past.
This is a fair point, but most people are happy to go along with the narrative rather than think critically about these issues. If you aren’t wallowing in a post-truth groupthink bubble, the world of today is really uncomfortable and lonely sometimes.
> If you aren’t wallowing in a post-truth groupthink bubble, the world of today is really uncomfortable and lonely sometimes.
I dunno... For the most part, my close friends are too intelligent to have this tendency (likely not a coincidence, but implicit assortative matching), but I have a couple close friends and many less-close friends who aren't. It seems to bring them a lot of emotional pain and frustration.
If your worldview is effectively religious, the heretics who blaspheme against the One True Flawless Way by disagreeing with you are reduced to actively-evil monsters. If you happen to live in a modern, pluralistic society instead of Reconquista Spain, this is a recipe for constant frothing fury at the tens of millions of people who don't share any given viewpoint you may hold. To my eyes, this is wayyy more uncomfortable than always being the person disagreeing,even if minorly, with the groupthink session.
Regarding loneliness, the part of my brain that enjoys the seduction of blind, rabid group membership seems to be missing (eg I've never been a pro sports fan either, despite being a fairly avid sportsman in the past). I can understand how this would be lonely for many, but... I dunno, being a bad person is fun, I don't think that's much of an excuse for doing it.
From inside a groupthink bubble, it seems like your half of the population are reasonable and logical people who are destined to win in the end, and the other side are an irrational and stupid cult. Which is definitely stressful, but at least there's the relief of thinking that your side are the good guys.
It's a lot more bleak when you realize there are virtually no good guys, and a lot of the people who might seem like good guys at first are either grifting or gazed too deeply into the abyss.
> It's a lot more bleak when you realize there are virtually no good guys, and a lot of the people who might seem like good guys at first are either grifting or gazed too deeply into the abyss.
It's more to grapple with philosophically, but it's much easier day to day. Having a model of the world that makes sense instead of expecting people to be more intelligent or decent than they are just makes everything go more smoothly. At least, that's my experience.
And it's not as misanthropic or nihilistic as it sounds. I have friends whom I wouldn't consider particularly intelligent, and the ability to accept that about them makes for much smoother interactions and over time has led to deeper connections over other parts of our respective characters/personalities.
> while happily wallowing in their own post-truth bubble
Explain? I have not seen any conspiracy theories on the left that are remotely close to the Qanon/plandemic/stop-the-steal clusterfuck of recent years.
Even though I also haven't seen those kind of theories on the left, that doesn't mean that the information consumed is unbiased in the slightest. I mean, you have the sideplot of the Trump presidency playing out on CNN where every time he coughs there are calls for him to be removed from office for being a dementia patient... or something.
The point I'm trying to make with this winding comment is that you can still consume an unhealthy amount of biased media without delving into the levels of Qanon- expand your horizons and try other sources!
I personally even make it a point to read FOX and r/conservative once in a while through a critical lens to see what exactly the right is consuming.
I don't think it invalidates all of the points of the platform of BLM, but it does make me question the sanity and legitimacy of the organization's leadership.