The post points to a true thing, Orthodox Privilege definitely exists and we see examples of it quite often. However, to some extent it exists within bubbles.
For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.
80 to 90% of the times I’ve seen this phrase, it’s been used in response to Black Lives Matter. As opposed to being used in the positive for, say, universal healthcare, food assistance programs, and initiatives to house the homeless.
I made the mistake of saying "but police brutality is a general problem, why make it specific to black people rather than try to solve all of it? Isn't it true that all lives matter?", and the person I was talking to basically heard "I'm racist", so it's not only true that it's both true and a racist dog-whistle, but it's also true that after the whistle has been blown, it doesn't matter what else you say.
The whistle should be a red flag, rather than surefire proof that you now know everything the person is going to say, therefore you shouldn't listen any more. I think one of the problems in the US is the pervasiveness of the mindset of "I think you're X, therefore I refuse to listen to anything else you say".
That's an unfortunate reaction to what should have been a teachable moment. You're not wrong, in so far as all lives truly do matter. The statement "Black lives matter" seems to have an implicit "more than yours" tacked on in a lot of people's heads, and that's what seems to grate.
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
> It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalized racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1].
> Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalize racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
It's not just a hook - black people are oftentimes the testing grounds for unjust programs that expand in scope to engulf other peoples (e.g. the prison industrial complex). The full tag line should be "All lives will matter when Black Lives Matter" because they are at the intersections of so many institutional inequities.
Something I've said for a while is that many "conspiracy theories" are distorted, garbled versions of "what if the US did to white people things that it has done to black people".
Yes, and also you're wrong. The efforts that will solve this problem for Black people will solve the problem for everyone else, too, or else it's not an acceptable solution.
People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts.
The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
To the extent that the problem can be solved, the solution isn't going to be race-specific! There's no subsetting going on here.
The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstand what the protesters are saying.
“Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point.
The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning.
That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.”
In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse.
Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?”
The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
The first half clarified some things for me, thank you. The second half is replying to the dog-whistle "all lives matter", which is not what I was talking about.
I think my misconception was that I thought BLM is a movement against police brutality, where it's actually more general than that. Under that light, it makes sense.
Every time I see the thin blue line flag or a "support our police" sign (or both combined, as in several yards just outside of town) I get angry. It's willfully ignoring everything you just wrote about, at best.
I think people are operating with incomplete, non-overlapping sets of information.
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
Sure. Stories are important. It's really not all that common, though, if we're being honest. According to this random memorial page[1] 48 police officers were killed in the line of duty last year in the US, an annual fatality rate of 0.006% assuming 800,000 active officers.
The numbers aren’t that low for lack of trying, though. The majority of attempts fail because the police are better-equipped and better-trained than the people trying to kill them. That’s part of why there are so many officer-involved shootings in the first place.
I'll admit that the phrase "black lives matter" makes me nervous, but not because I feel like it implies other lives do not matter. I was taught to never single out a group based on race, and that it was supremely rude behavior. On a fairly irrational level the phrase makes me nervous because it goes against what I was taught was polite behavior.
I've seen a good metaphor to this: imagine if somebody told you the Amazonian forest needs saving and you said "but all forests matter". While an obviously true statement, you just (unwittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities.
That's not a good metaphor because there isn't a single entity destroying all the forests. If, say, Exxon, was destroying all the forests, I'd for sure not be trying to save the Amazon but trying to stop Exxon instead.
There isn't a single entity killing black people in the US (police forces are highly localised, and the original campaign was about a vigilante murder and not caused by the police per se, but the failure of the justice system to convict a murderer)
I think you're projecting your perspective of the relative dangers to the Amazon rainforest and the {other} rainforest in that metaphor. In your head one class is in real trouble, and other class is in lesser trouble. Try to exercise your metaphor from the perspective other forests are in equal or greater danger:
eg:
Imagine if someone told you the Pacific Temperate rain forest needs saving and you responded with "sure, but we're prioritizing resources for the Amazon first - its got it way worse"
You just (wittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities because of how you perceived their relative danger.
Now consider your original metaphor without the bias about which forest is worst off in reality. You might find that "all forests matter" might be a more valid response in that context because they don't want to dis-proportionally favor one at the cost of the others.
Unfortunately, given the prevalence of bad-faith debaters and sockpuppet accounts, we've got very used to a block-on-sight approach. It saves a lot of time.
Wait, so more than 1 in 10 times you've heard this, someone was saying it in an unrelated context to BLM? What were the separate contexts? I've never even remotely heard this term when not used as a response to "black lives matter."
Probably less than that, to be honest. People sometimes say it when it comes to banning abortion, but those same people don’t seem to care for childcare programs or maternal mortality rates.
Note: above comments relative to the insanity that is the USA, of course.
Exactly this. A lot of people who say 'All lives matter' as a response rather pointedly refuse to say 'Black lives matter' because that would be admitting that the problems of institutional racism that devalues black lives are real problems that need to be addressed.
Step outside your statement for a second and consider it in light of PG's essay. Is it possible you yourself are afflicted with orthodox privilege, to the extent where you can't see any legitimate critiques of your own standpoint?
If you continue to allow these statements to polarize and force a false dichotomy that demonizes a group and lionizes another, well, you're not really helping heal the divides either.
Dude, watch any video of a Republican politician saying 'All lives matter' and refusing to say 'Black lives matter' and then come back and tell me it's a false dichotomy.
I've seen what you're talking about, but the false dichotomy I am referring to is between the real political implementations of the Republicans and Democrats, which don't really seem that different from my outside-of-America perspective. Neither party seems capable of fixing anything, or building the infrastructure they promise, or really protecting the Americans they purport to represent. The same moneyed interests continue to exert the same amount of control regardless. The same foreign policies and the same sabre rattling happens.
The actual _people_ have much wider divergence of opinions, for sure. I don't expect a Republican to go around chanting the slogans of people who have declared themselves to be their enemies; why would they?
Just because neither party is progressive doesn't mean that the conservative choice isn't far, faaaaar better than the regressive one.
And yes indeed it would be awesome to revamp the US political system, but that won't happen anytime soon short of armed revolt, and keeping people alive in the meantime is still important.
And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly "law and order" President. Nothing is being conserved. Nobody has taken away gay marriage, abortion, legal weed, etc. Nobody sent in the Army to destroy CHAZ.
The reality is that in the American system the President is not very powerful, and the permanent bureaucracy and moneyed interests have a lot more control over policy than one might thing at first glance.
> And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly
An incompetent conservative is still conservative. And the trump admin did try to erode many of these things: protections for gay and transgender workers[0], abortion[1], etc. That reversing supreme court decisions (which most of these were based on) is exceedingly difficult worked against his goals, but denying that he tried is ignorant.
The problem with the slogan black lives matter is that it is so obviously a straw man as are all "____ lives matter" slogans. Except for some truly tiny pockets in the US, the overwhelming majority of people believe black lives matter, even most that use the expression "all lives matter" in earnest. My observation is that almost everyone I've seen use the term "all lives matter" is doing so as a response to a straw man. Most people who have been arguing on the internet long enough can agree that as satisfying as a straw man argument is to use, it's almost invariably counterproductive to convincing your interlocutor of responding positively to whatever point you're trying to make. Why? Because by responding with a straw man, you've demonstrated that you're not going to interpret any response from your interlocutor charitably and that's just getting off on the wrong foot.
The slogans black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, etc., are all straw men slogans/arguments that communicate to whomever you're speaking with that you're not planning on interpreting them charitably.
I know lots of people who think black lives matter some, but who don't think they matter as much as white lives. Like going around and murdering black people is clearly unethical, but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
> but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
was and is (relatively) commonly stated. I claim that to believe this is alright, you must implicitly value black safety less than white safety. I'm open to counterarguments.
I don’t think anyone actually supports the idea of “overpolicing and imprisoning [black people in particular] for nonviolent crime”.
I think your understanding of the situation is that black people are “overpoliced” and disproportionately imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. This is why you want to change the situation, which is a logical conclusion.
I think people who disagree with you about the conclusion you reach didn’t get there by sharing your understanding of the situation, shrugging their shoulders, and saying it was fine. I think they perceive the underlying situation itself differently than you do. It’s not a difference in values. They might be wrong, but people are wrong about things all the time.
If I tell someone that "Black people are incarcerated at a 3x higher rate for drug crimes they commit at the same rate as white people", and they argue that that is Black people's fault, what should I conclude? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667342)
I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race. I think you’re jumping to that conclusion a little. And I don’t really want to continue this because I have a hard time trusting that you’re going to listen to me in good faith, either.
> I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race.
I agree. But that's not what I asked. The statement I originally made was that
"overpolicing and imprisoning <black people> for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people."
Which I do think is fairly clearly demonstrated. There's a subtle shift, but a relevant one. Creating new systems of oppression based on race is racist, but letting existing systems that treat races unfairly is okay, even though the results would be the same.
I want to reiterate: I don't believe this person claims that black people should be policed different purely based on their race, but it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
And way back, the statement we started from was "black lives matter". And in general I hold that to mean "black lives matter just as much as any other race".
How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified? I don't see how we can. But again, I'm open to other interpretations.
> it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
This isn't a very charitable interpretation.
There is no lack of injustice in the world. There are more injustices in the world than any single human can possible wrap their head around much less devote attention to caring about.
Just because someone prioritizes other concerns does not mean they are uncaring about a concern you care about, just as you prioritizing the concern you care about do not imply that you're unconcerning about the injustice the other person is prioritizing.
> How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified?
Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Maybe it hasn’t worked out that way, but here we are again arguing how we perceive the situation, not the underlying values we’re trying to optimize for. I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
> Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Sure, and that was the common understanding 20-30 years ago. (see: Dem and black community support for various crime bills, "Superpredator", etc.). But our understanding of the situation has evolved (based on evidence, I should add!).
> I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
My point is that there are people who don't accept that. Who insist that nothing should change. The argument goes something like this:
(1) Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime
(2) police will naturally interact more with black people so
(3) black people will also be arrested more for nonviolent crimes, and therefore
(4) nothing needs to change.
This breaks down somewhere between one and two, for a variety of reasons. The amount of violent crime isn't proportional to the amount of overpolicing, a lot of the forms of overpolicing don't actually reduce violent crime, etc. These are the people who I think it's reasonable to have suspicion of. People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things (and I'll note that the person who I linked earlier was in that group).
Again this isn't very charitable. I've had many of the same discussions and very few people I've debated this with come to the conclusion that things don't need to change. Most agree that things need to change, but they conclude that different changes are warranted than you do.
Many people today focus the change on step 2 ("police will naturally interact more with black people") with policies like defund the police, while others might focus on changes that change the step 1 ("Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime"), while others even still will focus on things the are priors to even step 1.
Disagreement on the change required is perfectly normal and to be expected. Just because people disagree on the change and don't see things exactly as you do doesn't mean they don't care or are bad people.
> But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust.
I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo.
“Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself.
Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens.
If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you.
> People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things
We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
> We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.
I think you can believe the status quo is better than the set of changes you are proposing without devaluing the lives of black people.
“Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist.
> noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions
Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
> But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”
Then I'd reject this on moral grounds:
Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright?
I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
That’s beside the point though. I wasn’t making the argument that some people choose to trade off between different values in different ways. I was making the argument that, even if you hold those values constant, you will never achieve any of them perfectly.
To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible.
It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.
And I think that it's pretty obvious that we aren't at such a maximum.
Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
> Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.
The only way to prove that we aren't at a global or local maximum is to make the case for some specific set of changes. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, show me a possible world that's better. Even if we agree about the values, we can still disagree about factual and counterfactual questions enough that maybe I won't believe your better world is possible, or that your possible world is better.
> Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives, because your claim is that nobody can possibly support the status quo while believing that black lives as as valuable as white lives. So let's try and stay consistent here--you're the one shifting values on me all of a sudden! :)
I happen to agree with you about cannabis, but as I said before, that's the same as saying that cannabis should be legal irrespective of racial equality. And that's because we agree that cannabis usage is less of a threat to black lives than the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
> The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives
Wait now hold on! I'm not trying to maximize the value of black lives. My claim is that black lives are currently given less value than white (or broadly, other) lives. The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Or in other words, Black Lives Matter is about maximizing equality. I claim that Marijuana legalization is one such change that will reduce inequality, and will have few enough side effects that they don't make it unacceptable to implement.
tl;dr: We were looking to increase the societal value of black lives, but that is done within the lens of achieving equality.
> I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
> The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Fair. Though they are effectively the same until parity is reached.
> I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
And here we are back at (hypothetical) differences over our respective understanding of the situation, particularly in comparing the social impacts of drug use and incarceration. I still don’t think any difference in values is necessarily implied.
Being utilitarian is a moral position just like your position and a utilitarian would be justified on rejecting your position on moral grounds as well.
Two people have have a moral position and disagree because they are fundamentally working from different axioms.
It's possible to come to conclusions about that situation that aren't explained by racism. Correlation is not causation.
If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.
I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.
To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.
For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?
The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.
Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.
The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.
Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.
Say you are a Mongolian tourist and you arrive in America and people are getting upset about "all lives matter", you would think that it is an utterly bizarre thing to get upset about.
In fact, the angry reaction to "all lives matter" precisely is what encourages its use. Because if you take as premise, that "all lives matter" is true then it becomes easy to cast anybody who gets angry about a true statement as unreasonable.
You might think that there are no Mongolian tourists in America, especially right now, but you might be surprised how little many people pay attention to current events.
[Disclaimer for the internet mob, I have never and would never use the phrase.]
You are confusing disagreement with racism. Saying "Black Lives Matter" has the connotation that the police force has "systemic racism" against black people, and the phrase "All Lives Matter" is intended to explicitly affirm the literal aspect of the phrase while disagreeing with the connotative element. Disagreement with important, factual claims is not racism.
I know folks, including black folks, who disapprove of the Black Lives Matter messaging and try to redirect BLM conversation towards specific issues while promoting the use of 'all lives matter'
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
When you use a catch-phrase associated with racists, and you are trying to be an effective communicator, and you are not a racist: then you use a different phrase next time.
If you're not trying to communicate effectively, or if you are trying to communicate your sympathy with racism, you keep using that phrase.
Everyone is responsible for their own heuristics to judge other people. Other people are not responsible for behaving in accordance to your heuristics, it is your error if you misjudge them.
Therefore, if someone uses a phrase also used by racists/communists/some other baddies, and does not fall into that category, it is your error to guess that someone does. It is just victim-blaming for error of judgement.
Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
In the context of a programming discussion, "Just hash the string and see if you get a match" is a reasonable and meaningful thing to say. In the context of cooking breakfast, it's meaningless drivel.
Reasonable people try to use words that their current audience will understand in the current context. If they make a mistake, they learn from it.
Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
> Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
This is exactly correct. Not everyone's experiences are the same, leading different people to wrap a situation or a statement in different context.
When some people hear BLM they wrap it in the context of the ideology of the founders, or in the riots they see on television, or in the intense anti-[insert group] hate on social media. Those people aren't racists, and they would happily work with you to combat corruption in our politics and policing. They want the world to be better, they simply disagree with how the movement is organized.
> Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
People who said 'All lives matter' early on were labeled racists and attacked mercilessly on social media and television. I don't believe these people are all unreasonable.
There’s an interesting corollary of that: multiple “Black Lives Matter” organizations believe in ending capitalism and dismantling the family. By your argument, nobody should use the phrase “black lives matter” either unless they, like the founders of that BLM org, actually are literal Marxists.
Maybe you are a Marxist and you think it’s a grand idea to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. But actually, effective communication is a little beside the point here. If you effectively communicated that you wanted to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family, nobody would care or pay attention. If you instead hid those ideas under a slogan specifically chosen to be as undeniable as possible, you can sneak a lot of things in pretty fast.
The thing about protest is that it has the capacity to be misunderstood. They misunderstood you. You misunderstood them.
> it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
Like you did here. In my experience, an "all lives matter" activist is quite happy to both acknowledge racism and have a discussion on the nuance of racial treatment in the United States.
Where the two sides really differ is in their general view of America. Whether its optimistic or pessimistic. Whether its isolated or systematic. Whether its "racial" or "cultural".
To be blunt, its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle". Its either an overt, racist megaphone or just a difference in opinion.
Dogwhistles work because they are not obviously false.
The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
(There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!)
(I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)
> She tweeted on Tuesday: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives” and “Abolish whiteness”,
I'm sorry but no amount of "academic context" makes these sentences any less racist.
> It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
No it isn't, your argument is fallacious, no organization came with a "9/11 plane crash matters" slogan at first place.
"black lives matter" is a bad slogan because it both doesn't mean what it says and is divisive by nature. "black lives matter" is black people telling white people that "black lives matter too". It's incredibly patronizing. The great majority of white people do understand that black lives do matter, as much as white lives and that police brutality does affect all races.
If you design a slogan in such a way that it is divisive by nature, then disallow anybody else from fighting for their own cause or even broader causes, then you are not seeking a solution involving everybody, but just more racial strife, as you are claiming the exclusivity on victimhood.
Nobody can come here telling me that no white people has ever been beaten or killed by the police abusing their power.
> If that were true, why has it been happening for so many decades?
You mean white people also getting killed by the police? Good question.
> Fairly sure MLK had something to say about this, and that it was impossible to "not be divisive" when talking about race.
The civil right act didn't grant special rights to minorities, it just made both segregation and racial discrimination illegal. This is a non divisive way to solve race issues.
Divisive slogans claiming the monopoly on victimhood solve nothing.
> You mean white people also getting killed by the police? Good question.
Where was the campaign against white people getting killed by the police (or vigilantes! the original campaign was in re Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman) before 2013, or indeed in the present day?
> Where was the campaign against white people getting killed by the police (or vigilantes! the original campaign was in re Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman) before 2013, or indeed in the present day?
Where was the campaign against sex abuse in Hollywood before metoo as well? Now imagine women in metoo telling men to shut up about sex assault because metoo is only for female victims?
This is the difference between a unifying movement and a divisive one. Especially when the latter is making a loud point about silencing anybody that attempts at broader reach. "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
> Now imagine women in metoo telling men to shut up about sex assault because metoo is only for female victims?
This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
> "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
Those are fine. It's the specific confrontational wording: a group of people saying "we matter" confronted with "no, you're not special, stop saying the word Black, it makes us uncomfortable".
> Those are fine. It's the specific confrontational wording: a group of people saying "we matter" confronted with "no, you're not special, stop saying the word Black, it makes us uncomfortable".
but "all lives matter" isn't fine? as for the rest of your sentence, that's not what is happening. What is happening is people specifically telling others that "white people lives don't matter, as white lives" as quoted from the article I linked, which you did not address.
> This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
No, this is a perfect example as to how to come with a slogan that pushes unity instead of strife, when a phenomenon concerns everybody.
What evidence is there that it is a "racist dog whistle?" What "action" has the phrase prevented from being taken?
Is it "racist" in the DiAngelo definition, a reflection of white people's innate racism and thus like anything a white person might say or do outside of the anti-racist activity of contemplating one's own racism?
Is it a "dog whistle" because it summons racists like a bat signal, "Hey white supremacists, time to do some racism!" How is it that so many people who can hear a particular phrase immediately denounce it as a "racist dog whistle?" Is the denouncement part of systemic racism whereby white people can pretend to be allies and yet still demonstrate their white supremacy bonafides because they can hear the signal?
> The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people.
Have you considered the possibility that a lot of people agree that action should be taken, and that statistically-speaking, that positive action will reduce unnecessary deaths for all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity?
If a software bug is reported to affect a certain subset of users more often than others, but upon investigation, it turns out the bug is a duplicate of another more fundamental bug that affects all users relatively equally, are we preventing action (or discrediting that subset of users who reported the bug) by marking it as a duplicate and giving priority to the fundamental issue so as to fix it for everyone?
Just as Black Lives Matter supporters often claim that the phrase is misunderstood by those who question it, All Lives Matter is misunderstood by many who think it takes something away from the black community. It's not a denial of anything, but rather a recognition that the problems actually do statistically affect everyone, and singling out one race (when all are affected) actually does more harm than good when it comes to ending racism.
That would be believeable if all lives matter didn't get thrown around by the same people who say blue lives matter and who systematically refuse to take action on police violence that affects everyone.
You don't counter protest a movement you agree with because you dislike it's semantics. You use semantics as an excuse to ignore a movement that ultimately makes you uncomfortable. MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail being ever relevant.
Perhaps you could re-read the article this discussion is about. You're misrepresenting (and projecting other ideas onto) a viewpoint that you seem to fundamentally misunderstand.
Semantics do matter, especially when specifics are used to highlight division, and that division is used to justify more violence (such as murders committed by the very people who are protesting).
- Politicians that state "all lives matter" by and large do not support action to reduce police violence in general.
- Groups that state "all lives matter" often exist to directly counterprotest groups that state "black lives matter".
- Groups that state that "all lives matter" often also state "blue lives matter" and espouse support for the police in favor of protestors.
Do you disagree with those statements? If you agree with those statements, why would someone who believes that police violence is a problem choose to associate themselves with the police over other people protesting police violence?
It is more pragmatic to support the group that causes you more concern, if you have two concerns that are temporarily at odds. Ergo, if you, aware of the above, say "all lives matter", you know that you are associating yourself with people who condone police violence against everyone. This would imply that you believe the "danger of racism" in the BLM movement is of greater concern than police violence.
Please critique my logical progression there.
To be clear, while you may have only the best intentions when you say "All Lives Matter", it is naive to believe that everyone else who says the same does. When you choose to use a politically charged slogan you should be aware of the message that sends. You ultimately cannot choose how people will interpret your words, and that they see your words by their association instead of your intention is not the recipients fault.
You're saying that "because X group said Y and X group also does Z, Y supports Z".
Your premise is based on a genetic fallacy, and your argument implies a false dichotomy. Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
I'm not making an argument about beliefs, but about perception.
I don't support everything Joe Biden does, but I still throw my support behind the democratic party because there are only two realistic options in the US today, and the other one is far worse.
If you're going to choose to say "All Lives Matter", you are choosing to involve yourself in a binary. And ignoring the context of that binary (that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that came about only in response to the statement/movement "Black Lives Matter") is done at one's own risk.
> Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
So you disagree that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that only came into being post-"Black Lives Matter"?
Edit:
On Blue Lives/ All Lives people minimizing violence against black people[0].
And Tim Scott, who is known for being an "All Lives Matter" proponent, opposes ending Qualified Immunity (and indeed his proposed bill on police reform does almost nothing). Whereas Colorado's QI-ending bill was sponsored by Leslie Herod, who joined a Black Lives Matter march.
In the House, the Qualified-Immunity ending bill[1] is sponsored by only Democrats, among them many who are openly pro-Black Lives Matter, and, well Republicans don't seem to be[2]. Swallwell supports ending QI, Gaetz does not. Swallwell says Black Lives Matter. Gaetz refuses to say that, instead saying that All Lives Matter. Is that enough evidence?
> I'm not making an argument about beliefs, but about perception.
* sigh * I miss the day when we could state our beliefs and defend them on principle rather than on perception, trying to guess which groups may choose to be offended.
> * sigh * I miss the day when we could state our beliefs and defend them on principle rather than on perception
Yeah, this was never the case for large swaths of people.
Truly the good days in history, where Civil Rights activists noted that, ethically, segregation was problematic. Everyone agreed and racism was solved. They didn't need to worry about offending anyone, people just understood them. Legislation followed swiftly without much kerfuffle. There was no worry about offending the sensibilities of the "white moderate" (letter from a Birmingham Jail really showing up today!)
Missing the days when you didn't need to worry about how your views were perceived is itself a privilege.
Please stop putting words in other people's mouths or implying that someone is associated with racism when they're stating their beliefs and defending those beliefs with principles. It takes a more nuanced understanding of reality to accept the fact that someone can miss certain aspects of the past while at the same time acknowledging the imperfections of the past.
The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
To imply that taking offense (over "semantics" used by some people who express their views) is somehow equivalent to the unjust laws mentioned in Letter from Birmingham Jail is, in its own way, a mockery of what Martin Luther King Jr was fighting for. He defended free speech, even when it was offensive at the time. In our time, we speak up about our beliefs and some see them as offensive, but those freedoms should be defended all the same. Publicly shaming people based on false interpretations, and in many cases causing harm to them (as we've seen in the news recently in response to conservative viewpoints being expressed) is an obstruction of those liberties.
If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle. On the other hand, if you pretend that what they're saying is invalid because someone else chooses to be offended by it, you are no longer talking about objective reality. Without a basis in objective reality, public discourse becomes nothing short of a shouting match with rules that change with the wind. We've seen an explosion of that kind of behavior recently on social media.
Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints. Let's not paint someone as the devil because they disagree with us (or because we've given them a label based on other people with that viewpoint), but instead offer them a bit of respect and understand that their intentions may be just as honorable as our own, albeit colored by different circumstances and experience.
> Please stop putting words in other people's mouths or implying that someone is associated with racism when they're stating their beliefs and defending those beliefs with principles.
Saying "the slogan you choose to support will be perceived as being associated with racism" is a statement of fact. You can argue that that association is wrong, and you are free to try and change that association, but in the meantime, you should acknowledge that fact.
> It takes a more nuanced understanding of reality to accept the fact that someone can miss certain aspects of the past while at the same time acknowledging the imperfections of the past.
I agree. You seem to have missed my point. Claiming broad things about the past having been a certain way misses the nuance that for many people it wasn't actually that way. It's a privileged view on history. Having privilege isn't racist. Let's all be a little less defensive, shall we?
> The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
I agree. So please stop taking umbrage when I correctly point out that certain slogans are associated with racism. I'm stating facts.
> If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle.
We're having a discussion about semantics. "All lives matter " and "black lives matter" are political slogans. Which one you choose to associate with sends signals that are based on context.
If you believe that it is more important to express that all lives matter than that black lives matter because a "race blind" statement is more powerful (or something, you haven't actually taken the time to explain the principles on which you're operating anywhere in this thread), you're free to express that view! You can do it! We have strong protections on your freedom to express ideas, even controversial ones. But because of that, others are also free to express their own ideas, such as criticism of yours, like that you are ignoring context.
> Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints.
I don't want to listen to nazis. I don't have anything to gain from listening to nazis. It is physically uncomfortable for me to listen to nazis. It makes me anxious. It is ultimately a waste of my time to listen to them.
I'm not saying that all views I disagree with are nazis, but the implication that free expression requires others to listen to you is a dangerous one. We can all draw the line somewhere on who we listen to. You have no right to my time or my audience, and it is not reasonable to substitute your right to speak with my right to ignore you. The opposite is also true, you're well within your rights to ignore me, and I support that for you.
Broadly, I think it's ironic how much your responses are colored based on things I didn't say. You haven't actually taken the time to respond to my thoughts or words, nor does it seem that you even took the time to ponder on them. You instead ranted about only tangentially related topics. And that's your right! You can do that. I can't stop you, you're welcome to ignore me.
But all those nice words about "debate" and "listening" to other viewpoints ring a little hollow when you don't actually engage with any critique.
> The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
I'd respectfully disagree on this issue. I think it's possible to be worried about police abuse of force from the context of being a person who is a mere citizen and thus has a lot less rights than the police. No ethnic group has a truly zero chance of dying at the police's hand. Do white people have it better? Yes absolutely. But it's not as though the police only use excessive force against black people.
I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way. The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct. And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground. It's pretty tragic.
> The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct
Isn't it? Which genuine pre-existing police reform campaigns are using that phrase? Do you have any examples?
> And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground
People are told that "all lives matter", in that specific phrasing, is divisive, and keep using it. If you say "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", you're quoting from the universal declaration of human rights and uncontrovesial (in the west!)
> I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way
Are there? Who? More importantly, how? And I don't think any of the specific BLM proposals are actually race-specific, are they?
If that were true, then you would see significant anti-police violence protests under the banner of "all lives matter." I will happily acknowledge that people who are protesting, or agitating for change, by using that phrase are (likely) not using it as a dogwhistle. But I've seen no one who does that. I've only seen the phrase used as a response to people fighting for black lives.
> I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way.
I agree with this, in that evidence seems to show that the problems with criminal justice and excessive use of force are amenable to color/ethnicity agnostic solutions, and that this would have the most positive impact by far on non-white minorities for obvious reasons. I also think BLM is doing a fine job of raising awareness about the issue but it's less clear that they have good solutions, whereas conservatives have been looking at this area for a long time but haven't done nearly enough to advertise the social equality angle. So this seems to be a case where orthodoxy privilege and lack of respect for intellectual diversity is hurting both sides.
OP was comparing the two statements in terms of 'orthodox privilege'.
Meaning they were not claiming that they both have the same ethical standards or logical consistency. But rather that 'orthodox privilege' can be extrapolated into 'bubbles' or sub-cultures. The 'orthodox privilege' in PGs article is also mostly descriptive rather than normative.
You were arguing based on ethics and logic. I agree with your conclusion and I sympathize with your reaction. But it seems you missed what OP was going for: describing what people might think/say/do and why that might be rather than what they _should_ do.
I think that their usage of the "* Lives Matter" statement was probably a little distracting. They're trying to say that "Orthodoxy" isnt neccesarily universal and that different (large) bubbles have their own orthodoxies
Au contraire, Saying "Black Lives Matter" is a distraction. The actual problem is police violence and overreach - not just police killings, but even things like swatting, civil forfeiture, police buying surplus army gear, drug war, etc. etc. - and focusing attention on just one tiny issue, then proposing a braindead solution ("defund the police" - do you really want to live in a society with no police? like e.g. CHAZ?) is the worst way to solve the problem.
I think the orthodoxy in the dominant, pro-Trump faction of the GOP would say "All Lives Matter" is not racist or a dogwhistle. (I think there are few that would openly consider themselves racist, thus making their orthodox opinion on the phrase: 'we are not being racist'. Even if I personally disagree with that self-classification.)
Even current popular use of the term "dogwhistle" has become a dogwhistle in and of itself.
In current contemporary use, members of the blue tribe use it to communicate to other members of the blue tribe that they believe they have identified a member of the red tribe and want other members of the blue tribe to join them in the tar-and-feathering of the suspected red tribe member.
Both the blue tribe and the red tribe are mirror images of one another in far more ways than members of either are willing (capable?) of acknowledging.
You're right, except that _the majority_ tends to be one of the bubbles ;-)
It's why I worry about the left promoting and abusing cancel/outrage culture.
Ironically, if you want to protect minorities, then liberal values need to be protected because it is liberal values that protect minorities against the _tyranny of the majority_.
As an example, on the one hand, as a European, I agree with banning hate speech if it is well defined, and I think the western European countries have a good track record in not abusing censorship. On the other hand, censorship can easily be extended to "fake news", or it could be interpreted that a critique of religion is hate speech, the same religion that promotes hate speech in the Bible, with organizations behind it that support conservative values, actively pushing for legislation against minorities.
Why do minorities think that if censorship starts to be more common, that it will be in their / our favor, given the entire history of the human race? It's a mystery to me.
And I understand the current phenomenon in the US. The justice system in the US is dysfunctional because systemic racism exists, and it's unjust. So people are taking matters into their own hands. With a dysfunctional justice system, the outcome is predictable.
However, that outcome will not be positive. Sorry but I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks; the instances in history where popular revolts worked to enact positive change are rare and far between.
There's a time and follower threshold where it goes from being a bubble to a cultural norm. IMO that threshold has been greatly lowered by all of social media allowing for a relatively quick (compared to hundreds of years of human communication) amassing of followers to form a bubble. In this way, you can mint your own orthodoxy. Having a large number of people following some idea is a powerful force in recruiting others.
And although the threshold has gone down for new bubbles, it has also gone down for when they get removed. It's become normal to churn through a bunch of different bubbles and seeing which one sticks around long enough.
For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.