Me and my brother watched the Super Bowl last night, me rooting for he Rams and him for the Bengals. We saw the same play happen live, resulting in the Bengals getting a penalty for holding and the Rams being awarded free yards.
He saw it as "fucked up" and I saw it as "just".
When the Rams were called for a penalty, the roles were reversed and I felt like the refs were in the pocket of the Bengals for calling such a stupid penalty.
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All that to say: when _my_ team does stuff, it's okay. When _their_ team does stuff, it's bad. This is the same line of reasoning that is being played out with the above hypocrisy.
The logical case against the legitimacy of BLM protests is primarily predicated on evidence. Specifically, that while police brutality is definitely a problem in the US, there's no evidence that it disproportionately impacts people of color. When you look at the actual data, it seems that police like to brutalize and kill innocent suspects in a relatively colorblind manner. There are even a few outlier studies that suggest police actually show greater restraint with black suspects, although those studies do have some methodological issues.
It's effectively one of those "reals before feels" situations for those of us who prefer to view politics through a lens of actual data rather than baseless emotion.
Nobody batted an eye when Daniel Shaver's murderer was cleared. The protests should have been explicitly anti-police-brutality, not race-baiting nonsense.
It arises when supporting a group is all that matters, and one's "values" morph and twist into whatever is optimal to support the tribe at any given moment. It yields a lot of meaningless words.
This happens all over the political spectrum. It happens in technology discussions. It happens in, as another post said, sports commentary.
Because many on the right (and center and left) are naive enough to think that left-leaning groups/entity protests getting "mostly peaceful" positive coverage during the height of lockdowns in 2020 was actually an unbiased shift of norms, and not just media partisanship.
Where do you think that hypocrisy comes from? I'm across the pond so very far from the action, but I'm very curious how people reason about this.