Interesting view on Black Lives Matter

[barney]

Interesting view on Black Lives Matter from the Spectator in the UK. The writer, an immigrant to Britain, thinks the movement should be opposed because it wants to impose reverse racism. I have to say, I'd be happier with a movement that proclaimed All Lives Matter. Because they do.
Is there any sense in the US of what he says BLM leaders want? How do people feel about what he says? In Australia, the position is different again, where it is mostly indigenous Australians who have suffered, and there is overwhelming support - which I share - for improving their position. And if that's what BLM means, I certainly support it.
Part of the problem here is that no one is quite sure what the solutions are. First nations people themselves don't agree. And that should be no surprise - would tens of thousands of Irish Australians or Jewish Australians agree on anything?


The article:

Konstantin Kisin
I don’t support BLM and neither should you
2 July 2020, 12:42am
I don't support BLM and neither should you

Most of us have remained largely silent as we watched the scenes of disorder and destruction around the country in recent weeks. Driven by the desire to be clear in our opposition to racism, we turned a blind eye as protestors abused and injured police officers, chasing them around the streets of London with impunity. We stood aside as they defaced key symbols of our history and bowed cowardly institution after cowardly institution to their will. We watched spokespeople for this movement declare a cultural revolution and pretended we did not know what that meant. We can no longer afford to maintain this façade of ignorance and docility.

Do I believe the lives of black people matter? Of course. Do I think racial injustices must be addressed, and with urgency? Absolutely. Do I support a neo-Marxist organisation that wants to 'dismantle capitalism', 'defund' the police and undermine the nuclear family? No. There, I’ve said it. I do not support the Black Lives Matter organisation. Neither should you.

Although I’ve always had strong reservations about the organisation, the turning point for me came this weekend when we discovered that Black Lives Matter UK had some interesting thoughts about Israel:

If up until this moment you had believed that BLM was devoted to securing justice for the horrific killing of George Floyd or a broader struggle for racial equality, it might have been tempting to assume that Rebecca Long-Bailey had been accidentally given the reins over the movement’s social media strategy. However, to anyone paying attention this development was entirely unsurprising.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a newly-surfaced video from 2015 that she and her fellow organisers are 'trained Marxists'. BLM UK’s fundraising page, which has secured funding of over £1 million, suggests that the money will be spent on 'developing strategies for the abolition of police' and 'dismantling capitalism'.

We must begin to take these people at their word and act accordingly. This is not about eliminating discrimination, it is about applying it in reverse.

Many of us have been warning for some time that the inevitable consequence of identity politics – the idea that what matters most about an individual is not the content of their character but which supposed 'community' they come from – will inevitably lead us to the place we are now in. We are told repeatedly that there is such a thing as the 'black community', the 'British Asian community' and so on. This is a lie.

Black Britons from different backgrounds often have less in common with each other than they do with other ethnic groups. A recent arrival from Nigeria may have more in common with someone like me, a first-generation Russian Jewish immigrant, than they do with someone whose family came here generations ago from the Caribbean. There are huge disparities between educational and career outcomes for Britons of African and Caribbean descent. The same is true of British Indians and Pakistanis who are insultingly lumped into one ridiculous acronym after another as we cede larger and larger swathes of the alphabet. There is no such thing as the 'black' experience, the 'brown' experience or the 'immigrant' experience. I know this will come as a shock to the guilt-ridden chattering classes but not all of us think the same.

All of this nuance has been absent from our public debate for decades. Instead we have been fed a steady diet of the damaging, counterproductive narrative that is now euphemistically described as 'anti-racism', an approach that will set race relations back by decades. According to this narrative, the best way to prevent racism is to obsess constantly about race. Rather than striving for a colour-blind society, which we are now told is the very definition of racism, we must instead be hyperaware of race. As I have said repeatedly, if we make any more 'progress' down this path, we’ll end up with two sets of drinking fountains.

The tragedy, of course, is that many sensible commentators, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, have been predicting this for some time. Mostly their warnings have fallen on deaf ears as the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media continues to ignore them. Where, as in the case of someone like Trevor Phillips, they cannot be ignored, it has become perfectly acceptable among some to describe dissenting minority voices using awful labels such as 'coconuts', 'oreos', 'race traitors' and 'bounties'.

The truth about these pink-haired revolutionaries and those who encourage and support them is that they believe that skin colour matters more than who you are as a person. They believe that white people who don’t agree with them should be described as 'gammons' and use racist language towards minorities who speak out against their ideology. We must resist this divisive agenda before it is too late.

WRITTEN BY
Konstantin Kisin

[Belle]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/0 ... l-culture/

And

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al7gc_F ... e=youtu.be

This is what happens when you support political extremism because you dislike a democratically elected President. Good luck with that. As the excellent Dr. Thomas Sowell says, "the Left doesn't like facts because they find them emotionally unsatisfying".

[jserraglio]

As the excellent Dr. Thomas Sowell says, "the Left doesn't like facts because they find them emotionally unsatisfying".

By contrast, the radical Right makes passionate love to their facts, alternate facts. Facts that even a party with a vested financial interest in seeing displayed on its public forum has to flag as having been made up out of whole cloth.

Twitter added a label to [Trump's] posts with a blue exclamation point symbol and a warning that Trump was making an “unsubstantiated claim.”

“Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” a statement from the company read once users clicked on the alert.

So much for soi-disant facts issuing from the mouths of right-wingers.

[diegobueno]

The thing I find the most appalling about the "All lives matter" response is the level of studious and deliberate miscomprehension of the point being made. It should be as clear as day that in a society where black people are time and time again shot by policemen in situations where a white offender would only get a ticket or a warning, and the officers get off with no charges, where a black college student picking up trash outside his dorm is detained by a police officer and asked for identification and threatened with tasing while the word of the white professor who happens by and vouches for the student's identity is accepted unconditionally, where a black property owner being threatened with violence by neighbors has to hold them off by showing a gun and the police officers who arrive arrest the black guy instead of the harrassers, where talking heads on Fox News routinely spin the stories of these black people so that the conclusion is that they were "thugs" who "deserved what they got", that black people are going to conclude that to whites, their lives don't matter. How can you not see that? What kind of blinkers do you put on to hide the simple truth from your eyes? Please, people! If the phrase "black lives matters" offends you, you need to change society so that it treats black people as if their lives DO matter!! This is something we all have to do, and we have to do it now and we need to keep doing until it is a reality.

[barney]

The thing I find the most appalling about the "All lives matter" response is the level of studious and deliberate miscomprehension of the point being made. It should be as clear as day that in a society where black people are time and time again shot by policemen in situations where a white offender would only get a ticket or a warning, and the officers get off with no charges, where a black college student picking up trash outside his dorm is detained by a police officer and asked for identification and threatened with tasing while the word of the white professor who happens by and vouches for the student's identity is accepted unconditionally, where a black property owner being threatened with violence by neighbors has to hold them off by showing a gun and the police officers who arrive arrest the black guy instead of the harrassers, where talking heads on Fox News routinely spin the stories of these black people so that the conclusion is that they were "thugs" who "deserved what they got", that black people are going to conclude that to whites, their lives don't matter. How can you not see that? What kind of blinkers do you put on to hide the simple truth from your eyes? Please, people! If the phrase "black lives matters" offends you, you need to change society so that it treats black people as if their lives DO matter!! This is something we all have to do, and we have to do it now and we need to keep doing until it is a reality.

I recognise all those things, and I want black lives to matter as much as white. And I want white to matter as much as black. And Aborigines, Japanese, Chinese as much as any. The original point was, is the criticism of Black Lives Matter as a cover for a wider agenda accurate in any way. Possibly in the US the slogan "all lives matter" has political connotations it does not in Australia. But for me, as a Christian, all lives are created by God in his image and therefore have ineluctable value. Blacks every bit as much as whites. My first examination of any issue does not begin with race, and it seems that in America it does. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I am different.

[lennygoran]

Possibly in the US the slogan "all lives matter" has political connotations it does not in Australia. But for me, as a Christian, all lives are created by God in his image and therefore have ineluctable value. Blacks every bit as much as whites. My first examination of any issue does not begin with race, and it seems that in America it does. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I am different.

Barney in the US black lives have not mattered as much as white lives-that's the way it seems to me. We still have a President seeming to resist taking down the confederate Flag. Regards, Len

[diegobueno]

I recognise all those things, and I want black lives to matter as much as white. And I want white to matter as much as black. And Aborigines, Japanese, Chinese as much as any. The original point was, is the criticism of Black Lives Matter as a cover for a wider agenda accurate in any way. Possibly in the US the slogan "all lives matter" has political connotations it does not in Australia. But for me, as a Christian, all lives are created by God in his image and therefore have ineluctable value. Blacks every bit as much as whites. My first examination of any issue does not begin with race, and it seems that in America it does. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I am different.

Barney,

The expression "black lives matter" does not mean "only black ilves matter". It does not mean "white lives don't matter". It does not negate the idea that all lives matter. It simply means what it says: Black lives matter. This is where the "studious and deliberate mischaracterization" comes in. The right wing press in this country are trying to spin this slogan in ways it was not intended in order to promote racial division and keep the people they see as "others" in their place.

[jserraglio]

The expression "black lives matter" does not mean "only black ilves matter". It does not mean "white lives don't matter". It does not negate the idea that all lives matter. It simply means what it says: Black lives matter. This is where the "studious and deliberate mischaracterization" comes in. The right wing press in this country are trying to spin this slogan in ways it was not intended in order to promote racial division and keep the people they see as "others" in their place.

I agree. In America, right-wing racists use the mantra "white lives matter" to put down African-Americans who challenge the violence directed at them.

[Belle]

The expression "black lives matter" does not mean "only black ilves matter". It does not mean "white lives don't matter". It does not negate the idea that all lives matter. It simply means what it says: Black lives matter. This is where the "studious and deliberate mischaracterization" comes in. The right wing press in this country are trying to spin this slogan in ways it was not intended in order to promote racial division and keep the people they see as "others" in their place.

I agree. In America, right-wing racists use the mantra "white lives matter" to put down African-Americans who challenge the violence directed at them.

You know very well that this is a projection and that you now belong to the extreme Left, which has been sadly and unfortunately embraced by the Democrats. Even Margaret Attwood and JK Rowling have had to pen a public letter complaining about cancel culture, repression and the loss of freedom of speech. This is the stuff of the old Soviet Union. And Dr. Ferguson talks about what's going on in American universities by way of extreme politics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asc27lxtnas&t=1360s

Stop it because you know this is only playing into Donald Trump's hands. Surely now even you can admit that one of the major reasons for the election of Trump was the people's refusal to be hogtied by Leftist extremism. Get back to first principles if you want your nation back. Whether black lives matter means this or that is immaterial; at the end of the day its bedrock ideology is IF I CAN'T HAVE IT NEITHER CAN YOU. The oldest song in the capitalist playbook.

So this is the new 'summer of love'??!!

[jserraglio]

Even Margaret Attwood [sic] and JK Rowling have had to pen a public letter complaining about cancel culture, repression and the loss of freedom of speech.

Your response marries Generalization to Accusation. But to dispute one point: in this forum at least, I don't see anyone in favor of muzzling speech.

[lennygoran]

in this forum at least, I don't see anyone in favor of muzzling speech.

Thank goodness for that-as an aside I was just listening to Rachel's show from last night fully devoted to trump's niece's new book-great material already out there even as trump tries to muzzle the book! Regards, Len

[diegobueno]

It seems curious to me that advocating for fair treatment from law enforcement makes one part of an "extreme left". How far right must a person be to see justice, which should be at the center of what the U.S. is about, as something "extreme left"?

Speaking of muzzling speech, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Michelle Cusseaux, Freddie Grey, Janisha Fonville, Eric Garner, and countless others have had their speech muzzled -- permanently. Whatever your political orientation, this should not be a right vs. left issue. This is a serious problem and it deserves serious reform.