I’m still technically on a “respite” from social media and the Posting grind, but can’t resist momentarily indulging this morning. Being in England at the moment, I have observed an unusual amount of attention paid to the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. There was a whole segment devoted to the subject in last night’s edition of
It's weird, but only slightly less weird than "Black Lives Matter" yard signs in high-end suburbs and bucolic college towns across America. It's elite virtue-signaling, any relationship to real problems and solutions is purely incidental.
I agree with all of this, but as a fellow resident of the Bay Area, if San Jose, Mountain View and Palo Alto are in the Bay Area, Oakland definitely is. In fact, the SF metro Bay Area as its defined by the Census includes SF and Oakland, but not the "Santa Clara Valley", which is considered a separate metro (San Jose). But yes, in my travels around the Bay Area and elsewhere, the wealthier and whiter a neighborhood is, the higher the chance you'll see Black Lives Matter yard signs and flags in it.
Oh, I think you're just getting confused between "the Bay Area" and "Silicon Valley". Oakland has traditionally not been thought to be in Silicon Valley, which started as a moniker for the Santa Clara "Valley" or Santa Clara County (Palo Alto and points south through San Jose).
The Bay Area's traditional "core" is SF-Oak-Berkeley, but most people also consider Silicon Valley to be in the (greater) Bay Area. Silicon Valley has over the last 20-30 years gradually migrated north though the Peninsula, into the City, and across to the East Bay. Pandora for example is located in Oakland. It's easy to imagine that in 2021 people think Silicon Valley and the Bay Area to be the same thing, but if so, Oakland's in it.
I remember watching some massive protest in Brussels last year after the Minneapolis cop killed a black man who had pointed a pistol at a pregnant black woman's belly. I remember wondering when the people of Brussels had become so involved and infatuated with the state of Minneapolis policing. It didn't take a genius to realize that it was the latest "event" that we were all supposed to argue and fight, destroy, and kill over.
The people at the Top of the Pyramid, the Keepers of the Narrative, read Julius Caesar's "The Gallic Wars", where JC gives you chapter and verse on how to divide and conquer. Their private boarding schools haven't removed 'dead white men' from the curriculum. But your school did it long ago. Your son's school swapped out "Tale of Two Cities" for "Tale of Two Trans Daddies".
There's a method to their madness. I'm not sure there's a method to yours.
I get annoyed every time the US media goes through a cycle of news on the royals. I can only imagine how the English feel about importing American struggle sessions. But then again, I have never understood why there is so much international activism around US politics.
When Canada was a free country, Canadians would regularly inject their own opinions on things like American elections. When I would ask them why they care about the election cycle for another sovereign nation, they would reply by saying that American policies has an impact on their own country.
While that is true, you could say the same for every other country on the planet. If I'm being honest, I could care less about what dictator that they put into office. The same is true for the UK but Canada is much more entertaining. At least the UK has the stones to pull out of the EU.
Meanwhile, Canada is putting church pastors into jail for violating COVID restrictions while they take a knee to BLM and protest in the streets for the killing of a man in Minneapolis. Whenever I start to feel bad about the state of US politics, I just take a look at what is happening in Canada.
That's what it's like having one state-run media outlet setting the narrative. Our little idiots (NYT, WaPo) try their damnedest to do the same thing here, but thankfully, we're built different and we have choices (for now).
Do you honestly believe that the BBC would allow dissenting voices? They actively ban them. No conservative (Katie Hopkins, for example) would ever be allowed on the air to challenge their narrative.
I read recently that a UK BLM leader named Sacha Johnson, who gave speeches literally saying white people should be made into slaves, was attending a party in her home neighborhood when a group of black men with rival gang affiliations to hers shot her in the head. The UK news services tried to make it sound like she was a martyr for her political activity, but, in fact, she was just a victim of a gang shooting from people just as scummy as her.
If there is anything that could honestly be called "White Privilege" it's that white people never pressure each other to make heroes out of white criminals who happen to get put down by the authorities, be it a legit killing or not. When Dylan Roof gets the needle, most white people will be like... "Great... Good riddance." No marches... No banners... No tears... As it should be when bad people die.
I noticed this via the twitter propaganda they keep recommending on the right of the site. A story keeps popping up regarding the UK and Floyd one year later... Uh... Why is anyone in the UK thinking about this at all?
"And yet rather than object to what’s really a kind of cultural imperialism being foisted upon them by foreign activists, even these Conservatives seem rather inclined to act like wet noodles."
Reading an essay out of the UK this morning after reading this short piece, I find the following.
"As I’ve written before, median white British household wealth stands at £314,000, compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. Similarly, a typical white American family owns eight times the wealth of a typical black American family and five times that of a Hispanic family."
My math based on the above quote, says median white wealth for British household is 9 times "the black African family" compared to 8 in America. Neither result is a point of pride. In looking at UK demographics in the recent path, they seem to make much of white from Wales, white from Scotland, Northern Ireland, etc. I have seen this as an attempt to deflect from a very homogenous population. 86.0% of the population of England and Wales is white, while 3.3% is black. Asian ethnic groups are the largest minority at 7.5%.
I agree wholeheartedly; I'm from the UK but have lived in many places including the US.
I find it all really odd.most people here couldn't place Mineapolis on a Map (or spell it).
Black people have been particularly keen to hold onto this issue (unlike Brazilian police brutality or the enslavement of west Africans in Libya) and bear some deep grudge against the rest of country.And a lot of white people seem very keen to be admonished for this.
What was really odd was watching football players kneel in solidarity to the US blm.when we have much more local issues relating to anti white sexual violence by Pakistanis minorities which warrant something like that.
Also the beheading of Samuel paty this year seems to of had a very small impact culturally, even though France is a lot closer.
Sorry but you lost me here: "There are barely any relevant parallels between US and UK police culture and/or laws governing use of force. The cultural dynamics between the two countries vis-a-vis race are also vastly different. “BME” minorities are well-integrated in the UK relative to the US and, to take another example, France."
Not only are there parallels in the way immigrants from former British and French colonies are treated by police and the US (albeit the latter being MUCH more deadly), you're basically saying that American Blacks *aren't* well-integrated in the US despite having been here since the 1600s. If that doesn't give you something to think about regarding "what you've learned" since George Floyd (or before), then I don't think you're giving it much thought at all.
So you think that American Blacks aren't well integrated into US society? Would you care to expound on that?
Regardless, it's amazing how American culture exports (like movements, music and Hollywood) have such an effect overseas, isn't it? Having learned what I know over the past 40 years, I wouldn't automatically discount the CIA or MI6 (and their cutouts) for promoting BLM style protests in Europe.
Police use of deadly force in the U.S. is vastly greater than other OECD countries for one simple reason - the prevalence of firearms. Use of deadly force by police in the U.S. against unarmed people is extremely rare. Like 40-50 or so a year, in a nation of almost 350MM. The fact that the police in the U.S. are themselves more likely to be armed in any given interaction than police in the U.K. also plays a role. Because they are armed, they cannot afford to loose a fight, lest their weapon be used against them.
Thanks. That's what I was assuming (see my link above). Even WaPo says they don't have the real amount, but I'm not sure how far off the mark they are or how much effort/manpower they put into tracking the shootings that aren't reported to the FBI.
Here's the money shot from that article:
"Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.
That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.
“What’s there is crappy data,” said David A. Klinger, a former police officer and criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri who studies police use of force.
Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year.
“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from (arrest-related deaths) both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” said Michael Planty, one of the Justice Department’s chief statisticians, in an email.
Even less data exists for officer-involved shootings that do not result in fatalities."
So it's very possible they're seriously undercounting both officer involved firearm deaths and even moreso those that don't result in death. Wish there was a nationwide requirement to report this info and I'm not sure why the FBI doesn't make it mandatory.
So if that's correct, there are more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies (which may include prisons/jails?) but only 750 of them are actually doing any reporting to the FBI. I kind of doubt WaPo has enough staff or other resources to call each and every one of the remaining 16,250 agencies to get the statistics.
You are going down a rabbit hole here. Your original link is from before WaPo created the database. We have accurate data from 2015 forward. The database is accurate from 2015 forward (accurate for quantity, I should say - people do quibble on characterizations like armed versus unarmed in incidents where, for example, the deceased was trying to hit an officer with an automobile, which WaPo will describe as "unarmed"). WaPo does not assemble the database by calling the police agencies. All of these are public records and are publicly reported on by local press. All they did was the work of collecting/de-duping/verifying.
Yes, that link was the precursor to WaPo deciding to create the database. Maybe I am going down a rabbit hole, but all that WaPo says about their methods in the link you provided is this:
"The Post’s data relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings and police reports. Analysis of more than five years of data reveals that the number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained relatively constant."
If they're truly going to cover 17,000+ law enforcement agencies, the above methodology would indeed require a LOT of work and resources. Again, news accounts, social media postings and police reports. The last item in that list alone would entail requesting data from XX,000 of the aforementioned agencies. Maybe I'm old school, but so are a lot of police agencies. Do you have any other, more detailed information on exactly what the process is that WaPo uses to accumulate the data? Because what they do say is somewhat vague and again implies a lot of time and energy.
Where are you getting those statistics? From what I understand they aren't required to report those stats to anyone, but the FBI has a program where they VOLUNTARILY (and often don't) submit them. I'd be interested in a good source to use in future conversations.
I don't pay much to Euro politics in any great detail, but I thought those 'car BBQs' in the suburbs of Paris and the strength of Marine La Pen makes for a different in picture, no?
It's odd, isn't it? The UK, as everywhere, has it's own social problems. So why the need to import more? I'm guessing it's in line with the media's insatiable appetite for woke hand wringing.
The fact that they had to learn English is a great benefit.....this coming from an immigrant who didn't establish some fluency in English until age 14.
BTW, I think Hong Kong would much rather be a British colony rather than being swallowed up by China and the totalitarianism that entails.
It's weird, but only slightly less weird than "Black Lives Matter" yard signs in high-end suburbs and bucolic college towns across America. It's elite virtue-signaling, any relationship to real problems and solutions is purely incidental.
I agree with all of this, but as a fellow resident of the Bay Area, if San Jose, Mountain View and Palo Alto are in the Bay Area, Oakland definitely is. In fact, the SF metro Bay Area as its defined by the Census includes SF and Oakland, but not the "Santa Clara Valley", which is considered a separate metro (San Jose). But yes, in my travels around the Bay Area and elsewhere, the wealthier and whiter a neighborhood is, the higher the chance you'll see Black Lives Matter yard signs and flags in it.
Agreed, last time I passed through Oakland it was in the Bay Area. Unless they moved it.
Yes, see my previous comment.
Oh, I think you're just getting confused between "the Bay Area" and "Silicon Valley". Oakland has traditionally not been thought to be in Silicon Valley, which started as a moniker for the Santa Clara "Valley" or Santa Clara County (Palo Alto and points south through San Jose).
The Bay Area's traditional "core" is SF-Oak-Berkeley, but most people also consider Silicon Valley to be in the (greater) Bay Area. Silicon Valley has over the last 20-30 years gradually migrated north though the Peninsula, into the City, and across to the East Bay. Pandora for example is located in Oakland. It's easy to imagine that in 2021 people think Silicon Valley and the Bay Area to be the same thing, but if so, Oakland's in it.
I remember watching some massive protest in Brussels last year after the Minneapolis cop killed a black man who had pointed a pistol at a pregnant black woman's belly. I remember wondering when the people of Brussels had become so involved and infatuated with the state of Minneapolis policing. It didn't take a genius to realize that it was the latest "event" that we were all supposed to argue and fight, destroy, and kill over.
The people at the Top of the Pyramid, the Keepers of the Narrative, read Julius Caesar's "The Gallic Wars", where JC gives you chapter and verse on how to divide and conquer. Their private boarding schools haven't removed 'dead white men' from the curriculum. But your school did it long ago. Your son's school swapped out "Tale of Two Cities" for "Tale of Two Trans Daddies".
There's a method to their madness. I'm not sure there's a method to yours.
I get annoyed every time the US media goes through a cycle of news on the royals. I can only imagine how the English feel about importing American struggle sessions. But then again, I have never understood why there is so much international activism around US politics.
When Canada was a free country, Canadians would regularly inject their own opinions on things like American elections. When I would ask them why they care about the election cycle for another sovereign nation, they would reply by saying that American policies has an impact on their own country.
While that is true, you could say the same for every other country on the planet. If I'm being honest, I could care less about what dictator that they put into office. The same is true for the UK but Canada is much more entertaining. At least the UK has the stones to pull out of the EU.
Meanwhile, Canada is putting church pastors into jail for violating COVID restrictions while they take a knee to BLM and protest in the streets for the killing of a man in Minneapolis. Whenever I start to feel bad about the state of US politics, I just take a look at what is happening in Canada.
I'm sure they all agreed there is much work to be done.
The global chorus increasingly sings from the same songbook.
That's what it's like having one state-run media outlet setting the narrative. Our little idiots (NYT, WaPo) try their damnedest to do the same thing here, but thankfully, we're built different and we have choices (for now).
Do you honestly believe that the BBC would allow dissenting voices? They actively ban them. No conservative (Katie Hopkins, for example) would ever be allowed on the air to challenge their narrative.
That's Leftism for you.
I read recently that a UK BLM leader named Sacha Johnson, who gave speeches literally saying white people should be made into slaves, was attending a party in her home neighborhood when a group of black men with rival gang affiliations to hers shot her in the head. The UK news services tried to make it sound like she was a martyr for her political activity, but, in fact, she was just a victim of a gang shooting from people just as scummy as her.
If there is anything that could honestly be called "White Privilege" it's that white people never pressure each other to make heroes out of white criminals who happen to get put down by the authorities, be it a legit killing or not. When Dylan Roof gets the needle, most white people will be like... "Great... Good riddance." No marches... No banners... No tears... As it should be when bad people die.
She also advocated for Black people to pay no tax so that they could accumulate more saving and buy property and business equity.
Whilst offering nothing for the white working poor.
MP Diane annot still trued to present her as activist for "racial justice"
The right still called her a "marxist" even though she's a black nationalist who loves clearly loves capitalism.
I noticed this via the twitter propaganda they keep recommending on the right of the site. A story keeps popping up regarding the UK and Floyd one year later... Uh... Why is anyone in the UK thinking about this at all?
"And yet rather than object to what’s really a kind of cultural imperialism being foisted upon them by foreign activists, even these Conservatives seem rather inclined to act like wet noodles."
And that's why they no longer have an Empire.
Reading an essay out of the UK this morning after reading this short piece, I find the following.
"As I’ve written before, median white British household wealth stands at £314,000, compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. Similarly, a typical white American family owns eight times the wealth of a typical black American family and five times that of a Hispanic family."
My math based on the above quote, says median white wealth for British household is 9 times "the black African family" compared to 8 in America. Neither result is a point of pride. In looking at UK demographics in the recent path, they seem to make much of white from Wales, white from Scotland, Northern Ireland, etc. I have seen this as an attempt to deflect from a very homogenous population. 86.0% of the population of England and Wales is white, while 3.3% is black. Asian ethnic groups are the largest minority at 7.5%.
Can you please provide a link to the publications? I wonder how "household" is defined....is a 2-wage home and a 1-wage home, counted as "household"?
314,000BP is around $450,000....which I think is higher than US.
https://unherd.com/2021/05/the-self-loathing-of-the-west/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=4496556d2f
I agree wholeheartedly; I'm from the UK but have lived in many places including the US.
I find it all really odd.most people here couldn't place Mineapolis on a Map (or spell it).
Black people have been particularly keen to hold onto this issue (unlike Brazilian police brutality or the enslavement of west Africans in Libya) and bear some deep grudge against the rest of country.And a lot of white people seem very keen to be admonished for this.
What was really odd was watching football players kneel in solidarity to the US blm.when we have much more local issues relating to anti white sexual violence by Pakistanis minorities which warrant something like that.
Also the beheading of Samuel paty this year seems to of had a very small impact culturally, even though France is a lot closer.
Sorry but you lost me here: "There are barely any relevant parallels between US and UK police culture and/or laws governing use of force. The cultural dynamics between the two countries vis-a-vis race are also vastly different. “BME” minorities are well-integrated in the UK relative to the US and, to take another example, France."
Not only are there parallels in the way immigrants from former British and French colonies are treated by police and the US (albeit the latter being MUCH more deadly), you're basically saying that American Blacks *aren't* well-integrated in the US despite having been here since the 1600s. If that doesn't give you something to think about regarding "what you've learned" since George Floyd (or before), then I don't think you're giving it much thought at all.
So you think that American Blacks aren't well integrated into US society? Would you care to expound on that?
Regardless, it's amazing how American culture exports (like movements, music and Hollywood) have such an effect overseas, isn't it? Having learned what I know over the past 40 years, I wouldn't automatically discount the CIA or MI6 (and their cutouts) for promoting BLM style protests in Europe.
Police use of deadly force in the U.S. is vastly greater than other OECD countries for one simple reason - the prevalence of firearms. Use of deadly force by police in the U.S. against unarmed people is extremely rare. Like 40-50 or so a year, in a nation of almost 350MM. The fact that the police in the U.S. are themselves more likely to be armed in any given interaction than police in the U.K. also plays a role. Because they are armed, they cannot afford to loose a fight, lest their weapon be used against them.
This is where I read that, BTW. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/
WaPo created a database of police shootings beginning in 2015 that pretty much everyone relies on.
Thanks. That's what I was assuming (see my link above). Even WaPo says they don't have the real amount, but I'm not sure how far off the mark they are or how much effort/manpower they put into tracking the shootings that aren't reported to the FBI.
Here's the money shot from that article:
"Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.
That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.
“What’s there is crappy data,” said David A. Klinger, a former police officer and criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri who studies police use of force.
Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year.
“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from (arrest-related deaths) both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” said Michael Planty, one of the Justice Department’s chief statisticians, in an email.
Even less data exists for officer-involved shootings that do not result in fatalities."
So it's very possible they're seriously undercounting both officer involved firearm deaths and even moreso those that don't result in death. Wish there was a nationwide requirement to report this info and I'm not sure why the FBI doesn't make it mandatory.
So if that's correct, there are more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies (which may include prisons/jails?) but only 750 of them are actually doing any reporting to the FBI. I kind of doubt WaPo has enough staff or other resources to call each and every one of the remaining 16,250 agencies to get the statistics.
You are going down a rabbit hole here. Your original link is from before WaPo created the database. We have accurate data from 2015 forward. The database is accurate from 2015 forward (accurate for quantity, I should say - people do quibble on characterizations like armed versus unarmed in incidents where, for example, the deceased was trying to hit an officer with an automobile, which WaPo will describe as "unarmed"). WaPo does not assemble the database by calling the police agencies. All of these are public records and are publicly reported on by local press. All they did was the work of collecting/de-duping/verifying.
Yes, that link was the precursor to WaPo deciding to create the database. Maybe I am going down a rabbit hole, but all that WaPo says about their methods in the link you provided is this:
"The Post’s data relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings and police reports. Analysis of more than five years of data reveals that the number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained relatively constant."
If they're truly going to cover 17,000+ law enforcement agencies, the above methodology would indeed require a LOT of work and resources. Again, news accounts, social media postings and police reports. The last item in that list alone would entail requesting data from XX,000 of the aforementioned agencies. Maybe I'm old school, but so are a lot of police agencies. Do you have any other, more detailed information on exactly what the process is that WaPo uses to accumulate the data? Because what they do say is somewhat vague and again implies a lot of time and energy.
You can download the data here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
Where are you getting those statistics? From what I understand they aren't required to report those stats to anyone, but the FBI has a program where they VOLUNTARILY (and often don't) submit them. I'd be interested in a good source to use in future conversations.
I don't pay much to Euro politics in any great detail, but I thought those 'car BBQs' in the suburbs of Paris and the strength of Marine La Pen makes for a different in picture, no?
It's odd, isn't it? The UK, as everywhere, has it's own social problems. So why the need to import more? I'm guessing it's in line with the media's insatiable appetite for woke hand wringing.
The fact that they had to learn English is a great benefit.....this coming from an immigrant who didn't establish some fluency in English until age 14.
BTW, I think Hong Kong would much rather be a British colony rather than being swallowed up by China and the totalitarianism that entails.
It may not apply to everyone, but I am fairly sure that people in Hong Kong would rather be a British colony than what they are about to endure.