It seems to me that the thrust of this sub-thread is a debate over narratives. One narrative is "America is basically good, but it has serious problems, and we're working on fixing them". Another narrative is "America is basically bad, we should burn it to the ground and start over". Neither of these narratives are right or wrong, because all narratives are false. But I think one of them is more useful than the other.
And can I argue against your strawman as well, or will that disrupt your momentum?
This subthread started with "Well, ACTUALLY, if you look at the statistics, state sponsored/condoned violence against black people in the US barely exists and all this kerfuffle is an overreaction"
That's not admitting a serious problem, and calling it out as revisionist BS is not saying we should burn the country to the ground.
Oh, OK - I misspoke. It was the sub-subthread that started off cherrypicking statistics.
But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
To put it another way, calling for the razing of America is totally unreasonable. But such calls are in actual fact extremely uncommon.
Using statistics directly responsive to the claim is cherrypicking?
It seems like your issue is with the claim, not the statistics. Being murdered by the police is not a central example of the problems of black people and holding it up as such will only cause people to address what you claim is the problem rather than what the actual problems are.
> But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
When "things you don't like" consists of the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that's pretty hard to distinguish from burning the American system to the ground.
That's your conception of your country? I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but they're all dead now. All of the slave owners and all of the slaves are dead. Their children are dead. Their children's children are dead. It has been seven generations.
Or are we cherrypicking the past for things that mean something today as well?
> Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson is dead. Independence is not.
So, even though his children are dead and their children are dead, it's almost as if what he did in his life had ramifications through the ages and still shapes society today. I'd never considered that possibility. I wonder if there are other situations where that applies?
The obvious difference being that "all men are created equal" is something we should want to preserve whereas slavery is something we should want to destroy forever.
The point of his use of those statistics was to say that this phenomenon, while bad, is a small part of what the United States is. I didn't read it as minimizing the issue, as such. It's certainly one of the biggest issues we face today. And that's a great thing - that one of our biggest issues is such a small statistic. It certainly hasn't always been that way. Our biggest issues used to be much larger statistics. Slaves were more than half the population in some states. The point wasn't a dismissal of police violence as a non-issue, the point was that a reduction of the US to that fact is not a useful framing. Not for the victims, or for anyone else.
