And this is a straw man. I'm really, really, not going in circles today. It's not a dichotomy, it's more about testing and implementing progressive policy without dealing with politics.

This is true. I just find it ironic that the SJWs love to claim they have some type of moral high ground over everyone else on the opposite aisle. These people can still believe in big gubment and could also donate to local charities, they are not mutually exclusive.

The progressive position on poverty, and black poverty, is theory based, and built on endless correlations. The reality is, they see the suffering as much as conservatives and both sides want to help. The issue is, progressives are naive. They just do not really understand the plight of the poor person, outside of the abstract correlations they make. Progressives really do not get their hands dirty:

If progressives really want to help, they need to get involved so they can truly understand the issues these folks face, instead of relying on abstract academic-y correlations. The best way to do that is to start a small non-profit and implement progressive policies. If they work, it's going to grow, and their ideas will gain more influence on government policy. They won't work though, or they will become more moderate on the extent discrimination, and the "white man" plays in it, and ultimately focusing on the real issues these communities face. Progressives lack experience.

And yet, as specious as you feel my fact based arguments is, I am sure you all hold to the progressive opinion that the BLM was a positive force for the locales that experienced them, despite no evidence whatsoever to support this feeling.

So did you just ignore my post that contained a far more comprehensive study and showed that people in blue states are actually more generous in terms of giving time and money to charitable causes?

Edit: This was to itshot

I don't think that it has necessarily done a huge amount to directly help those communities yet, and there is evidence of something amounting to a "Ferguson Effect" (although the exact causes and size of the effect are certainly not clear/agreed upon). However the increase in violent crime has already halted and has dropped back to previous levels, while the wider acknowledgement of structural issues within policing is slowly leading to reforms within the system. It may not have had an immediate positive effect and progress is still slow but I do believe that the movement is overall a very positive one and that the benefits are still in the process of being realised.

That wasn't a study. Or it it was a study they didn't go into the weeds with their methodology or data. For example, what is the p value of this difference that you are so sure a score of 23 vs 26 indicates that blue states are more charitable?

I actually would be interested in looking at the data and methodology. For example Utah and Minnesota come up on top of a lot of categories. Utah, it isn't a big mystery because charity is a formalized component of the Church of LDS; but for Minnesota I would be very interested in getting into the weeds of how this charity is coming about, because it isn't obvious to me.

But this is a conviction of faith, and there is no actual data you can cite to support this belief, correct?

Yeah, I ignored the conclusions of that editorial, becasue it contradicts almost all other peer-reviewed research on the topic. It's an outlier and they used fairly subjective variables to weight the numbers. And it's not really relevant to the point I'm making. It's not really about who is more generous. Liberals think of government/taxes like conservatives think of charity. My main point is political action, and influence on government policy. You can do more politically by showing the ideas work with out having to go through a ways and means committee, and an electorate. Trying to make the argument that progressives are competitive with Mormons, Catholics, and protestant Christians is absurd, on it's face, when it comes to giving (and they are overwhelmingly conservative, and make up a significant percentage of the population), especially when it comes to helping poor people. (I'm agnostic, and I don't fall into any religious group)

I assume giving to churches is donating to charity (non-profits).

I'm floored that conservatives would do so at a higher percentage.

It's not just a conviction of faith; it's the fact that far more police officers are regularly wearing body cams, it's the fact that 3 police officers were convicted for murder last year (compared to one in the previous 14 years), it's the fact that in one of the most recent high profile cases in Baltimore (https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2019/...camera-latest/) video evidence showed an officer trying to de-escalate when his superior was being overly aggressive and confrontational, and that end result of that incident was the aggressive officer being charged with false imprisonment and assault.

As I said, things aren't going as quickly as one might hope, but the evidence that things are slowly changing is there.

So you have anecdotes, but no data. Sounds like faith based reasoning to me. Which is fine. I am sure plenty of my own reasoning relies way too much on ideology and anecdotes, and not enough on empirical data. We are all just human after all.

I would argue that 34 states enacting legislation of some variety, in 2015 and 2016, that is directly to do with either improving police accountability (e.g. body cams) or reforms in the methods of policing (e.g. revisions on use-of-force practices and emphasis in de-escalation) is somewhat more than "anecdotal" evidence.

The exact impacts of the changes will obviously take longer than the few years since Ferguson to have a clearly measurable impact on crime/policing statistics but I think there is a lot more evidence supporting my belief in this regard than there is for example for your belief that progressive attitudes towards "teenage promiscuity" is maladaptive.

In regards to the first bold, this is evidence progressive reforms are taking place, not evidence that they are accomplishing anything positive. You still have not even attempted to show any evidence supporting that claim.

In regards to the second bold, fair enough. Although in my defense I actually do at least attempt to show evidence which I feel supports my argument, which others have rebutted with evidence contradicting my claim (in the case of teen pregnancy) or handwaving it away because they have nothing to support their beliefs (in the BLM argument).

I hope you can at least realizing you are not even attempting to show any empirical evidence to support your argument as it pertains to BLM. IMO this is because no evidence exists and it is all just a faith based exercise at this point. Which is fine. I am sure at some point when some time has passed someone will do an honest accounting, and we will all be free to accept it or reject it depending on whether it supports our biases or not.

That sounds largely fair. There is tangible evidence that BLM has had an impact in that it has brought about legislation and revisions of policy, but as of yet the effect of these changes is largely anecdotal - which does provide some insight but is obviously not enough to draw any real conclusions. It will be a number of years before we have enough statistically relevant data to make any real analysis as to its long term efficacy.

Speaking of the dangers of unintended consequences of progressive reform, this leads to another idea I have been thinking about.

And that is that the sexual revolution and women's entry into the workforce, as realized in our current neoliberal capitalist system (or corporate socialist system if you prefer to think of it that way), has actually resulted in destabilization of the middle-class American family.

The argument is that the added value of adding a second income to the nominal 2 parent middle class household in practice has been completely mitigated by a combination of childcare costs, rising housing prices (especially if you want to live in a "desirable" school district), and runaway increase in college tuition.

In addition, despite there being no real value added, the potential costs are much greater, as families with both parents working (and needing to work) to maintain a middle class lifestyle lack the built in safety net of having a stay at home parent in case something catastrophic goes wrong (illness, disability, job loss, etc.).

And the unintended consequences of this are a destabilization of the nominal family, which has such downstream consequences as bankruptcy, divorce and decentivizing having children at all.

Just something to chew on.

This is something I've thought about a bit. Destabilization is a good word choice, but it should also highlight the fact that this should make sense: really large social changes are inevitably going to be disruptive (in the neutral sense of that word). I think it's reasonable to look at the last few decades and recognize that the consequences of social change are not uniformly positive (though I consider them to be overwhelmingly positive on the whole). On the other hand, it should also be clear that

- this is not so simple to measure; there are a ton of confounding variables. Just as an example, it's reasonable to think about labor supply expansion having an impact on wages, but there are many other factors like globalization, or other aspects of the "neoliberal capitalist system" that you mention.

- social change is almost inherently disruptive, but stability is also a function of time. People are adaptable, we figure things out as we go. Your evaluation of the consequences of change will depend a lot on when you observe it from.

Mostly, the negative reaction you will get for musing along these lines is that people will interpret your comments as suggesting that therefore change is bad. Maybe that's not what you mean, but it often seems like you do mean something like that. Or at least that you want to suggest it's possible. There's a certain kind of small-c conservative sensibility in there. But evidence of disruption is not really evidence in favor of that conclusion on any final basis.

I'm sure that we're far from solving all the interesting problems we have in relation to the social changes of the last several decades, some of which are directly related to the process of change. We've touched on this topic in the past and what I said to you at the time was that at the very least I support many changes on purely moral grounds. But I also think you're probably too pessimistic about our ability to find new, stable, equilibriums. And perhaps also too pessimistic about the status quo in terms of people's overall quality of life in the present, but again that's difficult to evaluate objectively.

I don't know about that, but thanks.

Distribute women to incels —>
Make women stay-at-home wives and mothers —>
All problems solved, peace on Earth

- The Kelhus Plan

.

There is also that if you have lived in a situation where the police act as an occupying force that see you only as subhuman sources of fine income to increase their budget, maybe taking on an extra 4/100000 chance of being murdered to stop that isn't all that bad a deal?

I mean, assuming any of this has any effect on the murder rate, which is doubtful.

I recently learned from an attorney friend about NYPD’s “Operation Lucky Bag”.

It’s where the NYPD plants unattended valuables and then arrests the person who picks them up. Often the valuables are sticking out of a purse or bag (“Lucky Bag”) left out in public and watched the NYPD. The bag never has an ID or owner info so there’s no “returning it to it’s rightful owner”.

Just your run-of-the-mill targeting and entrapment of the poor and low-income communities.

They also do “Lucky Bikes” where they leave a bike unlocked and unattended while they watch and wait nearby.