The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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Joe Rogan Discusses the Protests/Rioting with Bret Weinstein

Good food for thought when Bret Weinstein sits down with Joe Rogan to discuss the protests and the civil unrest. I haven't been buying the standard line that these sustained protests are driven completely by the homicide of George Floyd. That horrific incident is certainly what triggered the demonstrations. However, the duration and intensity of the unrest , the organic "leaderless" groundswell, the unfocused attacks on virtually every American institution (including universities and STEM) and the unhinged demands (e.g., where "defund the police" doesn't actually mean defund the police) have convinced me this unrest is about far more than police abuses. Weinstein believes that many Occupy Wall Street demonstrators (he supported this movement) turned to anarchy and have now combined with the many demonstrators who fall under the Black Lives Matter umbrella, as well as other participants.

Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist living in exile from Evergreen State with his wife, Heather Heying, also an evolutionary biologist. These two biologists somehow survived intact the abysmal failure of Evergreen to deal with its own unrest in 2016, an incident that gives Weinstein a unique perspective on the ongoing crisis. In the first 30 minutes of this podcast, Weinstein and Rogan focus on the failures of BOTH political parties to represent the interests of the American working class. Ever since Bill Clinton, both parties have catered almost exclusively to the needs of their "clients," large corporations, which have rigged the game to screw small business and working people. This trend of catering to big corporations and screwing workers has continued under the current administration. One result of this: Widespread joblessness and hopelessness in both big cities and small that is now exploding on the streets.   This economic misery has hurt minorities living in urban areas especially hard, exacerbating their many concerns about institutional racism. Weinstein sees no short term or long term solution to this mess given the complete lack of political leadership, especially from the White House.

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Questioning the “Political Spectrum”: To What Extent Are Political Parties Social Clubs?

According to this article by Hyrum Lewis ("Our Big Fight Over Nothing: The Political Spectrum Does Not Exist"), the political "spectrum" is primarily tribal. Lewis states that many of the respective policy positions in the platforms of each of the two main political parties are not glued together by overarching consistently applied principles. These conclusions of Lewis run counter to the writings of George Lakoff, who (in his book, Moral Politics) argues that Republican positions derive from the metaphor of a "stern father," whereas the Democrat positions derive from the metaphor of the "nurturant parent." To the extent that Lewis is correct and that Lakoff has overstated his case, this is an inconvenient fact for those of us who claim that our political stances are completely principled, not adopted as the result of social pressure. Here are a few excerpts from Lewis' article:

In the essentialist theory, ideologies are unchanging, transcendent principles, while parties are evolving social organizations that can be “captured” by the ideologies. In the social theory, by contrast, ideologies don’t capture parties; parties capture ideologies—that is, they redefine them. Once again, research supports the latter: what is considered “right-wing” or “left-wing” is simply whatever the Republican and Democratic Parties happen to stand for at a given moment. Left-right ideologies are tools of self-delusion—they let us indulge the fantasy that our partisanship is principled rather than tribal, i.e., that there is some noble ideal connecting all the distinct and unrelated issues that our party happens to support. But essentialist predictions do not hold up to reality. . .

An alternative to this essentialist theory is the “social theory” of ideology, which says that distinct political positions correlate because they are bound by a unifying tribe. If the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.

... Public opinion polls further reinforce the point, showing that left-right ideologues often switch their beliefs to conform to the tribe. In the past decade alone we’ve seen self-described conservatives go from being anti-Russia to more pro-Russia, strongly pro-trade to strongly anti-trade, believing that personal character matters a great deal in politicians to believing that it matters hardly at all, staunchly interventionist in foreign policy to staunchly isolationist. Where is the “essence” behind all of this variation? It doesn’t exist. The views associated with left and right are constantly shifting for social reasons that have nothing to do with essential principles.

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Face2Facebook: A Proposed App for Decreasing Contentious Conversations on Facebook

I enjoy spending time with many of the people on Facebook. I’ve also had to endure more than a few rude exchanges with other Facebook users. On several occasions over the past two years, I’ve reached out to a FB user from my city who seemed rude. I sent a private FB message and I wrote something like this: “Hey, I’d bet that we have a lot in common. Would you be interested in having a face to face conversation, perhaps over coffee?” Several people accepted my invitations and every one of these conversations was cordial and productive. Several of these relationships are ongoing. We don’t agree on everything, but these in-person conversations are well worth it. I get the gift of learning how to see the world through the eyes of another person and that’s always a good thing. Also, we inevitably find out that we have many things in common, just as Donald Brown established in his classic 1991 work: “Human Universals.”

Over the past couple of years, it seems that FB has become an even more contentious place. It is increasingly expected that people will preach at each without a willingness to be changed by new information. When I offer information or ask a question on FB, I often receive huffy pushbacks, accusations, ridicule and name-calling instead of open-minded fact-finding and a willingness to start the conversation by finding each other where we are. The bad behavior we see is clearly not how adults should be interacting, but I don’t place all of the blame on the FB users. The format of social media dehumanizes us to each other, making it easy to lash out at mere words on a page, distracting us from the reality that real human beings seeking connections are writing those words. This is more than a frustration. This non-stop boorish behavior is convincing us that it is impossible to have conversations with those who see the world differently than we see it.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer FB this free idea: Face2Facebook. Here’s how it would work. If you believe that someone is being rude to you on FB, click the Face2Facebook button and it will bring up a scheduling app for both you and “the rude person.” The app asks both of you to designate various times when you would be available to have a ten-minute video conversation through FB. When that date and time arrives, the app will encourage you to start by getting to know each other as people by discussing a bit about each other’s family, community and interests. Only then should you ask each other about the topic that gave rise to the contentiousness. If you are both brave, you’ll listen to each other with open minds, putting each other’s best foot forward. A timer will ding after ten minutes, at which point you can (but need not) say farewell to each other. The best outcome is that each of you will be reminded that you were communicating with another human being. You will be reminded that there was a person behind those words. Perhaps the app will ask you to rate each other on whether you were good listeners. After you complete the ten-minute video conversation, Face2Facebook will publish a public acknowledgement that the two of you reached out to each other and had a conversation.

Not that every conversation will be easy or fun, but isn’t this worth a try? Maybe that conversation will change how you think about a topic. Then again, that video might only reveal that that “53-year old engineer” was a 14-year old boy whose highest aspiration is piss others off. If the other person refuses to talk to you on a video, perhaps this could be indicated on their profile so that the FB community would see statistics regarding who requests conversations and who cowardly refuses to meet on Face-to-Facebook.

This is only a rough draft idea, not a polished app. I don’t know if this is really workable. I do hope that FB might consider something like this because we desperately need something to get us out of our social media downward spiral.

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