[n0tth3dro1ds]

>BLM

>LGBT

>counter culture

Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

[pjc50]

"Supported" in only the very thinnest sense. The Raytheon Pride flags are generally considered to be extremely "virtue signalling" even within the community; at best this means "we'll allow you to work here and prevent people using slurs openly in the office", not "we'll stop donating to politicians and parties pushing anti-trans legislation or increased police budgets".

The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.

[viraptor]

Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting". Corps gonna corp and if changing the logo and publishing some nice post brings more money, they'll do it. (While donating to Republicans at the same time)

[throwaway894345]

If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO.

And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).

What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.

As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I want to add that my final paragraph above really describes the fundamental flaw with countercultures if you believe they are a vehicle for political change. They are really premised on the idea that it is possible to make a set of personal, individual choices and that if enough other people make similar choices you can build a sort of parallel society to mainstream culture. If you believe in them as a mechanism of political change, you tend to imagine that parallel society serving as an example/lesson to mainstream culture and being adopted by it.

As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.

[bitwize]

Thing about 60s/70s counterculture is, it didn't become the culture. Rather, its members were recruited by mainstream culture with the promise of wealth and the good life, to betray the values they espoused as youths.

Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"

[PaulDavisThe1st]

This is not really true. While there were a few hippies who moved to wall st., the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population were hippies (or their cousins). The "older adults" who made up the 80's/90's culture were, for the most part, the "young adult" members of mainstream culture in the late 60s/70s.

It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).

[throwaway894345]

> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?

[undersuit]

Not ally, but ingratiate.

[z3c0]

But what you're describing is exactly where "counterculture" flips over to "culture". It may have been counterculture at one point, but once it's grabbed up by the mainstream canon, it is no longer counterculture.

This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.

[throwaway894345]

Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered. Maybe I have a weird media bubble, but the content I saw was endlessly pro-BLM (even contortions such as the memorable CNN reporter wearing a gas mask against a burning Kenosha with the caption “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) for most of the last decade.

I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

[z3c0]

> from the moment it was discovered

Counterculture is a like a good stock tip - if you're hearing about it, that ship has already sailed.

[pessimizer]

> Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered.

It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.

[pjc50]

> I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

Fighting the police is about as counter as you can get.

[YurgenJurgensen]

SMBC kind-of predicted this nine years ago: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23

[lelanthran]

> Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting".

Meh. "really supporting it" or "poseur supporting it" is irrelevant, what's relevant is that it's mainstream, not counter[1] to mainstream.

[1] That's what the "counter" in counterculture means, dammit.

[Jensson]

If signalling support for X is good publicity then X is mainstream regardless of intentions.

[goodpoint]

Not for a second.

[pessimizer]

How about donating tens of millions of dollars, and employing the incorporated versions of these movements as consultants and trainers?

[MockObject]

Imagine if F500 companies displayed the Christian cross to the extent they did the Pride colors, for one month. Would that signal "support" for Christianity?

[viraptor]

Well... Hobby Lobby exists as an example of full on support https://www.newsweek.com/hobby-lobby-christian-july-4-advert...

On the other hand every Christmas/Easter thing happening at your local supermarket - it's not support, just seasonal reason to get more money.

[RangerScience]

That’s… factually incorrect? Unless you don’t consider Fox News a news outlet, among other examples.

Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.

[anon223345]

I think their point was that BLM has flipped from counter cutler to mainline culture

It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum

[RangerScience]

Ehh. I dunno, if that's "mainstream", why is this the third+ time this has had to be fought for? (BLM, Civil Rights, Civil War).

We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...

...and yet the same fight is being fought again.

I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.

(edit: In my head, I'm compare/contrasting with suffragette and other aspects of women's rights)

[srackey]

This eternal fight is the culture.

[throwayyy479087]

Yup. The fact this person doesn’t see this is evidence for the article.

[cfltlayoffs]

This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.

Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.

[YurgenJurgensen]

If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.

[yadoomerta]

imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho

[goodpoint]

> it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore

The very opposite.

[thebooktocome]

> People don’t try to fake having low cultural status.

They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.

Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?

[YurgenJurgensen]

That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.

[harimau777]

I don't think it's a "no-true-scotsman" to say that they would need to support the core goals of the movement in a meaningful way.

[cubix]

"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski

[n0tth3dro1ds]

Based and Ted-pilled

[throwaway894345]

Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).

It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.

[pjc50]

> killings by police are way down

[citation needed]

> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.

You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

[throwaway894345]

> [citation needed]

Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097

> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.

[harimau777]

I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.

I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

[throwaway894345]

People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear. It very much feels like they cut policing in the name of black Americans and then lost interest when policing drove up crime rates, particularly in black communities.

> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).

[harimau777]

That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.

[leshow]

This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.

Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.

Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.

[throwaway894345]

Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.

Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”

Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.

Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.

These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.

[leshow]

If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.

edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.

[throwaway894345]

Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.

[Nasrudith]

Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.

The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.

[leshow]

This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.

[barneygale]

> BLM > Endlessly supported

Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.

[throwawayacc6]

That's happening in spite of BLM being endlessly supported. Doesn't negate the fact that BLM is supported by "literally every news outlet [save Fox News], major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class" AND the US government [0].

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-embassies-authorized-hang...