Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus and these people are breaking the rules to stop its further spread because of one incident thousands of miles away that happened to be captured on a smartphone
This seems incredibly ignorant. The "incident" was a murder, in broad daylight, by a police officer.
https://twitter.com/joshuapotash/status/1267327498339127298?...
The majority of whom where very old and/or in ill-health and had a 5-10% chance of dying in the next year anyway.
They're not angry about someone dying!
That's disingenuous, and breaks the basis of your argument.
The problem isn't dying at all, it's why.
They're angry about a murder, which reminds people there are too many murders.
Angry at a murder by a police officer who thought he could casually do so in broad daylight surrounded by onlookers, because he lives in a culture where he expects to get away with it.
Angry at a culture where a police officer can reasonably think he'll get away with it, because they often do.
Angry at the other officers on the scene who went along with it instead of intervening.
Angry at all the other racist murders that keep happening, and systematic racism on a massive scale in general.
That said I thoroughly agree with your point about protecting the elderly. And for that matter, protecting large numbers of young with asthma and diabetes, and conditions nobody knows about because they didn't matter before. (How easily people reduce these things to "just old people" so they can be ageist).
Trouble is, there's a real dilemma over the right and effective things to do. I think there is a deep human social instinct in play. The protests are not about one person dying, or one person being murdered even. They are about a serious systemic problem which undoubtedly results in large numbers of people, more black than not, dying prematurely. As well as a culture problem, which maintains that problem as those with more influence in society treat the problem as unimportant. I would not be surprised if the number of premature black person deaths in the USA, directly or indirectly caused by racism, comfortably exceeds the number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by COVID-19 in the end.
My parents are in that category, but I attach a very high negative value to using violence (or threat of it) to control people's behaviour. From my perspective it's extremely immoral to say to a huge swarth of the population: you can't work or meet your friends for the next few months, or else we'll throw you in jail if you're caught. I.e. human rights (free movement, association) are human rights; they're not compromisable just because somebody decided it's an emergency or there's some greater good that needs to be enforced. Yes it's reasonable to argue that those at risk have a right not to be infected (e.g. to require potential carriers to stay away), but this doesn't extend to requiring people they have no proximity/interaction with to stay at home and not interact with each other.
> 10 years thrown away so some people can go on a march because they're angry about someone dying.
10 years lost by one person, vs 2-3 years lost by 10 people due to the permanent negative effects on lifetime outcomes of poverty resulting from the lockdown-induced depression. Not to mention lifetime reduction in standard of living. In terms of measure that actually account for this, Quality-Adjusted Life Years, it's like the intervention is probably not a net positive: https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/economic-cost-o....
>I presume that's because no one you care about, including yourself, is in that category.
Also, in general, making decisions based on their emotional effect on you is a selfish and unprincipled approach to any kind of public policymaking.
Well, there is (was?) the Patriot Act because 3000 were killed in a terrorist attack. This allowed for indefinite detentions, unwarranted search and surveillance, etc. If it is still in act, then it lasted almost 20 years.
I don't assume you agree with measures like the Patriot Act, but I think some weeks of quarantine can be justified by the more than 100000 covid victims in the US, so far.
It's not affecting me at all; I work in finance, in a role that's fine with working from home. I actually made a bunch of money from the massive volatility that the lockdown announcements caused. If you're incapable of making decisions that aren't solely based on self-interest, that doesn't mean it's correct to project and assume everybody else thinks the same.
Are you in an at-risk group for police brutality? The benefit if the protests achieved their aims would be a lot less nebulous for those people who are.
The majority of interaction with Americans I have is via this site, and I've seen quite a few comments over the years by people who claim to have received bad treatment at the hands of police in spite of doing nothing wrong.
> I'm not black but I've been subjected to stop and search on the streets of London. I've been taken aside and put in a room by police while they checked me out on entering the UK only to eventually be told "OK, you can go" at the end of it, no apology. But generally I've found with police that if you're polite and cooperative they are respectful in return. My first boss in the UK, who wasn't white, one of the first things he said to me was to be wary of black people, they have a chip on their shoulder. I was pretty shocked to hear him say that actually.
I'm not black either, and I live in the UK.
I've been stopped by police, I've seen others stopped by police, and I've been with people who are stopped by police.
For the most part the interactions have been fine, but I have seen what looked like black folks "hassled" in London which I have not seen happen to white folks. It is just anecdata and may be nothing but random experiences.
For me the most striking difference was on the border between France and Switzerland.
My girlfriend was black; I was white. We were stopped at the border driving across, by men with extremely large guns. I got a cursory skim of my papers, but my black girlfriend had to get out of the car, be detained for a while, have her papers checked other and generally given a hard time. Even though she had a stronger connection to both countries than I did. However we both had UK passports. They basically didn't believe she was a UK citizen, or that she worked for the UN... just down the road!
Eventually they let us drive on, but it was a very striking difference in treatment.
Europe is doing much much better than the US in terms of dealing with the virus, so it's actually not unreasonable to say that it might be a risk worth taking.
As far as I can tell, it's not about that one 'incident' but about all the deaths that weren't recorded, and the many lives that are spent in fear.
Otherwise it's quite expected that in a segregated society, people are killed by in-group members. This would only be different if there is a huge number of lynch mobs.
That said, there is another issue hidden beneath 'by a wide margin'. It's also bizarre that there is so much more crime among black people, and that blacks are over-proportionally incarcerated. The easy answer is that blacks are so much more violent. But if you look closer, don't you think that's a bit puzzling?
Black and Hispanic police are as likely or more likely to kill people of color as white officers
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
With regard to your second point, you're hinting at something, why don't you spell out your aetiology for the high levels of crime along black people along with your evidence for that causation.
If that's true, it suggests the racism problem is more serious than we thought; that police of all colors may be endemically racist as a group; that it's not just mainly white police.
That said, we don't see black-on-black murders of innocent people so much. This might be due the symbolism of white-on-black murders in broad daylight with onlookers. Or it might not. Regardless, it's all racism if innocent black folks are getting murdered more often.
Really? The murder rate inside the black community is massively higher than within any other community in America. Also black people murder more white people than vice versa. If you take account of the different community sizes the disparity becomes even more extreme. If this is coming as news to you I don't know where you've been all your life.
What I meant to write was we don't see black-on-black police murders of innocent people hitting the big news and causing mass demonstations so much.
My 'aetiology', I think it comes down to less opportunities. Without discipline that comes from a stable environment, motivation can easily turn to violence and crime. This leads to difference in police behavior. I have nothing to back this up and I don't know how to 'cure' this.
To bring this back to the start: All I want to say is that the protests are not that bizarre. America is the cultural center of the West, people are as informed about this incident as they are about their local news. Many don't want to live in a racist future, even more so for their children. So they risk the lives of their parents to improve the lives of their children.
Was this a death caused by racism? I don't know. It appears to be. Thus the protests.