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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

If you read your first sentence, you might see how funny it actually is:

"You're the only one who's confused. BLM is both a sentiment and a real political organization. The sentiment is overwhelmingly popular whereas the actual political movement is not."

Yeah, that's not confusing at all. Kind of like "Hey, 'Defund the Police' doesn't mean defund the police" Maybe the organizers should hire (better) PR firms.

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BLM has fantastic PR for an organization that has pretty far left views. That was exactly my point. People are generally positive towards to main stated goals of the organization, preventing police abuse against black people. It resonates with their own experience and the experience of black people they know.

You're trying to conflate the detailed political views of an organization with people who tend to agree that Black people need to be treated like human beings by police officers.

I also agree, 'Defund the Police' is a shit term for Police Reform.

Can't reply to davewritescode but... BLM as a political movement believes that American law enforcement disproportionately targets black citizens with violence disproportionate to the alleged crimes or situations in which the violence occurs. This is not a far left view in my opinion, as someone who hold "far-left"/left-libertarian views on a variety of subjects. "Defund the police" has been proposed by some people who share this core beliefs proposed by the BLM movement as a way to reduce the disproportionate violence against black citizens in the US. Unfortunately, I think it is a vaguely and poorly phrased slogan because I have seen that for some it means abolishment of law enforcement and for many others it means restructuring the funding of law enforcement to provide alternative public services to people who are having a mental health crisis, for example. The idea of reducing law enforcement budgets or redirecting some of the resources currently budgeted for law enforcement to alternative public services doesn't seem to me to necessarily consist of a "far-left" policy either, though that is because I think the notion of reducing law enforcement violence when unwarranted should and is a concern of people of most citizens other than a distinct minority. Of course we are all awash in the propaganda and media messaging of disparate groups with various agendas so understanding all of this in a shared and cohesive manner as a society is messy and somewhat difficult, but well-worth trying.

I just wanted to be clear that the “far-left” parts of the Black Lives Matter movement I was referring to wasn’t demanding police treat of people of color equally, more about some of the economic justice and reparations policies advocated for by the Movement for Black Lives. I’m not saying I disagree with any of them, just acknowledging they’re further left than the most well known policies of the group. They’re also the reason a lot of right wing people denounce the movement as ‘Marxist’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Black_Lives

Demanding that people all be treated equally by law enforcement isn’t far left, I thought that was important to state that.

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