NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.

I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/

https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/

The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.

At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.

The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)

It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.

Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.

Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).

I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.

Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.

I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.

We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.

Honestly, that sounds like a great lifestyle fit for you, but for many people there is a huge risk in that lifestyle in becoming extremely isolated from other people and not feeling like there is an easy way to escape that isolation.

A couple of mile walk into town is not the kind of thing someone who is feeling down but wants to maybe meet people is going to do unless the bicycling infrastructure is pleasant and easy to use. It also leaves you heavily dependent on having a healthy body to socialize which again I think is generally a bad idea as it is the times we are in poor health that we need friends the most.

Then I would definitely recommend moving somewhere where going out and meeting people is easy, whether it be hobbies, nightlife or other reasons to get together with new people and make friends. Definitely don’t buy a house somewhere where it takes a conscious input of energy from yourself to see others as when we become depressed that is the HARDEST time to get ourselves to push through inertia. If you are anything like me you are going to end up on your couch feeling sad and a lot of times you won’t push through that to drive the 30+ mins to whatever thing you were considering doing. You also can’t be anywhere near as spontaneous about interacting with people and participating in different community events when every time you do it requires specific planning. If you live in town all it might take for you to get involved in something happening you were unaware of or thought you weren’t interested in is to pass by it happening. When you live far away from things, you have to sit there on your couch and specifically make the decision while blobbing on your phone that you want to participate in whatever thing you are interested in, and that can be a lottttt harder when you are depressed, trust me lol.

If you want the feeling of being out in the sticks, pay attention to being close to mass transit or easy drives out into nature.

That must be nice

I strongly recommend getting a house where you can walk out your door and walk somewhere without feeling unsafe because the road immediately outside your house is dangerous if you aren’t in a car and have the destination you are walking be a pleasant environment to be a pedestrian (i.e. not endless stroads).

The impact on your health, especially if you can win the lottery and get a job within walking distance, cannot be measured easily and most people vastly underestimate the savings and quality of life impact from not having to drive everywhere for everything.

Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.

The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.

In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:

the injustice itself

the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd

the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice

These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.

Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.

Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.

I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?

If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.

However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.

Migraines….

…but also… seeing my mom lose all her patience and yell at my dad for having aggressive late stage dementia and not being able to function properly.

Seeing that and being broke and unable to materially change the situation was by far and away the most cynical, insufferable thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and hopefully I will never experience something as awful again or I fear I would shatter into a million pieces.

What really hurt me to see (obviously it hurts the actual victims more) was how during Covid there was this what felt like once in a generation opportunity for progressive policies that were necessary during Covid such as rent eviction moratoriums, child support payments and stimulus checks to prove themselves to society and be embraced outside the context of Covid.

Then the rich violently slammed the door shut, and seeing the rent eviction moratorium be let to unceremoniously expire made my heart sink, it felt like the final nail in the coffin of the possibility of a brighter future because of how obviously wrong it was as a choice and how much the narrative of mainstream media was ready to move on as if we always had to move on, we always had to get back to this incredibly unsustainable grind that is quite visibly slowly (and not so slowly) destroying everyone around me including myself (which isn’t casual hyperbole, I say that very seriously).

The system cannot be fixed at this point I don’t think unless the people in power see agreeing to fixes in system (“concessions” from their standpoint) as the less scary alternative to other things. Otherwise Covid proved exhaustively that populist changes that improve everyone’s lives will be forced by any means necessary to be repealed by the ruling class.

Nah I swear I am just not seeing any cute af cat photos. Maybe y’all need to try again and just post some different really cute cats? I think it would be really helpful to lemmy devs to pursue this bug and figure it out, you know do more research kind of thing.

I really wish there was a way to quantify how dumb a country was in terms of its GDP (not the humans being physically less intelligent, just the culture is stupid even when there is abundant money to fund things) because it would be really fun to watch the US and UK keep fighting neck and neck to be in the lead.

It would be like following a sports rivalry between two unstoppable teams, except the unstoppable aspect is how much everything is stopping from falling apart for no good reason.

:)

You poor people need to get over yourselves and admit that the lines on the graph of economic factors that exclude poor people look good. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves, the fact that you aren’t happy about us making money is going to LOSE US THE ELECTION so get serious ok?

The other guy is worse, so we really don’t have to listen to a damn thing you say at all and you have to vote for our guy, get that through your poverty addled brains.

The important question is why smartphones are designed around not having root access and computers are?

What are the incentives at play?

The answer is obvious, tech companies wouldn’t have given users access to root control on their computers either if they knew what they were doing and thought they could have gotten away with it.

It is just circular logic claiming smartphones have to be this way, circular logic that provides a rhetorical smokescreen for the process of corporations taking our agency away from us over our lives and the tools that sustain us.

For the vast majority of Americans having a car is a mandatory part of having a job?

I can’t remember the last job I applied to that didn’t ask specifically whether I had a drivers license and car.

Yes, owning a car is mandatory at least in most places in the US. I don’t like it, but to believe otherwise is a strange distortion of the reality for most.

I> A person can actually, literally, control whether their car hits anything. It’s a solvable problem.

That is a really silly way to look at car accidents and the tragedies that come out of them. Just because you could rewind time and change what the drivers were doing to avoid a crash happening doesn’t really mean anything about the inherent risk factors to driving. Accidents are going to happen, we live in the real world not the one in which people behave consistently and perfectly and freak unexpected situations never happen.

Further, most people HAVE to drive their car in order to live their life on a daily basis (getting to work and back being the most obvious need). Driving isn’t a choice for most people at least in the US, so people are absolutely always going to be driving when they really don’t want to or aren’t at their most alert. It is just something we have to do sometimes in order to make ends meet in our lives.

I disagree. It’s like a gun. There’s negligence, but “true accidents” I’m not sure if I buy it.

No, you can walk around with a gun, even with it cocked and so long as you keep your finger off the trigger the likelihood of an unavoidable or unforeseen accident is still fairly low. A gun is an inert object that must be compelled to become lethal by the pressing of a trigger. A 5000 pound SUV on the other hand, by simply moving at normal driving speeds in close proximity to other people, consistently presents lethal opportunities that the driver must actively take steps to prevent from becoming realities.

A gun and a car are almost precise opposites in that respect. A car is like a gun that periodically aims at someone and automatically begins a firing sequence and you have to be paying attention enough to actively intervene and stop it.

If you don’t start yelling at somebody or something within 10 minutes of getting in the driver seat you are in the vanishing minority of drivers. Are you some kind of monk?

It’s far easier to get to the grocery store without hitting anything with the car than it is to, say, pass the first level of Super Mario Bros.

Then why don’t we let kids who can beat Super Mario Bros in their sleep (and thus from your perspective have demonstrated the skill required to learn how to drive) drive cars?

Again just because it is easy to aim the steering wheel and press the gas peddle doesn’t mean that every time you so much as drive to the grocery store and back you aren’t literally doing the most dangerous (mandatory) activity in most adult’s lives (both in terms of risk to yourself and risk of killing or hurting others).

I’m sorry not hitting another flying object in an absolutely MASSIVE three dimensional space that is 99.99% empty is a trivial task next to driving through a busy city in essentially a two dimensional space (you can’t go above or below to avoid hazards) with high speed traffic going the other direction only inches away, abrupt requirements to stop when something pulls in front of you, a dizzying variety of cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and other hazards to keep track of and the constant pressing need to ALWAYS be ready to brake or steer violently in order to avoid crashing.

Also when air airspace does get relatively congested like say at an airport, there is usually a tower full of people who’s job it is to route traffic so all you have to do is follow their directions and communicate effectively. You don’t have to make instantaneous choices like someone trying to get to an exit across 5 lanes of busy highway traffic that isn’t letting them in.

Let me put it this way, with an airplane cruising on a level flight path, how long could the pilot let go of the controls and ignore the environment around them before they hit something? That is a difficult question to answer, it could be 10 minutes… it could be more (assuming the aircraft can maintain a cruise speed and level flight). With a car, the answer is simple, it takes no more than 3-5 seconds of ignoring the environment around you and letting go of the controls to hit something. At highway speeds the difference of a second or two can determine if you collide head on with another vehicle at a combined velocity of 120+ mph.

An airplane pilot rarely is put in a position as risky as driving a car unless they are acting extremely irresponsibly. The rules of flying set out to make it so the pilot ideally never needs the kind of split second reactions that driving requires on a day to day basis (except for perhaps during landing).

The numbers support my claims too, flying is BY FAR AND AWAY safer than driving a car. It isn’t even close, driving is by the numbers extremely dangerous compared to everything else we are required to do in order to live our lives.