Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, October 23, 2020

As I have said before . . .

. . . and some people didn't want to believe, much of the violence associated with BLM protests was initiated by far right, racist provocateurs. Just so we're clear.

Update: Here's a clear-eyed look at the issue from USA today.

Since I expect that the people who actually need to read this can't be bothered, here are the main points:

Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

There was looting and arson late at night during the early days of protest in some cities, but this quickly  died down. These were opportunistic acts by people not associated with the protests.

The cities where this happened are now calm and ongoing protests are not disruptive to everyday life.

Much of the violence was initiated by police.

People arrested in connection with the protests have not been members of extremist groups, and they have mostly been arrested for minor offenses.

Kevin Shay at Medium rounds up innumerable instances of right wing provocateurs initiating violence at BLM protests. He also notes:

Studies show that right-wing extremist groups are much more violent than left-wing ones. For instance, 90 percent of the extremist-related murders in the US in 2019 were linked to right-wing extremists, according to an Anti-Defamation League study. Between 2010 and 2016, about 35 percent of terrorist attacks in the United States were carried out by right-wing extremists ,compared with 12 percent by left-wing or environmentalist extremists, according to a University of Maryland-led consortium.

And here's more on the subject from Just Security.

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

And--having just seen the new "Borat" film (thanks, Amazon Prime)--apparently (according to Rudy Giuliani) Covid-19 was created by the Chinese, who then spread it around the globe--which SBC brilliantly parodies at the film's end (no major spoilers!).

And I'm sure RG knew what he was doing in a woman's hotel room.

What is shocking--in addition to the lechery and controlled insanity of RG, a "serious" person next to the character played by SBC, who's the clown but is in real life a brilliant mensch--is the realization that as ignorant as RG and Donald Shitler are, they aren't stupid. They're just really, really horrible, cynical bastards.