So, yes, context matters. I would absolutely argue the value in the being part of the strongest push against police brutality in decades, that just might result in systemic change, is incredibly more worthy than virtually any other activity. It does not mean there is no public health cost. It does mean it is a tragic choice to have to make.

In this specific case, it looks like the police officer will face justice. But that only happened after the huge public outcry, and it didn't happen in countless other cases even when there was a big-but-not-as-big outcry. In many cases, not only have the officers escaped trial, they've actually kept their jobs!

That's what people are protesting.

Yes, outrageous police conduct has happened before. But for some ineffable reason, this one time was one time to many.

As a less politically sensitive topic for most Americans, I point to the Arab spring uprising as a good example. Tensions had been rising for decades, but the final trigger was when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, lit himself on fire to protest the local police stealing his possessions & threatening his livelihood. A tragic event, for sure, but after decades of brutality and continual tragedy, who could have possibly predicted that that would be the final straw?

But in the meantime, we now see videos of cops following humvees through residential neighbourhoods and shooting at unarmed people on their own property.

As a result, people are more concerned about police brutality than they were a month ago, rather than less

1. Peaceful protesters against police brutality (including peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters).

2. The radical wing of the Black Lives Matter, who believe that the time of peaceful protests is over and that the only way to change the situation is to use violent methods, especially directed against the police.

3. Marauders and looters: who leverage the protests to rob shops, destroy and set fire to cars and buildings. These people do not give a shit about any other groups.

4. Anarchists and Antifa: their goal is to stir up arbitrary rule, to destroy the system using extremely violent methods. They are catalysts of chaos and their main goal is to create chaos that will lead to the arbitrariness and anarchy of the crowd.

5. White supremacists and extreme right-wing radical groups. They're catalysts for chaos. To make things a little simpler, their goal is to "anti-advertising" any African-American civil rights movement against police brutality and racial riots in the United States.

When has antifa ever been archistic?. They are anti-facist, they dont want to bring down the state, unless that state is a Fascist one (I know Trump is bad but the USA is not a facist state currently).

So pigeonholing people is pointless and no one needs to control anything. Control implies a hierarchy, a hierarchy means you can go after the leaders, the point now is to raise so much awareness that you cant just go back to how it was last week.

The radical wing protesters are all well prepared. There is no way to identify them, they wear bandanas, cover their faces as much as possible. Peaceful protesters are barely covering their faces - basic face-masks to prevent the spread of the virus.

As for the antifa, they are taking the civil rights movement hostage and trying to create chaos on these protests by framing peaceful protesters and peaceful African-American activists.

A lot of violent protests are organized movements. They "advertise" on websites similar to Craigslist and offer $25/h on average. Police is well aware of all of that, which is why they have to act fast. This whole thing is no longer about George Floyd and police. It's much broader. A shit ton of people see this as an opportunity to reach their own goals hiding behind BLM, police lawlessness and so on.

P.S. English is my second language, so when I say control, what I really mean is to make sure peaceful protest stays peaceful. It's needed because not everyone is smart enough to understand that stealing laptops from stores is not normal.

That needs a citation, seriously, even if English is your second language you must know that is a bold claim. Who's paying this $25 per person, how do the logistics of organising a group like that happen? I mean trump pays actors to turn up to his rallies, but they aren't going to get arrested or killed.

Occam's razor though says that they really are just fed up of people of colour being harassed and killed by the police that's why they are protesting, that's why there are so many of them. sure it's co-opted by a some people, or small groups, for financial gain, but these aren't huge global cabals, they are criminals who see an opportunity to exploit.

There was a video circulating of a streamer who tried to instigate trouble at a peaceful protest and he was called out on it by lots of those around him.

If you have ever been in one of these protests you would know that the spark is almost always a police charge or other offensive action like tear gas.

Also remember a riot is not looting, a riot is just defcon 5 on the protest scale, and some people will use that as an opportunity to loot, same people who would loot after a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. That's doesn't mean the riot is wrong.

Police needs a reform. It's not questionable. But there are many other problems and angles to this whole situation. There is no single truth and it's important to consider all of these issues wearing each group's shoes, including the police.

Seriously? They let him slowly kill a dude right next to him! This isn't a situation where he just whipped out a gun and instantly shot someone, that kind of thing would be hard to stop in time, they had literal minutes where they could've stepped in, and chose not to.

In the military, I would have been convicted of a war crime had I done this to an unarmed and incapacitated enemy combatant; even in ignorance, even if it had been a mistake, even if I was tired and had a bad day. I'd hope our police force would be held to a higher standard dealing with our own citizens than a soldier or Marine dealing with an enemy of the state.

What's the chances that of a sample of officers who responded, those 4 are the only ones who would have let this happen?

If I owned a martial arts studio and I let a student do that, I’d face criminal & civil liability. Why shouldn’t trained officers of the law be held to at least that standard?

Part of the outrage is how blatantly unequal the treatment of cops and and civilians accused of crimes are. It’s especially galling because not only are they given the power of the state, they are also given extra rigorous training in the safe application of force. If anyone should have reasonably known that kneeling on someone’s neck would be lethal, it would be the cops.

Oh, and all the bystanders who clearly recognized what was going on. Apparently they’re more wise to the dangers of kneeling on a restrained human’s neck than the police are.

I do believe they should be arrested for accessory and face a trial by jury. It’s your right to think to the contrary, but your rationalizations about why they were willing to stand by and watch something that has deeply shocked the conscious of the whole nation is both disturbing and unconvincing.

That’s why we have trials by jury, to determine guilt even though we can’t read minds.

So, why are they still free men?

And they did it even as people yelled at them and were recording. How many more officers might do it if nobody was watching? That's the truly scary thought.

What do we have instead? 3 other "the police" standing by watching and not doing a thing. Being accessories to murder, that they would gladly arrest anyone else for doing the same. Followed by days of police brutality towards peaceful protesters, "the police" showing their itch to start shooting, throwing 'white power' signs and grinning, etc...

Come on.

A global pandemic is awful, but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility.

Was it uncomfortable and difficult? Yes. Am I glad I went? Hell yes. Black lives matter.

The protests haven’t worked though for the last 20 years or so. IMO it’s more important to vote and promote change than to block traffic.

People remember how you made them feel more easily than what you actually said. Preventing them from getting somewhere is a great way to just piss people off.

You can. As far as I know, the US is still a democratic country with elections.

How do you know? Do you have an alternate timeline of history to compare it to?

Many of these issues were reversed in an attempt to be tough on crime again with a big push from the AG in 2017. Tensions have been stoked by things like a pardon dealt out to a sheriff who violated a court order relating to racial profiling. I have a hard time believing these acts aren't having their intended effects.

Exactly how is destroying low income housing, small businesses (many of them minority owned) and peoples places of employment going to persuade "the elites"?

If not, please explain how you having a mutual fund means that "the elites" who control Apple aren't impacted by lost revenue.

So if you can't understand how hurting the pocket books of "the elite" can encourage them to compromise, you haven't been paying attention to history.

History says that mob violence is probably more likely to lead to a dictatorship than to another new deal, but you're being willfully ignorant if you don't acknowledge the existence of a potential chain of consequences that starts with "damaging companies' bottom lines" and ends with policy change.

And they were told to "shut up and dribble" and the president said they were sons of bitches and should be fired? [1]

There's your peaceful leadership right there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_protests_...

Then, people who are complacent complain no one is trying.

You just don’t like the priorities of everyone else so you’re claiming it hasn’t worked.

That bit is correct. Yes, it does work -- for some. But the masses that are angry are whom it didn't work for. When it starts working for the other 90% people wont be as angry.

Are you suggesting shooting rubber bullets is an appropriate means to enforce social distancing?

As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey accuracy, not to increase shock value.

The fear is that this number (0.026%) will seem too low, which is why we're trying to use numbers like 100,000 in order to convince people to continue acting safely. The real message is: this number is so low BECAUSE we've all been working hard to keep it this low. That's a hard message because its nuanced, but its not misleading. I don't know if its as persuasive, its probably not, but that doesn't make "100,000" not misleading when used for shock.

0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19", and "many people aren't even directly acquainted with anyone that died of covid19". That's because the social distancing is working.

If it weren't working, based on covid19 survival stats, the human feeling would be "most people are directly acquainted with one or two people that died of covid19". That's a very different feeling. TBH, its still not exactly "black death in the middle ages" type of feeling, but the direct human impact would be MUCH larger.

WITH social distancing, at the present death rate, Covid19 in the US is killing about 1/4 the number of people daily of Cancer+Heart Disease.

WITHOUT social distancing (i.e. run amuk), based on "when hospitals were overwhelmed in some italian cities" survival rate, it looks like it'd be daily killing about 2x Cancer+HeartDiesase.

So social distancing is having big impact, and a really good job everyone, we are gaining a LOT of saved lives for our sacrifices.

All that said, I do wonder if 2x the daily deaths of Cancer+HeartDisease tips into "unthinkable to even openly discuss the tradeoff between quality of life and safety" territory? At what death rate do we consider completely changing the world as we know it? 0.00001%? 0.00001%? 0.001%? 0.01%? 0.1%? 1%?

And at what death rate do we surpress discussion of NOT making the tradeoff as too dangerous (risking thoughtless noncompliance)? 0.001% 0.01%? 0.1%? 1%? 10%?

Lets say you were one of the leaders of a small fishing village without mass media (i.e. without big numbers), and somebody convinced you that you had a choice:

1) Everyone stays in their huts for 6 mos to a year with all the impacts and suffering that entails

OR

2) An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years.

Does that seem like a no brainer? It doesn't feel like one to me. That would be a hard decision to me. I think I'd go for sitting in the huts, but if somebody wanted to discuss the decision with me.... I think that would be pretty reasonable. If the whole village wanted to get together and really talk it out and vote rather than just letting the leader(s) make the call, I think that'd make a lot of sense.

Personally? I think I'd vote "everyone stays in their huts" but I would absolutely NOT vote "can't be openly discussed because the discussion is too dangerous".

Similarly, the 40,000 who die each year from traffic fatalities are only some miniscule number of Americans, so why care about those deaths either?

Should we become more risk averse as population grows because the numbers of deaths become so staggering? Or is percentage deaths a more relevant measure?

If you have 10000 people in your medieval media sphere, and ONE PERSON DIES EACH YEAR from an ox cart accident, we probably don't stop using ox carts. What if there's ten billion people in your media circle and therefore A MILLION OX CART DEATHS PER YEAR, should we therefore abandon ox carts?

I don't feel 100% on the answer, maybe the answer is something like.... we should spend the same percentage of resources avoiding unnecessary ox cart deaths as we would at the small scale? That would be a lot of money toward better ox carts, but we wouldn't shut down the world because OMG ONE MILLION either.

> 0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19"

My wife's grandmother had COVID-19. At 80 years old, she was a lucky one and was asymptomatic. She's in a nursing home and many people around her did die though. I have 3 other friends who lost relatives to COVID-19. Even at the low population rate, it's rather stunning anecdotally.

"I know a few people who know somebody who died" sounds consistent with what you might expect from 0.026% if everyone communicates with about a hundred people... crudely (and wrong, but order of magnitude): 0.00026 * 100 * 100 = 2.6 = "a few".

I phrased it pretty carefully, but I agree it didn't immediately clarify that mostly the victims will look pretty old.... just bebcause "people who are likely to die within several years" is going to be dominated by people over 70. FWIW a few different measures of "likely to die within 5 years" looks like one of the simplest single-index predictors of covid19 survival, much better than just age. If you're 40 and likely to die before 45 due to a serious health condition, Covid will be roughly as dangerous to you as if you're 82.

The number includes everyone who has tested positive, what do you mean by ‘applying it across the whole population’ ?

> An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years.

The death rate is not an equally weighted distribution over the whole population. In fact, it's very weighted towards middle age and up, with younger people dragging it down. So in your example it's likely to be more than an extra person in the typical age of older parents and grandparents.

This virus is dangerous to the elderly, but not nearly as relatively dangerous as the flu is to the young:

https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-1...

If the young had political power, the response would be a lot different, but because the wealth/power lie with the elderly, the current response is predictable. Fascinating times

The article also uses 60k flu deaths as the average baseline which is incorrect. The 60k number was a particularly bad flu season. Last season flu deaths were ~34k [1]. This season could be much lower because of the lockdowns.

Comparing COVID to the flu is hard, and really should have never been done. Without taking into account the respective IFRs, CFRs, R0, etc... any comparison is going to be severely lacking. It's also hard to get accurate numbers while in the middle of the pandemic. I hope as things open up that COVID just becomes a memory. Unfortunately, that doesn't look like the case so far.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html I'm not really sure how the author got to a 60k average unless 2007-2009 was really bad. The years on the CDC site only have 1 season greater than 60k. Errors like this do bring all of the statistics into question.

Probably doesn't even have to be that long. A large portion of Europe is pretty much back to normal already.

I said we're back to normal, but I wasn't 100% fair: our borders are still semi-closed. We'll probably have another surge if we restore travel in the future from countries where Covid is active.

All in all I think it was a very small price we paid to be back on the tracks in only two months. Some companies are getting out of Kurzarbeit already (government help).

And in case you think 'yeah but the lock downs don't work' look at Vietnam: they are the first country to have local transmission outside China, and they started anti-pandemic measures in December. Results? 95 million people, 329 caught the virus, 0 deaths as of today. Not 329 thousand. 329 people. That is what this could have looked like in most of the world, if the virus had been taken seriously and if our politicians cared about human life.

really, as in having that conversation would bring it into your home???

i dont know where this intolerant shutdown ofconversation even among the educated folks is going to lead us...

Of course there are people in the world who, genuinely or out of other interests, try to contest all sorts of things. The earth is flat, man made global warming is not happening, the earth is 6000 years old etc. That doesn't mean we need to seriously entertain these ideas just because some people do so, or claim to do so.