I think this is a good point, and you don't deserve to be downvoted for it.

I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-culture.

google: coun·ter·cul·ture /ˈkoun(t)ərˌkəlCHər/ Learn to pronounce noun noun: counterculture; plural noun: countercultures; noun: counter-culture; plural noun: counter-cultures a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm. "the idealists of the 60s counterculture"

Being not native, I googled before I posted. In the first page I saw some phrases that seemed to confirm for me. For example, Wikipedia, citing a book from 1991:

Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.

But if I'm completely besides the mark, apologies

One big difference between the US and other countries: The US doesn’t look at counterculture as a fundamental threat or challenge to the government. The US citizens actually have freedom. The constitution went so far as to identify the sovereignty of the country with its citizens - thus no royalty.

This might sound quaint to some critical ears of the US, but that is the basis of the law and US systems. The US citizens only need to be reminded of this fact and decide whether they want to reinforce that fact with their personal choices - nonviolent protest, voting, etc.

Edit-That might not seem related to the definition of counterculture, but it absolutely is. The US has a culture of multiculturalism. It has the Amish and lets them largely have their culture within the larger culture. There are many such examples with gradients all over and within the US. Sure, sometimes some of those subcultures get political and exert themselves. But they do it within the peaceful political system as a strong trend.

>BLM

>LGBT

>counter culture

Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance

Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting". Corps gonna corp and if changing the logo and publishing some nice post brings more money, they'll do it. (While donating to Republicans at the same time)

But what you're describing is exactly where "counterculture" flips over to "culture". It may have been counterculture at one point, but once it's grabbed up by the mainstream canon, it is no longer counterculture.

This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.

Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered. Maybe I have a weird media bubble, but the content I saw was endlessly pro-BLM (even contortions such as the memorable CNN reporter wearing a gas mask against a burning Kenosha with the caption “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) for most of the last decade.

I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

> I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.

Fighting the police is about as counter as you can get.

> from the moment it was discovered

Counterculture is a like a good stock tip - if you're hearing about it, that ship has already sailed.

> Pretty sure BLM was a media darling from the moment it was discovered.

It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.

SMBC kind-of predicted this nine years ago: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23

If signalling support for X is good publicity then X is mainstream regardless of intentions.

Not for a second.

If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO.

And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.

Not ally, but ingratiate.

When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).

What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.

As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.

> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?

Thing about 60s/70s counterculture is, it didn't become the culture. Rather, its members were recruited by mainstream culture with the promise of wealth and the good life, to betray the values they espoused as youths.

Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"

This is not really true. While there were a few hippies who moved to wall st., the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population were hippies (or their cousins). The "older adults" who made up the 80's/90's culture were, for the most part, the "young adult" members of mainstream culture in the late 60s/70s.

It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).

I want to add that my final paragraph above really describes the fundamental flaw with countercultures if you believe they are a vehicle for political change. They are really premised on the idea that it is possible to make a set of personal, individual choices and that if enough other people make similar choices you can build a sort of parallel society to mainstream culture. If you believe in them as a mechanism of political change, you tend to imagine that parallel society serving as an example/lesson to mainstream culture and being adopted by it.

As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.

> Changing the colour of your logo on a certain date is not really "supporting".

Meh. "really supporting it" or "poseur supporting it" is irrelevant, what's relevant is that it's mainstream, not counter[1] to mainstream.

[1] That's what the "counter" in counterculture means, dammit.

How about donating tens of millions of dollars, and employing the incorporated versions of these movements as consultants and trainers?

Imagine if F500 companies displayed the Christian cross to the extent they did the Pride colors, for one month. Would that signal "support" for Christianity?

Well... Hobby Lobby exists as an example of full on support https://www.newsweek.com/hobby-lobby-christian-july-4-advert...

On the other hand every Christmas/Easter thing happening at your local supermarket - it's not support, just seasonal reason to get more money.

This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.

Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.

If your culture is well-known enough and seen as desirable enough that you start having to no-true-scotsman to differentiate between the corporate poseurs and the true believers, it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore. People don't try to fake having low cultural status.

imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho

> People don’t try to fake having low cultural status.

They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.

Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?

That's faking low financial or political status in order to obtain cultural status. If the rich and powerful are generally hated, you don't become popular by flaunting your wealth but by distancing yourself from it.

> it's a pretty strong sign that you're not a counterculture anymore

The very opposite.

I don't think it's a "no-true-scotsman" to say that they would need to support the core goals of the movement in a meaningful way.

Police budgets are up, but policing is down, killings by police are way down, and consequentially violent crime is way, way up. Protesters didn’t get everything, but they got a lot of what they asked for (reduction in policing, basically) and they seem content (no more major protests or riots since the precipitous drop in policing following the Floyd protests).

It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.

> killings by police are way down

[citation needed]

> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.

You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

> [citation needed]

Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097

> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?

The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.

I don't think it's that activists are content. Rather I think it's that a combination of people returning to work, the end of Covid financial support, and high inflation means that people can't protest anymore. There's probably also a lot of fatigue after protests were going on for months.

I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

People protested for half a decade before COVID. Even if they couldn’t get out and protest, they could still engage in social media, and yet it seemed like their enthusiasm for the subject largely evaporated, even on social media. Even the cheapest of symbolic stuff like “#BLM” in Twitter handles and bios seemed to largely disappear.

> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.

I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).

That wasn't my experience. From the start I heard people saying that "defund the police" was a poor slogan because it didn't convey to most people what activists actually meant.

This is such a misunderstanding of the current situation. The demands were varied, but common ask was _not_ just a reduction in policing paired with a ballooning police budget. Ironically, the "defund" movement ended up causing an even more reactionary movement such that police actually got more funding.

Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.

Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.

Society did not get abruptly and dramatically unequal between 2013 and 2015 nor between 2019 and 2020. Socioeconomics doesn’t predict these crime surges.

Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”

Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.

Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.

These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.

Of course they're being silly if they decide the mere discussion of holding criminals accountable is responsible for a rise in crime, just because said criminals happen to be wearing blue.

The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.

This is just a recipe for chiefs that are good are juking stats or playing PR. You can't just fire the person at the top, the institution needs to change.

If you don't think there is any correlation between the material conditions of people and crime I don't know what to tell you. You're basically subscribing to essentialism. There are plenty of cranks with ivy league degrees in economics.

Obviously no one in this thread ever disputed the relationship between socioeconomics and crime. This is a flimsy, transparent attempt to move goal posts.

"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski

Based and Ted-pilled

> BLM > Endlessly supported

Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.

Not at any rate higher than other races when factoring rate of police encounter (which is elevated for blacks because they commit more crime)

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...

But if you do any real analysis on the subject, you’re racist, right? Maybe burning down another city will help?

Oh God, not one of these "we used self-reported statistics from metropolitan police departments to determine valid discharges of firearms to paint with broad strokes all over the country" studies.

As if they say anything about the rural parts of this country, like my hometown, half an hour from where Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/us/jarrett-hobbs-camden-count...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507322/Georgia-dep...

That data generally agrees with victim surveys about the race of offenders of violent crimes. It stands to reason that a group with a larger share of violent criminals is also going to have more police killings. Is there any data that contradict these? Is there any plausible theory about why victims might conspire with police to make it appear as though black Americans collectively overcommit violent crimes?

At first, I typed out a more long-winded reply about why one can't conflate the self-report statistics of victims with the motivations of police in violent skirmishes, but I've been reflecting a lot lately on choosing my battles.

The "but black people are more likely to be violent criminals" rebuttal is a despicable one, and if you can't see the absence of causal links that you're deliberately hopping over in an attempt to shoehorn that in, then I doubt I'm going to make you see it in a HN comment. That said, I sure hope you don't ever correct someone on "causation vs correlation", as you'd be a tremendous hypocrite.

It’s only appears to be despicable to people who don’t understand statistics on a basic level (which, sadly, describes most Americans, even educated ones) or ardent racists who believe that “the race” supersedes “the individual”.

Notably, we can correctly observe that black people commit more violent crimes per capita than other races without implying any of the following:

1. black people are biologically disposed to crime

2. a significant percentage of black people are criminals

3. any given black person significantly more likely to be a criminal than any given non-black person

I definitely think your decision to pick your battles more carefully is the right one, and I encourage you to be even more judicious.

I firmly believe that you don't understand statistics on a basic level, and you've wholly demonstrated that in this comment by throwing around a bunch of "explanations" with no basis but your own intuition. So the irony of your opening assertion has a wonderfully humorous tinge to me, a literal statistician. Take your pseudo-intellectual trolling back to reddit.

The irony of ad hominem arguments and telling people to go back to Reddit (:

Maybe take some time to compose yourself, scan the HN guidelines, etc before commenting?

Enjoy your day, Literal Statistician. :)

I will, as much as I enjoyed most of your posturing, including your misunderstanding of what constitutes an ad hominem AND the feeble attempt to invoke the guidelines. Is my tone too harsh for you? Or was it that I assumed the bad faith that you wear on your sleeve?

Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I think your argument is wrong in several ways, but even accepting it -- equality of far too many murders by the police is not actually what anyone is looking for.

It’s certainly not what I’m looking for, but BLM was obviously about purported racial inequality with respect to police killings or else Daniel Shaver, Tony Timpa, Justine Damond, etc would be among the Names that we’re told to Say.

So it's not monolithic, I've definitely been at "BLM"-y protests against police violence where non-Black victims were mentioned.

As far as actual policy changes we might want to advocate for or support, does it make any difference? I guess it would mean that "diversity training" for cops is not the way to go -- I agree and I think most BLM organizers would too (the ones I know anyway do). Instead ways that increase police accountability or limit police interactions are the way to go, which I again think would be agreeable.

I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.

> So it's not monolithic, I've definitely been at "BLM"-y protests against police violence where non-Black victims were mentioned.

Yes, I'm generalizing. It's not possible to make meaningful statements about a millions-strong movement that apply universally, so I'm generalizing just like we generalize about "liberals", "conservatives", "progressives", "Trump supporters", etc. And I stand by my generalization--any mention of white victims of police violence was an aberration, an outlier.

> I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.

I mean, I think virtually everyone agrees that police killings are classist. Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)". Something like 90% of Americans in 2020 (per Gallup or Pew--I forget which--but think about how big this number is particularly in light of the polarization of American politics) agreed that police brutality was a problem and police reform was needed--this was extremely uncontroversial. But the claim wasn't "classism", it was "racism"--police target ("hunt" was even commonly invoked) black Americans because of their race.

> Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)"

I'm confused why you think this is "of course"?

I'm confused why you are so caught up in whether the problem is described as "classism in a society where the poor are disproportionately black" or "racism in a society where black people are disproportionately poor."

I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related. Slavery, the beginning of American race relations, was, of course, a class relation -- enslaving people for their labor.

I think one reason non-poor Black people do get targeted by police is because they are perceived ("coded" to use fancy language) as poor, because in America Black is associated with poor. Like not even necessarily that the individual person is assumed to be poor -- although they may be, but it may not be that explicit or conscious. I don't think the police are even necessarily explicit or conscious about the fact that they can behave abusively toward poor people specifically (although they may be sometimes); but implicitly and unconsciously they know that certain kinds of people can be mistreated, that it's even their job to mistreat certain kinds of people -- and they are likely to read a Black person as that certain kind of person.

You can disagree with this analysis. No big deal. I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though; or why, if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, you can't work with people who agree with you while having this analysis, on solutions that make sense to all, instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.

> I'm confused why you are so caught up in whether the problem is described as "classism in a society where the poor are disproportionately black" or "racism in a society where black people are disproportionately poor."

Because those are different problems with different solutions, and picking the wrong set of solutions tends to exacerbate problems (as we're seeing now with soaring crime from which black communities suffer disproportionately).

> I think in America you can't actually totally separate racism and classism as completely separate things, they are always related.

I'm sure there's an element of "black == poor" (brings to mind Biden's "poor kids are just as bright as white kids" gaffe) and in that sense these things are interrelated, but it doesn't follow that we can solve the problem by ignoring what is likely a considerably classism component altogether.

> I don't understand why it seems to make you so angry that other people have this analysis you disagree with though

I think this is entirely in your imagination. I can chuck a few smiley emojis around if it helps? :)

> if you agree that there is a problem with police brutality and abuse, as you seem to, and even agree with the problem statement "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)" -- you can't work with people who agree with you so much of the way even though they disagree on some analysis, work together on solutions that make sense to all (like no, not "diversity training" for police, literally nobody I know that's BLM or "abolish the police", and I know a lot of people, think that's useful either) -- instead of considering them somehow on another side. "you" being you personally, or anyone in this category.

As is often the case in politics, agreement that there is a problem is not actually very much agreement. 90% of Americans agree that we need police reform (Gallup 2020), that doesn't mean we should pick the proposals offered by the most extreme 10% (proposals which 80% of black Americans reject). Notably, there's a lot of research that indicates that the little bit of de-policing we've done in this country seems to be driving a tremendous amount of additional violent crime. Homicides are up 60-70% since ~2014, amounting to about ten thousand additional lives lost every single year (that's about three 9/11s every single year just in homicides, not to mention all of the "mere" assaults, armed robberies, etc) in order to stop a handful of unjustified police killings. Why would I work with the most extreme 10% who are actively making things worse when there's another 80% of the country that are open to more moderate reforms which can address police brutality without enormous body counts?

Read your own citation. That conclusion did not reach the level of statistical significance. The authors admit it studied a single precinct that self-reported data. They had no way to corroborate or verify the accuracy of the data they were given.

“In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!”

> elevated for blacks because the commit more crime

True perhaps, but very misleading. Consider that blacks are far more likely to end up in jail (and for longer) for the same crime a white person commits. Consider that ending up in jail and with a criminal record puts someone in a situation where they're more likely to commit crimes in the future. Sounds to me like racial bias is creating a higher likelihood of the police encounters that may result in shootings occurring.

https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d... https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/racial-disparity-us... https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2019...

That's happening in spite of BLM being endlessly supported. Doesn't negate the fact that BLM is supported by "literally every news outlet [save Fox News], major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class" AND the US government [0].

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-embassies-authorized-hang...

Yup. The fact this person doesn’t see this is evidence for the article.

"Supported" in only the very thinnest sense. The Raytheon Pride flags are generally considered to be extremely "virtue signalling" even within the community; at best this means "we'll allow you to work here and prevent people using slurs openly in the office", not "we'll stop donating to politicians and parties pushing anti-trans legislation or increased police budgets".

The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.

That’s… factually incorrect? Unless you don’t consider Fox News a news outlet, among other examples.

Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.

I think their point was that BLM has flipped from counter cutler to mainline culture

It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum

Ehh. I dunno, if that's "mainstream", why is this the third+ time this has had to be fought for? (BLM, Civil Rights, Civil War).

We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...

...and yet the same fight is being fought again.

I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.

This eternal fight is the culture.

BLM, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy Wallstreet are the culture.

Colour-blind antiracism, preparing for global warming instead of pushing green deal & capitalism are countercultures now.

Right, and ironically all are astro-turfed and embraced by the World Economic Forum.

BLM is literally on flags, in schools, it’s not counter culture

The AP even has it on tests for college credit

I'll believe BLM is mainstream culture when people of color aren't being disproportionately killed by police.

Until then, if police forces are upholding a mainstream concept of law and order resulting in said disproportionality, BLM is countercultural.

Otherwise, if acknowledging the aims of basically what's a human rights movement via flags and spots on AP tests constitutes inclusion into mainstream culture, then the mainstream culture is absurd and perverse.

This is like saying being "anti-murder" is countercultural because murders still happen.

Just because something occurs does not mean there is no mainstream opposition.

I would go further and say that the most basic elements of the BLM were never countercultural.

opposition to excessive police force has been mainstream since the 70s-80s.

The only part of BLM that is actually controversial and countercultural is the idea of abolishing the police. As a result, the majority of BLM supporters reject this aspect.

Note that by that measure, hippies were not counterculture.