I don’t wear this on my sleeve so I didn’t mention it in the Kaepernick thread. During my military time, I spent some time on the post Honor Guard. I’ve carried enough flag draped coffins and watched enough devastated widows clutch the folded flag like it was the last lifejacket in the middle of the pacific to know using the flag to protest is just cruel. Survivors of those lost don’t just look at the flag as the symbol of our nation they see it as the symbol of lost loved ones. It’s the equivalent of protesting by stomping on kittens.

If a group of athletes decided use their free speech rights to salute the flag with a chest thump, straight-arm palm down salute would we say the upset relatives of Holocaust victims were engaging in “recreational outrage”?

There are an infinite number of ways to draw attention to a cause without bringing the flag into it.

Give us concrete ways to solve problems. more accountability, body cams, for example. The American people are reasonable. We want a better police, while understanding it is a very difficult job. But these generic protests to protest fuzzy, generalized problems and complaints? Not very helpful. 

an extension of a concept that will be quite familiar to baby boomers: Marxism.  More specifically, it appears that large swaths of my generation have come up with a variation specific to this bizarre and utterly destructive social force: Cultural Marxism.

I'm far from a scholar, but my understanding of the theory goes something like this: the proletariat and the bourgeoise which Marx described are the paradigm into which victims and oppressors are most easily fit in order to achieve fast, effective penetration into a person's mind.  So the remedies suggested (implied?) by Marx are then applied to every other instance of oppression, real or otherwise.  In today's terms, that seems to drive people to gut the oppressors of their power, make them supplicate before their former victims, and keep them submissive lest they resume their previous oppressive policies.

Naturally, there are a few assumptions one has to accept in order for this Marxism angle to be revealed most clearly, chief among those assumptions being a significant power disparity between a relatively few elite and a relatively many sub-elite.  Again, I'm not a scholar but I am a reasonably smart person who spends a lot of time thinking and learning about this kind of stuff.  It's probaly my number one hobby these last few years.

The whole paradigm, however, rests on maintaining--or even ADVANCING--the total victimhood of the oppressed group.  If the oppressed are no longer viewed as legitimate victims then they lose their impetus, mandate, and moral high ground for persisting in the class war.  This is where a concept called 'intersectionality' has bubbled up in the last coupld decades of grievance/victim politics.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a long-time ally of Camille Paglia and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, just had an interview posted in Psychology Today where she discusses, in the context of modern feminism, subjects like: victimhood/grievance politics, intersectionality (the idea that, essentially, the more Oppression Points a person has, the greater their mandate and moral authority to impose change upon the system which they perceive to be oppressing them), and a few other factors which in her view are wholly destructive forces in the quest for true equality between the sexes.  But much of what she talks about could just as easily be applied to race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other quality which might be employed in this Cultural Marxism machine that genuinely seems aimed at undoing Western Civilization as we know it.  The link is below.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-mortal/201609/is-modern-academic-feminism-harming-women

I enjoy Christina Hoff Sommers' work greatly, but I wouldn't have found her without Doc's linkage to Camille Paglia's Salon articles.  The above article seemed to touch on some of this stuff, so I thought I'd link it.

In short: the idea of addressing or even acknowledgint the reality of black-on-black crime would only lead to a better understanding of the reality of crime in large tracts of black communities, and that better understanding would probably negate a significant portion of the 'Victim Points' currently enjoyed by the community (or its leaders--I genuinely don't know enough about the specifics to comment on whether this is more grassroots or leader-driven behavior).  So instead of being open to new information which accurately describes the situation, the leaders (who I have no idea whether or not this is conscious or subconscious) reflexively and categorically deny any evidence or information which doesn't fit their narrative.  It's hard to whip up an angry mob when they're well-informed on the matters at hand--just ask Thomas Jefferson about whether a well-informed populace can be trusted with its own governance.

Anyway, just one more data point to toss on the scales.

The murder capitals of the United States in no particular order are Chicago, Camden, Baton Rouge, St. Louis and Detroit.  Chicago had thirteen murders this weekend.  Like Doc said, police violence is 5 percent of the problem.  The biggest problems are young inner city mostly black men shooting each other, and bystanders, and other people who look like their enemies for inconsequential reasons. 

I imagine that police in that sort of environment are often put in a few very sticky situations.  Some police probably also become jaded and mean after a few too many gun battles.  Here's some questions:

Given the current bad press, how is an inner city police department to recruit good police officers?  

What does an inner city war zone turn police officers into?

What incentive do police officers have to do good work or enter into dangerous or sticky situations?

How does a city break out of this cycle of violence?