Reblogged:What Does BLM Accomplish?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

As I put it recently of Black Lives Matter, it's "an organization whose name I can't agree with more, and whose ideas and methods I can't agree with less."

But let's skip the ideas and methods for a moment, and focus on consequences.

What, exactly, is BLM accomplishing?

Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian has just offered us a nice, up-to-date summary, in his most recent post, "Chicago, Circling the Drain:"

Image by Gabe Pierce, via Unsplash, license.

[L]ast night, a second wave of looting erupted in Chicago, including both in the downtown and in the luxury shopping district just north of downtown known as the "Miracle Mile." There are many videos of the looting, which appears to have been orchestrated on social media.

I'm just completely mystified about the thought process. Let's assume the worst for the police as to the incident on Sunday. Even so, how is that somehow a bigger issue than the well-over-300 blacks murdered so far this year in Chicago by people who are not the police? And again, even if you assume the worst about the police incident, how is looting an appropriate response? Encouraging young black people to go out on looting sprees is making them completely unemployable in any professional job and ruining whatever chance they might have had for high paying jobs and careers. The demonstrators shout "black lives matter" while they destroy black lives by the hundreds or thousands. [bold added]

All I can think to add here, for the sake of anyone who imagines BLM to be an ally of black Americans is this, from Ayn Rand villain Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes."

All this is hardly to say that the pain, suffering, and loss of everyone else affected by this senseless violence -- emphatically including business and property owners -- doesn't also count.

-- CAV

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