noble savages?

I'm back.  Actually I got back yesterday morning, but by the time I did it was too late to post anything.  Partly my fault, partly google's fault.  Things get complicated and very boring in the cyber world.  I will leave it at that.


I wonder what Beagles thought that Chaz was all about, local guys deciding they could form a better place if they could just get the gummint off their backs?  Maybe going back to our noble savagehood?  There was an idea of the noble savage that was kicking around three or four hundred years ago in that civilization was what ruined the natural goodness in man.  It's basically a myth, the savage without the accoutrements of civilization is obeying the law of the jungle, of which there is nothing noble.  I suppose it is free of hypocrisy. but I don't mind hypocrisy like I did in my younger days when I saw myself and my brother hippies as some kind of noble savages.  Anymore I see it as kind of the dark side of good manners.  It helps us get along, and I believe in getting along.


I never liked that occupy movement.  One of their principles was that they had no leaders and their aims were vague.  This helped increase their membership (such as their membership was, they were not a card-carrying organization) because there were no specific issues to disagree with.  They had a pretty good idea of what they were against but no unified idea of what they were for. They faded away like dust in the wind, and who cared.

Black Lives Matter has a similar structure no leader, nobody carrying cards, no specific program.  They are mostly in reaction to black people getting killed by (white) cops which happens with depressing regularity, which keeps them going unlike the occupiers who didn't even have that much specificity.

One of the core problems of these cop killings that spur BLM is that the white cops almost always skate.  Everybody but the most hardened racist sees that this is wrong and here is where I think they get most of their support.  And lately these guys are getting prosecuted (with mixed results because cop unions are powerful), but beyond that they are against police harassing black people in general, and brutality, which again most people can agree with, 

But then we get to the issue of systematic racism along the thin blue line and institutional racism where the country is split more evenly, with Trumpists and right wingers not agreeing that either of these exist.

The deeper and wider the demands of BLM become the harder it is to achieve them.  It's not that much of a problem to get a bad cop offender prosecuted, but reforming the police is a much harder slog, and institutional racism an even harder slog.  And how are you going to accomplish them with a leaderless band who don't need no stinking cards?  Marching is easy, anything else is much tougher.