What to protest Black Lives Matter continued

Following up on yesterday’s discussion, I received this in my email:

I think you protest society (and whatever you think the cause is) on the unconditional probabilities but only protest cops on the conditional probabilities.

That is from a very high quality correspondent.  Since I think BLM is in large part trying to raise consciousness about society at large, and not just complaining about the cops, it is fine for them to protest the large number of bad outcomes for many black people without getting too caught up in the “conditional upon x, y, and z, is a cop more likely to shoot a black or a white person?” sort of question.  Body cameras, reforming/ending the War on Drugs, stronger civil liberties, and other changes make sense for macro reasons, no matter what your view on the conditional probabilities.  So a big chunk of your 300+ comments are simply off the mark.

My response to the correspondent included the following good advice:

Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version.  The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.

If you focus on the stupid version, you too will end up as the stupid version of your own movement.