*equality

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In Canada at least BLM really has given itself a bad reputation. They halted the Toronto Pride Parade until their demands were met, those demands including excluding police officers from participating in the parade...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/pride-parade-toronto-1.3662823

I hope the Canadian, and specifically Toronto, chapter of BLM is disparate from the American one, because this incident wasn't isolated. BLM Toronto has taken repeated actions like this one that give exactly the black lives matter MORE vibe that the All Lives Matters crowd accuses the group of.

When your wife asks do you love me, she DOES mean do you love me MORE than others, BLM Toronto at least certainly has acted in that manner enough to lose my support for now.

*promote *quality

This isn't funny, really. And the way I have felt about this topic since the beginning.

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No, BLM did that with the Minneapolis / St Paul Pride parade in Minnesota last year as well. I've had to stop and have some real thinks about some of the tactics employed by BLM over the last few years, as frequently my gut reaction has been "well that seems excessively antagonistic towards people who likely already support them." Things like blocking a pride parade, or shutting down sections of highways and such. Ultimately, these actions aren't aimed at the people who are immediately affected by them, they're done to generate publicity for the group when they might otherwise have difficulty getting any sort of media attention paid to their message from more typical, "polite" protests.

Civil rights organizers have had over 60 years of experience in determining how to effectively protest, or longer if you look at examples like women's suffrage. At this point I think they have a pretty good idea of what forms of protest are useful vs counter-productive. I support what BLM is trying to accomplish, and as someone who to date has not personally helped that cause in any direct manner, I'm opting to trust that they have an idea what they're doing and that if I'm reacting negatively to their approach I should probably question / sit with that reaction before saying something foolish.

It's not even as much that BLM disrupted the Pride parade, but that one of their demands was to ban the police from participating in the parade in the future. That's actively destroying years and years of hard fought progress to bring people together, and I can't fail to call that a bad thing. Again, I hope the US chapters are different in that much, and in many states there is also much more justified outrage against the police, which is very much unlike up here in Canada.

Canada's BLM held sit in protests demanding to meet with the chief of police and then repeatedly abandoned the meetings before they were supposed to happen. They then went on to condemn the police chief for having zero interest in protecting black civilians in Toronto. FYI, the chief of police of Toronto at the time was a black man.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mark-saunders-police-black-lives-matter-1.3587533

A BLM toronto co-founder railed at how our Prime Minister, who makes Barack Obama look like very right -leaning, is a white supremacist terrorist. Rhetoric that just means absolutely nothing and looks like little more than gross false victimhood.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzd4px/black-lives-matter-toronto-called-justin-trudeau-a-white-supremacist-terrorist

And then for good measure another co-founder squeezed in a quarter million dollar 'overtime' payment on their last week with the University of Toronto's Student Union. When the Student Union sued to get that money back as their was no documentation justifying paying out that kind of money all of a sudden the Student Union were racists. Eventually the case was settled with an undiclosed amount returned.

https://thevarsity.ca/2017/07/31/the-breakdown-the-utsus-lawsuit-against-former-executive-director-sandy-hudson/


BLM Toronto has done enough harm I am pretty comfortable saying I oppose them. The goal of making race relations better is of course good. Correcting injustices is of course good. I just don't see that coming from a group taking the actions I've seen, IMO they are actively making things worse, not better.

Again, that is specific to up here in Canada, I can't imagine that the US chapters can be as bad without it having been all over the media where I couldn't miss it. That said, up here I would likely have altogether missed everything but the parade as well save for having personally witnessed a just disgusting racist attack on someone at a an event. That led me to discover the attacker was tied in with BLM Toronto and suddenly seeing that as perhaps not an entirely isolated event .

It always bewildered me how the common response on the right was "all lives matter". Exactly how paranoid and racist do you have to be to assume that what they mean is "only black lives matter".

100% agree. I don't know how you miss the point of a movement ** started in response to police killings of black people **.

The phrase "black lives matter" is a refutation of the status quo where they clearly DON'T MATTER (at least not to certain police officers).