SSCReader
28d ago
Except...it's probably not true:
No one doubts that Kitty Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., in the early hours of March 13, 1964. However, the story of the impassive witnesses seems to have sprung up about two weeks later.
Trial testimony established that Winston Moseley attacked Genovese not three times but twice, with a 10-minute hiatus in between, argues Levine. When the first attack happened, on Austin Street, a shout from a window scared Moseley away. In addition, a retired police officer recalls that, as a boy, he saw Genovese staggering down Austin Street and Moseley fleeing in the opposite direction, and that his father called the police. Others have also said that they called, Levine adds.
As Genovese made her unsteady way around the corner and down an alley to the back vestibule of the building where she lived, Moseley returned and attacked her again — out of sight of the Austin Street windows, says Levine. A man whose apartment had a view of the second stabbing contacted another resident, who immediately called the police, according to the trial. That woman then rushed to the mortally wounded Genovese, holding her in her arms until the ambulance came, according to trial testimony.
In 2016 the New York Times (which was responsible for claiming many witnesses did nothing), admitted it's story was flawed and inaccurate. And that many fewer people were probably aware of the attack than they claimed and that of those who were aware did take some action (such as calling the cops).
"While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital."
"Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original Times article, asking Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story.""
The attacker was initially scared away by someone intervening, but that person did not realize Genovese had been stabbed, so when she got up and walked off he assumed everything was ok. But the attacker disguised himself and came back and found Genovese in the alley where she had collapsed where he then raped her. But that was actually also reported to police at the time, and a neighbor did come out to help, but it was too late. Most of the so-called 38 witnesses who watched and did nothing while she was murdered, were not in fact aware that a murder was happening at all.
Remember, the media even back in the 1960's was still about getting eyeballs and the whole story was the result of a single New York Times article.
SSCReader
6d ago
Like, how would a nightclub make sense financially in rural Mississippi (?), specifically for black people which were mostly sharecroppers and low-wage laborers? And the Twins should know this, since they worked and/or were in close-enough proximity in this sector.
I mean this part is roughly historically accurate. Clarksdale did have a number of juke joints, it even has festivals to this day celebrating them. It's one of the important stops on the Mississipi Blues Trail for just this reason. Many of them did struggle financially as their clientele were mostly poor black sharecroppers, but they did also have a mostly captive clientele, blacks weren't allowed in white establishments, so something was going to spring up to cater to that segment. The population of the city itself then was about 10,000 but it had significant cotton plantations around it and those workers wanted somewhere to drink and so on.
"Classic juke joints, found for example at rural crossroads, catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after emancipation.[1] Plantation workers and sharecroppers needed a place to relax and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were barred from most white establishments by Jim Crow laws."
SSCReader
28d ago
Deportations can be done easily and cheaply without any government involvement.
I'll note most of your examples will require government involvement though. Just on organizations. Someone will need to make sure the banks are following the law and checking fake green cards or whatever. Someone will have to police the liquor stores to make sure they are in fact checking passport stamps. The IRS will have to have to have more staff to investigate fraudulent payments and so on and so forth.
You're just shifting the government involvement from directly deporting them to monitoring all the organizations which will make their life more difficult, but whose incentives often run to not bothering unless they have some risk of getting caught and punished.
It's potentially workable, but only with government involvement.
SSCReader
20d ago
I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
Absolutely, which is why the time to do that would have been at the founding. Trying to do it now would be a huge mess to say the least.
The only thing I would disagree with is that power honey pots are inherently bad, they do attract wasps, but to do anything requires power, so wasps must be planned for and tolerated. The optimum amount of government power is more than you think, because otherwise the honey pot will still exist and will be exploited by wasps anyway. At least if the hive is in charge you might get something useful done while the wasps are grifting.
SSCReader
3d ago
Yeah Timpson is a notable prison reform advocate who famously (or infamously) thinks 2/3rds of all prisoners should not be in prison. He's talking about women here because the prison in question is a woman's prison, but he has said exactly the same thing about the prison population in general (which is like 90% male). The only difference is that women prisoners who are mothers usually means the state is paying to jail the woman and then pay to put her kids in foster care etc.
SSCReader
28d ago
Was the media that politically correct in 1964? The Times that did the Genovese story also published this in 1965:
An investigative article by The New York Times claimed a connection between the Fruit Stand Riot and militant bands of anti-white youth gangs "trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people"
Which doesn't exactly seem like they were shying away from reporting on black on white violence at the time.
40 people being unwilling to intervene seems like on it's own is a more eyeball catching story than a stabbing and rape regardless of racial dynamics. Which is basically what the journalist said, when asked about it privately. It made for a more interesting story.
Remember clickbait journalism is not new.
SSCReader
1d ago
Maxwell hill is a location in Malaysia. The posters habits interests and grammar indicate either a British ex pat with connections to Malaysia, or a British educated Malaysian. That could be faked but the name is a Malaysian connection on its own.
SSCReader
21d ago
the forced passivity feels more akin to foot-binding or raising a vegan cat than religious beliefs.
My grandparents were raised in a super pacifist offshoot of Christianity, you also have Jainism and the like. Passivity is also part of what people get to indoctrinate their kids into. And of course I am sure the other way round, you can put your kid in boxing and martial arts at an early age if you want.
It's possible the US would be more cohesive if public education was centralized and everyone was taught the same value system, and parents were not allowed to go against it. But I'm not sure it would be the US at that stage, quite.
I kinda feel the same way about my sister in law (who is Catholic and has huge problems with Catholic guilt which she incessantly complains about), raising my nieces and nephews in Catholicism. I think she is causing them significant damage. But if my brother is ok with it (he like me is an atheist) then I keep my mouth shut. People get to raise their kids in ways I find stupid and damaging.
The alternative is you giving swords to their kid secretly, me telling my nieces and nephews that God doesn't exist and is made up, and so on and so forth. But that's not likely to be any better I don't think in the long run.
SSCReader
25d ago
Sure, but that is not a 0% of pulling through as a going concern. The population could drop 80% as you point out and you can still be a going concern. The US might not be a super power any more and it might take a long road to recovery, but even what you are describing is not a zero percent chance of pulling through.
Depending exactly how a civil war breaks out and where the fighting is concentrated, the damage could be greater or lesser. It could be 3 states vs 20 with the rest sitting it out. There is simply no way that we can say 0% is the correct figure with something so nebulous.
SSCReader
25d ago
There is approximately a zero percent chance that America as a going concern could survive a significant portion of its population concluding that they were being ruled by actual tyrants. Things would go so bad so fast it would make your head spin.
It did once (twice?) before right? Sure a Civil War would be bad, but countries come out the other side all the time. If one side wins conclusively I see no reason why America wouldn't carry on. Both the US and the UK have had actual real civil wars and both survived (and thrived in fact!) as going concerns. The US is even to an extent the product of a Civil war (you call it Revolutionary, but you're still just fighting against people from the same nation at the time). I can see circumstances where that wouldn't happen of course, but it seems like setting the bar at zero percent is just ignoring history needlessly.
You can in fact kill large numbers of your civil war enemies, burn down their homes, conquer them and force them back into obedience for hundreds of years. You can in fact lose a Civil War, relinquish your former ruled areas and still be a going concern and then later become firm allies with the very nation formed from that Civil war with both of you still being going concerns.
The chance of any of that certainly isn't 100% but I don't think it's 0% either.
SSCReader
1d ago
British ex-pats (of which I am one) and some wealthy Malaysian British educated people STILL call it Maxwell Hill to this day. I've been there, which is how I know. I wasn't stationed in Malaysia but it was close enough I've visited (and hung out with said British ex pat community myself). That's not impossible to find out of course, so doesn't prove anything.
But you know him being a retired or semi retired ex-pat of an age close to my own is also not impossible. People born before 1979 do exist here. Indeed to blow your mind. I was born before the moon landing in 1969! I've been on the internet since it was Usenet and Muds.
Its not impossible Maxwell picked maxwell hill as part of her name and the house she grew up in, found out that it was also a place in Malaysia and was still called that by some people based her character on that, dropping hints over time she was Malaysian connected (remember though the Malaysian connection is based in part on posts by maxwellhill), not just a post hoc discovery, so it would probably have to be a deliberate choice by her.
It's not proof. But reading the maxwellhill posts it's either a British educated person with good knowledge of Malaysian ex pat/Brit educated communities or a very good imitation. For me its enough to suggest the Ghislaine connection is less likely. YMMV.
SSCReader
6d ago
This plus the Faculty were two of his major inspirations according to Coogler himself.
SSCReader
6d ago
I think that's fair. The coda is a little at odds tonally, because vampirism goes from this horrible thing the main characters are willing to die to fight off, to being portrayed as not that bad after all. But Buddy Guy is a great choice for an aged Sammie so it's hard to complain too much.
SSCReader
6d ago
so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there"
Possibly. Except Remmick makes an offer that if the black people join him willingly, they will be able to get rid of bigotry and racism entirely. He knows the Klan (because he turned a Klan member) are planning to kill the twins the next day anyway and he calls them bigots. So another way at looking at it is that Remmick is offering a pan-American assimilation. Blacks, Irish, Octaroons (like Mary), White Klan members, Chinese, all one big happy bloodsucking murderous musical family, in a way mainstream society will not tolerate. So an assimilation yes, but not into mainstream white society. (Note: Vampires are a little odd here because it seems that everyone they feed on is turned into a vampire, which seems like it should leave any area overrun with vampires in fairly short order, and the Klansmen vampires seem totally fine with the black vampires so parts of the personality seem subsumed, while others remain, vampires are not racist apparently!). Remmick wants Sammie's powers so that he can see his people again, as Sammie can bring forth the spirits of the past and future through music, and because Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently) his people and culture no longer exist, he can only see them again through Sammie.
Coogler said he made the vampire Irish because they too had suffered oppression which may also lean towards that idea. Now of course Remmick is happy to turn everyone forcibly to get what he wants but he does seem (as do the others he turns) to see it as a gift.
It's a reasonably good movie with great music, so I would say it is worth a watch overall. My wife didn't like the sex scenes though for what that is worth.
SSCReader
28d ago
Inferential distance is nothing to do with this. We're supposed to both say what we mean and assume that people are saying what they mean here. You inferred something from what I wrote, that I did not say, which says more about you than me I think. I take very seriously that we are supposed to try and communicate openly and charitably here. So perhaps reflect on that. Especially as you also did the same for the OP.
In any case (and again without assuming motivations of the OP being coy, just taking what he said at face value), it is unlikely that people did not intervene because the attacker was black. Because some people did intervene and because many of the witnesses only heard things, and therefore weren't aware in there was an attack at all let alone that the attacker was black.
SSCReader
28d ago
Look at what the SF mayor said about the zebra murders:
What has that got to do with the New York Times? I think I showed that the specific paper at the time is unlikely to have been trying to cover up a black man committing murder by making the story a sensation all over again 2 weeks after it happened by writing a story about bystanders not acting, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only would it have been counter-productive (they could just not have talked about it any more!), it doesn't fit with the other types of stories they were running. This appears to be more likely to be yellow journalism than trying to distract from a black man murdering Genovese.
SSCReader
28d ago
Sure, i am not saying they are the same crime, I am saying the newspaper in the 60's was very different than today and given other headline and stories they wrote it's unlikely they decided to hide a black mans involvement by digging up an angle about bystander apathy 2 weeks later. They could just not have gone back to the story again if that were their goal.
SSCReader
5d ago
unless Remmick is talking about when the Normans invaded - but Ireland was already Christian by then and after a bit of pillaging and dispossessing the Normans settled down to assimilate into the native society, hence "more Irish than the Irish themselves"; it fits better with a later historical period, say the Tudor era or later, especially the 17th century when land was taken and efforts to anglicise the Irish were very pronounced.
Yeah the implication seems to be 5th century or earlier. He doesn't specify who it was who stole his fathers lands or make any claim about how widespread it was, so could be a Christianized vs non-Christianized neighbor dispute for all we know. I think if he were just pre-Norman or Tudor it wouldn't quite fit the way he talks about it because it's the Christian bit he is stuck on specifically. But as you say who knows how much research effort was put forth.
SSCReader
6d ago
And if you can persuade more people to vote for the reasons you do, then you potentially affect change. Unfortunately most voters are short termists, so most politicians are short termists.
I did some consultancy work for Reform at the last election, so I have nothing against them per se. I quite like Nigel Farage personally (as politicians go). But I heavily suspect you'll find that even were they to form a government they might not do as much as you'll like about immigration. Even for natural Reform voters the economy featured highly in internal polls. Nigel knows that.
SSCReader
6d ago
David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market.
Precisely! That's why Brexit will allow us to control immigration was such a blatant lie. We could always have done so. And that article also notes my view. I think he misrepresents it though. It is not that British workers won't do those jobs it is because they will want more money which will then make those services and products more expensive thus slowing growth. He comes close to it here: In reality, the demand for work is potentially infinite: it’s like trying to fill a bottomless well with buckets of water — the more you throw in, the more you need to keep throwing.
What he is talking about is expansion, more immigrants, means more jobs, means more GDP, means the line goes up. That is the driving factor.
I can tell you from direct experience David Cameron and Boris Johnson have barely a committed ideological bone in their body. They aren't allowing more immigrants in because of some love of global Britain or for other elites. They aren't committed enough to anything to sacrifice for that.
SSCReader
6d ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white. Its not black people or Asians or whatever making those choices. They don't have the numbers or power. If you want to say elite whites are making different choices than non elite whites want then perhaps you have a point. But its still white people making those choices.
And even there i'll point again to the discrepancy that haunted the Tories, people say they want less immigration, but they also punish any party that oversees an economic downturn.
If you want politicians to really drop immigration you have to show you will vote for them when the economy tanks. And mostly people don't. That was our finding when I worked for the Tories. All our modelling showed that doing what people said they wanted, would lose us votes. Same with Brexit, as soon as the economic winds started to bite, voters turned on the Tories. What lesson does that teach your politicians?
We get the politicians we deserve. People may say they want lower immigration, but they are not prepared to pay the costs that involves. I'll bet dollars to donuts that in 2028, if Trump really has made a dent in numbers of illegal immigrants and the economy has suffered that Republicans lose, even if they did what most people wanted. And politicians learn that lesson.
More people rate the economy as their most important political issue than immigration. Therefore spending billions on immigration enforcement, driving up costs of food, cutting other programs for Americans to pay for it, is a losing proposition. Thats why even Trump was going back and forth on enforcement for illegal farm workers.
Its not that the call is coming from inside the building. Its that there are 300 million calls all saying contradictory things, reduce immigration, make my food cheaper, make American goods, make me able to buy a truck and a TV, and so on and so forth. Trump to his credit, is trying to stick to some of these, but even he admits it will make things worse in the short term.
That means you need to persuade people in 2028 to vote Republican even if, especially if! the economy sucks. If they do, then you are creating a new signal. If they don't then they are telling politicians what their revealed preferences really are.
SSCReader
28d ago
It seems to me you tried to use that article as evidence of racist reporting from a racist time, but it backfired.
What? No. My referencing that article was meant to illustrate that the newspaper would report on other actual black on white crimes. It may well have been sensationalized I am sure. But that's the whole point. That it is unlikely they sensationalized Genovese in order to cover up the involvement of a black man, because they were willing to report on (in possibly sensationalist ways) other black crimes.
To be clear I used that example to demonstrate not racism but that they did in fact report on such crimes while mentioning black criminals. I think you have entirely misunderstood my position. I don't think that story was ridiculous and racist particularly. You seem to have imputed that yourself. I didn't say anything like that at all. My post should be read at face value.
SSCReader
5d ago
Well it depends who you are talking about, in general ADOS want it to help ADOS so from their perspective it is not helping the people it was "meant" to help. Which is the perspective I was taking.
If you mean that the people implementing it never meant it to help ADOS (or perhaps never meant it to primarily benefit ADOS at least) then you might be on firmer ground. But then you'd have to address why they wanted to help rich Nigerians or what have you, but not ADOS. I think I might suggest they meant it to look like it would help ADOS as part of a sop towards previous discrimination but were not too bothered if it actually did or did not.
SSCReader
5d ago
Tiers of justice, ceding the commons to the lowest common denominator, deciding that racism (or sexism) is good so long as you target it at the right people, restricting the right of association based on certain protected classes but not other categories of those classes, so on and so forth are also bad. Less so. Does that make them reasonable prices to pay for moral improvement? Does that make a functional multicultural society? All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Maybe, that's the point. It might be once it committed to slavery that America had no good outcomes. Either genocide or hundreds of years of racial animosity and war or affirmative action and critical theory. As you say the best option would likely to have been not enslaved a bunch of people. Once you do that as Jefferson noted, you have no good options.
So it might be that (hopefully not!) the price that must be paid for moral improvement is what you see today forever. Or it might (and hopefully will) decline over time. How long the racial wound of slavery and discrimination takes to heal is an open question. The question is given we can't change the past, is this the best option we have of those available to us? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was what 200 years give or take? So maybe roughly 200 years is what it will take to heal. Would 200 years of the things you don't like now worth 200 years of what black people had to go through in their 200 years? Or is that too great a moral price to pay?
There is no objective answer to that, really. I'd sway to the idea that yes that would be a reasonable price to pay. But that is also predicated on the fact, I think being a white man in the US is pretty good even with whatever headwinds being faced. So I don't really view it as much of a cost at all. I'd choose to be white over than black in a heartbeat from a flourishing point of view in the US right now and I don't see that changing particularly.
But how much of a cost (if any at all) anyone person is willing to bear for the mistakes of Americans past, is going to be invariably a very personal thing.
With bi-polar though for example, being on medication can literally turn you into a different person. My exes mother had bipolar and on medication she was a sweet Christian lady who baked cakes and wouldn't hurt a fly. Off it she was a foul mouthed, paranoid who lacked impulse control and used to beat her kids with metal coat hangers.
Which was the "real" her? The difference between a mental illness and just being an asshole, is an asshole can choose to not be so. With a mental illness you can't.
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