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New Year, Same Old Culture War
At least 10 killed in New Orleans after driver ‘intentionally’ rams into crowd on Bourbon Street (CNN)
Apparently, "FBI Special Agent Aletha Duncan said the Bourbon Street attack is 'not a terrorist attack' in comments delivered after the mayor spoke." But then, later:
New Orleans mayor declares 'terrorist attack' on Bourbon Street, FBI confirms investigation (Fox)
Coulter's Law appears to be in force. As a reminder:
And indeed, this was a shooter, who died in a gunfight with cops... but so far it appears the ten deaths and dozens of injuries were vehicular, not firearm-related. Over on 8
chankun (warning: images of death) it's claimed that "FBI Director Kash Patel states killer was 'Middle Eastern Descent'" but I don't see a link to direct evidence of that. I will be interested to learn whether it is a disinformation thing, or whether 8chankun is just better at reporting news than multiple multi-million dollar corporate news media outlets. Can a failed shooting preceded by successful vehicular homicide be used as ammunition (hah) in Second Amendment debates? Probably! Apparently at least one "explosive device" was also found?There is something to be said for "wait and see," and indeed I expect to hear much more about this attack in the near future (unless, of course, we simply don't). Though clearly Special Agent Aletha Duncan did not seem to think there was any reason to "wait and see" when declaring, contra the mayor, that this was not a terrorist attack.
In unrelated news, Stocks just did something they haven’t done in nearly three decades--and in case you are unimpressed with CNN's clickbait headline,
Everything old is new again.
I went into the shop this morning and rolled my eyes when the front page of the Irish Independent referred to the perpetrator as a "Texas man". But later in the sub-heading he was mentioned by name. The online version of the article even refers to him as an "Islamic State-inspired killer". Perhaps, in Irish journalism, nature is healing?
I guess, to be fair, he really is a Texas man rather than someone from Saudi Arabia with thin ties to Texas. Details are still emerging, but this is an African-American born in Beaumont that served in the US military and was later converted to Islamist ideology. He is probably also a literal crazy guy. I'm as quick to blame Islam as just about anyone and I'll certainly do so again here, but it isn't misleading to refer to him as a Texas man as long as you also include the ISIS information alongside it.
Exactly what I was getting at. The average Irish person, upon hearing "Texas man", thinks "white, God-fearing GOP voter, probably living on a ranch which contains a small arsenal of firearms". Upon hearing "Texas man commits terrorist attack", the average Irish person would probably assume that such a person committed a Dylann Roof or Timothy McVeigh copycat crime. Mentioning him by name later in the sub-heading immediately disambiguates this (I'm not saying it's impossible that a white man might convert to Islam and change his name to "Shamsud-Din Jabbar", but such a sequence of events certainly sounds unlikely), and emphasising that his attack was inspired by ISIS disambiguates it further still.
Such honesty and forthrightness is to be commended from the Independent, considering that they published an entire article about the stabbing in Dublin in November 2023 without once naming the assailant or mentioning anything about his ethnic background.
I wonder if there's some kind of geographic component to Coulter's law: maybe Irish journalists are willing to specify the ethnicities of criminals who commit crimes in far away countries, but are reluctant to do so when it happens at home (or in neighbouring nations). Or perhaps not: the New York Times is no less cagey when reporting on the Dublin riots, refusing to name the perpetrator and continually referring to "unconfirmed" reports that he's Algerian (by which they mean "unconfirmed at the time the riots unfolded" - by the time this article went to press it had been conclusively established that the perpetrator was Algerian).
This is a trait endemic to journalism as a whole; 'Lying via omission' is a well-worn skill that allows Journalists to selectively leave out information while allowing themselves to claim 'At no point did I give false information or lie.'
There are reasons why the public opinion on Journalism is so low.
Oh of course, I'm well aware. It's one of those things I never stop being appalled by no matter how often I encounter it. I guess it must work on a majority of their readers or they'd have stopped by now.
I think it takes seeing malicious reporting on a particular issue either close to the reader or that's something they happen to know a lot about in order for someone to stop trusting most journalism by default. I think most people just haven't been black-pilled in that way yet.
It'd be interesting to do some kind of academic research into this: what concentration of inaccurate or knowingly misleading reporting, in what timeframe, must a reader be exposed to before they apply healthy scepticism to a) that journalist in particular; b) that outlet in particular; and c) mainstream journalism in general? What is the level of bullshit you must be exposed to in order to overcome Gell-Mann amnesia? We could call it "Gell-Mann saturation point", where more naturally sceptical/distrustful people have a lower GMSP than more naïve or trusting types.
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