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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   336 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 5, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Last Sunday, a 22-year-old man walked into a small shopping centre in Fairgreen, Co. Carlow and began discharging a shotgun into the air. The police and bomb squad were quickly called, but the man in question turned the gun on himself. To the best of my knowledge, the only other person injured at the scene was a young girl who tripped while fleeing from the scene and skinned her knee.

That's not the interesting part of the story - the interesting part is how it was reported upon. The Irish police (Garda Siochána) were extremely quick to clarify that the perpetrator was a white Irishman:

The Garda Press Office issued four press releases over the next 24 hours which provided a full picture of what happened, including a precise timeline of events, the extent of injuries (including to a young girl), and – most notably – a description of the perpetrator as a “white adult Irish male” on Sunday night.

It was unusually direct by the standards of the Garda press office, which tends only to offer the most basic details around crimes, in part out of sensitivity towards victims and their families.

The decision followed a similar move by police in Merseyside less than a week previously, after a man drove into a crowd of football fans celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League title win in the city.

The incident in Liverpool saw the same kind of misinformation spread as in Carlow, with false claims that the ramming was a terrorist attack and that the suspect was a person of colour being shared on social media.

So why are the Garda announcing the perpetrator's ethnicity, you ask? To combat "misinformation" and "uninformed speculation":

The Dublin riots in November 2023 were fuelled by a deluge of speculation about the identity and motive of the man who carried out a knife attack at a school near Parnell Square.

The Southport riots last year in England followed the same grim pattern, when far-right groups seized on speculation about the identity and motive of the man who fatally stabbed three children.

Both instances were preceded by hours of silence from police and officialdom, which created an information vacuum in which speculation and conspiracy theories were able to take hold.

On each occasion, speculation dampened much more quickly after both police forces provided additional information about the background of the perpetrators.

...

The strategy denied bad actors the ability to hijack the narrative and acknowledged a basic truth about modern social media: in the absence of facts, fiction will flourish.

I know this word has been abused to death over the past decade or more, but I really cannot think of any word which better captures the feeling I am feeling right now. I feel like I am being gaslit. A full year and a half after the stabbing in Parnell Square which sparked the Dublin riots, in an article specifically about the Garda's sensible decision to get ahead of conspiracy theories by disclosing demographic information about the people who perpetrate crimes - and The Journal still cannot bring themselves to mention that the stabbing in Parnell Square was committed by an Algerian Arab. They still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the Southport stabbings were committed by a black Rwandan. They'll wax lyrical about the "deluge of speculation" which followed these horrific crimes, without once mentioning that much of this "uninformed speculation" turned out to be entirely accurate.

But some people aren't happy about this strategy:

But although it worked this time around, it’s a tricky strategy that’s not without its downsides.

Several far-right accounts online accused Gardaí and Merseyside Police of being ‘too quick’ to say that the suspects in Carlow and Liverpool were white locals, with the implication that this was an act of political messaging rather than public clarity.

What is so confusing about people objecting to a blatant double standard in how crimes are reported upon? What is so objectionable about a standard in which all crimes are reported upon in the same way regardless of the perpetrator's ethnicity or national background?

The next time a similar major incident occurs and Gardaí or British police don’t — or can’t — release identifying information about the suspect(s), it’s easy to see how the decision not to do so will be seized upon.

The public may take the lack of information as confirmation that the suspect is foreign or non-white, and may end up believing bad actors or others who are speculating about what has happened.

Gosh, how might they arrive at that idea, I wonder? It's not like the article in which this sentence appears mentions four distinct crimes, and only provides any identifying information about the two perpretators who were white natives while conspicuously avoiding mentioning anything about the perpretrators of the other two crimes.

At this point, all I can say is that, at least in Ireland and the UK (and probably in a great deal of the rest of Europe as well), Coulter's Law is no longer just a journalistic convention, but actually an official public policy.

Frankly I suspect European authorities might be straight up lying about the identities of suspects now. I’ve clocked two suspiciously terrorist-like attacks on the last few weeks (a vehicle ram attack in the UK and a mass stabbing in Germany) where the authorities immediately announced that it was committed by a white European. I can’t confirm the Germany one but the on the scene video of the UK attack was ambiguous, the guy looked like he could potentially be English, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was Syrian or Egyptian either.

I don't have a particularly high opinion of British police, but, per Bounded Distrust, I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to think they would frame an innocent man for a terror attack just because the real perpetrator was of the wrong ethnicity. It invites the question of why this wasn't done for any of the high-profile public acts of violence committed by non-white non-natives in the recent past (Southport, 7/7, the murder of David Amess, Reading, London Bridge X2 etc.).

They don’t necessarily have to frame anyone though. Just announce a fictitious perpetrator.

The guy who allegedly did the Liverpool attack has been remanded in custody.

Do we know for sure that the recent Liverpool one was an “attack”? Is there a known or accused motive? I admittedly have not paid much attention to the story but my first impression when it happened was that he might’ve just been very drunk.

If they actually did this, it probably would have been by declaring a European ODC the real culprit.

I am highly suspicious of such a thing in a country with jury trials, but that’s how you’d go about it.

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