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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Previously I've written about how Musk can Make Twitter Great Again with Celebs&Sports.

But now let me discuss how Musk can use twitter to subvert the regime without even trying: just allow people to have a clear and unfiltered look at the world.

As an example of this, consider the most recent viral content on twitter - more popular than an NBA game happening simultaneously - #wafflehousefight.

As the mainstream media might describe it, "some drunken revelers at a Waffle House in Austin, TX engaged in an altercation with Waffle House employees." At least that's what they might write if they covered it, but only yahoo and foxnews have bothered to actually cover it. And of course the reason is clear: the story is a group of morbidly obese angry black women assaulting a pretty-ish blonde (and clearly red tribe working class) waffle house employee after demanding the "white girl" make them waffles while they sat in a closed off area. The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's a clear glimpse of what the mainstream media + tech companies normally try to hide: a disproportionate amount of crime is just black people getting angry and doing dumb stuff.

Quite a lot of tech and media tries to cover things like this up. Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar. The mainstream media similarly downplays stories such as black nationalist terrorists shooting up subways, as well as using tactics like not including the attackers photo.

Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.

When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.

Twitter is popular because of celebrities and sports, and the content most people consume there will continue to be 90%+ celebrities and sports. But with stories like #wafflehousefight, Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.

What exactly do you think is being hidden, and from whom?

In Victoria 2, populations have the stats 'consciousness' (politically awareness and pursuit of political self-interest) and 'militancy' (how prepared they are to join rebel groups or perform civil unrest). The consciousness and militancy of black populations in Western countries is very high, supported by the media. The consciousness and militancy of white populations is very low, again due to the media.

For example, I'm confident few outside the US have heard of the Zebra murders, where four black men killed somewhere between 15 and 70 whites, wounding several more. They were motivated by some racial-religious angle, there were some connections to the Nation of Islam. There may have been many more involved in the killings who were never uncovered. Fascinatingly, about half the wikipedia page is about various civil rights groups trying to stop what they saw as racial profiling when the police tried to racially profile the all-black suspects.

Yet practically everyone in the entire Anglosphere has heard of Emmett Till, who was lynched. I'm not even American and yet they brought it up in class when I was at high school - we were studying 'To Kill a Mockingbird' as a compulsory text. There are Emmett Till poems and songs and films - Biden signed an Emmett Till anti-lynching act back in 2022. And in marked contrast to the forgotten Zebra Killings, Robert Raben has been lambasting the criminal justice system for not harassing the accuser enough:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/emmett-accuser-carolyn-bryant-donham-last-chance-justice-rcna42415

On a purely objective basis where we ignore the race involved, you'd think the former would be much more widely known. Killing many random whites is surely worse than killing one black, who was thought to have sexually harassed someone. That's merely on the level of honor killings - which clearly isn't good. At least there's some kind of reasoning behind the killing other than racial hatred.

Yet Emmett Till is big news even today, Zebra murders are forgotten.

If a white police officer chokes a black criminal in Minneapolis, or is seen to choke him (I don't really want to go into the George Floyd drugs/breathing thing) there's a giant global media frenzy - there's massive rioting and corporations falling over eachother to support BLM. If a black police officer turns and inexplicably shoots a random white woman who was totally unconnected to his work in Minneapolis... It's so unmemorable I have to check it up online to find it at all.

PS. I really hate that people come here with extremely cringe names like gaygroyper100 or that pedofascist fellow we had earlier. Don't be egregiously obnoxious should apply to that. If someone did that on 4chan with a tripcode they'd be bullied and rightly so.

Your comparison of the Zebra murders with Emmitt Till doesn't work. The Emmitt Till case is well-known because it was historically important. It was an important factor in the success of the Civil Rights Movement, because it engendered white, middle class support therefor. The Civil Rights Movement in turn was nothing less than a social revolution. Moreover, the Emmitt Till case was representative of a much broader phenomenon, ie, Jim Crow. So, of course it is well known. Hell, it was even indirectly responsible for the development of The Twilight Zone.

In contrast, the Zebra killings and shootings had little effect on history or society, though I suppose it is possible that Art Agnos would never have become mayor had he not been a victim. Nor were they representative of a larger social issue. Had they given rise to a race war, or perhaps in the alternative some sort of police state, they would be better known.

And, btw, you answered your own question re the shooting by the Minneapolis police officer (a case that was the subject of about 20 articles in the NY Times, btw): You called it "inexplicable." That implies that it has no greater implication, does it not? Unlike, say, George Floyd, which was, at least arguably, an example ,albeit an extreme one, of the larger phenomenon of excessive force by police. And, btw, it doesn’t help you to misstate the facts of your ostensible examples; the victim in Minneapolis was not "totally unconnected" to the cop's work, because she is the one who called the cops in the first place.

Isn't the Minneapolis case also an example of excessive force?

The Minneapolis case is so bizarre that it is sui generis. It was a rookie cop panicking when someone approached the window of his car, and shooting that person -- and, in doing so, shooting across the body of his partner, who was sitting in the seat next to the window. It was not a cop using excessive force to arrest someone, or to punish someone for giving him lip, or for any of the usual reasons.

Emmett Till didn't set out to become a martyr, nor did his killers set out to make him one and light a fire in the Civil Rights Movement. Their intentions didn't matter, but the intentions of those using their story did.

I don't understand why that matters. The point is not what they intended (unlike the Zebra killers, who might well have intended to create a race war, IIRC). The point is that one turned out to influence a major, major historical development, and the other did not. That is why everyone has heard of the former, and not the latter.

The radical left of the 70s might not have gotten everything they wanted, but I find it hard to swallow saying that they haven't had much more success than they deserved, or that the Zebras weren't representative of a larger social issue (the same social issue as Till and Floyd, really).

? Why does it matter whether they had more or less success than they deserved? My point is not about deserts, but about the extent of change that happened subsequently. As I mentioned, the Civil Rights Movement was quite literally a successful social revolution. Whatever success the radical left of the 1970s achieved, it was quite marginal compared to the Civil Rights Movement, which was one of the two or three most momentous developments in US history. Of course we are going to be familiar with people associated therewith.

Well, of course a story can't have impact unless people hear about. But the story of the Zebra killings also was widely told at the time. The reason that one is well known today is because it was part of a massively, massively, massively important historical development. You might as well ask why everyone in the world has heard of Hitler, but not Father Coughlin. After all, they were both anti-Semitic demogogues!

The story of 70+ people being murdered is of course going to circulate at the time it's happening and not be completely buried. The question is why is it considered literal bar trivia? As mentioned, many of us hadn't heard of the killings at all and have heard of many Dahmer-type serial killers. The obvious reason is the racial angle. Five Klan members killing 70+ black people in the 1970s would still be widely discussed today, but I'm not sure what could convince you of that.

I'm not suggesting a sensational Top Men coverup of the story. It's more mundane than that. People in media will highlight and dwell on stories that conform to their world view and forget or downplay those that counter their worldview.

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