site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42555 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.

Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.

That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.

When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.

Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.

I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again

I feel like the gender identity of criminals is sort of a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. If the NYT uses "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and scream and say they're honoring the criminal. If the NYT makes an exception to its general rules on "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and laugh and say "look, even the NYT doesn't believe that trans women are women, they revoke the status as soon as they commit a crime."

I actually like the capitalization of Black when referring to black people in America. It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms: African American mostly worked, but it doesn't include Zohran or Elon even though they are literally from Africa and in America; American Descendants of Slavery was a little more precise, but there's obvious edge cases involving black skinned people who were never enslaved, or non-black people who were in other circumstances. Black neatly captures the group we are talking about when we are talking about them. I don't really think white either is or needs a similar group identification.

It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms

By this argument, both capital B Black and capital W White make a lot of sense. Both are new ethnicities divorced from "Old World" roots, some by force and some by choice. Both occupy a strange checkbox of culture and ethnicity. Alas, the NYT style guide doesn't use your much stronger argument.

Black refers to all black people around the world:

Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.

Emphasis mine. As far as I'm concerned this is deeply racist and, of course, quietly white supremacist (or slightly more charitable and using progressive language, their argument continues to center the experience and importance of white people behind a mask of false respect for Blackness). Black people in America, in the UK, in Africa, everywhere? Basically all the same, according to Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett.

We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.

White people are just too doggone diverse and unique to have a shared anything. Plus bad people used it, so it's radioactive.

Either you believe trans women are women or you believe trans women are men. Almost no one believes trans women are women when they are law abiding and they are men when they go shoot up a school. Using their style guide for most cases but skipping this one makes no one happy and both sides mad, obviously they wouldn't do it. Ditto for Black vs black.

In the counterfactual scenario where they actually made an exception for these articles like you want them to, we'd get threads about how NYT's selective application of their style guide proves they are intellectually dishonest hypocrites instead.

Either you believe trans women are women or you believe trans women are men.

I believe that whether a transwoman is a man or a woman depends on why you're asking.

Either you believe trans women are women or you believe trans women are men. Almost no one believes trans women are women when they are law abiding and they are men when they go shoot up a school.

People with such opinions don't believe trans women are women but are willing to humor them by calling them that anyway. They are not willing to humor criminals.

You are making the pronouns an issue. Would it be any less ideological if the NYT abandoned their style guide, just this once?

I think there is certainly a case to be made that following these kind of style changes are more ideological than abstaining from their use because they are fundamentally prescriptive rather than descriptive. It was not the common use of English speech in America or anywhere else to refer to males as she/her should they wish to identify as such, and neither was it common use to capitalize Black. Calling a human male he or a person of predominantly African ethnicity black is not some conscious political choice. Choosing to do otherwise, and beyond that making it an institutional requirement to do so, is what is ideological (for better or worse).

Yes you can argue that choosing not to rebel against convention is just as political a choice as doing what everyone else does yada yada yada but I think this misses the point, besides being needless sophistry. When describe things as being "political", they mean that the action in question done was with deliberate intent to make some kind of rhetorical or political point. Failing to try to make a point, or not even conceiving of your speech as political at all, is obviously inherently less "political" in nature.

I like to say that even if you must insist that a chocolate chip cookie recipe is just as political as, say, Das Kapital, you must at least be able to recognize that they are political to vastly differing extents.

That’s an argument for choosing a different style guide, not for abandoning it when the subject is sufficiently grim.

It also assumes that the NYT does not, in fact, believe the underlying premise. I don’t think this is obvious. If it were, though, why should they break kayfabe for this? Is it somehow more compassionate?

In 2016, a tourist family from Nebraska visiting Disney World allowed their toddler to wander around the edge of a small lake near their hotel without close supervision. The young boy was attacked and killed by an alligator. Anyone who grew up in the Southern United States knows not to let small children wander around bodies of water unattended. Nobody explicitly tells you this, but there is a general cultural understanding of alligators, how they work, and where they live.

I know it’s controversial even here to refer to the homeless urban underclass as vermin or wild animals, but I can’t think of a better metaphor.

Everyone who grew up in a major American metropolitan area knows that certain environments around the city are the natural habitat for a certain kind of predator. You don’t have to know these locations by heart. You can identify them simply by looking around at the ambient population. The (small-n) native American knows that these environments are significantly more dangerous than other areas of the city, and thus require a heightened level of vigilance when one is unable to avoid these areas in the normal course of city life. You cannot expose yourself by putting earbuds in and spacing-out on public transportation directly in front of a disheveled black man wearing a hoodie, especially if you are a small and vulnerable young girl who sticks out.

You cannot expose yourself by putting earbuds in and spacing-out on public transportation directly in front of a disheveled black man wearing a hoodie

I would submit to you that this is not some universally known people of social lore that every native-born American knows. Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice. If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.

If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.

To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.

Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice.

I’m assuming this is a joke?!?!? I like not being stabbed.

I like not being stabbed.

What if you consider your lesser-privileged counterparty in the knife-involved incident may have enjoyed the experience more than you were saddened by it?

You develop thick skin

To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.

It is, but it is vastly less concerning and mostly a function of the nature of urban poverty. Beggars are ancient phenomenon.

I've only been stabbed twice

Only twice? Noob

I know it’s controversial even here to refer to the homeless urban underclass as vermin or wild animals, but I can’t think of a better metaphor. Everyone who grew up in a major American metropolitan area knows that certain environments around the city are the natural habitat for a certain kind of predator.

It's not like Ukraine or Eastern Europe in general is radically different from North Carolina in that regard though.

Eastern European gopniks do not usually commit random acts of violence in front of bystanders. They might do this against a minority male, but a white Ukrainian female knows that while she shouldn't take a shortcut through a park when the dog walkers have left, on a train no one's going to mug her or rape her unless she and the perpetrators are the only people in the carriage.

But ‘has black people’ is, in charlotte, not narrowing it down, and this woman was used to public transportation anyways.

That may be defensible as a policy

I could understand it if they limited Black to the American context, aka American Descendants of Slavery/Foundational Americans (one of the other, rather more bombastic names for the group), but they don't! The style guide treats all black people around the world as a cohesive cultural identity, which to me is wildly old-timey racist and I've never found a justification for why it isn't. The logic seems to be that all black people are basically the same, but white people are just too diverse and unique to be lumped together? Ridiculous.

I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all.

While taking the words of a schizophrenic to mean anything is a questionable practice, the murderer said "I got the white girl, I got the white girl" after stabbing her. Deranged he may be, he seemed to think it had something to do with race.

Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.

Well. Some second-order effects.

I do not think anyone expect nationwide riots after this murder. Maybe the Charlotte mayor loses her primary, maybe that magistrate gets investigated.

Edit: nope, the primary was yesterday and she won.

Almost certain the mayor wins the general, too, given the voting habits of urban democrats.

There must be real and true consequences before there can be any rapprochement, and yet we never saw any of that from the 2008 crash, we never saw it from COVID, and we've never seen it, ever, in fifty-plus years of integration failures and unidirectional ethnic violence.

Consequences, please, while there are some reasonable options left.

Consequences, please, while there are some reasonable options left.

Wait until a "jury of his peers" finds the murderer not guilty and he's back on the streets again.

Peers are supposed to be fellow lords, and the word "peer" is absent from the Constitution.

He deserves an impartial trial, but unfortunately there's only one group of jurors who are ever impartial.

How are the memes coming along? Other than the inevitable Ghiblification, I think my favorite is "I don't see race/race seeing you". Extremely poignant reminder that you may not care about the culture war, but the culture war cares about you. Or, as Zoomer Historian put it, "You are in a race war whether you know it or not."

Honorable mention to "Concealed carry!" It's very pretty, but somewhat marred by a) the fact that Iryna Zarutska was stabbed from behind with no chance to defend herself and b) the fact that if even if she had defended herself with a gun she would have just gotten Daniel Penny'd.

This is why we had segregation. Not because evil whites wanted to hoard all the magic dirt for themselves, but because they wanted the right to go about their daily lives without worrying about getting stabbed.

EDIT: "The inevitable Hollywood race swap" is great, too, since that is exactly what happened when Epic Beard Man was adapted into Bad Ass.

I suspect this one will not catch on: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1965107130668908660

This is why we had segregation.

No, it is blatantly not.

It really is. There was a wave of black on white violence after the slaves were freed, and as a response to that, Jim Crow which was effective at its intended purpose of preventing these depradations. Jim Crow and segregation were weakened by integration and eventually repealed and replaced with the Civil Rights Act, and there was a corresponding wave of black on white violence which lasted until the tough on crime 80s. Those policies also worked, and some lingered into the 21st century when they were repealed by legislatures or subverted by activist DAs, and we're living through the third such black on white crime wave since the civil war. Hopefully we will have the correction sooner rather than later.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. The cycles will continue until we both learn the lesson, and teach it to our children so they don't forget.

This is exactly what segregation was for, and it worked as intended.

Even under segregation black people rode the bus. A black schizophrenic standing up and knifing a white woman in front of him would be equally viable under racial segregation. I don't accept the general premise and particularly don't accept it for this example.

The best part of reality is that it doesn't need your acceptance.

At a certain point in every fundamental disagreement, one person will say "I think X is true" and the other person will say "I think X is not true," and both parties have a choice of either pressing their point, with arguments and reasons, or saying "Nuh uh, you're wrong."

If you reach the latter stage, just stop. You do not win Motte Points for having the Official Last Word. If someone asserts something you think is incorrect and you can't be bothered to continue arguing why he's wrong, the correct follow-up is not "Reality says you're wrong."

These highly emotive threads are producing highly emotional arguments and the quality of argumentation is in inverse proportion to its heat.

While pithy, that's a statement that can easily cut both ways.

And the reality is black people rode public transportation during segregation and that wouldn't have prevented this murder. That'll indeed remain true regardless of your opinions.

This transparently looks like you are feigning an academic interest for how the memes are coming along in order to show us your list of motivational propaganda for your position. Why be so coy about it?

A single incident in a country of hundreds of millions is not data nor does it form a basis for consistent policy, no matter how good the memes made of it are. The other side will have no shortage of incidents they could do the same with - remember the wave of wanton violence against Sikhs after 9/11 by Whites who couldn't or didn't care for the difference? (Here's one, and the perpetrator looks pretty pasty even though I'm sure some polheads will get hung up on the Hispanic surname)

At least the people of the /pol/ thread you linked had some awareness that they were being manipulated, though they had to couch it as "I'm as racist as you, I just hate even more groups" for acceptance.

Do you have any competing memes? I'd like to see them.

A single incident in a country of hundreds of millions is not data nor does it form a basis for consistent policy

You wouldn't like the data, either. The data say that blacks are something like 50x more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks. The data say that rich blacks are more murderous than poor whites, and that black women are more murderous than white men, despite the incredible share of all violence committed by men.

The data say the same thing as the anecdote, you just don't like what either one says.

I am actually not particularly interested in collecting trite propaganda, but I'm confident I could find a lot of material denigrating white men in like 30 minutes of looking. However, this is not rDrama, and so posting those would not be any better than what the parent poster did.

murder data

I did a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations with some 2019 data I found, and given that the male:female murder rate seems to be about 10:1 in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men. Either way, we're talking about tail events; even for black men, the same calculation said that fewer than 0.5% ever murdered even under generous assumptions (and most of those are probably locked up or socially segregated in a way that makes this hardly relevant for day-to-day choice of neighbours and interaction partners).

Be careful of proving too much: very similar figures tend to turn up as lower bounds of how much more likely men are to be rapists (based on sex offender registrations, inference from victim counts, etc.). If you think that a 0.5% percentage of murderers in one visible demographic is grounds to agitate for its complete removal from public life in a country - on a rationalist-adjacent forum, rather than the screeching pit of public politics, no less! - then you will have a hard time rejecting the bulk of hardcore feminist stances on principle, which generally does not seem to be an outcome right-wingers like. If the monkey's paw offers that you get to treat blacks as murderers but have to accept that men will be treated as rapists, do you take the deal? On that matter, it's probably not that hard to find some other correlate of being murderous in America that's at least as good as "is black". If such a correlate is found, do you support the removal from society of everyone who meets it?

in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men

...why would you say any of these things as though they favored your point?

it's basically a wash between black women and white men.

I wouldn’t call it a “wash” exactly.

/images/17575320553380384.webp

it's basically a wash between black women and white men

Which is mind-bogglingly high given the male propensity for violence.

the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same

Also completely insane given one is >5x more populous than the other.

Both of which support my assertion and refute yours.

Either way, we're talking about tail events

First you complain about anecdotes, so I bring data. Now instead of complaining about anecdotes, it's about tail events. Yes, murder is rare, and therefore a tail event. Quit eliding the point, because the patterns don't change when you start following the tail back to the body.

You know another outlier minority? /pol/ users. They are surely less than 10% of the population of the internet, but have a well over 0.5% rate of engaging in heat-over-light, culture warring and other conversational behaviour that degrades the quality of any forum way below what we are aiming for here. What do you say if we ban them on sight?

This is why we had segregation. Not because evil whites wanted to hoard all the magic dirt for themselves, but because they wanted the right to go about their daily lives without worrying about getting stabbed.

No, this seems ahistoric, especially in the south -- whites weren't afraid to share public transit with blacks, as long as the blacks sat in the back (segregated, but with no separation)

Blacks sat in the back under threat of violence. I think people would be less outraged if a gang of whites had immediately jumped the Charlotte subway guy and killed him in retaliation.

I think people would be less outraged if a gang of whites had immediately jumped the Charlotte subway guy and killed him in retaliation.

Which is likely what would have happened back in the Jim Crow days. But it's not segregation that caused that and not lack of segregation which prevents it now.

The comparison is made much, much worse by the obvious fact that THIS black man WAS sitting in the back…

a) the fact that Iryna Zarutska was stabbed from behind with no chance to defend herself

Sure, but that's where the "relax tax" memes come into play

A. Wyatt Mann is truly the original memester; "never relax" remains relevant decades after it was drawn.

There are so many threads to this murder to tug. Like how somehow the judges that let all these criminals go are all black women without law degrees? Because apparently you don't need one to serve as a judge in North Carolina? And the one that specifically let this guy free without bail runs a halfway house she pockets taxpayer money with by sending the criminals she releases under her authority as a judge there? How the council of black women that run the city have a history of embezzling COVID funds, and threw a birthday party in the middle of discussing the murder. How this murder occurred on a bus full of black people and not one single person who saw it happen helped her. Although in the grand scheme of things it took about 90 seconds for a black man to run back and attempt to apply pressure to the wounds about as well as you could hope an amateur would. So at least someone tried to do something.

Long long ago, in a more naive time, on a different site, on a different account, I compared Obama's border policies to a hypothetical scenario where all the jails just decided "Fuck you, you aren't allowed to criticize us, we're going to dump all the criminals back on you." It seemed so unthinkable at the time. Such absurd hyperbole. Alas.

Charitably everything about this case is a scathing indictment of Democrat rule. More accurately, it proves 4chan and Scott Adams were right.

Edit: Sources as best I can.

Tiawana Brown, Charlotte Councilwoman, used COVID funds for birthday party

Charlotte City Council being almost entirely black and majority female

RE: None of the black people who saw the attack helped her, just watch the 7 minute video of her dying

Stokes and her wife run a halfway house where the criminals she releases receive "treatment" at the taxpayer expense

90 seconds is probably about as fast as you could expect someone to react, though? Nobody expected stabbing out of nowhere.

How this murder occurred on a bus full of black people and not one single person who saw it happen helped her. Although in the grand scheme of things it took about 90 seconds for a black man to run back and attempt to apply pressure to the wounds about as well as you could hope an amateur would. So at least someone tried to do something.

Yes, I observed as much and was conciliatory in that regard. There was no saving this woman, and realistically shaving 30 or even 60 seconds off the response time that it took a good Samaritan to make an attempt to save her wouldn't have mattered. 90 seconds to someone who actually possesses a soul to rush to the scene might be the best you could expect in this day and age. Maybe even more than. My condemnation is of the 4 or more people who watched the attack, watched the woman collapse and bleed out, and just minded their own business, got up and walked away, whipped out their cellphone to upload to World Star Hiphop or whatever that shit gets uploaded to these days.

I'm tagging this post as borderline low-effort for the lack of links, which nudge it toward "weak man" territory. Assuming you've characterized the facts accurately, the post itself is basically fine, but I'm not going to go link hunting to chase down every single one of these claims to determine whether you're identifying sufficiently narrow groups, being sufficiently charitable, etc.

So basically, more effort than this please: bring evidence in proportion to how badly the facts seem to reflect on the group(s) under discussion.

I mean, the problem is, because of the reporting blackout and the "Republicans Pounce" narrative, it's all twitter threads. It's that sufficient?

Yes, your edit is definitely sufficient.

It's that sufficient?

Do the tweets have receipts? I mean, I assume there is some external evidence that e.g. North Carolina has criminal trial judges without law degrees, a public list (and maybe photograph) of all the members of the relevant "council of black women," etc.

Linking to a bunch of people just saying stuff on Twitter is not any better than just saying stuff here. But "amateur" journalism from Twitter users is fine, provided they are doing something recognizably journalistic, like linking sources, posting credible video evidence, etc. Randos doing journalism on Twitter are at least as good as those working for the New York Times (and often twice as honest!).

Do you have a source on that?

Source?

A source. I need a source.

Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.

No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.

You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.

Do you have a degree in that field?

A college degree? In that field?

Then your arguments are invalid.

No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.

Correlation does not equal causation.

CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.

You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.

Nope, still haven't.

I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a Glormpf supporter. A moron.

@WhiningCoil edited links into the comment. I clicked a few. They seem basically adequate to me, and I appreciated the effort of their addition. Your copypasta has no power here.

You appear to be making an argument that demands for citation are being used as, as another commenter put it, a filibuster against evidence other commenters don't want to look at. This may be so, and this is in fact the behavior your pasta is meant to highlight, but it seems to me that these are in fact inflammatory claims, that the citations should in fact be provided, and that while some here might be trying to filibuster in this manner, the user you are responding to is not, and it has drawn a number of reports.

We have a rule about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims. We also have a rule against low-effort engagement, which copypasta certainly is, and in fact your last warning was for copypasta. Your warning/AAQC ratio is about 3:1, not horrifying, but not great either. I am giving you a one-day ban; please read the rules posted at the top of the page and in the sidebar, and make an effort to understand and follow them. If you disagree with what you see here, just say so. You're allowed to do that. You are not allowed to do this.

How about you just let the man contribute to the discussion with context instead of hassling him like this is wikipedia.

Everything he mentioned I already knew, and had read about. If you don't want to be neck-deep in the culture war, then so be it, but this has been topic #1 for at least the last two days, and it came late to the motte, so it's not surprising that somebody posts like we might have others who are up to date.

He even followed the rules by not posting it at the top level and keeping it to a reply.

And furthermore, he's absolutely right. The communists spare the criminals every day because their enemy is the kulak, the everyman, and people like DeCarlos are their footsoldiers.

Inflammatory claims require evidence.

Which part is inflammatory?

Like how somehow the judges that let all these criminals go are all black women without law degrees? Because apparently you don't need one to serve as a judge in North Carolina? And the one that specifically let this guy free without bail runs a halfway house she pockets taxpayer money with by sending the criminals she releases under her authority as a judge there? How the council of black women that run the city have a history of embezzling COVID funds, and threw a birthday party in the middle of discussing the murder. How this murder occurred on a bus full of black people and not one single person who saw it happen helped her.

Yes it’s so absurd it can hardly be believe can it?

Almost enough to make you seriously question how are society has been structured and why it’s been allowed and even enforced to be this way

Did you search, at all, to see if it was plausible? Did you question your assumptions before questioning the poster? Because I heard about this part two days ago and have been waiting for someone to post a top-level comment. Every single thing he posted has been widely circulated across my network, it matches what I've seen reported, and the reason it is inflammatory is because of the facts of the event, not because it is untrue.

Yes, the black magistrate who released this guy doesn't have a law degree. Yes, she pays herself to run diversionary programs to which she sends criminals (not unlike the cash for kids judge whose sentence was commuted by Biden). Yes, all the immediate bystanders on video were all black and no, none of them lifted a finger to do anything while the white woman bled out in front of them and the black murderer strolled away. Yes, the city council served a birthday cake and had a celebration immediately before talking about this murder.

It's a lot of work to go find good links to prove each and every small claim, especially since this has been well-trod elsewhere, so please do more than say citation needed and walking off like you've improved the conversation.

Is there any reason you think any of this is untrue, or did it trigger a fnord?

P.S. The murderer said, "I got that white girl," twice, immediately afterwards. Go watch the video yourself if you want proof, but I won't be doing that work for you.

It's a lot of work to go find good links to prove each and every small claim, especially since this has been well-trod elsewhere, so please do more than say citation needed and walking off like you've improved the conversation.

Is there any reason you think any of this is untrue, or did it trigger a fnord?

I don't have any reason to doubt this user, but this forum's rules should not be blatantly ignored. Don't blame the messenger.

Demanding sources for something that you don't doubt the truth of is a filibuster, not an honest criticism.

Tell that to the moderators who made the rule, not to me.

Like how somehow the judges that let all these criminals go are all black women without law degrees?

"All" is undefined, but making a couple assumptions: Charlotte is about evenly black and white, and given the magistrate requirements below, it wouldn't be that surprising if it does end up that many of the judges are black women and, between personal beliefs and local/state policies, are relatively lenient.

Because apparently you don't need one to serve as a judge in North Carolina?

Magistrate requirements:

the individual shall either be a resident of the county for which the magistrate is seeking nomination or renomination or a resident of a county that is contiguous to that county.

To be eligible for nomination as a magistrate, an individual (i) shall have at least eight years' experience as the clerk of superior court in a county of this State or as a law enforcement officer in this State, (ii) shall have a four‑year degree from an accredited senior institution of higher education, or (iii) shall have a two‑year associate degree and four years of work experience in a related field, including teaching, social services, law enforcement, arbitration or mediation, the court system, or counseling

Assuming she was full-time as a magistrate, the pay is in the low $50K range for the length of time she's been in the state.

Back to you-

And the one that specifically let this guy free without bail runs a halfway house she pockets taxpayer money with by sending the criminals she releases under her authority as a judge there?

This one is less clear. Reporting suggests that she's listed as a director of operations for a Charlotte nonprofit that Brown may have been referred to, but the org has gone quiet and the site is down.

There's some fishy tax filings about a nonprofit she ran in Michigan, but doesn't relate directly to this case.

threw a birthday party in the middle of discussing the murder

They took a supposedly 10 minute break from a four hour meeting to have birthday cake and mingle.

This one is less clear. Reporting suggests that she's listed as a director of operations for a Charlotte nonprofit that Brown may have been referred to, but the org has gone quiet and the site is down.

Whether this particular person paid her via the nonprofit is less important than the fact that she let him go, and also profits from these "diversions."

They took a supposedly 10 minute break from a four hour meeting to have birthday cake and mingle.

They threw a birthday party and served cake, immediately before discussing the murder of a woman on the train, where they tried to downplay the event.

The bigger news than the style guide(which, however dumb and offensive in the moment, is baked in) is that they refer to it as a ‘killing’ and not a murder. Nobody thinks stabbing random people to death, unprovoked, on the bus, is good. Everyone agrees this is a murder. They just won’t say it.

I believe this is standard journalistic practice, in that it’s not technically a “murder” per se until someone is found guilty. The same way news outlets have to call people “suspects” and crimes “alleged” until a trial happens even if there’s obvious video of them committing the crime, it’s just accepted standard practice, nothing nefarious. It does result in somewhat silly outcomes at times, but I think the legalistic consistency is worthwhile for a non-tabloid outlet.

Edit: Just scrolled down and saw that @VoxelVexillologist already posted essentially this exact comment. Whoops.

While it's often sounds ridiculous, the New York Times was at least relatively consistent about this regarding the 2020 happening and AFAICT eyeballing search results they didn't start calling it a murder until after the trial.

Probably some opinion articles that got away with the improper terminology, and I suspect many other outlets are less consistent on this.

With the 2020 case you could argue there was a lot more conjecture around cause of death and liability

IIRC at least some journalistic style guides recommend against calling a death "murder" unless a trial court has ruled it to be such. Otherwise it's just spicy homicide "killing". There are ways to kill people that are merely manslaughter, and ways in which doing so with intent still not be considered a "murder" (self defense, the death penalty).

It's relevant that they also generally say "accused" for libel reasons even when the case is expected to be pretty open-and-shut.

And of course it isn't technically a murder if the killer is legally insane - which is the scenario most likely to be relevant here.

While this is true, if black schizophrenics are (hypothetically, I don’t know if they are) vastly more likely to aim their paranoia and rage at white people than at black people, that seems to blur matters somewhat.

“This person is possessed by unstoppable rage that makes him hurt people.”

And

“This person is possessed by an unstoppable rage that makes him hurt people AND a racist hatred of whites that means he goes after them specifically.”

Seem to hit quite differently. Like if Dexter had gone after Indians rather than other serial killers.

Well, yes, and many people here have done so. But given how many people rioted over thinking it was murder, I'm mildly impressed the NYT actually stuck to the principle on this one.

It's manslaughter, isn't it?

That's a different dimension than what's at play here, I think. Just from what I saw on the video, there's no way that that behavior counts as manslaughter, not murder. Manslaughter tends to be about unreasonable recklessness causing an unintended killing, not intent to kill causing an intended killing. The reason journalists don't call this "murder" is probably because, sans an actual conviction, they're opening themselves up to libel accusations. Sure, this video makes things pretty clear cut, but it's still a judgment call of whether this is truly clear-cut enough to declare as murder given that the justice system hasn't is probably something journalists and editors don't want to make. They could call it "alleged murder," which I think would be fine even if the guy hasn't been charged with murder.

We're not journalists publishing in news outlets, though, so we can call it murder all we want, and I'm pretty comfortable calling it first degree murder, based on the evidence I've seen.

Depends on the prosecutor but somebody said the feds are taking it up. If it stayed under NC law and I'm reading all the or's correctly, I think it could be first-degree murder because it involves a deadly weapon, or possibly second-degree murder under "such a reckless and wanton manner as to manifest a mind utterly without regard for human life and social duty and deliberately bent on mischief."

Manslaughter requires proving heat of passion and no malice.

I see, thanks. My understanding of the US criminal law was wrong. I thought the difference was in premeditation.

It varies by state, too, so there’s likely some where that has more emphasis. Though in my experience reading cases premeditation is one of those terms with quite different legal versus colloquial definitions, and likely flexible by prosecutorial and judicial effort as well.

What would be the justification for making this a federal matter?

In addition to what professorgerm posted (which is what they're currently using), there's also the "Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Act" (18 USC 849(a)(5)), which doesn't provide for death but does provide for 30 years for any racially motivated murder.

Let's see!

A federal criminal complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Charlotte today, charging Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., 34, with a federal crime in connection with the fatal attack of Iryna Zarutska on the city’s light rail system. Brown is charged with one count of committing an act causing death on a mass transportation system.

Wait, what?

18 USC 1992:

(7)commits an act, including the use of a dangerous weapon, with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury to any person who is on property described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (4);

(4)(B)garage, terminal, structure, track, electromagnetic guideway, supply, or facility used in the operation of, or in support of the operation of, a mass transportation vehicle, and with intent to, or knowing or having reason to know,1 such activity would likely, derail, disable, or wreck a mass transportation vehicle used, operated, or employed by a mass transportation provider;

Huh. TIL. Interesting application of a terrorism law.

and with intent to, or knowing or having reason to know,1 such activity would likely, derail, disable, or wreck a mass transportation vehicle used, operated, or employed by a mass transportation provider;

This makes it sound like it has to be more than just a murder on a transportation system? Although I guess the earlier point says "any person who is on property described". I'm going to take a wild guess and say the defense is going to be about whether the law applies, rather than guilt/innocence.

Yeah, I wondered the same.

ChatGPT didn't turn up any precedent for this usage, and specifically mentions this case. I didn't know it had real-time access now for free-tier freeloaders. Seems like the code is hardly used at all and one case was a guy whose truck got stuck at a construction site. That there's precedent for "willful" only meaning non-accidental could be part of the case too.

I think the law was written to sound as if it was just to cover terrorism but actually covered a lot more. I'm pretty sure the "intent" part of paragraphs (4)A and (4)B does not transfer to paragraph (7).

Afaik it's not a murder until somebody has formally been found guilty in court

All is proceeding as foretold in the prophecy. The left was so desperate for racial division that they staked their entire sociopolitical project on racially antagonizing the majority of teh country. At long last, they may be starting to get what they want. There has never been a shortage of black crime to make the news.

I expect the right to be every bit as cautious and measured with their racial moment as the left has been with all of theirs. And who can blame them?

It was a stupid, evil thing the left and their media has been doing for most of a century. Equality under the law was never what they wanted. Justice was never what they wanted. They've been poking the most racially progressive white people in the world with the "Nazi" stick for three generations. They have chosen their destructor, and now we will get to see the left melt away from the poor black people they've been hiding behind.

I hope that the right can maintain a sort of Chris Rock "black people vs. niggaz" distinction going forward, but they probably won't, as the left never did. The thing about pendulums is that the swing one way is equaled by the opposite.

Not that anyone on the right listens to me, but I'd rather they targeted the mostly white lefties who set up these rules and systems of oppression and division. But that's not how mass movement works. Remember the savage glee of the left as they cancelled and/or assaulted everyone that mildly disagreed with them for twenty or thirty years? Get ready to watch that with MAGA hats on.

I'm here for it.

teh country

Rare spotting of a critically endangered typo. Autocorrect has driven this once common forum friend to the brink of extinction.

I expect the right to be every bit as cautious and measured with their racial moment as the left has been with all of theirs. And who can blame them?

There's no racial moment. No doubt, the last few years saw a right-wing victory in that rightist views can get platformed again. But it wasn't a platform that made Fergusson or Floyd electrifying. It was a full spectrum propaganda apparatus that amplified these useful signals every hour, every day, from every glowing screen. And I'm not just talking about CNN or NYT. Turn on the Disney channel in 2020, and you'd see preteens raising their fist in solidarity with Black victims. Moreover, the left had sympathetic bureaucrats and NGOs waiting in the wings to cash political capital when it got generated.

The right has none of this. Yes, they're mad. Peasants can be mad as much as they like.

I'm underselling this a bit. With Trump in office, the right can parlay this into some useful currency. But there will be no "moment" for the anti-BLM right just because we have a horrifying video.

What stood out to me the most in that article was that it was, "Republicans Pounce". The style guide is dumb, but that's sort of baked in at this point. It's almost mechanical, like if someone changed their spellchecker. Whereas making the affirmative choice to headline with "Republicans Pounce" requires more in-the-moment intent.

I mean, I can see the logic, from their perspective. They think Trump is Hitler 2.0 and that he and his supporters are drooling at the thought of an excuse to massacre all the blacks. I read the article (or at least, what I can see of it before the paywall) as saying "OH SHIT, Reichstag Fire Decree incoming", which if true would legitimately be much-bigger news than a murder.

The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).

I see the logic, but it also still doesn't make sense to me. "Republicans pounce" is a well-trodden meme at this point, and using such phrasing signals partisanship that discredits themselves and whatever article is under the headline. Anyone who's been paying attention to US politics and journalism - which should include literally every American journalist writing about Republicans - should be fully aware of this. As such, if I were a cynical partisan Democrat journalist editing a headline, I would make sure to avoid any phrase that has any similarities with this meme, knowing that any such similarities would make my mission of manipulating people into buying into my framing and narrative less likely to succeed.

Now, some might say that these journalists are in echo chambers that prevent them from recognizing how they discredit themselves. Seems reasonable, but this also doesn't escape the same problem as above: everyone knows that everyone is susceptible to echo chambers that are invisible to them. And, again, US journalists who cover US politics should be more aware of this than the typical person. As such, a US journalist should at the very least be highly suspicious that they live in an echo chamber, which means that they're less capable of analyzing and reporting the news credibly to the populace in general, which means they're less capable of manipulating them. Or informing them properly, if you're an honest, good-faith operator. As such, a selfish, cynical, partisan journalist would (and certainly a non-cynical, non-partisan one would) try to gain perspectives from outside their echo chambers, thus allowing them to understand how damning anything similar to "Republicans pounce" is to their credibility.

And yet we see the line - sometimes verbatim - trotted out regularly. It appears as the mirror image of the "Democrats are the real racists" (DRRR) meme, which the left has already developed antibodies for, and as such, just serves to discredit the speaker for playing into their hand.

I'm reminded of the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog far too often these days.

The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).

The steelman is not that they're worried about Hitler, it's that they're worried about another Willie Horton situation. Which, from the left-wing view, was a opportunistic racial attack that not only cost Democrats the election but actively led to destructive tough-on-crime policies instead of left-wing policies that would have helped remove the causes of crime.

To many African-American people, the scars from that campaign attack remain fresh. Whatever Mr. Bush’s intentions, they said, the campaign encouraged more race-based politics and put Democrats on the defensive, forcing them to prove themselves on crime at the expense of a generation of African-American men and women who were locked up under tougher sentencing laws championed by President Bill Clinton, among others.

The logic is not really that different from not wanting to cover terrorists or shooters on the grounds that it inflames the public and makes them want cures worse than the disease.

We don't really need to bring in the Nazis. There's a perfectly American fear here.

I'll cop to not having read this when I posted (it was behind the paywall), but now it's loading without the paywall for some reason, so...

Today, Mr. Trump’s critics fear that he will use the death of Ms. Zarutska to justify sending federal troops into American cities, as he has already done in Washington, despite statistics showing a downturn in violent crime nationwide.

“Trump’s MAGA allies are trying to use the tragic murder of a service worker in Charlotte, North Carolina, to justify its illegal occupation of U.S. cities,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the state’s most prominent African American civil rights leader, wrote in a text message.

[...]

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

As I said to @ControlsFreak, I wasn't trying to steelman, but fleshman - i.e. model what they were actually thinking. It would seem that my model had some predictive power, although they did say other stuff too.

I think the slightly easier steelman would be riffing off your phrase "much-bigger news than a murder". That is, one might think that this is "just a murder". Murders happen all the time. They're often not Paper of Record material. So the steelman view could be something like, "This wouldn't be Paper of Record news if it wasn't for Republicans Pouncing to try to make it news."

Of course, this still exposes some significant premises. One could have taken a similar view for several other cases that became cause celebres mostly due to the left "pouncing". It takes more time and effort to work through some reasoning for why any given incident is "legitimately" newsworthy versus primarily being pushed for political concerns. Nevertheless, the most basic observation that is difficult to explain away is that I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'." Their concerns just are; they're inherently just and true; there is no intermediate agent actively choosing to pump up the situation for political purposes.

But all these sorts of observations require realizing the possibility and then having sufficient time/exposure to realize what's happening, which is more sophisticated than most observers are likely to be.

Whether a story is a "pounce" comes down to whether the story actually instantiates a larger problem. That's the rub, isn't it? The left and right don't agree which problems are a big deal, or even which ones are real.

I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'."

Oh, I do this all the time. My reaction to every police anti-black brutality story of the last decade has been to think of those perfidious Chinese cardiologists. To wit, okay, maybe the cop went too far in this or that story. Maybe. But the problem you (progressive journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event. Yes you can supply a lot of anecdotes, but that's only because we're a massive country. And your talking about that freak event is causing riots and lax policing leading to preventable deaths, so actually, your complaining is the problem here.

I suppose this is also what Blueskyers mean when they mock Republicans for being afraid of riding buses or what not. "The problem you (NY Post journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event." And they think Republicans talking about this freak event is leading to racism, which is a Real Problem.

I was never trying to steelman. I was trying to fleshman - to give my best guess at what they were thinking. I won't deny that Republicans Pounce has been a thing for a while, but I do actually suspect that a chunk of the NYT are in full-blown "the sky is falling" mode. See e.g. Ezra Klein's piece in the NYT a few days ago, although I'm also drawing from my more general experience with SJers in the past few years.

Further evidence that this is an actual phenomenon are examples like Cracker Barrel and Budd Light vs favored left-wing cancellations, where you see Republicans, right-wing extremists etc lashing out like babies vs "people are saying," unnamed groups (probably just ordinary decent human beings) leading the backlash

The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.

The enormous levels of bias, lying, context denial and manipulation on the part of the US mainstream media with regards to race relations was already clear as day back during the Trayvon Martin scandal 13 years ago.

  • I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race,

The murdered begs to disagree, there were at least three other black people on that bus. Men and women, the guy didn't go on a stabbing spree. He pattern matched the woman to white, how could he have known she's ukrainin and decided to end her.

He also says something about a white bitch or white woman whilst he's getting off the bus post-stabbing.

If this was reversed and somebody dropped the N-word deboarding, national martyr etcetera.

"I got that white girl," repeated twice, while he was drenched in her blood and before he even left the train.

White Americans, outside of some ~5-10%, have for decades made it their sole raison d'être to denounce white identity, identity politics and collective action in general if they in any way believe that its purpose is to advantage their own group.

To that extent there will never be a reversal of roles since that's what's been worked towards. So I have a very hard time understanding how people who aren't literal white ethnocentrists of some stripe can say this or what they hope to accomplish by saying it.

Whatever you think of the style guide, they shouldn't change it for one story.

If it's bad for one story, and it should be consistent for every story, then...

I, for one, would be happy if they got rid of their racially-biased capitalization. I can't even point to this story as the basis of my opinion, as I thought it was bullshit politicization from the first time I heard of it.

I think they should get rid of the capitalisation too. The reasoning is too America centric for a paper with global reach (not everyone identifying as black does share a cultural identity, even if there is a shared cultural identity and history among many black people in the US).

I think the gender pronouns are fine though and non-honorific, and it would be ridiculous to suddenly stop using them if a trans person commits a crime. (The reporting should make their trans identity clear, which it easily can without mis gendering.)

"misgendering" is a propaganda term.

Personally I do use trans pronouns as an honorific for well-socialized trans people who are well-integrated into the social fabric. And I do remove them if a person acts in antisocial manner. Otherwise, the pronouns serve to cloak the identity of the person (usually as an antisocial man, who is actively hacking people's threat assessment with female identification), which is exactly the harmful case that TERFs are worried about

That's your prerogative but to me your argument is identical to someone saying, 'I use regular pronouns as honorifics. 'He' is no longer worthy to be called a man, so I use the term 'it'. It should be hanged'. You can do that if you want, yes, but you assume too much if you think others must be using the terms the way you do.

It's not mere contempt though. It's specifically using trans norms as camouflage for bad actors that I'm concerned about. Women are considered less dangerous and awarded more sympathy than men. Trans identified men who are bad actors specifically take advantage of that.

When I heard "Ziz" referred to as "she", I specifically was not on alert for a psychotic man to be active in my social circles and I underweighted the danger from Ziz as my priors were set to "female" and not "male". If I knew there was a murderous psychopath named Jack LaSota going around, that primes my behavior differently.

Trans language pollutes the information commons, to the benefit of evildoers

I understand the issue, I'm not sure how significant it is though. I feel that using preferred gender pronouns can be compatible with being upfront about a person's transness, so any misdirection would be just for a brief moment (for example, a news report can use 'she' while also mentioning someone's trans status right away). So your threat monitoring can resume as normal after just a beat.

To understand your approach better, may I ask how you decide when to 'award' preferred gender pronouns? You mentioned you do it with people who are well integrated. Do you use their assigned-at-birth pronouns at first, and then only after getting to know them and trust them switch over?

In the bay area, there was one particular trans woman who passed well, was sociable, and all around pleasant to be around. She wasn't very forward with the fact that she was trans, so it took me a bit by surprise when I eventually found out. I used her name and preferred pronouns. There were several other awkward non-passing males who haunted the outside of gatherings. I never interacted with them much, and part of my reluctance to do so would have been feeling like I was betraying my own perception and being coerced into using names/pronouns that I did not believe in.

I don't use preferred pronouns for murderers and sociopaths, and I try to use birth name where available. Mr. Wax-my-balls is Jonathan Yaniv, not his preferred porn name Jessica. Ziz is Jack LaSota, and etc.

I think the net effect of having lots of "women raped two kids" headlines is to muddy the waters about the truth of the difference between male and female danger and capability. Sure, it may mention that woman was trans in the article, or you may be able to infer it. But it's pissing in the epistemic commons, and ultimately the point is to make it harder to object when someone pushes for policies which genuinely impinge on women in your life. I don't think bay area people have many children in general, so they don't have to worry about their daughters being forced to room with a weird male, or etc.

A political organization should stop using tools that favor its own side, because it sometimes needs to make subtle exceptions to better serve its cause?

Here's my recommendation: Stop treating political actors as neutral service providers. Newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.

Here's my recommendation: Stop treating political actors as neutral service providers. Newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.

How about the opposite: I'll loudly and conspicuously complain about how they aren't meeting the standards of neutral service providers. I can't think of a better way to convince people that newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.

Why not advocate for newspapers to be better?

I like it when news organisations lean more into their 'present the facts' mode, even if they can never be (and have never been) truly neutral.

Because making them better is against the Geneva Suggestions?

This might be a question of personality, but I think they defected a little too hard to deserve any more trust. Newspaperem delendam esse. At least the central nodes, the big papers and publishers and all those who work for them, shouldn't be trusted anymore, because any return to neutrality would most likely be a short-lived survival measure, with a certain snap back into ideological mode as soon as they think they can get away with it. They're still the same people after all, and even if the changing times force them to be a little more demure, it won't change what they think and believe.

Does that imply you think there are some more smaller, neutral, non-ideological, trustworthy news orgs waiting in the wings? Perhaps I take the lesson of 'no one is neutral' as a more fundamental one.

There are some "news orgs" that explicitly make it their mission statement to be politically neutral, like Ground News and Allsides, but those are news aggregators, not reporters.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples. There must be some reporters reporting for reporting's sake, somewhere, who aren't deliberately selecting stories to serve some narrative.

But yes, if in doubt, mistrust and the assumption of ideological capture seem safer bets.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples.

The existence of newspapers which seek to avoid political bias (except for the pro-establishment bias that comes from the need to cultivate sources and any bias which comes from seeking sensationalism) is the result of a temporary and somewhat unusual situation in the American advertising market in the second half of the twentieth century. Founding era newspapers wore their partisan bias on their sleeves, as did the Hearst era yellow press. So does the press in most other countries - the only British paper that isn't proud of its political slant is the Financial Times.

The truth-forming function of the press is best delivered by ideological diversity, not by hoping that a journalistic monoculture is unbiased. The problem here is that you need your partisan journalists to be journalists first and partisan second (as, for example, Rupert Murdoch and his news outlets always have been) or else you end up with Pravda and Infowars shouting at each other.

I'm mildly surprised that I haven't yet seen talking heads complaining about the coverage of the murder and protesting that "black women also get murdered and nobody cares," etc. (This may be happening but I have yet to read it personally.)

Years ago when I first heard of "missing white woman syndrome" coined I guess 20 years ago by a TV anchor, I thought "Hm, that's interesting." But it's less-and-less interesting to me now. Now, whenever I hear people throw it out it seems to be yet another tedious effort to downplay criminality and make every god-damned thing a zero-sum-game involving race.

"missing white woman syndrome"

I'm not sure the implied criticism by this is wrong: the media really does spend disproportionate air time on "cute" victims (Natalee Holloway got a lot of press coverage). See this thread happening now, and not for Debrina Kawam who was lit on fire and killed by an illegal immigrant: the latter was homeless at the time. (Or a recent stabbing murder on a bus in my city. Or the guy arrested recently for threatening bus passengers with a machete.) There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood" and they're hardly rare, so there is comparatively little advocacy for actually stopping it (similarly, "gun violence" advocates care a lot more about school shootings, and seemingly almost not at all about inner-city gang violence) --- and what advocacy there is ends up ineffective IMO partially because it politically ignores some of the causes of that violence, although in the past it's maybe swung the other direction in being callously ham-fisted. I don't think the problems here, or the solutions to it, are easy. And so the cycle continues.

IMO the headline-worthiness bias of "man bites dog" really does the world a disservice by skewing perceptions of the world. If you only follow the news and don't go outside, you'd think dogs were really at high risk of man-bites.

There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood"

No new thing; from the 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler where a policeman is disappointed to be the one lumbered with a killing (by a white guy) of the black manager of a bar, because he needs a big case and nobody cares about this sort of crime (warning for period language, as per the best publications*):

A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn't try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty's shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn't look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.

He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:

"Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section."

…Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. "I'll get him," he said, "about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."

*"The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience."

Would be hard to pull off with people sharing "George Floyd vs. Iryna Zarutska search result hits" memes.

I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all

The assailant is on tape saying "I got that white girl, I got that white girl" as he walks off the train after the attack. Maybe he was mentally ill, maybe he was motivated by racial animus, or maybe it was a bit of both? Perhaps interviews with the assailant will reveal more, but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders. They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.

From a broader perspective, this incident has highlighted some awkward realities of inter-ethnic crime rates that have largely been banished from mainstream discourse. Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion... but it's the now the incubation chamber for right-wing messaging, and the Overton window there has significantly shifted in the last few days. The video is really powerful, I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact. Or course it won't have the same amplification, given how national media coverage appears to be grudging at best. The NYT article on the topic is absolutely ridiculous - they try to equate honest reporting on a serious crime to fabricated reports of crimes leading to a riot in the 1800s:

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.

Definitely a stretch in the raw legal terms of it, but I like the idea.

Murder in the US is overwhelmingly the result of strained interactions between males 18 - 34. If a man gets murdered, they're very likely to have known their killer and to have had a recent dispute around drugs, money, respect / social esteem, or a woman via love triangle. For women who get killed, the stats are even crazier - something around a 90% chance their killer was a previous or current romantic partner.

Random acts of lethal violence like this one truly are rare and shocking. I like the idea that, for such cases, we ratchet the punishment up to eleven. This isn't to say that we should shrug at "normal" murders. "Murder stay murder," to quote the Wire. But I like throwing a terrorism or federal level hate crime charge in there. I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy, but if a random act of violence gets a no-buts-about-it life sentence with no parole, I have to imagine that would have an effect...For those in control of their faculties.

Which brings up the point about the culpability of schizophrenics, drug addicts etc. There's a lot of landmines here in terms of personal liberties and the slippery slope power of the State to lock people up for being cooky, but the alternative (and current) situation is that sane society carries around this socialized risk of literal death that is also quite obvious and easy to mitigate; DeCarlos Brown had a decade long rap sheet, which included prior armed robbery and assault. Jordan Neely (of the Daniel Penny incident), IIRC, had been arrested over 100 times in NYC. The stats are almost a pareto distribution; "top" 1% of criminals are responsible for 63% of convictions per NIH - it's darkly ironic that that's being published by the National Institute for Health. When these big red alarms keep going off, eventually it rises to the level of a literal public health issue to not intervene with these individuals.

I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy

Deterrence Theory of Punishment works exceptionally well, if there is a high certainty of punishment. It's not necessarily the severity of the potential punishment that matters, though of course life in prison for shoplifting would probably reduce the shoplifting rate for the week it would take SCOTUS to strike the law down as an 8th Amendment violation, but the certainty of punishment that matters. Quoting part of a journal article here that jives with my own understanding of the matter:

Criminological research over several decades and in various nations generally concludes that enhancing the certainty of punishment produces a stronger deterrent effect than increasing the severity of punishment

Page 4. The article goes on to list a few different studies that have come to this conclusion, which I won't bore you by repeating because to the best of my knowledge this is not particularly contentious. To provide an n=1 personal anecdote, there's a section of road I used to drive that had a speed limit of 35mph. This was perceived as a ridiculously low speed limit. A driver could very easily go 55 safely, and indeed many, many people did, because why not? There were no intersections, no red lights, no stop signs, no school zone, no earthly reason for the speed limit to be 35 that anyone could see. Presumably there was some very good reason for it to be so labeled, but it was not immediately apparent as to why so most people went much faster. The county (presumably) installed a series of speed cameras along the road. For a few weeks, the road went at a very sedate pace because everyone knew that if they went over 40mph they'd be getting a ticket in the mail. This lasted until everyone knew where the cameras were, at which point traffic began to slow down approaching a known camera location, and then immediately speed back up after. A measurable change in criminal(ish) behavior due to certainty of punishment. It didn't matter that the fines were relatively minor, perhaps $40, nobody wanted the hassle.

So all this to say, while treating random acts of lethal violence far more seriously may reduce the incidence rate of random acts of lethal violence, it won't do so as long as people think they can get away with it, or aren't thinking about the consequences at all. Certainty of punishment breeds compliance.

This is very insightful, thank you.

I am reminded of listening to Rafael Mangual on Coleman Hughes' podcast. The stat he related (which made me literally rewind the podcast) was that the average state / federal prison inmate (not jail) already has over six felony convictions before they are incarcerated. They went on to discuss how this is a direct result of more lenient probation and deferred sentencing / alternative sentencing "reform."

But, as your article points out, think of the incentive and messaging we're sending to criminals. You can learn the robes of armed robbery, drug dealing, even assault, and you get to play on easy mode the first half dozen times. Of course this is going to backfire.

but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders.

Which is the strategically correct move if you assume Trump’s actual goal is ‘punish democrats’ and not ‘eradicate the blacks’.

I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact

Honestly if you watch the George Floyd footage there's enough in there to support a reasonable take that Chauvin was an asshole but didn't ultimately kill Floyd. Chokeholds do not work like that, positional asphyxiation may potentially work like that, a highly stressful situation plus some positional asphyxiation plus a lot of drugs in the system is the most likely causatory factor in Floyd's death

Floyd was alive when he got the hospital, a fact that was ruthlessly suppressed until years afterward.

Do you have a source for that?

Yes.

You can't collect antemortem blood from a dead man.

So I'm open to this but I don't think that's how that works. Any blood collected before a doctor pronounced him dead counts as antemortem if I understand correctly. Would need much more than this to change my position.

Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion

It never was, it was way more warped to the other side, if anything it's more real now. Absolutely nothing stops the bluecheck tribe from participating and swaying the mass twitter user opinion, but they don't have the manpower.

I saw that line too and I don’t deny it complicates things. It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment. Either way it’s very distasteful to see people scoff this off like a manufactured right wing story when a refugee was brutally murdered on a train.

The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.

I had a whole post, but I don't want to get banned, so I'll let Norm say it for me.

I'll expand. There are at least four other people in the frame that he could have attacked, all of them are black. He said, twice, I got that white girl.

Given these two pieces of information, the obvious assumption is that he saw a white girl he could prey on, and did. If you dispute this, you need some affirmative evidence, because without it you're just grasping at straws.

It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment.

Old white man shoots young black guy, it's assumed to be racial animus. Black guy stabs white refugee, possibly not animus. Black guy shoots white family, supposedly not animus. Black guy shoots white kid, supposedly not animus.

It doesn't take Golf Course Guy to notice a particular degree of deliberate blinkering and incredible assumptions of charity in the mainstream regarding what is allowed to be called animus.

Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings. I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.

  • -18

Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings.

We do in fact have a history of racially-motivated killings of whites by blacks, such as the Zebra murders. Are they on the same numerical scale? Certainly not. But I don’t know why the question of historical scale would necessarily impact your priors about the likelihood that any individual was motivated by racial animus. (Particularly given the documented fact that this individual did, in fact, draw attention to race literally immediately after committing the crime.)

Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings.

What is the punishment for the crime of being white in the wrong place? I submit the theory that a significant percentage of the black-on-white murder rates are, in effect, racially motivated lynchings.

I think that's a defensible argument, but it's a claim about what's happening today. I was talking about historical precedent. Priors, in Bayes-speak.

it's a claim about what's happening today

At least since the 1950s.

Well, what's our cutoff point for historical precedent versus today?

Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings

That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.

it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.

There's an order of magnitude or two fewer such events than the reverse, so they're more likely to be racist? That's a bold argument.

That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.

What's your claim, here? That lynchings weren't a thing? Or that there is some equally-widespread history of black-on-whites lynching that has been suppressed? When? Where? (And don't say South Africa or something. I mean where in America, which is what we're talking about here.)

There's an order of magnitude or two fewer such events than the reverse, so they're more likely to be racist? That's a bold argument.

That "so" is a strawman. My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.

The modern-day balance of one type of crime versus the other is an entirely different factor, which may or may not alter one's weighting of the historical precedent. Though I think the balance is confounded by so many things that it doesn't tell you much about motives. For example, I'm fairly sure black-on-black crime also dwarfs white-on-black crime, so the facts would be perfectly consistent with the view that blacks are more likely to commit violent crime whatever the victims' race, with the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental.

  • -10

My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.

To the extent that this Bayesian argument makes sense, it is pretty much useless for any analysis of this incident or incidents similar to this one, because in no actual incident we're talking about, are we dealing with a prima facie situation where literally the only thing we know about the murder is the races involved. Notably, the races involved, by themselves, provide so little information about any given incident in comparison to readily available information about the incident just from observing it that to call it rational to consider this specific almost-as-crude-as-possible Bayesian analysis to be meaningful would be rather absurd.

As such, your judgment below is suspect:

I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.

It is irrational to rely on such a crude method of Bayesian analysis to land at a conclusion when there are many far more precise, far more specific pieces of information that offer far more information on motive than looking only at the races. Now, it's possible that there's a silent "prima facie" in that sentence, which is perfectly cromulent and makes it more defensible. However, if such a hidden term were in there, it would also render it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, as the discussion is about a situation (and generally, multiple situations) where prima facie doesn't apply due to just mountains of information surrounding the incident and the individuals involved.

People aren't talking about what the Platonic form of a journalist would do in a spherical vacuum, they're talking about how real-world journalists are really behaving when given lots of information that has irreversibly destroyed their ability to be in a prima facie state and, as such, using extremely crude Bayesian reasoning of this sort is irrational.

However, it's not odd, given what we know about the biases and behaviors of most mainstream journalists in most mainstream outlets. I suppose that's one form of Bayesian thinking that's justified in this case.

The crudeness of such spherical-cows Bayesianism did form part of my point. This is exactly why I said that I "would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence". I think falling back on any Bayesian pattern-matching in this sort of case is largely illegitimate, whether that's assuming that a black man stabbing a woman can't possibly have been racially-motivated, or its converse of readily assuming that eg a white cop shooting a black man has to have been an unmotivated racist hate-crime. There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".

I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land. We'll be in prima facie land until the suspect is interrogated, or at the very least, a background investigation is made into his life based on people who knew him before the incident. The information we have now is woefully insufficient to assert much of anything about the killer's mens rea. (I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)

Ergo I think it's much too early to make any kind of cogent statement on the murder. But journalists have to try to spin more than the bare objective facts out of this, it's what they're paid for. So they fall back on extremely loose pattern-matching. This pattern-matching is dumb, but I argue that any pattern-matching would be dumb and the particular heuristic they're applying ("white-on-black murders are more often racist in nature than black-on-white") doesn't seem like a terrible heuristic as these things go, heuristics just don't get you very far.

More comments

That lynchings weren't a thing?

My claim is that this is "mostly peaceful protests" all over again and you're special-pleading that for ideological reasons, a subset of murders that are Officially Expert-Guaranteed Biased are substantially and meaningfully worse than murders that are probably but not officially biased.

Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?

I disagree, in the same way I am generally disinterested in the debate around fascism versus authoritarianism. Murder is murder. Mass murder is mass murder. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Gerrymandering the border to forgive one's own totalitarian or otherwise bigoted impulse while attacking another is not useful.

long-standing precedent for American whites

Not since the 1930s. First few years of the graph are also interesting.

I don't particularly feel like digging up the graphs for black-on-white murders, but your perception is downstream of this invention of a special category of murder, just like the power+prejudice definition of racism was created so that racism couldn't be committed against certain people.

not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same

You have zero proof for this.

the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental

Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?

The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.

Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.

The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.

The full video, part one (backup link), part two (backup link). NSFL, obviously.

It could point to racial animus

If the equivalent footage was played with a white homeless male saying anything akin it'd be complete journalistic open slather.

The crowd watching it don't care, either. The obvious defense is that they're in fear for their lives, but that isn't it; they follow the killer off the train past the victim bleeding out.

I mean, bystander effect is a well known phenomenon. I don’t see any reason to assume this case is unique in that respect.

The bystander effect is a fake and gay meme.

The only valid presumption to be made by anyone who has watched the murder in question is that every single person there outside of the victim is a subhuman. Maybe they were born that way, maybe they were radicalized by media, or maybe it's a combination of both! But the display speaks for itself.

The only valid presumption to be made by anyone who has watched the murder in question is that every single person there outside of the victim is a subhuman. Maybe they were born that way, maybe they were radicalized by media, or maybe it's a combination of both! But the display speaks for itself.

Does it? This is a pretty poor argument for such a broad generalization- yes, yes, I'm sure you only meant those exact people on that particular train.

This whole thread is full of people who really, really want to trot out their favorite race-war talking points. Some are doing so more or less calmly if unkindly, some are just throwing heat and flashing gang signs and boo lights. This response falls into the latter category. Knock it off.

I feel like the uptick in mental illness and drug-motivated public transport stuff means that frequently the best move is to just not move, since you're not dealing with a rational actor.

Yes, somebody should have assisted the woman in the clip but generally on public transport when confronted with the irrational people just freeze.

They literally abandoned her and followed the killer out of the bus. Two people from the front of the bus later come over to help her, but the ones closest to her just noped out.

The inevitable result of diversity.

This is so low-effort it provides no argument, just a hiss. Other people are making actual arguments, including the one you are hissing in the direction of.

I’m not so sure. I noticed that once the guy had walked off the train, people were moving a lot faster. One guy runs over and says oh my god. I’m reluctant to judge bystanders but it is sad that nobody jumped to her aid immediately. Clearly it took some time to set in exactly what he had done

It sure would have been nice to hear all these sorts of justifications for why things ain't quite so bad as they appear, oh I don't know, 5 years ago...

What if the media just drops the mask and starts explicitly praising murders like this, explicitly calling for a race war to exterminate or enslave whites, etc?

What if it did? Is this a question? A hope? An accusation? It looks to me like bait. Knock it off.

Even among the Nation of Islam, that is not a popular view(Jews on the other hand).

They'd probably lose subscribers and influence quite quickly. It's not a popular opinion, to say the least.

That’s not what’s happening here, and framing it that way just muddies the waters. The New York Times isn’t openly cheering murder or calling for race war. What they are doing is applying style guide rules (pronouns, capitalization) without reflection, in ways that overshadow the violence itself.

When they ideological signal while reporting on tragedies, they hand critics easy ammunition. That’s how we end up with Musk’s tweet going viral. It validates the narrative of media bias and feeds this weird anachronism that’s emerged.

If you actually want to stop the slide into complete culture war, the solution isn’t imagining the NYT as genocidal propagandists. You should instead demand they show restraint and focus on the victims (and leave their signaling to op eds and trump bad stories).

What they are doing is applying style guide rules (pronouns, capitalization) without reflection

Applying the style guide is ignorant rules-following, not unlike the NYT-Scott Alexander debacle.

Choosing to make the story about the reaction more than the murder and bringing up century-old events is not merely ignorant rules-following.

The "style guide rule" is an ideological commitment to racial hierarchy.

They also applied their style guide to a quote, which seems completely inappropriate. Dinesh D'Souza did not capitalize either word. NYT version:

“The reason for the media silence is racial,” Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator, wrote in an online post on Sunday. “If the killer were white, this would get coverage. Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a Black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”

There used to be a time where I thought newspapers would be forced to either do something like:

... Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.” [sic]

or:

... Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a [B]lack victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”

Of course, there's no enforcement mechanism. Only putting direct quotes between quotation marks isn't a fundamental law of the universe, after all, and nobody cares about those standards of precision.

fakeEdit: and if they were just correcting grammar, then they should have added a comma after "Of course...", so it's not an evenhanded application of their standards.

See also the CBC, here: They omitted "...of Alberta..." from their quote of the referendum question because it flows better and they don't care about precision.

Only putting direct quotes between quotation marks isn't a fundamental law of the universe, after all, and nobody cares about those standards of precision.

Style guides vary, but maximal precision in quotes, er, string literals is the domain of software engineers. The Jargon File has some relevant pithy quotes:

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.

For example, the American convention is to move punctuation to within quotation marks. It probably capitalizes without annotation the first word of a sentence even if it was quoted from within a sentence. I can see a weak argument for "correcting" capitalization from a written quote: if it was said aloud, it'd have been ambiguous anyway.

Maximal precision in string literals is referring to a different type of precision. To a software engineer, this sentence is incorrect:

The phrase "my quotation" is the same as "my quotation."

because a period is either part or not part of a string and those two options aren't the same string.

But this sentence is fine:

The quotation "I'm making the point that [X] via a careful logical application of [point Y], and [point Z]" can be summarized as "Y and Z imply X".

because quotation marks are how you indicate that something is a single string variable (a noun phrase, essentially) whose internals have no syntactic impact externally. IMHO it's actually pretty annoying that there's no clean universal English-language way to do this. Often you can get away with punctuation to delimit a phrase if you reword the sentence a little, or you can use a hyphenated-compound-word if it's short enough and if it's needed as disambiguation (which it isn't in this sentence; the rule is so non-universal that I'm already breaking it here), but there's nothing as clean as the programming rule: wrap it in these delimiters and you're done. (Isn't that colon so much more annoying than quotation marks would have been there?)

To an American journalist (and to most non-journalist normies, honestly), the first sentence is fine (it's just using the "typesetters' quotation" rule, common in America, for how commas and periods interact with quotation marks) and the second is wrong (because quotation marks around text are "to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name"), not just a mere paraphrase, unless the paraphrase is also marked via brackets. It's not that journalism is supposed to be less precise, it's just that it's supposed to be following a different set of rules.

I've spent most of my life writing software for fun and for school and for a living, and I frequently have to fix it when I catch myself slipping up (or get caught by others while slipping up) in just this way when writing English, and although I probably fail to catch myself even more often I'm at least trying. I feel that someone who went into the humanities in school and writes English for a living and doesn't have a half dozen incompatible computer languages twisting their brain and does have an editor trying to catch their slip-ups can be fairly held to the same standard.

Moreover, in these cases we're not even talking about misquotations where the rules disagree! Omitting a phrase like "of Alberta" would be incorrect by both journalistic and programmers' rules - the use of quotation marks is fine by programmer's rules, but the semantic meaning of the sentence including it is false! That's even worse! Errors which fail to compile are much better than errors that compile but then give you the wrong results!

I'm still happy (by which I mean persuaded and unhappy) with my theory that technological/economic devastation of newsroom employment means we're now stuck getting our news from people who make bad life choices.

I wish fully logical quotation was the standard; I should be able to say something like "He said 'the sky is blue.'.". But I'd just look like a retard.

Say, speaking of the Jargon File, ESR has his own take on this incident.

In theory, there is an enforcement mechanism: D'Souza could sue them for defamation, on the basis that his brand was damaged by NYT quoting him as using their style guide (since his fanbase considers said style guide an enemy identifier). I'm not sure he'd succeed, but the threat of such suits is a good chunk of why quotes are/were sacrosanct.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats