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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.
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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.
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.)
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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.
At least since the 1950s.
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Well, what's our cutoff point for historical precedent versus today?
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That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.
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.
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.)
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.
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:
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.
OK, but then that changes the meaning of the statement fully. Because doing such an obviously stupid thing is irrational. Which makes your statement mean something like, "If you're committed to being irrational by falling back to Bayesian pattern matching, then it's not irrational to land at this conclusion." Fair enough, 100% true and defensible. Also doesn't contradict or challenge at all the notion that journalists are being irrational in being quicker to label white-on-black killings as racially motivated than to label black-on-white killings as such.
Yeah, no. You need zero priors weighted towards that. Entirely unprovoked murder on a random stranger followed by commentary on that stranger's race doesn't need one to have a prior leaning in one way in order to conclude racist motivations.
If person X killed ginger Y, and one of the only specific pieces of information we knew about the motive was X muttering "got that ginger bitch," we would absolutely be justified to conclude tentatively (as is the case for all conclusions we're talking about here) that he was motivated by some sort of bigoted hatred against gingers. It wouldn't be a particularly strong conclusion, one that could and would change as more information came in, but it absolutely would be the correct conclusion based on the available evidence.
To the extent this is true, my point is that it's so tentative as to be speculation for speculation's sake. Maybe that's the most correct conclusion under the circumstances, but even the best available conclusion is still going to be so tentative as to be useless, so why bother? There would be no cause to even begin to think about what the incident said about the state ginger-vs-brunette relations in 2020s America. There would certainly be no cause to print anything of the sort in a major newspaper. You're only going to come out with such a flimsy (if technically "most correct") conclusion if you have a gun to your head, albeit metaphorical. Journalists have one of those in the form of economic incentives to find something profound-sounding to say about every mildly viral event, way too soon for there to be anything valid to be said.
(But I'm not convinced it is true. Say I have a strong prior that "unprovoked public murder on a random stranger" probably evidences a disturbed, incoherent mental state on the part of the killer - psychosis, schizophrenia, or just hard drugs. That is, I will assume the killer's mental state to be so erratic and irrational that their actions are essentially random, and whatever they may gibber before or after the murder bears negligible relationship to anything that could be called a "motive" because the killer most probably doesn't have a "motive" at all, beyond a sudden, violent intrusive thought. In this case - and this doesn't seem like a silly prior to have - then you should in fact write off the "ginger bitch" remark and stick to your null hypothesis of an apolitical nutjob.)
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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.
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.
You have zero proof for this.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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.
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.
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The full video, part one (backup link), part two (backup link). NSFL, obviously.
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If the equivalent footage was played with a white homeless male saying anything akin it'd be complete journalistic open slather.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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