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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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Which is mind-bogglingly high given the male propensity for violence.
Also completely insane given one is >5x more populous than the other.
Both of which support my assertion and refute yours.
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?
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