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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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The rhetoric around his killers have used the word "gang" more often than other police killings, and I can't help wonder if that is because his killers are Black. It's an odd form of racist dog whistling from the "woke" denizens of reddit.

I view the use of "gang" more anti-cop than anti-black. For example, see these pieces covering the Los Angeles "deputy gangs". That said, it's easy to interpret it in an anti-black sense, and I wonder if it will end up going down the euphemism treadmill like many other words that were at first benign then turned into slurs.

We don't give terrorist videos this kind of air time, and we actively scrub videos of mass shootings that get posted online.

I disagree that this should be standard operating procedure. People should know what happened, and not be restricted to learning about it through second-hand accounts. When you don't let people see video, you end up with wild and unsubstantiated speculation like "Paul Pelosi's attacker was a right-wing MAGA-wearing extremist!" (no, the bodycam footage shows he was just some random dude who decided to break into a house).

I agree with the rest of your points, though; hyping it up in any way is atrocious and disgusting, and in fact all the hubbub around this situation is unnecessary. Protests and riots of any form are unnecessary at best and excessive and damaging at worst.

I thought Paul Pelosi's attacker was a gay lover/drug dealer.

He may have been, however, he has clearly broken in there during the altercation in question. There's exhaustive discussion of the bodycam footage elsewhere in the thread.