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Notes -
To be clear, an immigrant gouged out a deaf man's eyes, then tried to behead him.
An uncharitable person might think you're deliberately sanding off the horrific, inhuman corners of this specific crime, then presenting it as "merely" an immigrant attempting to murder a native.
There is no version of this where, in your example, an athlete (?) attempts to gouge out a man's eyes and behead him, and we all go "well, that's part of the plan".
To be clear, when I say "an uncharitable person might think there's some folks just looking for an excuse to do a pogrom" I am engaging in rhetorical understatement - there are people explicitly doing exactly that in this thread.
Horrific murders happen with unfortunate regularity, if for no other reason than there are a lot of people and some of them are pretty fucked up. A few weeks ago some Irish rent-a-cops suffocated a man to death. If you peruse a list of people executed in the United States, you'll find a significant share of them are pretty egregious (as in, above and beyond 'mere' murder). The point of emphasizing the horrific nature of this crime in particular is to try and gin up more violence against other people who didn't commit this crime. This is the purpose of the emotive language - don't think, don't empathize, get revenge (on unrelated people).
Perhaps not:
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This was stupid and they will probably get charged with something, but for context the shoplifter was violent and had just broken a pensioner's ribs.
This part isn't mentioned in some newspapers but the original Irish Times article has it.
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Does the moral status of 'pogroms' change when less-unpleasant approaches have been attempted and failed?
People get arrested over there for expressing concern about it. I don't know what they're supposed to do, exactly.
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My understanding is that the autopsy has yet to determine if that was the cause of death.
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