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This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.
I saw some news articles online about this in Australia earlier today.
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best 'older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). There was also no mention that I can recall of the perpetrator being tackled and restrained by a member of the public, and certainly not that he was Brazilian. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
Except, of course, the second half of all these articles all quote a bunch of Irish politicians and other public figures condemning the riot as the actions of a hateful, far-right mob, or similar words to that effect. Which kind of gives the game away. Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give credance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.
I would like to hear a journalist's perspective on this some day. Is it taught? Is the intuitive grokking of those rules – condemn the far-right mob, but don't explicitly spell out their casus belli, so the impression is that far-righters are just spontaneously violent – a job requirement? Am I too deep in a bubble and it's just common sense already to speak this way here and the other way around about George Floyd?
I suspect the tactic actually works – remember, 50% of people are below average, and the average ain't that high, and it's white people who are the target audience, so they just trust journalists to do a honest job.
I would be shocked if Journo-list wasn't still around, and journalists almost by definition are much better educated than they are remunerated and live in urban areas, so they tilt pretty heavily left anyways.
Either chatgpt has been around for much longer or Journo-list (or equivalent) still exists. It is creepy how quickly the same terms get used, even in opinion rags, to describe something.
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Schooled. Journalism schools still exist, but I hesitate to say educated because at least from my conversations with the students they were not well rounded independent thinkers. They learn good technical writing of articles, but generally don’t get enough background in other subjects to allow them to understand what is actually happening.
I mean, isn’t that kinda not their job? Journalists are biased, but they’re definitionally reporters and not supposed to be running blogs.
Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.
How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.
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I mean the problem with sending someone to report on a topic that knows little about the topic is that they don’t have any way to vet what each set of experts is telling them.
A scientifically literate reporter is probably going to have some insights into how diseases work and how germs spread and so on. Maybe not perfect but enough to know where the expert’s story might not add up, or what questions need to be answered or even whether the research referenced says what the expert claims it says.
A political science literate person who knows the history and main actors in Israel and Gaza is not simply going to uncritically report the two competing narratives and call it good. They’re in some sense going to examine the evidence in light of what is known about the parties and give as accurate of a picture of what’s actually true.
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The most I saw was national broadcaster, RTé, mentioning that he was an Irish citizen who “came to this country 20 years ago”. The exception is GRIPT, a small but quickly growing media company that mentioned that he was Algerian in the headline.
I really think the Aisling Murphy case is worth looking into, the media is making the exact same mistake as before by obfuscating the nature of the attack (it will be a true repeat if they’re brave enough to scold Irish men for toxic attitudes that lead to random attacks against teachers).
It was crazy how up in arms all of the women on my Instagram were about Aisling Murphy and how her murder was a huge indictment of Irish culture and how Irish men are socialised and how we need to #stopblamingwomen - up until the exact moment it turned out the killer was Slovak, and then they immediately shut up about it.
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The same here, only the tabloids and alternative media specified that the attacker was Algerian; "respectable" outlets like The Journal, the Times and the Independent don't consider his nationality or ethnicity worth mentioning at all. Whenever there's a horrible unprovoked crime like this, you can practically smell the "please let the assailant be Irish" energy emanating from broadsheet journalists and the PMC types on X and Reddit. I saw a comment about the stabbing on the /r/ireland subreddit, some dude said something to the effect of "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
Some years ago (probably on the old subreddit) I pointed out that this journalistic approach has a limited shelf life. Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime committed by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim). (See also Scott's post, section IV, about how banning employers from asking interviewees about their criminal record actually decreased the rate at which employers hired black candidates.) They're going to have to come up with a different method for routing around this problem sooner or later. Perhaps five years from now, news articles will read "an assailant stabbed a victim" without mentioning any identity characteristics about either person at all.
Well this is the thing: for modern broadsheet journalists, contempt for the common man is built into their psyche. If you've fully internalised the idea that any uneducated person can become radicalised overnight by exposure to far-right disinformation and "fake news" - well, imagine how much more potent an effect information and real news might have. The average journalist no longer sees their job as one of informing the public but educating it, and if that means selectively leaving the reader in the dark about certain pertinent facts, so be it. (Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.) Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions, so they resort to this circuitous approach of informing the reader that Alice has transphobic™ opinions (or quoting a woke person who thinks Alice has transphobic opinions i.e. "delegated defamation") without actually telling the reader what those opinions are and allowing them to draw their own conclusions as to whether "transphobic" is an accurate characterisation.
They're pulling the wool over our eyes!
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This video essay makes a pretty compelling argument that, yes, in fact the news was (more) unbiased and higher quality in the past and it's not just nostalgia.
Some of the examples are mindblowing. The example of the reporting on the Soviet Union's political affairs is remarkably unbiased and uneditorialised despite it being the literal height of the Cold War.
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Sadly i don't think this will ever happen. Remember, the bottom fraction in terms of intelligence has trouble figuring out that theyv would probably be hungry right now if they hadn't eaten breakfast this morning. They certainly aren't going to intuit chains of reasoning like this.
This isn't true. Even if the original study didn't have measurement errors(and my two cents is that the study you're referring to almost certainly added points to the prisoner's IQ scores- I can say from personal experience that there is an IQ cutoff for the question but it's a lot lower than 90. Maybe a high seventies or something) it showed the IQ threshold for simple conditional hypotheticals to be 90, which you'll notice is noticeably below average. The US average IQ is 98 IIRC with a standard of deviation of 15, so like 67% is above.
You're right. Bottom half was too aggressive. I'll edit it to say bottom fraction.
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Eh, this is pretty uncharitable towards the lower half of the population
The "Muslamic ray gun" guy sounded like a low class idiot (which egalitarians gleefully pointed out), but his "stereotypical" view of things turned out to be closer than the people mocking him for his accent gave him credit for. They already have these views. If they keep reading and don't see it, they'll notice.
You also ignore that distrust of the media will lead them to people who will point it out explicitly for anyone too dumb. "Coulter's law" is not some obscure wisdom for >100 IQ nerds. It's one Google search or rightist YouTube video away, for those without the IQ or patience to read it's a real golden age.
(This is the same logic behind "low class conservatives are too dumb to use their smartphone to find out Bud Lights parent company and it's subsidiaries. ". Well, if you went on /r/conservatives there was a copypasta in every thread listing them. Even if they were that dumb -and they aren't- only one person needs to be smart.)
I've found that it's the fully bought in progressive, "right side of history" middle class - who should be higher IQ - who're really hard to convince if they can't find an NYT article stating something. It's them this omission works best on. If they say "X never happens" (about something contentious like say...race or gender) you can have a billion NYPost/whoever articles with proof they will simply shut down the minute they see the URL unless you can show a paper of record also touching the problem. This is why activists hate Jesse Singal so much for that Atlantic article.
A lot of the time the news isn't obscuring knowledge so much as denying it legitimacy. People know the Muslamic ray gun theory. It's just that educated people all just know it's merely another instance of justifying racism by appeal to protecting white women from dehumanized people of color.
But this only lasts so long as the system as a whole is legitimate and isn't under too much strain.
Which Jesse Singal article, the trans kids one?
Yes, he had an article where he touched on trans kids and the detransitioning issue.
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Note that I said "every reader", not "every person". The people who read broadsheet newspapers are a selected group already.
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I don't eat breakfast, and I often am not hungry by lunchtime. So "you will be hungry at Y o'clock if you don't eat breakfast at X o'clock" isn't always true. What you are trying to say is that there are some people who don't know how to play the game of answering problems like that, that the 'right' answer is 'supposed' to be "if I didn't eat breakfast, I would be hungry now" even if you are one of those people who skip breakfast and don't get hungry until later than you are 'supposed' to get hungry.
He's referring to a psychological experiment on inmates which showed prisoners with IQ's below 90 can't understand hypotheticals no matter how dumbed down eg "how would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast". I suspect that prisoners were either systematically less cooperative than average(likely) or their IQ tests were graded on a curve(also not implausible).
Was it even a real experiment? I first saw this as a post on 4chan and when I google it it just leads me back to that.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-breakfast-question
I don’t actually know, but that’s the context.
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Yeah, I think it's likely both that (1) some prisoners were too dumb and (2) some prisoners were messing with the interviewers. Besides, I don't think that question is such a great test: it's just testing "do you know how to guess the teacher's password?"
Yeah, I might be hungry if I didn't eat breakfast. Or I might not. Or the question might make no sense because I always make sure to eat breakfast, so why are you asking me if I don't? Or I might be someone who always skips breakfast, so replying "I feel fine" is the true answer. The only 'correct' answer for the test-takers is "I would feel hungry" but that's not 'considering a hypothetical', that's 'can you guess what answer you are supposed to give?'.
I agree that if you're smart enough to be able to guess the 'correct' answers then you're not likely to be in prison, but then again you don't need to be too smart to figure out "what does this guy want me to say?", either.
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As an experienced pedatn, I enjoyed the fact that the line morphed from the grammatically correct "How would you feel now if you hadn't eaten breakfast?" to the strictly incorrect "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast?"
Obviously look it's variation in dialect, blah blah prescriptivism, but I still found it funny
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No. I was just speaking in shorthand. You don't have to say you would be hungry. "I probably still wouldn't be hungry even if i skipped breakfast because i often don't eat breakfast" is a perfectly fine answer as well. "Bad" answers are those that reveal that the person is incapable of embracing hypotheticals. Ie people who say things like "what are you talking about, i did eat breakfast"
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Called by some "Coulter's Law":
To be fair Apophasis exists for a reason. Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers. See also: Don't stuff beans up your nose.
Here in the Washington DC area, everyone's taken it for granted for decades: carjackers, robbers and other violent criminals (except the occasional domestic murderer), and professional thieves/shoplifters, are never white.
Edit: And of course, you'll never find anybody drawing attention to that fact in public, as that would be "hate speech"; the metro area is 99% blue tribe.
Are there even working class or underclass whites in DC?
Not since 1965 or so in DC itself. School desegregation in 1954 caused the trickle of white flight to turn into a torrent, making for the "Chocolate City/Vanilla Suburbs" that obtained until:
1973 in Prince Georges County, when school busing was introduced to achieve racial balance and created an even greater surge of white flight there, and
The early eighties in the rest of suburbia, when the first wave of Central American immigrants started pouring into the affordable garden apartment complexes, displacing the whites from there and pretty soon taking all the fast food, landscaping and physical labor jobs. Nowadays, on the buses and at the bus stops in Fairfax County, you will not hear one word of English (even the drivers are all foreigners now! (And most of the taxi drivers are African immigrants and Afghanis.)), nearly all small shops are owned and staffed by immigrants, and Fairfax County schools are maybe 35% white, down from ~80% in my high-school years forty years ago. Less than that in Montgomery County and in the low single digit percentages in DC and Prince Georges.
Pretty much all the whites here are white-collar PMC types, and the white working class has decamped to remote trailer parks many miles from the nearest public transit.
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Not really as local residents. There are some amount of folks who commute in from VA/MD and as far as WV for service work.
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Isn't this the whole reasoning behind "journalistic balance"? You present one side of the debate, the other side of the debate, then allow the readers/viewers to draw their own conclusions.
A healthy journalistic approach to the debate around trans women in prisons would look something like this:
Instead what we so often get is:
Me: "Wow, that sounds really bad. Shame that the article doesn't tell me what these views are." half an hour of Googling later "Oh. He thinks it's inappropriate to house trans women in female prisons if they haven't transitioned. This is a totally normal opinion that the majority of people believe, which doesn't remotely imply that you hate trans people or wish them harm."
As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas - on some level, the journalist thinks their own ideas are so weak and unintuitive that even mentioning an opposing view will make a convert of the average reader. Indeed, we already know this is the standard attitude of trans activists everywhere, given that their whole modus operandi is to smuggle in unpopular pro-trans legislation under the guise of gay rights legislation which the average voter actually does endorse.
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This 'lying through omission' also becomes evident in the meta narrative where left leaning journalists from the ABC and SBS choose which stories they cover and which they do not.
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