…and writing Bonfire of the Vanities, the classic satire on late-eighties class and race relations, I’m fairly sure he’d move on and pick another topic. Our class war (the race war is really a class war) is beyond satire.
Case in point: even though we know the Atlanta shootings last week were not motivated by anti-asian hate, the media is still playing it as an anti-Asian grievance, at best – and at worst, the media’s grievance pimps seem to be actively wishing yet another racial fault line into being.
The media points out this shooter acquired his firearm from a licensed dealer after passing a background check, the same as a whole list of other shooters (which they helpfully provide).
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/17/nbc-news-atlanta-shooter-used-9mm-handgun-that-was-purchased-legally/
Then, they note the House passed H.R. 8 last weekend and the New York Times quoted Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), praising background checks as means to “reduce gun violence the right way.” Moreover, Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety claims, “Requiring background checks on all gun sales is proven to reduce gun violence.”
The logical disconnect between the second thought (background checks stop crime) and the first thought (except for all these guys) does not occur to them.
We don’t have a background check problem. We have a mental health problem which is not being addressed so it doesn’t show up in background checks. Clayton Cramer explained it in “My Brother Ron” years ago. Still valid analysis.
Funny that they only focus on the Asians. If his crime was really racially motivated, why did he shoot two white people? Typical media deception and lies.
I’m fairly sure he’d move on and pick another topic
You’d be wrong, Mitch, the Wolfe’s two classic essays dealing with class and race are Radical Chic And Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers. They predicted the modern-day state of class and race. And, in addition, moreover, they’re mostly fact. Let’s start with the time that Leonard Bernstein (the lead conductor of New York Philharmonic) and his wife, Felicia, invited the Black Panthers over for a cocktail party with hors d’oeuvres of Roquefort cheese rolled in crushed nuts, asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi.
… or maybe we’re now in the history repeats itself as farce phase.
Wolfe was an interesting writer on cultural topics because he knew, and despised, the dominance of the bourgeois in American (and European) culture. He was smart enough to see that the “revolutionaries” of the Left are as bourgeois as they come. Castro was the son of a plantation owner, Che Guevera came from a family of doctors. The examples are endless. Socialism has never been a “workers movement.”
But, anyway, it is nice to know that any criticism of, say, Putin, and the state apparatus of Russia is forbidden because because such criticism may induce otherwise calm, rational Americans into going on anti-Russian killing sprees.
A mass delusion has swept our country. Several, in fact. I’m at a loss to account for it. The “stop violence against Asians “ is the cause de jour. The US Golf Association published a statement on its Facebook page condemning the latest identified social justice horror. The group that makes up arcane rules governing how to identify the correct location to drop a golf ball after hitting it into a penalty area (new term by the way. Used to be a water hazard) and calculating handicaps now needs to inform its members about racism and its evil consequences. It took them years to figure out the correct width and depth of grooves in club faces but perhaps a half hour to make a ruling on the prevalence of anti-Asian violence in a country of 330 million souls. Another Covid miracle.
If Trump’s reasonable claims that China acted irresponsibly and spread the Wuhan virus around the world, causing a disturbed individual to engage in a shooting spree against Asians (only women, tho), what are we to make of the Democrats and the media 5-year attack on Putin and Russia?
Shouldn’t such speech result in anti-Russian hate crimes?
Well, if calling covid-19 “the Chinese virus” causes hate crimes against random Asian women, it should.
but it hasn’t.
Words are not violence. Words do not cause violence. A quarter of “anti-Asian” hate crimes are carried out by black men, who make up about 7% of the population.
The false Anti-Asian/White Supremacists angle is a counter-narrative to combat the very real elite campaign against Asians dominating all the top spots at elite schools.
I mean, how many billions in ivy league endowments does it take to keep them Asians from taking Biff and Buffy’s rightful place at the Skull & Bones Society table?
Oh by the way..
School Endowment Value as of 2019
Brown University $4,200,000,00
Columbia University $10,950,000,000
Cornell University $7,300,000,000
Dartmouth College $5,700,000,000
Harvard University $40,900,000,000
University of Pennsylvania $14,700,000,000
Princeton University $26,100,000,000
Yale University $30,300,000,000
Hell, don’t tax the rich…..tax their endowments and trusts.
The Media is wasting all of their time hyping a false narrative about Anti-Asian hate crimes while completely ignoring the Human Trafficking of Asian women into American sex shops. Our local Media could be interviewing Washington County Prosecutor Pete Orput, but then again, he has a habit of doing the jobs our State AG refuses to do.
I’m going to use an old word to describe the actions of our media class and its political arm, the Democrat party.
That word is “sophistry.”
There are several definitions of “sophistry” in modern English dictionaries. These boil down to “subtle but defective reasoning.”
In its original meaning, defined ‘way back when by Greek philosophers, it meant using rhetoric to convince a group of people that what was false, was actually true. Sophistry is a corruption of the faculty of reason, which, used correctly, must always bring us to the truth.
The Greeks struggled mightily with the problem of sophistry (there were pro and anti sophistry philosophers). The problem with sophistry was and is that a beautiful argument, one which by all measures is attractive to us, is no assurance that the argument is correct.
The argument that some people are less successful than others due to their race is sophistry. It relies on the irrational idea that a person’s racial identity is essentialist, meaning that it underlies and shapes their every faculty.
Matt Taibbi on the anti-Russian, anti-Trump sophistry pedaled from the highest reaches of the federal government and the media for the past five years
The report added Ukrainian legislator Andrey Derkach, described as having “ties” to “Russia’s intelligence services,” and Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian influence agent” (whatever that means), used “prominent U.S. persons” and “media conduits” to “launder their narratives” to American audiences. The “narratives” included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” (note they didn’t use the word “false”). They added a small caveat at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
As Glenn Greenwald already pointed out, the “launder their narratives” passage was wolfed down by our intelligence services’ own “media conduits” here at home, and regurgitated as proof that the “Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” even though the report didn’t mention the laptop story at all. Exactly one prominent reporter, Chris Hayes, had the decency to admit this after advancing the claim initially.
With regard to the broader assessment: how many times are we going to do this? We’ve spent the last five years watching as anonymous officials make major Russia-related claims, only to have those evidence-free claims fizzle.
MO – perhaps the recent Court decisions regarding Project Veritas, as well as the GA SOS phone call lies will open up some reported lies. But, I’m not going to hold my breath
The Asian sex-trafficking story is right in front of their noses, but gets ignored like Epstein Island.
Remember Bob Kraft’s little “happy ending” at a massage parlor frequented by other millionaires and billionaires and “employing” an almost all-Asian group of masseuses?
You don’t remember that?
The significance that classifying actions as a hate crime has to do with the fear that the crime instills on other members of the victim’s ethnic community. Hate crime victims are not random — they were picked because of their race and to instill fear on all members of that race. It’s similar to the reason why terrorism is called terrorism, and genocide is genocide, and aren’t all just classified as murders.
Hey Maximum,
Here’s a perfect example of sophistry, or am I being too generous to Emery?
Not just ethnic community Emery. Hate crimes can be against GLBT and Q also. But, not SS. They can be against Islam. It can be mysogany.
But, if the perpetrator makes a statement that it is for some other reason, that should be ignored if it doesn’t fit the narrative.
Was it a hate crime against gay Asians when Andy Ngo was beat up by a bunch of white folks dressed in black? How about the elderly Asian woman attacked in San Francisco – hate crime?
It is disingenuous and uninformed for progressive elements and the media to generally decry the “sudden surge” in violence against Asians and then dismiss or ignore that so many of the perpetrators are non-white.
The datasets tell us that this is something far more complicated than a one-size fits-all issue of “white supremacy”. It’s past time to face it and report it as such. Until this happens, the cycle continues.
In what way is being murdered in a hate crime worse than being murdered in an ordinary crime?
It’s not. The victim is equally dead, the family is equally devastated, the justice system equally unable to fix it.
The ‘hate crime’ label is stupid.
Here is how the APA defines sophistry:
sophistry
n. a style of argumentation designed not to arrive at truth but to persuade others that one’s position is correct. This is generally accomplished by careful strategic use of language and the skillful use of fallacious arguments (see fallacy). For example, one common type of sophistry is to represent the other’s point of view as more extreme and less plausible than it really is and then attack the extreme version of the position and show that it is wrong. A particular instance of sophistry is called a sophism. The term comes from the Sophists, a group of itinerant teachers in Greece in the 5th century bce who taught and practiced rhetoric.
It is defined by its purpose, not by the elements that make it up, though the APA, “This is generally accomplished by careful strategic use of language and the skillful use of fallacious arguments (see fallacy).”
For an example of “careful strategic use of language,” see the
Mueller Report’sWeissman Report’s conclusion: “Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issuesthat would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time,if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. ”For the “skillful use of fallacious arguments” read pretty much any op-ed and you will find the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the question-begging fallacy (see Emery’s 10:02 for an example), and of course, the ad hominem fallacy.
I had the privilege of meeting Wolfe back in college around 1990, and one of the most interesting things about his talk was that he noted that it was getting harder and harder to do a parody when real life was getting so weird. That’s one of the big reasons his novels are so far apart–he was trying to “poke” society, but as mores went more progressive, reality became stranger than his fiction. Back to the drawing board…
And shame on the media for totally messing this one up, and I would guess that it is at least partially intentional on their part. You see, if the media dealt honestly with the reality here–that anti-Asian sentiment is very significantly by non-whites, and that sexual slavery is common among illegal immigrants–the left would be forced to confront the weaknesses in their own policies. And we can’t have that.
The entire purpose of “hate crimes” is to rank citizens on their value to the government (or Democrat party). This is what the democrats have done since they were founded by slave-staters back in the 1820s. This scheme has always come to grief. The idea that some citizens are more equal than others is anathema to the founding principles of this country (at least those parts of it that were north of Maryland). The 14th amendment declares explicitly that all are equal under the law:
Amendment XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In what way is being murdered in a hate crime worse than being murdered in an ordinary crime?
It’s not. The victim is equally dead, the family is equally devastated, the justice system equally unable to fix it.
When you add additional penalties to hate crimes (like a caucasian murdering a minority, or a straight person murdering a gay person), then you instantly make the lives of the protected class worth “more” than those of non-protected class. It’s no different than counting a slave as 3/5ths of a non-slave.
Bill, it’s worse than the 3/5ths Clause. That Clause was designed to keep Slave States from inflating their representation in Congress by counting slaves that, by law, had no agency of their own. It was an attempt to consistently hold those slave states to their stated position that slaves were less than people.
Hate Crimes and Intersectionality are a worldview that some people have a greater value than others. It completely does away the false nicety that “All Animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others.”