Is it 'relevant' that James Holmes is white?
By Michael McGough
At the risk of being accused of having an obsession with references to race and ethnicity in journalism, I want to call attention to a controversy over the fact that some news reports identified James Holmes, the accused shooter in "The Dark Knight Rises" movie theater shootings, as a white man. (The L.A. Times story did not so describe him.)
This is from Richard Prince’s “Journalisms” feature on the website of the Maynard Institute:
"News consumers learned that the man suspected of shooting 70 people in Aurora, Colo., on Friday was white before they knew his name.
“NPR described the man accused of killing 12 people and injuring at least 58 others as a ‘white male in his early 20s.' On Pacifica Radio's 'Democracy Now,' host Amy Goodman said the gunman was 'believed to be white, about 24 years old....
“Paul Colford, spokesman for the Associated Press, explained to Journalisms at midday, 'I'm told that 'white' was part of the original police description, though that element will be dropped. Race is included when a story contains a racial element, and so far this one apparently has no such element.'"
It's true that most newspaper style guides counsel against identifying crime suspects -- and other people -- by their race, a practice dating to the 1960s. Before then, it was common for news stories to refer to a suspect, even after he had been captured, as a “Negro man.” The exception to the modern colorblind policy is when race is “relevant.”
That’s obviously the case in, say, the beating of Rodney King by white police officers or a description of a congressional candidate who is the first African American (or white, though that’s unlikely) to hold a political office. Race is also relevant when the suspect is still at large, though there have been instances of stories that tell the reader to look out for a suspect with “black hair and brown eyes" without mentioning race.
Beyond that, though, relevance is in the eye of the beholder, and readers often behold things differently from the way editors do.
To complicate matters, the same editors who would enforce a ban on racial descriptions in a crime story might nudge a reporter to make clear, indirectly, that the subject of a positive portrayal belongs to an underrepresented group.
Finally there’s the double standard for breaking news and feature stories: Physical description is at a minimum in breaking stories, but when a reporter is in feature mode, quasi-racial descriptions like “the blond, blue-eyed tot” or “the teenager in dreadlocks” come out of the tool kit.
In the case of the Colorado shootings, the arguments for identifying the shooter as white would be:
Readers/listeners are curious, just as they’re curious about whether the shooter was young or old or male or female. The problem with this argument is that for many readers that curiosity is tinged with a kind of prurient racism.
This is a story with anthropological/sociological overtones. One reason readers may have been curious about the race of the shooter was that the supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years. ...
Is this racist? Racially insensitive? Or unobjectionably informative? You tell me.
My view is: Of course the race of the Colorado killer is relevant. It's news.
As a commenter points out, the first three facts that the police gather on a suspect are sex, race, and age: e.g., "A male Caucasian about 25." For the press to go and proactively delete race shows their dedication to keeping the public ignorant.
The news media should drop its campaign to control the flow of facts about race out of disdain for its readers' "prurient" curiosity. The press writes about race constantly, but it tries to massage readers' opinions on race, most obviously by trying to cover up the fact that, according to the Obama Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics website, the majority of homicides since 1976 have been committed by African-Americans.
To give an example from the same edition of the Los Angeles Times of how baldly the prestige press often covers up race:
$50,000 reward offered in slaying of cook in Sherman Oaks
July 23, 2012 | 10:31 pm
Los Angeles officials will be announcing a $50,000 reward for information in the slaying of a 38-year-old man shot outside a Hoagies & Wings in Sherman Oaks.
Raul Lopez, who worked as a cook at the restaurant, had pushed out a group of men who had become angry while waiting for food before he was shot June 29, police said.
Police said the men had shouted racial slurs at employees, causing other customers to leave and prompting Lopez to take action.
There is no mention in the rest of the posting about the race of the killers, who are seen on security video, even though that's doubly relevant, since it can help somebody collect the $50,000 reward by identifying them, and because the killers "shouted racial slurs." But withholding relevant information serves the higher purpose of thwarting prurient racists' curiosity by not validating stereotypes.
See, leaving the impression that this could be a killing by a gang of white racist no doubt Romney-supporting anti-Latino murderers roving Ventura Boulevard is a good thing. (This strategic ambiguity might, for example, help the SPLC get some more donations from confused old rich people in Sherman Oaks. And the SPLC needs the money.)
In contrast, the lowly Sherman Oaks Patch reports:
The five suspects are thought to be in their 20s or 30s, and lead homicide detective James Nuttall said Tuesday that the men, all African-American, were driving a newer model black Cadillac Escalade on 26-inch chrome rims.
Okay! That's useful, relevant news. It's also, like most crime stories, a stereotype-palooza.
Keep in mind that this reticence about race and crime doesn't have anything to do with preventing further violence. This L.A. Times columnist is proud of how the press hammered on the subject of race in the Rodney King beating, which eventuated in 53 people dead and a billion dollars in riot damage.
Posts
96 comments:
See, leaving the impression that this could be a killing by a gang of white racist Romney-supporting murderers roving Ventura Boulevard is a good thing. (This strategic ambiguity might, for example, help SPLC might get some more donations from confused old people in Sherman Oaks. And the SPLC needs the money.)
Americans are in the position of people in the old Soviet Union trying to figure out what's gong on from reading Pravda.
So we know that the killers were NOT white gang members, because we know that if there were white, the LAT would eagerly inform us of that fact in the first paragraph. And the rest of the media around the country would go into a feeding frenzy with the story. Since these things did not happen, the killers were brown-skinned. QED.
Such is the state of the American "news media" in the year 2012.
The one thing that gives me hope for the future of this country is the tidal wave of cynicism and exasperation that you inevitably see in the reader commentary on each of these race-crime stories.
It's getting to the point where even most MSM outlets aren't bothering to delete the "objectionable" comments anymore.
People are just getting sick and damned tired of all this Uganda/Rwanda/Zimbabwe crap from the NAMs.
THe media is DYING to find a white male to vent their hate, project their narrative.. just look at George Zimmerman...
Did the article state that the shooter was dressed up as a comic book character?
Stereo-type-alooza
Geeks and guns don't mix.
Rwanda is actually pretty well run these days under Kagame's de facto dictatorship. Internationalist weenies are weeny about it, but the results speak for themselves.
The media *had* to mention that the shooter was white. Otherwise people would assume that he was black.
Whenever there's a crime story where there's no picture and no racial description of the suspect, the suspect is black.
This is a story with anthropological/sociological overtones. One reason readers may have been curious about the race of the shooter was that the supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years. ...
More media hogwash. Holmes is not a "serial killer". He is a mass murderer.
There have been a number of Asian mass murderers in recent years (Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech) but I suppose that does not lead to any "informed discussion" in the circles McGough travels in.
Talking about how bad whites guys are is something the media is exceedingly comfortable in doing. Talking about how bad other people are makes them feel ill. There's an interesting sociological discussion to be had there all right, but it's not the one our ace reporters have in mind.
It's always safe to assume that if the race of a murderer/rapist/robber is not mentioned in today's pathetic excuses for news sources -- especially if the crime has particularly horrendous aspects -- then that race is almost undoubtedly African-American (much less often Hispanic). The hypocrisy is so pervasive and blatant that any rational member of the liberal elite should realize that from his perspective it's become counter-productive. Whoopsie! I just realized that's a tautology since I'm speaking of the null set.
" all African-American, were driving a newer model black Cadillac Escalade on 26-inch chrome rims"
Help! I'm drowning in a sea of stereotypes!
I suppose people will just assume that if race isn't mentioned the perp is black.
What good this does to race relations, God alone knows.
Perhaps the censors want to exacerbate ill-feeling between the races.
Actual police begin a suspect description with a sex and race "Male caucasian, about 30 years old..." That's the difference between needing accurate information, and not wanting people to draw conclusions from it.
L.A. Times:
supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years
I am not sure if it's true or not but FBI site claims that it's not true:
"Serial killers are not all white males: the racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors the overall U.S. population"
"Race is also relevant when the suspect is still at large, though there have been instances of stories that tell the reader to look out for a suspect with 'black hair and brown eyes' without mentioning race."
instances?! he's kidding, right?
(mcgough is the same guy who recently wrote about how maureen dowd just maybe might've perhaps shown a little ethnic favoritism when she wrote about some irish-american kid who died: Is ethnic empathy the same as bigotry? h/t jayman!)
I wonder if New York cops ever wish their job was more like "Law and Order?" Picking up a white criminal mastermind would probably be a refreshing change of pace from the constant stream of small time NAM thugs.
One upon a time, these mass shootings in America were always the work of white guys, But once upon a time, this was a 90% white country. With diversity and equal opportunity, the "minorities" are getting in on the act.
2007 - Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech.
2009 - Nidal Hasan killed 13 at Fort Hood.
2009 - Jiverly Wong killed 13 people at a NY immigration center.
2010 - Omar Thornton killed 8 people and then himself in Manchester, Connecticut.
I suppose people will just assume that if race isn't mentioned the perp is black.
What good this does to race relations, God alone knows.
From the standpoint of the censors, that's preferable to people knowing for a fact that the race of the perp is black.
I bet half the population of the US reads these stories and comes away completely unaware of the race of the criminals. Not everybody is as wise to the medias games as we are.
Oddly enough the media always gives peoples' ages when they write about them. But is age really that important, particularly in this context?
I don't have a problem with the media dropping in a persons race/ ethnicity (people are always confounding the two) in every story like they do with a persons' age. But I'm not sure if there should be a normal set of information about a subject of a story that is always thrown in. What about occupation? Or religion?
The media *had* to mention that the shooter was white. Otherwise people would assume that he was black.
In the case of most crime, I agree,
but when I hear about a mass murder that involves fairly sophisticated advanced planning, I assume that the killer is white (or now sometimes Asian). The Omar Thornton mass murder does not qualify--it was a simple rampage.
mcgough is the same guy who recently wrote about how maureen dowd just maybe might've perhaps shown a little ethnic favoritism when she wrote about some irish-american kid who died
McGough sounds like a pathetic dickhead. God knows it's tough to get me to say a good word about Maureen (spit!) Dowd, but she had the right of this little pissing match.
McCough is the quintessential deracinated white liberal reporter - fearless when it comes to afflicting white people, gutless when it comes to imparting to his readers the most basic facts about non-whites.
Ethnic empathy isn’t the same as bigotry, after all. But it’s still politically incorrect -- except on the Blarney Beat.
Leaving aside the fact that his contention is a crock - really, "ethnic empathy" is politically incorrect for everybody but the Irish? in which America? - the problem is that he comes to a faulty conclusion from his faulty facts. If some people can engage in "ethnic empathy" and others cannot, the solution is to stop preventing it for some people, not to prevent it for everyone. Not that he really wants to prevent it everyone.
As can be seen by his comments on the Holmes case, he has no problem at all with engaging in "ethnic empathy" ... on the part of blacks.
The Omar Thornton mass murder does not qualify--it was a simple rampage
It was premeditated mass murder, not some guy suddenly losing his temper.
it does not take any "fairly sophisticated advanced planning" to buy a couple of guns and shoot a bunch of unarmed people in an enclosed place.
The 9/11 attacks were an example of "fairly sophisticated advanced planning". The actions of Holmes, or Seung-Hui Cho, or the Columbine killers, were not.
I was listening to a radio show today and a guest was on speaking about the Penn State molestation scandal and he mentioned that the majority of Sandusky's victims were black (I don't believe this is true at all). I know this topic has been discussed here already but the two hosts were aghast that the victims could have been black and now the crimes were twice as bad and more heinous than they ever imagined.
Apparently molesting a white boy is bad but molesting a black boy is evil squared. Black victims garner more sympathy and white perps get the Zimmerman Treatment.
" 'Democracy Now,' host Amy Goodman said the gunman was 'believed to be white, about 24 years old.... "
I wonder what Amy had to say about Nidal Hassan when he killed all those soldiers. I remember that the media were quite hesitant in even mentioning that he was muslim. They were much less hesitant in absurdly branding breivik a "christian fundamentalist".
Omar Thornton was "the exception that proves the rule."
TGGP is correct about Kagame. He is about as good as it gets in Africa, these days.
The media dropped coverage about Fort Hood ( done by Maj. Nidal Hassan, a Muslim man and non-White) and NEVER covered at all nationally the Hartford Shootings (Omar Thornton, a Black man was responsible).
The media is ONLY interested in White guy villains. Since the audience for the media is about 90% female, well, here's Jezebel with a list of James Holmes teen groupies on Twitter, and other serial killers married in prison.
What is profoundly unsexy, and thus worthless to the female audience, is the typical White guy behavior (no one does this better/more than White guys) of dutiful adherence to norms, rules, drudge work, self-effacement, etc. This is why White guy is an insult among women, and why the TV/Media portray (at least in part) White guys as villains. Sure, race-pressure groups and guys like Jessie Jackson make a huge difference. But there is also that pull -- women and White women in particular don't object to White guy as villain, they enjoy it.
And department of irony, now that Holmes killed a bunch of innocent people he did not even know, he'll get more conjugal action than he ever would had he been sane and a dutiful beta White male. Because he's a killer, women now like him. No not all. But a non-insignificant portion and some fairly hot ones if past experience is a guide. [One would think Lyle Menendez's first prison wife, former Playboy Playmate Anna Eriksson, was attractive.]
Yes there is the NAACP type pressure groups, general status-whoring "White guys except noble ones like me are bad" and the like. I'd agree that is a major part of it. But don't discount White female hypergamy. The only thing women don't forgive is lack of sexiness. At least, in a time of plenty, when providership is for chumps and there is always Daddy Government.
People are just getting sick and damned tired of all this Uganda/Rwanda/Zimbabwe crap from the NAMs.
So? What are they going to do about it? What should be done about it?
"One reason readers may have been curious about the race of the shooter was that the supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years. ..."
Really? Really?! Most of the mass murderers of the past decade or so have been maladjusted non-white immigrants. Anybody heard of immigrant mass murder syndrome?
Anybody?
Hey, the MSM won't report on black flash mobs which are taking place weekly, often targeting whites for beatings and "knockout king," but when a crazy white guy who thinks he's the Joker kills people at random (mostly other white people), then race is entirely relevant. Surreal.
The 9/11 attacks were an example of "fairly sophisticated advanced planning". The actions of Holmes, or Seung-Hui Cho, or the Columbine killers, were not.
All of those mass killings involved more advanced planning than we see in black murders, such as Thornton's. In Holmes case, he planned his murder for the premiere when the theater would be packed and some attendees might be in costume, got smoke grenades, entered the theater with a ticket and used the exit door to get his weapons from his car parked directly outside. He also booby-trapped his apartment.
This isn't 9/11, but it isn't typical of black crimes either.
the men, all African-American, were driving a newer model black Cadillac Escalade on 26-inch chrome rims.
According to Wikipedia, a 2010 Cadillac Escalade's base price starts at around $62,000. 26" chrome rims on an Escalade should be at least about $10,000. So they were driving around in a $70,000+ car. Did they get it at Eastern Motors or something, where "your job (or no job) is your credit?"
[One would think Lyle Menendez's first prison wife, former Playboy Playmate Anna Eriksson, was attractive.]
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20141856,00.html
"ONE NIGHT LAST FALL, WHILE EX-model Anna Eriksson was on the phone with her boyfriend, she stubbed a toe in her dark Los Angeles apartment and shrieked with pain. The next day he "had a little night-light sent to me," she says. "He's just sweet and kind and generous."
He also wasted his mom and dad with a shotgun, but why sweat the details?"
"Eriksson's altruism apparently kicked into overdrive when she saw Lyle Menendez on TV toward the end of his first trial in 1993. "I was watching the lawyers thanking people for all these letters of support Erik got. I thought to myself, 'What about Lyle?' " She felt the call. "I am a fabulous letter writer," she says, although she admits her maiden effort "was just a little note saying, like, 'Hang tough.' " When the accused sent back a thank-you note, a correspondence blossomed. In 1994, Eriksson moved to L.A.—accompanied, Lombardi says, by a boyfriend who refused to commit. "It was," she observes, "another crushed relationship."
But a new one was-about to begin. Menendez soon invited his faithful correspondent to L.A.'s Men's Central Jail for a visit, and the two finally met face-to-face—albeit separated by a glass wall. "All I can say is that we've connected," she says, "even though we've never touched." Lyle began phoning her regularly. "He was always concerned about me, asking about my life," Eriksson says, adding that in lighter moments, Lyle regaled her with his favorite knock-knock jokes. Last spring they vowed to marry, and Eriksson hopes one day to have a family. "That was part of the plan," Lombardi says, "to give Lyle a child. That word again: give, give, give.""
Jiverly Wong
His real name?
he planned his murder for the premiere when the theater would be packed and some attendees might be in costume, got smoke grenades, entered the theater with a ticket and used the exit door to get his weapons from his car parked directly outside.
Entered the theater .. with a ticket? Used the exit door to get his weapons from his car parked directly outside?
I guess we have different notions of fairly sophisticated advanced planning.
Thornton brought his guns in with him. Seems like better advanced planning than that of Holmes.
'The media *had* to mention that the shooter was white. Otherwise people would assume that he was black.'
No, this kind of killing is often done by non-blacks.
psycho-geeks.
clockwork orange hair
Omar Thornton was "the exception that proves the rule."
Then what was Colin Ferguson?
On balance, I'd like to see race reported every time. But then I probably have more 'prurient curiousity' than most.
In a sensational crime it all comes out in the color pieces (sorry) after the event. It's the workaday offings that could use a little sunlight.
Gilbert Pinfold.
There's another subtext in the head of the Lefty reporter. "White" is Leftist code for "Christian, Conservative, Republican, Tea Party." The Four Horsemen of the Liberal Apocalypse.
Even though vast swaths of whites are SWPLs and worse, to actually label someone "white" in the press serves the purpose of separating that person from the "good whites" and the right sort of people.
You'll never hear somebody say that Bill Clinton is just such a white guy, or even Harry Reid, who is as white as it gets. But Romney is instantly tagged as "that white guy running for President."
What stereotypes attach to James Holmes of CO, exactly? Is he supposed to be a Charles Whitman-esque timebomb? A spoiled trenchcoat mafia sociopath (crossed with VT's Cho)? Or an old-fashioned flyover-country serial killer? The assembled great minds of the media are having trouble fitting him into the right cubbyhole, even temporarily flirting with the prima-facie nonsensical "Tea Party angry white"
Yes it is relevant that he is white.
The press would be very reluctant to cover it fully if he were black.
Colin Ferguson (a case that was immediately exploited) and Omar Thornton (which deliberately wasn't) both had a "plan" but the story has to hang on the victims because neither murderer is a very compelling news subject. I can recall the media awkwardness when John Allen Muhammad turned out to be a black NOI adherent, which was in "Oddly Enough" territory even without noting his teen accomplice; fortunately Virginia had the death penalty. With the availability heuristic, the occasional mass shooting automatically will be deemed Culturally Significant, like Montreal 1989 and Littleton ten years later, but still they couldn't make make movies about the Beltway sniper if they wanted to
This is another example of how the current elites are getting more comfortable at speaking openly and defending anti-white double standards. These people are not going to be shamed into playing fair.
With this case I thought the narrative they'd go with would be Brevik but Holmes's public presentation, strange enough anyway, has not given them anything to work with
The race of the 5 attackers of a gay couple is not mentioned in this article today on NBC 4Washington news online. The attack took place in a bad section of DC.
"Yoga Instructor Hospitalized After Gay Couple Attacked"
---"Couple ambushed early Sunday morning after night out"
----By Pat Collins
| Tuesday, Jul 24, 2012 | Updated 11:35 AM EDT
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Yoga-Instructor-Hospitalized-After-Gay-Couple-Attacked-163475546.html
The Norway guy was no "Christian fundamentalist" but more like the closest personality to Ted Kaczynski of the past 15 years. Hasan was a straight-up Muslim nutjob and you can't pursue the story or make it interesting without highlighting the numerous embarrassing details. The FBI released its Fort Hood report last week and suffice to say it did not carry the weekend news cycle.
People who have NEVER watched a news source other than NBC, CBS, or ABC seem to think any member of the Tea Party or anyone who shares in whole or in part the concerns of the Tea Party are wild-eyed lunatics.
They seem to forget the Tea Party took off as a concept when representatives went home on vacation to face their constituents questions about the looming legislation that was called the Affordable Care Act. People in the audience were quite upset and yelling took place, esp. when the reps who said they were voting for the legislation showed they had no answers to questions about what was in the legislation.
The networks, brown-nosers of the man in the Oval, saw to it that they were labeled crazy, far-right loons, when in reality these gatherers were law abiding little old ladies and men, retired and peaceful Boomers, very small business owners who felt as if their family businesses were doomed, but........they were, by and large WHITE. When Tea Partiers held rallies, peaceful rallies after which not a piece of litter remained, demanding/imploring the government to address the spending and debt crises, these same networks dealt not at all with the peaceful manner in which the gatherers demonstrated their displeasure.
MOST TEA PARTIERS ARE WHITE. Makes sense. They work for a living and are peaceful. They don't throw rocks through windows. They don't adopt Occupy tactics. They don't call Sharpton types to organize parades and then commit blackmail.
Yet for all their peaceful behavior, they are portrayed as evil Tea Partiers....because they are white.
I mean, if more of them were brown, black, why then ABC,CBS, NBC wouldn't view them with such animus. However, when you take money from the government, when you don't own your own business, when you don't know a damn thing about the Constitution or about American history, why, then, you aren't likely to give a damn to the point of wanting to join a Tea Party demonstration.
One would be pressed to find five "journalists" on television.
It appears the bizarre behavior displayed by James Holmes rebuked at least someone.
A much sophisticated crowd didn't notice anything wrong with him though.
I was listening to a radio show today and a guest was on speaking about the Penn State molestation scandal and he mentioned that the majority of Sandusky's victims were black (I don't believe this is true at all). ... Apparently molesting a white boy is bad but molesting a black boy is evil squared. Black victims garner more sympathy and white perps get the Zimmerman Treatment.
That most of the kids were black is what I have read - Sandusky apparently figured no one would miss some orphaned "urban at-risk youth" if he got them into his orbit.
Anyway, I have long wondered at the disjunct between the official treatment of blacks as poor widdle cuddly bunny wabbits that everyone keeps immorally picking on, and my own direct experience of many blacks as menacing predators, waiting for any moment civilized people to let down their guard to strike. I think the explanation is that, as has been noted many times, much of the top (media, governmental, corporate, academic, etc) elite is insulated from the racial realities on the street that the rest of us deal with. So, instead of menace, they focus instead on black average lower intelligence and higher impulsivity, and see them as more exploitable in a complex modern technological civilization.
Also, I think many leftists, and many in the American elite, unconsciously feel like the world has not changed much since a hundred years ago, when Stoddard was writing. They are in denial about the kinds of major demographic changes that Patrick Buchanan's books detail so thoroughly. The rhetoric and actions of leftists and elites (but I repeat myself) demonstrate that they unconsciously believe that whites are 40% of the world's population, that whites are still 90% of America's population, that whites are still firmly in control of all aspects of important decision-making and resource-distribution in American, that whites still mostly run the world economically politically and militarily, that whites still manipulate Africa and other tropical areas, and that conflict between the races are still a case of Haile Selassie's tribesmen with spears still trying to defend themselves against Benito Mussolini's invading legions with their tanks, poison gas, and warplanes.
Anonymous doesn't like my use of "fairly sophisticated advanced planning." Okay, just call it advance planning. If you're going to argue that any planning went into Thornton's rampage you're just being contrary.
On the other hand, John Allen Muhammad definitely had a well-thought-out plan. His really was an unusual case.
A typical Sailer post, albeit not in one sense: this one tell us more or less what we already know, namely that the media is full of hypocritical scum who, on the one hand, constantly pump 'diversity', while on the other hand attempting to hide the consequences of it by censoring race from crime stories, even in the most absurd fashion, e.g. here by omitting that info on obviously dangerous criminals who are still being sought in a very public way by the police.
But it is typical Sailer in that one senses no outrage or disgust beyond what the usual mild sarcasm conveys. Maybe that's part of 'Citizenism' -- accepting all kinds of bullshit while making mildly sarcastic comments about it.
@eah:
What concrete steps are you taking to advance a white utopia?
ogunsiron:
You don't have to wonder, they have transcripts and recordings still up for old shows.
The headline with a quick transcript is here, and they did mention that he was a Muslim.
"Race is also relevant when the suspect is still at large, though there have been instances of stories that tell the reader to look out for a suspect with “black hair and brown eyes" without mentioning race."
Yes, there are lots of those. They should be known as "bad stories". Race is most definitely important if the suspect is still at large. At the very least, in those cases, it should be mentioned, although I have no objection to it being mentioned in any other case as well. I want to know the race of the filthy animal (I refuse to say his name) who murdered those people in Aurora, because it is a data-point. Data is good.
"This is a story with anthropological/sociological overtones. One reason readers may have been curious about the race of the shooter was that the supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years. ..."
Mostly less informed. The reason that non-white serial killers are supposed to be a rarity is because the media itself promotes that misconception. They are not a rarity. Nor are minority mass murderers and rampage murderers a rarity. Not at all. Perhaps this guy, McGough, ought to be talking about that - about why journalists don't talk about how over-represented NAMs are in most every category of crime.
OT: Shouldn't the news of the death of Sally Ride have gotten a more press - at least a link on the Drudge Report? As near as I can tell, he didn't even mention it. Even has-been TV actors from the 80s get a mention on Drudge.
Re sophistication of mass shootings: It's worth remembering that a lot of mass shooters (including the nut that shot up VA tech and the nut who shot Gabrielle Gifford) are carried out by people with serious enough mental problems that they are more-or-less nonfunctional and unemployable. Serious and careful planning is not in the cards for such people. Unfortunately, shooting a bunch of strangers in a crowded place is not very hard to do. Hell, Reagan was shot by a nonfunctional nut, and he managed to get past the secret service to do it.
The unabomber and the Norwegian bomber/shooter are examples of people with crazy ideas but pretty careful planning and execution over many years or preparation.
The sad fact is, it's fairly easy to kill people with guns, which are tools designed for just that putpose. This attack in Colorado was apparently well-planned, but I think that means something like "as much effort planning and buying supplies as you'd expend on a family camping trip."
Anon 6:13:
Start by recognizing that the prestige media are actively working to avoid fully informing you. Where possible, find alternatives that let you do an end run around the gatekeepers. Point out places where the raw footage on Youtube contradicts the offical account, where the protest you saw with your eyes never appeared in the paper, where black hate crimes are almost never reported and white hate crimes are trumpeted from coast to coast.
Over time, people calling this out will make it clear that there is a demand for news that doesn't try to edit out inconvenient bits of reality. It will also keep embarrassing prestige media, as people on blogs and facebook pages and tweets point out the omissions.
The pattern of nonreporting of race isn't something imposed by laws, it's a policy adopted by an intellectually inbred bunch of people in the interest of keeping the less wise and enlightened from getting the wrong ideas. When it starts hurting them, or starts embarrassing them, it will becoe a whole lot less widespread in a hurry.
Andif not, well, something is going to provide news to us in twenty years. Whether it will carry any of the DNA of the current crop of dinosaurs is less clear. If the prestige.media can't adapt to a world where hiding the embarrassing andpolitically inconvenient is a bad business strategy, good riddance.
i saw he worked at a JCC, and wondered if his mom was jewish. probably. jared loughner's mom was jewish too i think. i'm not jewish but i played club sports at various JCCs for years and the staff at these places was always well over 50% jewish. of course, plenty of gentiles worked at some of them.
personally i don't care about that. what pisses me off is that the united states can't kill these guys now. it's like the US can't kill anybody anymore. to me it's just another sign of the decline of america. they haven't even had a trial for nidal malik hasan yet! that guy should have been executed years ago. it's insulting to me every time he lives to see a new year.
this james holmes guy should not live to see 2013. instead he'll be alive for at least 15 years at best. at worst he'll live out the rest of his natural life in a prison, with taxpayers paying to keep him alive.
this situation is strange when you contrast it with the new "obama rules" where he can just kill you for any reason, no trial, no due process. the ACLU even foolishly filed a suit against him for that, which, like all attempts to stop obama, will be harmlessly swatted aside. this guy is pretty much unstoppable.
"But it is typical Sailer in that one senses no outrage or disgust beyond what the usual mild sarcasm conveys. Maybe that's part of 'Citizenism' -- accepting all kinds of bullshit while making mildly sarcastic comments about it."
You try maintaining outrage and disgust continuously for decades. It's a tall order. Maybe start your own blog?
I have good reason to believe automobile rim size is inversely proportional to IQ and directly proportional to the number of pages in one's rap sheet.
just 3 months ago, a korean guy walked into a small california college and killed 7 people and injured 3 more. other than the initial breaking of the story, there was absolutely, positively no national coverage of this at all.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/02/us/california-shooting/index.html
once they found out he was asian almost all news agencies dropped the story so fast it would make your head spin.
what's funny is doing a google search on his name. google "one goh" and note how all the results cluster around a 3 day window. they pretty much stop 1 week after the shooting. almost no follow up articles on the web in the first page of results. this confirms news agency interest fell off a cliff within a few days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikos_University_shooting
"THe media is DYING to find a white male to vent their hate, project their narrative.."
They never have to look far.
"The Omar Thornton mass murder does not qualify--it was a simple rampage."
And how, exactly, does killing 12 people in a movie theatre, as opposed to 8 in a garage indicate an Einstein level intellect?
" In Holmes case, he planned his murder for the premiere when the theater would be packed and some attendees might be in costume, got smoke grenades, entered the theater with a ticket and used the exit door to get his weapons from his car parked directly outside. He also booby-trapped his apartment."
Oh, hey, he bought a movie ticket, parked the car next to the door he was going to enter, and set up a bunch of booby traps that didn't work, OK, now I see the nefarious genius!
"Then what was Colin Ferguson?"
And Lonnie Franklin...and John Allen Muhammad....and...
How many "exceptions" is it, anyway before you no longer have a rule?
Truth,
The white guys turn out to be schizophrenics.
http://sunsetgun.typepad.com/sunsetgun/2012/07/john-boormas-deliverance-me-deliverance-never-feels-dated-in-fact-it-still-plays-so-revolutionary-and-daring-there-rea.html
"Actual police begin a suspect description with a sex and race "Male caucasian, about 30 years old..." That's the difference between needing accurate information, and not wanting people to draw conclusions from it."
- If we're talking about actual police descriptions, it more often goes," Male African American, about 20 years old...."
""THe media is DYING to find a white male to vent their hate, project their narrative.."
They never have to look far."
- The fact that they usually have to fabricate, exaggerate, distort, etc. to have one (ex.Tawana Brawley, Jena, Duke Lacrosse, George Zimmerman, etc.) proves they do have to look far.
"I have good reason to believe automobile rim size is inversely proportional to IQ and directly proportional to the number of pages in one's rap sheet."
- You must hate the hell out of tractor trailer drivers...
"Omar Thornton was "the exception that proves the rule." "
- Exceptions don't prove rules, they disprove them. This statement is almost always misapplied. In its original use, it meant nearly the opposite of how it is currently used. The statement was created when the word 'prove' also meant 'test', a meaning which has nearly completely dropped out of the vernacular. So it originally meant something along the lines of ' the exception that tests the rule'- in other words, to see if the rule is still strong enough to stand in the face of the exception. Not the current meaning, that having an exception 'proves' a rule because it is rare.
"The one thing that gives me hope for the future of this country is the tidal wave of cynicism and exasperation that you inevitably see in the reader commentary on each of these race-crime stories.
It's getting to the point where even most MSM outlets aren't bothering to delete the "objectionable" comments anymore.
People are just getting sick and damned tired of all this Uganda/Rwanda/Zimbabwe crap from the NAMs."
The Batman guy is a NAM now?
You've given up on even a flimsy pretense at making sense now, and gone full jackass?
This is a story with anthropological/sociological overtones. One reason readers may have been curious about the race of the shooter was that the supposed rarity of nonwhite serial killers has been a topic of more or less informed discussion for years. ...
Emphasis on "less." Wasn't the world's "greatest" serial killer an Indian? Hell, wasn't it the Indians who made a popular religion out of serial killing?
Blacks are OVERREPRESENTED in the serial killer statistics, relative to Whites or anyone else.
I am not sure if it's true or not but FBI site claims that it's not true:
"Serial killers are not all white males: the racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors the overall U.S. population"
I guess I have to dredge this up again. I've been posting this one since 2002:
There have been few studies of the race and ethnicity of serial killers, but the handful that have been done suggest that black serial killers occur in roughly equal — or even slightly greater — proportion to the number of blacks in the population. These studies estimate that between 13 and 22 percent of American serial killers are black.
Don't buy the authors' "slightly greater" BS characterization, though: blacks are roughly 12% of the American population, so the range is from "slightly greater" to almost double their proportion of the population.
P.S., you don't have to be a genius to offer more interesting crimes than what NAMs get up to. There's this little concept called a "middle ground," you see, and it occupies the space between NAM criminals and "evil geniuses."
From that Deliverance link:
Reynolds mentioned how bad he felt. Almost as if they were taking advantage.
No "almost" about it. They were taking advantage. Like that creep Baron-Cohen and the Kazakhs. The Boormans and the Baron-Cohens of the world only respect violence. That's why they make movie defaming Appalachian whites and Kazakhs, two welcoming and civilized populations, rather than more deserving targets, like blacks or Armenians.
"Anonymous said...
Geeks and guns don't mix."
Not true. Crazy and guns don't mix.
On the 'chicken wings' murder -
"A shark's feeding frenzy has better table manners", or should I say fin etiquette.
It's noteworthy that the cannibals who murdered the unfortunate Mexican chef drove away in a Cadillac Esplanade. Says it all really.
Anyway, since 'cheap' latin American labor in the USA has been reduced to the absolute irreducible eat-the-dust minimum (courtesy of 'The Economist' TM), it is sobering to think that the price of a mexican's life is not worth, literally, a plate of chicken wings. Infact the live broiler chicken that provided the wings probably had a higher cash worth to the Cadillac driving cannibals than the unfortunate Jose' did.
The great satirist (i recommend him highly) Jonathan Swift once, only half in jest wrote an essay saying that the Dublin poor should eat their own children and sell the skin to tanneries for leather.
Alas, modern multi-culti, porno wonderland, 57 varieties of immigrant LA fits that bill, perhaps in the future, the rationalists at 'The Economist' will recommend cutting out the middle man and frying up deep fried steak of Mexican to the Cadillac driving class of cannibals.
Tsk tsk tsk, Oh Whitey, why hast thou forsaken thee!
I wonder if James Holmes was any realtion of the late, great John Holmes ('Johnny Wadd'), who, ironically was accused himself of participating in a massacre up in LA's Laurel Canyon.
'Bludgeoned?' - ran a sick 'joke' of the period (1981), 'Holmes was running through the house naked and rapidly turned a corner without warning anybody'.
His race could be relevant, and there is nothing wrong with police in profiling for race. The MSM refusal to show the reality is just part of decline we as a nation face. On another front, a number of scholars hold that spree killers, are almost always white- some 95% of them statistics show. This type of violence is characteristic of white genetic lineages writer Michael Bradley argues in the Iceman Inheritance. White lineages, evolving in harsh cold climate environments, developed a more vicious killer instinct, honed to the rhythms of the hunt, and its linkage with sport (Ruston 1983, 1996) Selection for violence has carried down into today's white genetic stocks. Hence the most widespread criminal mass murder in history was carried out by white northern Europeans, lineal descendants of those selected by cold climate evolution. Seen in this sense the argument goes, it is not at all surprising that people like Holmes and Brevik (who killed 71 people- some as young as 12 years old) do what they do. The tendency for violence is inbred into white genetic lineages, honed in cold climates for millennia. This may not be a bad thing for it links with military strength and a drive to succeed, something being sapped by the NAM friendly media.
""THe media is DYING to find a white male to vent their hate, project their narrative.."
They never have to look far."
Right, and nobody knows that better than Richard Jewell.
Did Holmes work in a McDonald's after graduation with a science degree because the market is that bad for grads now or was it because he was weird as hell to anyone who was in a room with him?
This rule needs modification. When the crime is a mass casualty attack on random people, the suspect is a Muslim unless proven otherwise.
I find it hard to get exercised about killings like these. It's all very shocking and I feel sorry for the victims and their families but surely we have had enough TV news coverage. These kind of shootings are just background noise in a country this size.
Let's say that there is one of these random mad-man "Shoot 'em Ups" incidents each year. I think that's an overestimate but I'll stipulate to the figure of 12 deaths a year in the US. That means that I can expect 12 people to die at an average distance of 1,500 miles from me (half the width of the nation) each year.
On the other hand here in Oakland we have about 120 murders each year and they are all considerably closer. A murder rate ten times as high and a proximity figure a hundred times closer. I'm not going to worry about getting shot in a movie theater - especially since I have a Home Theater.
Local government has stopped police patrols in my neighborhood. They already have changed 911 procedures such that they only respond to felonies in progress. Cops in Oakland have had pensions of 90% of their salary starting at age 50. Property revenues dropped 20% three years ago. Cop rolls have dropped 25% and those left have been reassigned out of the hills. The City can't really afford cops anymore.
We need at least a bankruptcy. Better yet would be secession. The affluent hills voted to raise property taxes for more cops but those cops were assigned elsewhere. It's a sort of "Taxation without Representation" thingee. Money is raised in the hills and spent in the flat-lands. Redistribution?
Albertosaurus
Carney:
Most of the mass casualty attacks of the last several years in the US weren't related at all to a Muslim. Other than the Ft Hood shooting, you have to go back to 9/11 to get one in the US. And the 9/11 attack is a completely different sort of beast than a mass shooting--a multi-year 20+ person conspiracy crossing multiple international borders and involving many steps that had to evade detection by authorities vs one guy walking into his work with a handgun and blowing some people away till someone shot him. Otherwise, we've had a few ineffectual attempts at attacks by Muslim extremists, why are mostly too incompetent to get the fuse lit properly. We've also had animal rights and environmentalist and Christian fundamentalist wacko attacks and conspiracies that I think were about as effective, in general.
Now, overseas is a different matter. But inside the US, if there are a whole lot of Muslim fanatics who want to blow up Americans and die in the process, they're sure not managing to carry out many attacks.
"Did Holmes work in a McDonald's after graduation with a science degree because the market is that bad for grads now or was it because he was weird as hell to anyone who was in a room with him?"
- The social ineptitude may be part of it, but frankly based on his credentials, he probably would've had difficulty anyway. As everyone knows, its a crappy job market. At this point, one can even find some PhDs taking technician level jobs that ordinarily would go to BS degree holders. Freshly-minted Biology B.S. degree recipents often have to hustle to find jobs even in a good market. He did nothing extraordinary, was an average student, his experience was limited and basic, nothing that would make him particularly valuable to an employee, not much more than dissecting some birds and mice. He probably had crappy refs- he was hired to write a program and did a half-assed job at it.
If I were an employer, particularly in this market, I'd keep looking too.
On another front, a number of scholars hold that spree killers, are almost always white- some 95% of them statistics show.
It's a remarkable fact that in mostly white countries, spree killers are mostly white. Scholars scratch their heads in amazement.
" wonder if James Holmes was any realtion of the late, great John Holmes ('Johnny Wadd'), who, ironically was accused himself of participating in a massacre up in LA's Laurel Canyon."
- Doubt it. Didn't he say he was 'short/average' ?
If Cho had a son, he'd look just like James...
Albertosaurus,
Those of you in the Oakand Hills ought to secede.
Any damn progressives who wish to stay as part of the city of Oakland deserver the progressive POS city they have.
If Major Hasan was White he would be out of the Army before he could what he did.
Anon:
I gather the Army was having problems getting/keeping enough psychiatrists/psychologists to handle the huge upswing in PTSD cases from the wars. From what I've heard, the rate of this is much higher among soldiers than in earlier wars. I think partly this is because more of our soldiers now survive stuff that would formerly have killed them (but missing limbs and with brain damage), and contractors are doing a lot of the non-combat roles now, so a larger fraction of soldiers actually are in combat. So even a crazy, nonfunctional white psychiatrist might not have been pushed out.
What stereotypes attach to James Holmes of CO, exactly? Is he supposed to be a Charles Whitman-esque timebomb? A spoiled trenchcoat mafia sociopath (crossed with VT's Cho)? Or an old-fashioned flyover-country serial killer? The assembled great minds of the media are having trouble fitting him into the right cubbyhole, even temporarily flirting with the prima-facie nonsensical "Tea Party angry white"
He's a nerrrrrrd, a murderous and potentially genocidal nerd unable to accept his place in an absolutely perfect God-given society.
Don't ask me what the hell happened to my NYT link. I distinctly remember including it but I still have to go with operator error on that one. Let's try again:
Serial Killing's Squarest Pegs: Not Solo, White, Psychosexual or Picky
^^^^ There's definitely a link there this time.
Anonymous: "The one thing that gives me hope for the future of this country is the tidal wave of cynicism and exasperation that you inevitably see in the reader commentary on each of these race-crime stories.
It's getting to the point where even most MSM outlets aren't bothering to delete the "objectionable" comments anymore.
People are just getting sick and damned tired of all this Uganda/Rwanda/Zimbabwe crap from the NAMs."
From little acorns...
There are other small signs that cause me to be hopeful. Notice anything remarkable about this Wikipedia article?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ben_Kinsella
I'd love a post in which Steve explains why there are news stories that exist expressly to document the utterance of racial slurs, but fail to note what the racial slurs are. "N-word" would be sufficient, or even "naughty word for Middle-Easterners that rhymes with "flag head." I know from NPR that a police officer recently shouted a race-related word at a black Red Sox player, and I learned from the BBC that one UK soccer player used a "four-letter race slur" when talking to another socker player. In the soccer case, the identity of the slur would have helped me understand a great deal about the case, because the BBC report notes that slur-utterer exculpated himself in front of civil judicial authorities by arguing that the black player had used the unmentionable word first: in the white player's version, the black player said something like, "Don't call me a _________." Then (according the the same self-defense version of the events related by the white player), the white player answered along the lines of, "No I didn't. It doesn't make any sense that I would call you a _________." If _________ is an archaic term from the heyday of the British Empire, or if I have never previously heard _________, I believe the white player. Otherwise, I believe the black player. As things stand, the BBC has failed to shed light on the only issues in the story that interest me: the culture of athletes in the UK, what kinds of events British magistrates find plausible, and precisely what kind of speech gets people hauled into court in the UK. I get it that these types of stories are sometimes newsworthy, but without the central details, they amount to: "Something newsworthy happened, but some of our listeners are irresponsible jerks, so we won't say what it was." Why is a naked insult to listeners presented as a story? Honestly, why?
-Morgan C
I should have said: if an insult to one person is so bad that it is a news story, why does a NPR hide that news and use the occasion to inslut thousands of other people?
-Morgan C
If the MSM were serious about this subject they would never divulge the race of a perp.
The fact they are prepared to alter the narrative so blatantly is a sure sign, well, that its, er, blatant.
"..This type of violence is characteristic of white genetic lineages writer Michael Bradley argues in the Iceman Inheritance. White lineages, evolving in harsh cold climate environments, developed a more vicious killer instinct, honed to the rhythms of the hunt, and its linkage with sport (Ruston 1983, 1996) Selection for violence has carried down into today's white genetic stocks. Hence the most widespread criminal mass murder in history was carried out by white northern Europeans, lineal descendants of those selected by cold climate evolution..."
- This is what is called a hypothesis. The hypothesis as I understand it from what you wrote is that savage violence is something bred into the white stock during many generations in harshly cold conditions, compared to other races. Unfortunately, this hypothesis seems to fail even getting out of the gates, because underlying premises are false. Whites are far less savagely brutal than blacks, hispanics, and in fact most other races.
Check out 'The Color of Crime' for raw numbers per capita, but black murder rates are vastly higher than whites- somewhere around 10 fold if memory serves correctly. Black rates of rape are astronomically higher than whites. Name pretty much any violent crime and you'll find blacks are doing it much more per capita. This is true even for crimes like serial killing. It only appears that whites are doing all the serial killing because 1) it is rare overall, 2)the rates per capita are actually higher for blacks than whites, but the discrepancy between the two races is less than for other crimes, and 3) whites are ~5-6x more abundant in the US than blacks.
If savagery were somehow bred into whites in the cold, then why is the extremely rare crime of spree killing the only way it is expressed? (That is assuming that we take the original author at his word on the rates it occurs- I personally see little difference in the level of violence of a rare James Holmes gunning down 12 in a theater and the all-too-common black gangbanger mowing down a dozen homies in a drive-by). If savagery were bred into whites more than other races, we would expect that other violent crimes would also be higher than for other races. Murder, even brutal murders, are vastly more common than spree killngs and are committed far more often by blacks and even hispanics than whites; both of these groups evolvied in warmer climes than whites. If we were talking about any objective measure of savagery, these killings which number vastly more per year than the killings of the rare James Holmes would be the measure of it.
Unfortunately, the reality is that politics is driving these sorts of hypotheses, not facts and reality. The powers that be, need a 'white people are evil' line from an expert to further persecute whitey and help blacks (and liberal whites) feel good so someone churns out some nonsense, and no one, the press, the scientist, significant portions of the population, pay attention to the fact that at the core, its claiming that up is down and green is blue.
This is what is called a hypothesis. The hypothesis as I understand it from what you wrote is that savage violence is something bred into the white stock during many generations in harshly cold conditions, compared to other races.
And if it were true it would be an acknowledgement that whites, as a group, were somehow different from other groups. And if groups can differ in one way they can surely differ in others.
The liberal mindset wants to have its cake and eat it of course. ie we are all the same except when whites are more horrible than everybody else.
Its a common liberal assumption that only whites are racist. If that were true then its endorsing a racist assumption - not that whites are worse than others - but that one racial group is different from others.
Allow one difference and logically you have to allow at least the possibility of others.
Isn't "running amok" another version of the same sort of thing as a mass shooting? It's an anglicazation of a Malay term.
The much more common version of this involves some guy murdering his estranged wife and her boyfriend, sometimes killing his kids or other family members, too. That kind of crime isn't national news, though it makes the local news.
Somewhat less common is the version that involves some guy murdering his coworkers or ex-coworkers.
Both of those have the property that the motive makes sense, but the actions are way out of line with what makes sense. It's easy to see why the guy was mad at his ex-wife or his ex-boss, so the murders don't seem quite so random, even though the shooter often murders people against whom he didn't have any particular grievance--the guy who blows away his ex boss may murder the summer intern and the temp secretary on the way. And it seems like that kind of shooter usually kills himself, and he'd go to prison otherwise, so it's not really rational. But at least it doesn't seem totally unpredicteable or crazy.
The big crazy mass shootings like this one are harder to make any sense of. I mean this Aurora nut apparently decided he was the Joker and murdering a bunch of people in a theater was a Joker-ish thing to do. It's hard to see that kind of thing coming. Since almost all our defenses against crime are based on deterrence and rational safeguards, crazy people can do a lot of harm.
Post a Comment