I think this is more about fame. It’s because they aren’t actors on a well known TV show. Tracy Morgan’s car accident was all over the news. Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy was all of the news. Both of those things happen a lot in America (though I’ll admit the Jolie example is about a much bigger star, it was just what came to mind).
I don’t see an equivalence between someone throwing off a number in an online forum off the top of their head and politicians with large staffs who could do the research for them repeatedly using fake numbers after it’s been reported time and time again that the numbers are fake. You also can’t put words into the mouths of politicians who oppose hate crimes and act like they are spouting overblown rhetoric because someone in a forum did.
I hear people talk about a concerning rise in hate crimes in the US in the last couple of years, but I don’t see people inflating actual numbers. You can correct someone’s number with out turning it into more than it is.
But what’s more, while I think your reading was a reasonable one (restricting to hate crimes), @TheyCallMeMrPibb was probably just about correct. There likely are dozens of gay black men assaulted in the US every day*, mostly by their boyfriends, family members or acquaintances - not in hate crimes. The point that was being made was that we got front page news about Smollett but not about the many, many other violent crimes that take place every day, and they specifically mentioned that factors that got it on the front page included the elements that made it a hate crime. The implication being that if it hadn’t been a hate crime, it wouldn’t have got that attention, which rationally means that the ones that don’t make the headline include those that aren’t hate crimes. I’m not saying your reading wasn’t reasonable in the conversation, but it wasn’t exactly charitable either, so it feels a bit like you were catastrophizing from what was either a misunderstanding or an off-the-cuff inaccuracy.
* 400 per 100,000 violent crime rate over 325,000,000 people with 10% being black, 5% being gay over 365 days a year gives 17 per day, but being part of any marginalized group increases rates of crime victimization, and dating men increases violent crime victimization.
Add that being part of a marginalized group increases the rate of underreporting, as well as underresponding, and we can really only make rough estimates. It is higher than the official numbers, but how much higher?
Yeah, as under-reported as intimate partner violence and sexual assault are among victims who are women, I’m pretty sure there are good reasons to think it is even more under-reported among victims who are men. My understanding is that gay men are about as likely to be victims of intimate partner violence as straight women, but we have no good stats on it and the only way to know that is to talk to activists and community organizers because it’s a nearly invisible problem.
Im not sure what your point is in regards to me? “try” confuses here as some sort of segway?
I, personally, absolutely DO live in a society consistently hostile to me and most of what I believe. I am a very progressive liberal who has worked in PA machine shops for 10 years. Trump country before Trump. Most people I have worked with have been openly hostile to me, and anything I mention about my life, because I went to college and learned a foreign language, Japanese. I get the college boy routine ad nauseum, and have been threatened on the job and screamed at once people learned my politics. I had to quit a job 3 days before xmas in 2016 because of MAGA assholes making my working environment a living hell. I move to an area I thought was more liberal, and people were shot to death by the police a couple blocks from my door, while I have to work with more reactionary MAGA trash to earn my living, and try to keep my sanity as I joined the police protests feet from my door. My landlord now is tea party, flying the gadsden as I have to hide my views right next door to him. I live in a red district of what I thought was a liberal town. And I hold my fucking crippling rage in. And my fear of the police just the same, and I’m not black.
I live in a hostile Trumpian hell everyday, and I’m not black. You don’t need to have a specific skin color to live in misery in America right now. And having people I can speak my mind with who generally share my views is all I have left to keep what little is left of my sanity.
If you were chastizing me, I don’t need or deserve it. I live having to fight these real MAGA assholes everyday. People like this just make it worse for everyone, regardless of skin color. And that’s the point I was trying to make.
Are you also black and gay? Because whatever you had to deal with, imagine being that in our society, especially now or any time in the past all of it. All that you mention here, I grew up in a small southern town with the KKK still about on the regular, so yeah, I get that. But I wasn’t their primary target, even having progressive views from a young age. I was not the kind of person that they would attack in an ally for having the “wrong” skin color or for being attracted to the “wrong” gender…
Just because Smollett made this up doesn’t mean that these sorts of attacks, not just being made uncomfortable or getting bullied for your beliefs, do not happen on the regular. They do.
I’m just saying that what he did made it harder for others that are also black and gay. He did nothing to make it harder for you, other than having to hear a bunch of assholes flap their gums a bit more about this nonsense. I’m sad and disappointed, but he’s STILL a black gay man living in America.
Considering the source, maybe take it with at least a grain of salt, but TMZ is reporting that the brothers involved with the attack said in the grand jury that they didn’t get paid for the attack (but for actually training Smollett) and that they did not send the letter he got a little over a week before the attack:
So… I don’t know what this means, other than we’re going to have to wait for the trial to know what’s happening here…
It’s almost like you could make a television show out of this shit.
My nieces and nephews aren’t going to believe a quarter of the shit that went on between 2017 and, like, 2020. They’re going to be all “WTF was going on when I was 2 years old?”
Heck, sometimes, I can’t believe a quarter of the shit that went on last week.
Hoaxes are not tracked formally, but the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that of an estimated 21,000 hate crime cases between 2016 and 2018, fewer than 50 reports were found to be false. The center believes that less than 1 percent of all reported hate crimes are false.
But such false reports can play an outsize role in undermining the credibility of real bias victims and anti-hate efforts. In the aftermath of Mr. Smollett’s arrest, one lawmaker has even promised to draft a bill increasing the penalty for filing false hate crime reports.
Dude, ferfucksake, you’re violating the community rules here – no personal attacks allowed.
You’re also wrong. @Mindysan33 is a straightup genius-level angel, and we’re lucky she spends a lot of time sharing her wisdom and learning with us. And, she’s not at all “caustic” (wtf?).
ETA: “caustic” when addressed to a woman you disagree with is right in line with “Gee, why are you so angry? Calm down girl. Give us a smile!” Fuck that noise.
I feel like if a person both had doubts about the original story, and insisted that we ought to reserve judgement of Smollett until he was found guilty in court then we might think of them as rationally skeptical. I haven’t seen a single such a person.
I know I already made a snide comment to this effect earlier in the thread, but honestly, there are a number of people in this thread, and many, many more outside of it who:
Doubted Smollett’s story immediately
Accepted the story that he made it up immediately
There are many possible explanations for that. Healthy, rational skepticism is not one of them. It seems like sometimes its important to wait for the facts to come in, but sometimes it’s not.
Oh, please. Why would a police department well known for racist behaviour and fabricating evidence do something like this if they couldn’t produce leads in a high profile case? Next thing you’ll tell me is they were under supervision for being so egregiously bad, prior to Trump and Sessions.
If you can’t trust the police, who can you trust.
If you cannot see the sarcasm in this post, I suggest recalibration of whatever you use to detect it.
