What brings it to mind also is the common element that houses of worship are frequently targets especially. Not just out of religious bigotry (I’d be willing to bet money the arsonist here calls themselves christian) but because they serve as important community centers. It is unlikely you will find evidence of high-ranking officials directly ordering these kinds of actions, but clearly a culture is allowed to form where it understood there will be not much effort to prevent it from happening. Sure, these things never repeat exactly, but there are echoes; when we recognize the echoes of the past, we can say we know this evil, say its name.
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[quote=“wysinwyg, post:113, topic:67888”]
Which seems like a more effective way of convincing anyone of anything?
[/quote]I do apologize, but your condescending lecture seems to have gone unneeded - I’m not here to convince people. I’m here to speak my piece.
Convincing anyone around here that they’re wrong, let alone wrong about how The Media is like totally the worst thing you guize, is one of the most Sisyphean tasks I can imagine, short of the original. It doesn’t matter what you say, people won’t be convinced, they just move the goalposts and dig in deeper. They give lectures about how you’re doing it all wrong. They insult you, they try to discredit you. But they will never, ever change their mind.
Oh sure, they’ll claim they will, if presented sufficient evidence. And then any evidence bought forward is never sufficient.
So, too bad. Trying to change people’s minds around here is a waste of time and effort. I’ve known that since the days that Frauenfelder was posting about Raw Milk, and got to watch people try to lecture a food saftey Microbiologist about food saftey and microbiology. If it still exists - since it was on the old(like, at least one or two revisions ago) BB comment system - recommend you go back and find it sometime, it’s a giggle.
This is pure self-satisfaction and entertainment, I’m not here to fondle people’s ideological balls until maybe they listen a bit to what I have to say. You want someone to sit down and convince you? Go take a few J-school classes. You can even pay a consultancy fee and have someone teach you personally - I’ve done so a few times, though not for situations like this.
This is hilarious given the rest of your comment!
But to what end? What do you actually gain from speaking your piece? If there’s absolutely no way you’re going to convince anyone, what is even the difference between making your comment out loud to yourself in your room and not bothering to type it into the BBS?
You’re telling me you’re lacking any motive to communicate with the other commenters here even though you’re taking actions that wouldn’t seem to have any benefits unless you actually were trying to communicate with the other commenters? Does that seem reasonable?
But my comment is super condescending! LOL!
So, first of all, people don’t necessarily change their minds all at once when they hear new arguments. People aren’t rational, full stop. No one is. So expecting people to be bowled over by your brilliant and logical presentation of evidence is…kinda stupid actually. People have emotional reasons for believing some things, people have emotional reasons for not wanting to admit they’re wrong…that doesn’t mean people don’t change their minds, it just means that they usually don’t do so all at once because @churba presented them with a brilliant argument.
But honestly, you haven’t even made an argument. You’ve posted some links. That’s great, but it doesn’t really establish much about media saturation of the event any more than heavy media coverage of the “war on police” violence demonstrates that there has actually is any kind of “war on police” going on. Cherry-picking examples of what you’re looking for removes the greater context and makes it impossible to gauge the scale of the coverage.
But second of all, I can disprove you in one example: I’ve changed my mind (in part) based on discussions I’ve had on the BBS here. Probably on several things, but certainly on gun control. Your assumption that no one here is willing to discuss in good faith seems to be based on projection – you’re not here for a good faith discussion (what are you here for again?), so no one else is either.
But my comment was so condescending! LOL!
Convince me of what? You haven’t made an argument for anything. You presented some out-of-context links and snark.
There’s obviously some degree of groupthink here* but I think an even bigger problem for you may be that you’re an arrogant s.o.b. who can’t imagine that you might be wrong, or that there might be some sense in which you are wrong, or that you might be misinterpreting the argument, or that you might not understand the perspective of your interlocutors. Certainly your comments here don’t give any suggestion that you believe there’s any chance that you’re incorrect or misunderstanding something.
And given that, I’m not sure why you expect anything different from your interlocutors. Why would you expect anyone to be morally superior to you in their dealings with you? Why do you expect people to meet you more than halfway in a discussion like this?
Also, how the fuck would J-school classes even begin to address the question at hand?
I gotta say, I don’t think much of your taste in entertainment. I feel like almost any kind of entertainment would be better than to succumb to the little voice in your head that says: “you’re better than these people…now let them know!” (Also, you thought my comment was condescending. LOL.) As far as self-satisfaction goes, yeah, that makes sense. If you’re not trying to communicate then the most obvious explanation for your behavior here is that you’re engaging in a sort of preening, demonstrating how much smarter and better you are than all the lame “groupthinkers”* posting here.
*In the sense that different, unaffiliated people with similar opinions tend to agree with each other. “Groupthink” seems like a fairly strong and unjustifiably pejorative term for something that is not at all surprising or unusual, but if you insist, we can use it.
Edit:
Also, in what sense is admitting that you may be missing something and engaging in a good-faith discussion “fondling people’s ideological balls”? I missed this the first time around, but this seems especially telling. The only reason anyone could possibly disagree with the mighty @churba is due to ideology, presumably, and so any attempt to overcome disagreement through discussion must involve “fondling ideological balls”.
But first you accuse me of being condescending. The mind boggles, really.
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He doesn’t strike me as the type to even read that, but I did, and enjoyed it. The mismatch between the two of you is great fun, but only because he’s been such a jerk.
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I just want to understand the argument against!
I don’t pay much attention to news because it seems systematically misleading in many ways (e.g. “war on police”), and because it gives me sads about things I can’t do anything about (e.g. sensationalistic crime reporting). So I’m not really committed one way or the other. And I want to be open-minded! So when people pop up in the comments disagreeing with the OP, I want to understand why so I can consider the question for myself.
But the only people doing so in this thread have failed to provide any kind of arguments or evidence* for their position, instead substituting snark and scorn. Furthermore, the one who came the closest to engaging doesn’t even live in the USA making their perspective on US media coverage at least a little suspect.
Should I draw any conclusions from the fact that the only people willing to disagree with the OP failed to provide any arguments and seem to have Galileo complexes? I don’t want to…I’d rather evaluate rational arguments. But since none are on offer, I guess I have to work with the information I have.
*a wall of links is not evidence for the reasons stated in my previous comment
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Well, as my original post made clear, I’m not interested in shaming anyone or convincing people they’re participating in groupthink - that’s why I addressed the post to the “moderators” and not the group.
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As to the larger point of media coverage / national “awareness” (for lack of a better term) of this set of arsons in west St. Louis versus the CVS fire in Baltimore, I will simply submit 3 hypotheses which are testable:
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Incidents which occur in the middle of a larger public event will receive greater coverage than incidents which do not.
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Incidents which are captured on video will receive greater media coverage than incidents which are not.
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Incidents which contain ambiguity (such as whether all of these events are arson, whether they’re being perpretrated by the same group, etc.) will receive less coverage than incidents which contain less ambiguity.
Ultimately I believe #2 contributes the most to this disparity. Witness the response to the murders on screen of the news reporters in Virginia versus numerous other murder suicides which didn’t even make the national news. I do believe if one of these arsons was caught on film, the national reaction would be considerably larger because it would be spread throughout all the common social media channels, showcased on news front pages, etc.
Again, though, it’s just a hypothesis, and none of them imply malice or “indifference” by the public (any more so than our large “indifference” to many other upsetting incidents that occur in this country on a fairly regular basis.)
Whether these are tenable hypotheses depends whether you intend them in an absolute or statistical sense.
In an absolute sense, they are definitely false:
But the Trayvon Martin killing was not caught on video, and yet received much greater media coverage that many events that were captured on video. Nor did it occur in the middle of a larger public event. Also, it was highly ambiguous in several ways – and that ambiguity seemed to increase the amount of coverage as it resulted in huge arguments about e.g. how bad Zimmerman’s injuries were.
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