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What exactly do you think is being hidden, and from whom?
Let me explain it by way of analogy.
One of my favorite board games is Commands & Colors: Ancients. I've played it well over 100 times. It's hook is that it takes your typical hex and counter conflict simulator, and encodes the combat results table into custom dice. Then it has some extra rules for things like support, evasion, leaders, and then a fuck ton of cruft around how elephants work on the battlefield.
There is tons of light cavalry in this game. My understanding is that light cavalry in the ancient world were attackers of opportunity. Ride down the weak and injured. Flank the enemy. Stuff like that. These are literally just unarmored dudes on horses. These are not the heavily armored medieval knights that Hollywood has cemented in our consciousness as synonymous with cavalry.
I played probably 30 games in a row with a guy who simply could not dismiss the Hollywood version of cavalry from his consciousness when playing this game. Every, single time he plowed his light cavalry directly into my heavy infantry. Every time. No matter how many times I showed him the statistics behind these light cavalry, Hollywood had just brainwashed him into thinking they were heavily armored knights. No matter how many times they got cut to ribbons in scenario after scenario after scenario, he was just incapable of noticing.
The statistics, the personal experience, all of it glided off his smooth brain because he had no narrative to help contextualize it.
Stop trying to make me like you.
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Sorry, still don't get what this has to do with my question. What do you think is being hidden and from whom?
I think the point of the anecdote was that "people will believe all sorts of misconceptions because they saw it on TV or in a movie; black criminality is no different, as the way the media handles it has implanted the context of 'black people are never at fault for anything' in most people's heads." Whether or not that's true, it's hard to say.
For my money, I'd say that the Internet is pretty good at exposing and debunking things that only happen in movies (WRT guns, physics, security...basically anything that would have serious ramifications for one's continued existence in the real world), one Tumblr post or YouTube video at a time.
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Hexes, not freeform positions measured with rulers? Special dice instead of booklets of results tables? Sounds like some sort of children's card game.
Hollywood brainwashing is painfully powerful, I've had instances where I know the factual details of a historical event, read several first-hand accounts then watch a movie about it and have to constantly, conscientiously consciously correct away from made-up details that the lizard brain "remembers" having seen and emotionally knows to be true. "It's like writing history with lightning."
In D&D a long time ago, I mentioned that you could estimate the time by using the width of your fingers to measure the distance between the sun and the horizon. My friends pooh-poohed this and mentioned it for years as an example of me being stupid and believing in dumb shit.
Until Johnny Depp did it in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Then they accepted that it was real. No amount of me googling it, finding good sources or even literally doing it so they could see it was real would help. They had to see Johnny Depp do it.
Welp, that's enough blackpills for me today, gdi
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That game sounds great. How heavy would you say it is? Estimated time to play a simple scenario?
It takes more than an hour, but less than 90 minutes usually. It has 24 pages of wargame rules. But it's a lot of half page illustrations and reference material. Still, if all you've played is Catan, it's gonna be a doozy. I think it's a good entry level consim, if that's your cup of tea. But many people think it might be, go and try to read the rules for their first consim, and nope out after the first 3 pages spend defining all the terms the manual uses. All that said, I think the rulebook for Commands & Colors: Ancients is excellently written, and the first few scenarios have almost no terrain, and no units with wonky special rules.
My favorite games are Twilight Imperium and, recently, Hansa Teutonica. Before I tried the latter Brass: Birmingham had that spot. I don’t mind a dense rule book, but it’s a harder sell to get my friends excited about it!
I’ll check it out.
Maybe try luring them in with Rex for a slightly simplified version of Dune with the Twilight Imperium IP on top. Then you can entice them into a TI3:Shards of the Throne game using the Fall of the Empire scenario.
TI4 seems superior based on few games I played
Is
having something to recommend it? Is it redoable in TI4?
TI4 is generally better as a game but doesn't have quite the same road map. I'm more familiar with TI3 and have the full set of expansions. The Fall of the Empire scenario specifically is a variant with a playable Lazax faction starting with control of Mecatol Rex with a surplus of military power, reduced political power and the objective card win conditions shape the play pretty close to the lore. You can jump from Rex to TI4 but it is slightly less clean of a lore integration. The scenario cannot be replicated in TI4 without significant homebrew because of how dependent it is on the combination of treaty mechanics, the Lazax faction tuning and the objective cards.
The scenario itself is a very natural follow-up to Rex which is the Dune board game rules with various factions fighting on the ground to control Mecatol Rex while instead of the storm from Dune it has a fleet moving around bombarding locations. The mechanics, lore, diplomatic backstabbing and approachability of Rex (compared to Dune or TI proper but definitely still a barrier) seem like an easier sell the TI itself. I haven't played the Galeforce 9 Dune version and while the Avalon Hill one is well loved it has known issues and takes a long time. Rex from my perspective was a better game for the time, matches the TI lore theming pretty well for a barely modified reskin that mostly streamlines some mechanics (made the physical board actually being usable, still not a fan even of the GF9 version but then again Rex's board while usable is very bland) and can be played with fewer players and makes it shorter by an hour or so.
In both Rex and TI3: Fall of the Empire the Lazax naturally fall into a position where you can have an experienced player handling their more complex, initially overpowered position (offset by actual win conditions) acting as a sort of DM playing the BBEG on the board.
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Yeah, you'll probably be fine. Wargame rulebooks are just... different though. They read more like laws, with sections, subsections, sub-subsection, everything enumerated. Rules will often refer to other rules or sections with simple notation like [Section 2] or [Rule 3.2.1]. Once you get over the learning curve behind how different consim rulebooks are written, they aren't so bad. I find a 24 page rulebook is about the limit of the complexity I can handle. Especially since most of them break down into maybe 12 pages of actual rules, and 12 of illustrations and reference. And among those 12 pages of rules, there are probably 8 you'll encounter regularly and 4 that are just cruft bolted on to try to force some historical flavor.
I've played probably 250 games of Axis & Allies over the years and 249 of them were with my buddy Jimmy. And the one that wasn't just him actually involved him as it was a Christmas present from someone's mom. Dude killed himself last year and I haven't played a game since and I'm really itching to play.
I don't think I even like board games, I think I just enjoy Axis & Allies. However, maybe I don't even like AA, maybe I just enjoyed hanging out with him?
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In Victoria 2, populations have the stats 'consciousness' (politically awareness and pursuit of political self-interest) and 'militancy' (how prepared they are to join rebel groups or perform civil unrest). The consciousness and militancy of black populations in Western countries is very high, supported by the media. The consciousness and militancy of white populations is very low, again due to the media.
For example, I'm confident few outside the US have heard of the Zebra murders, where four black men killed somewhere between 15 and 70 whites, wounding several more. They were motivated by some racial-religious angle, there were some connections to the Nation of Islam. There may have been many more involved in the killings who were never uncovered. Fascinatingly, about half the wikipedia page is about various civil rights groups trying to stop what they saw as racial profiling when the police tried to racially profile the all-black suspects.
Yet practically everyone in the entire Anglosphere has heard of Emmett Till, who was lynched. I'm not even American and yet they brought it up in class when I was at high school - we were studying 'To Kill a Mockingbird' as a compulsory text. There are Emmett Till poems and songs and films - Biden signed an Emmett Till anti-lynching act back in 2022. And in marked contrast to the forgotten Zebra Killings, Robert Raben has been lambasting the criminal justice system for not harassing the accuser enough:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/emmett-accuser-carolyn-bryant-donham-last-chance-justice-rcna42415
On a purely objective basis where we ignore the race involved, you'd think the former would be much more widely known. Killing many random whites is surely worse than killing one black, who was thought to have sexually harassed someone. That's merely on the level of honor killings - which clearly isn't good. At least there's some kind of reasoning behind the killing other than racial hatred.
Yet Emmett Till is big news even today, Zebra murders are forgotten.
If a white police officer chokes a black criminal in Minneapolis, or is seen to choke him (I don't really want to go into the George Floyd drugs/breathing thing) there's a giant global media frenzy - there's massive rioting and corporations falling over eachother to support BLM. If a black police officer turns and inexplicably shoots a random white woman who was totally unconnected to his work in Minneapolis... It's so unmemorable I have to check it up online to find it at all.
PS. I really hate that people come here with extremely cringe names like gaygroyper100 or that pedofascist fellow we had earlier. Don't be egregiously obnoxious should apply to that. If someone did that on 4chan with a tripcode they'd be bullied and rightly so.
Your comparison of the Zebra murders with Emmitt Till doesn't work. The Emmitt Till case is well-known because it was historically important. It was an important factor in the success of the Civil Rights Movement, because it engendered white, middle class support therefor. The Civil Rights Movement in turn was nothing less than a social revolution. Moreover, the Emmitt Till case was representative of a much broader phenomenon, ie, Jim Crow. So, of course it is well known. Hell, it was even indirectly responsible for the development of The Twilight Zone.
In contrast, the Zebra killings and shootings had little effect on history or society, though I suppose it is possible that Art Agnos would never have become mayor had he not been a victim. Nor were they representative of a larger social issue. Had they given rise to a race war, or perhaps in the alternative some sort of police state, they would be better known.
And, btw, you answered your own question re the shooting by the Minneapolis police officer (a case that was the subject of about 20 articles in the NY Times, btw): You called it "inexplicable." That implies that it has no greater implication, does it not? Unlike, say, George Floyd, which was, at least arguably, an example ,albeit an extreme one, of the larger phenomenon of excessive force by police. And, btw, it doesn’t help you to misstate the facts of your ostensible examples; the victim in Minneapolis was not "totally unconnected" to the cop's work, because she is the one who called the cops in the first place.
But why? Because that case was widely promulgated in the media. The Civil Rights movement got extremely favorable media coverage: incidents that supported them were played up. Incidents that damaged them were swept under the carpet. Nobody hears about the teacher in a
Because the media didn't run with them and say 'let's have a massive scare campaign about blacks randomly killing whites that we use to raise the militancy of the white population and make them demand more anti-black policies/refuse to support pro-black policies'. They could have chosen to do that, it's within their power. What do you think they would've done if there was a band of 4-8 white supremacists wandering around murdering dozens of blacks on the street?
What, so when George Floyd gets choked and dies that's extreme force but when a woman gets shot dead, it's not? The 'implication' that the media rammed down everyone's throats was that white police officers hate and kill black criminals unjustly. They create that narrative, picking out whatever supports their case regardless of its statistical relevance and then ignoring opposing examples. Police anti-black racism is not a thing, it's been shown statistically: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883
Sure but this doesn't alter my point at all. She wasn't supposed to be a target in any way, shape or form. If it had been some other woman there, he would've shot her too.
Looking over Mohamed Noor's spotty biography, he may have benefited from Affirmative Action by MPD (see: Psychiatric concerns). The Somali community is significant in Minneapolis and they are underrepresented in policing. "Noor had been lauded in the past by Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges and the local Somali community as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area".
Perhaps a story about an incompetent jumpy cop shooting a woman who posed no threat could have been deemed Newsworthy and sparked a debate about Affirmative Action.
There was another bit in his wikipedia page about how he supposedly put a gun to someone's head during a routine traffic stop. All around not a good guy! I left that out for brevity though.
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The Minneapolis case is so bizarre that it is sui generis. It was a rookie cop panicking when someone approached the window of his car, and shooting that person -- and, in doing so, shooting across the body of his partner, who was sitting in the seat next to the window. It was not a cop using excessive force to arrest someone, or to punish someone for giving him lip, or for any of the usual reasons.
I don't understand why that matters. The point is not what they intended (unlike the Zebra killers, who might well have intended to create a race war, IIRC). The point is that one turned out to influence a major, major historical development, and the other did not. That is why everyone has heard of the former, and not the latter.
? Why does it matter whether they had more or less success than they deserved? My point is not about deserts, but about the extent of change that happened subsequently. As I mentioned, the Civil Rights Movement was quite literally a successful social revolution. Whatever success the radical left of the 1970s achieved, it was quite marginal compared to the Civil Rights Movement, which was one of the two or three most momentous developments in US history. Of course we are going to be familiar with people associated therewith.
Well, of course a story can't have impact unless people hear about. But the story of the Zebra killings also was widely told at the time. The reason that one is well known today is because it was part of a massively, massively, massively important historical development. You might as well ask why everyone in the world has heard of Hitler, but not Father Coughlin. After all, they were both anti-Semitic demogogues!
Is number of deaths the only metric? Gandhi didn't kill anyone, yet he is better known than Idi Amin. And probably better known than Pol Pot. And certainly better known than Ratko Mladic. My point was that the relevant distinction is their historical impact. Obviously, part of Hitler's impact was the number of deaths he was responsible for, but Hitler would be far better known than Coughlin even had Hitler stopped with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, and had not engaged in genocide. Father Coughlin is a historical footnote, like the Zebra killings, because ultimately he/they and his/their efforts had little effect on history.
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The story of 70+ people being murdered is of course going to circulate at the time it's happening and not be completely buried. The question is why is it considered literal bar trivia? As mentioned, many of us hadn't heard of the killings at all and have heard of many Dahmer-type serial killers. The obvious reason is the racial angle. Five Klan members killing 70+ black people in the 1970s would still be widely discussed today, but I'm not sure what could convince you of that.
I'm not suggesting a sensational Top Men coverup of the story. It's more mundane than that. People in media will highlight and dwell on stories that conform to their world view and forget or downplay those that counter their worldview.
You are being a bit fast and loose with that 70 number, that is a theoretical maximum that was hypothesized by someone who might or might not be credible.
Anyhow, I have no idea why many of you hadn't heard of it, but I have to say that a lot of people here are poorly informed about a lot of things.
But, here is the real problem. You say:
The problem is that I have never said otherwise. That is obviously true. My claim was very, very specific: That the comparison of the Zebra Killings to Emmitt Till is an awful example. That's what I said: "Your comparison of the Zebra murders with Emmitt Till doesn't work."
The Emmitt Till case is literally the worst possible example he could have chosen, for the reasons I have discussed at length: In a nutshell, it was part of one of the two or three most important developments in US history. In contrast, the Zebra killings seemed at the time, along with the Weathermen, SLA, etc, etc, to be part of an important development, but that turned out not to be the case. That whole movement petered out; the Civil Rights Movement did the opposite. Do you think that the OP knows who the SLA were? I doubt it; why should he? What about Black September?
Not only that, but the victim was unusually charismatic, and if it was just about the "racial angle," why is it that Medgar Evers is not as well known? What about all the other people listed here, virtually all of whom no one has heard of? Again, choosing Emmitt Till, of all possible examples, was just the worst possible choice. The OP's claim, and your own claim that "The obvious reason is the racial angle" are based on the most obvious cherry picking, based on the most superficial analysis imaginable: "One is black, and one is white, and that is all that could possibly be relevant to my comparison." That is not how fruitful comparison is done
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The OP actually made no claim about the amount of coverage that each event had at the time. (And in fact the Zebra killers got enormous coverage at the time). OP's claim was about why one event is known broadly today. Even if Till got more coverage, the difference is not so great that it is a plausible explanation of why it is so much better known today.
Again, the Till story affected history, specifically, it affected one of the most significant developments in US history. Hence, it is included in history books, and hence is still remembered today. The Zodiac case did not affect history, hence it is not remembered.
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I think you are completely missing the posters point.
He's arguing that the Zebra killings could have been every bit as significant as Emmitt Till if the people writing history chose for them to be. They could have been politically impactful if the crafters of narratives and politicians at the time chose for them to be. You are both working with opposite models of cause and effect. He's arguing that powers chose the cultural and historical narrative, and fit the events that advantaged that narrative into our national mythos. You are arguing that events have whatever impact they have, and earn their place in our national mythos by merit.
I'm not sure how it used to work, back when these events were, or weren't, cemented in history. But seeing how it works now, and the raw, naked, narrative crafting that just gets adopted as institutionally protected truth, now and for all time, immutable no matter how much the common people know how wrong it is, I'm more inclined to adopt the OP's framing than yours.
I don't believe that is OP's argument at all. He is complaining about why Till got into history books, and the Zebra killings did not. OP is not complaining about how they were treated at the time -- and in fact the Zebra killings were a big deal at the time, and were seen as a harbinger of things to come (of a piece with various violent radical movements, such at the Weathermen, and the SLA, and the Red Army Faction, etc, etc). And, had they turned out to be a harbinger of things to come, they would be better known. But, that didn't happen; radical left terrorism died out, it was a blip, not the leading edge of a new reality.
Basically, both were seen as a big deal at the time, but only one of them turned out to be at the leading edge of historical change. Hence, it is hardly surprising that only one of them is widely known.
I have never heard of the Zebra killings before now. I would have expected to hear of 70+ racially motivated serial murders in a "non-historical" manner the same way as I have heard about Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Unabomber, etc. None of those serial killers had a historical impact that you could point to, yet they all have Netflix specials.
There are ways to shape this into a historical narrative (or counter-narrative):
Why did the public have a growing taste for Tough On Crime policies in the 1970-90s? Why did large swaths of the public support racial profiling or de-facto racial profiling (stop and frisk, etc.) where Civil Rights organizations did not (as documented in the Zebra wiki)? People trash Biden today for Crime Reform in the 90's (strict sentencing, "Superpredators", etc.), but crime was a top issue in politics in this era.
If the NYT (especially with their writers who are very skilled at crafting narratives) repeatedly reminded the public of the Zebra killings, it would be on everybody's mind every time the topic of racial profiling or Criminal Justice Reform came up. Instead it's just deemed "not relevant".
The Zebra killers also spawned books and TV specials back in the day. And I am unclear what your discussion of crime rates has to do with anything.
Yes, if the NYT repeatedly reminded people of X, more people would know about X. What does that have to do with Emmitt Till?
Earlier you had suggested that the Zebra Killings are not discussed in media because they lack "historical" relevance rather than the story being memory-holed for uncomfortable political reasons. Modern political issues can be given "historical" salience if there is motivation to do so. Bizarro Right Wing-NYT: "Activists say black on white crime is rare, the grandchildren of Zebra Killings victims beg to differ" could be used to promote racial profiling. In this scenario, activists would have statistics on their side, but enough repetition leads to a distorted view of the world.
Emmitt Till is relevant because the story of his murder gets reinvigorated every time progressives want to push for Criminal Justice Reform or to tie it in with some tragic police shooting, giving the story narrative throughline. Between him and George Floyd, people mentally have an anchor when it comes to lynching and police brutality. Vivid stories of "black on white" violence exist but don't receive the same level of obsessive coverage because it would lead the general public to have more right wing views of policing/crime. I don't think obsessive coverage of "black on white" violence is good because it would enflame racial tensions and because they account for a relatively small number of crimes. However, you can't get mad a people noticing the double standards in coverage.
No, I did NOT talk about why the Zebra Killings are not discussed in media, because that was not the question. The OP was talking about why "few outside the US have heard of the Zebra murders . . Yet practically everyone in the entire Anglosphere has heard of Emmett Till," and opining that it must be because of some sort of racial bias.
I simply pointed out that OP's unspoken premise -- that the events are otherwise indistinguishable* -- is incorrect.
*Actually, OP claims that the Zebra killings were "worse," apparently because, not being an American, he does not understand the historical context, symbolism, etc of the Emmitt Till case; which was "worse" is irrelevant. The Emmitt Till case is well known because it ended up having historical significance, not because it was particularly "bad" -- there were certainly worse lynchings than his; as far as I know, for example, he was not castrated. And, at the time, the fact that he was a Northerner was probably more significant that how "bad" the event was.
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Yes, even a movie The Zebra Killer (1974). In which a Black detective, after his Black girlfriend is raped, finds that the murders are commited by a white man in Blackface.
And you think that that movie -- by a director whose oeuvre includes "Three on a Meathook" and "Asylum of Satan" -- is representative because ...? Look, I know a lot of people here are very young, and hence have no memory of events like the Zebra killings, but the idea that somehow they were ignored is just wrong.
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I listed specific examples above.
I also recognize that you can quibble about whether they are truly "hidden" as opposed to downplayed, obfuscated or whatever. Regardless of exactly which word one wishes to use, they are certainly not discoverable for someone not actively seeking them (in contrast to stories/narratives the left wishes to hype). Twitter can change that.
This feels like a dodge, "discoverable" by whom then? Spit it out.
The 6 words after the word "discoverable" in the comment above clarify this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability
Again, discoverable by whom?
To quote the comment you keep refusing to read: "someone not actively seeking them"
If you want a concrete persona for such a user, consider Joe Sportsguy who has logged on to twitter to engage with memes and discussions about any of the current topics of twitter's "Trending" tab. At the moment in the USA, 17 of the top 20 topics are sports, 1 is pro wrestling, and the remaining 2 are sports mislabeled as "business and finance". He occasionally sees other topics in his feed - #wafflehousefights or #blacklivesmatter - and they enter his consciousness. His view of the non-sports world is not based on actual statistics of the world, merely on an average of the things that enter his consciousness via various feeds and media.
Incidentally, this is also why the pressure campaign against Joe Rogan happened. Most of Rogan's podcast is bodybuilding, long distance running and stand up comedians. But in between that mainstream parasocial content there's a bit of stuff the establishment wants to suppress.
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