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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim)

Called by some "Coulter's Law":

The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.

Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions,

To be fair Apophasis exists for a reason. Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers. See also: Don't stuff beans up your nose.

Here in the Washington DC area, everyone's taken it for granted for decades: carjackers, robbers and other violent criminals (except the occasional domestic murderer), and professional thieves/shoplifters, are never white.

Edit: And of course, you'll never find anybody drawing attention to that fact in public, as that would be "hate speech"; the metro area is 99% blue tribe.

Are there even working class or underclass whites in DC?

Not since 1965 or so in DC itself. School desegregation in 1954 caused the trickle of white flight to turn into a torrent, making for the "Chocolate City/Vanilla Suburbs" that obtained until:

1973 in Prince Georges County, when school busing was introduced to achieve racial balance and created an even greater surge of white flight there, and

The early eighties in the rest of suburbia, when the first wave of Central American immigrants started pouring into the affordable garden apartment complexes, displacing the whites from there and pretty soon taking all the fast food, landscaping and physical labor jobs. Nowadays, on the buses and at the bus stops in Fairfax County, you will not hear one word of English (even the drivers are all foreigners now! (And most of the taxi drivers are African immigrants and Afghanis.)), nearly all small shops are owned and staffed by immigrants, and Fairfax County schools are maybe 35% white, down from ~80% in my high-school years forty years ago. Less than that in Montgomery County and in the low single digit percentages in DC and Prince Georges.

Pretty much all the whites here are white-collar PMC types, and the white working class has decamped to remote trailer parks many miles from the nearest public transit.

Not really as local residents. There are some amount of folks who commute in from VA/MD and as far as WV for service work.

Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers.

Isn't this the whole reasoning behind "journalistic balance"? You present one side of the debate, the other side of the debate, then allow the readers/viewers to draw their own conclusions.

A healthy journalistic approach to the debate around trans women in prisons would look something like this:

Alice: Given the minimal risk that trans women pose to female inmates (as evidenced by studies A, B and C) and the elevated risk of sexual assault they face in male prisons (as evidenced by studies X, Y and Z), I believe it is appropriate to house trans women inmates in female prisons rather than male.

Bob: I disagree - I believe the risk that trans women pose to female inmates has been vastly understated (as evidenced by studies D, E and F). Furthermore...

Instead what we so often get is:

"Bob has become notorious in recent years for his outspoken views on trans issues, which have been widely criticised as transphobic and demeaning to trans people."

Me: "Wow, that sounds really bad. Shame that the article doesn't tell me what these views are." half an hour of Googling later "Oh. He thinks it's inappropriate to house trans women in female prisons if they haven't transitioned. This is a totally normal opinion that the majority of people believe, which doesn't remotely imply that you hate trans people or wish them harm."

As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas - on some level, the journalist thinks their own ideas are so weak and unintuitive that even mentioning an opposing view will make a convert of the average reader. Indeed, we already know this is the standard attitude of trans activists everywhere, given that their whole modus operandi is to smuggle in unpopular pro-trans legislation under the guise of gay rights legislation which the average voter actually does endorse.

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