> Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric language early on in the pandemic, repeatedly referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.”
So why are WHO representatives in Wuhan now? Are they xenophobic too? Is everybody?
The really ugly thing is that most evidence points at corona escaping from the Wuhan lab, which explains the CCP coverup.
Same with LA riots. We all know who were behind it but we can't even say it because of intimidation and political "incorrectness".
Roof Koreans remember exactly who they were shooting at.
edit: I guess you win the bet. You were flagged within 12 minutes. For the awful amount of whining HN does when it comes to big tech censorship, it's guilty of the very same thing. The irony.
I predict my comments will soon be flagged and censored too for dare speaking the truth.
Parent probably would not have been flagged if they had documented their sweeping claim with evidence, but they didn't. It added little to the discussion.
its amazing how language can obscure and censor basic facts. we can't even talk about it because it "offends" ppl, never mind the Korean immigrants who lost everything during the riots.
the koreans in LA all know the races of the people looting their stores. but the victims of the riots can't even point out the perpetrators and wat community they were from 30 years on.
> Many blame the Trump administration for inciting this violence; Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric...
> NYPD date showed that there has been a 1,900 percent increase anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City in the past year... An 84-year-old Thai American man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was killed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco; a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman was assaulted in broad daylight in San Jose... caught on camera shoving a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown
Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City. Only 13% of the votes in San Francisco. Only 25% of the votes in San Jose. And 16% of the votes in Oakland. All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.
Well geez I wonder why this didn't happen in Obama's eight years. Could government sponsored sinophobia driving anti-asian attitudes have anything to do with it. They were shouting anti-china messages during the white house riots.
Well that would perhaps lead to solving some of the problems, which is not in any politician's interest. Having the problems, and blaming them someone else, is far more useful.
> All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.
So? Do you think Trump supporters are more likely to feel persecuted and lash out in rage against vulnerable targets outside of government-sanctioned mechanisms where they are a majority and control local government and institutions or where they are a small minority with little influence on local government and institutions?
And do you think that, even that general factor aside, when looking specifically at attacks on Asians by Trump supporters, the number of Trump supporters in the area is really more important than the frequency of interaction between Trump supporters and Asians?
Perpetrators of racist attacks tend not to be accurate representations of the local population.
And the fact that CA and NY are mentioned rather than Oklahoma and Idaho is far more likely to be the result of there actually being Asian people in New York and California.
Plus, of course, these two states are among the most populated. There are far more Trump voters in California than the Dakotas.
There are 90,000 Asian Americans in Oklahoma. There are over a million in Texas. And more than half a million in Florida. Certainly enough for a pre-mediated act of political terrorism to find a target.
You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population. That's definitely not true outside the coastal states. If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters, the Trump-stronghold of Houston (which has one of the largest Asian-American populations of any American city) should be a hotbed of hate crimes. Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco. Clearly there's an x-factor that goes beyond Trump.
There's about 300,000 in the City of San Francisco.
Heck, there's more of both Asians and Trump supporters in California than any red state, and probably far more of both in just red counties in California than in Oklahoma.
> You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population.
No, you’re constructing a dichotomy where blue states consist entirely of blue counties and blue voters.
> If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters
What if it's driven primarily by Republican voters who are lashing out at highly visible targets outside of official channels where they don't control local and state governments and therefore feel disempowered?
> Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco
San Francisco has about twice as many Asians as Houston, with about 1/3 the total population, for about 6 times the concentration. The average Trump supporter in SF (where, sure, there are fewer) is going to encounter a lot more Asians in daily life than in Houston.
There's a flagged-to-death response here that really deserves a response:
> It's Trump's fault Blacks in CA and NY are attacking Asians?
To the extent that it is blacks attacking Asians this is more plausible than it superficially might seem: people here love to cite the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, but if you think that that is a significant force dealing with content of intellectual interest in a single news source, you probably ought to recognize how much more powerful it is for messages playing on out-group fear relayed through multiple social channels.
Sure, the ground is prepped for it by preexisting background racial animosity, but then even if not Trump specifically, a lot of that is also from racist propaganda of a white supremacist origin permeating society and turning nonwhite groups against each other.
Indian-American here. One thing I often find irritating about the phrase "Asian-American" is that it's usually used to refer to people with East Asian heritage (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc). Somehow people with South Asian heritage, like myself, often aren't included in that category, to the point that my girlfriend was surprised to hear that Indian-Americans count as Asian-American.
I was seeing a woman from Tatarstan, the double eyelid phenotypes were pronounces along with some other features that are even more common in East Asia. There are a lot of people in Russia like that.
I had never heard of that place while in the US, its just “Russia” and an image of the part bordering the EU
The fact that Chinese and other East Asian people look far more similar and are the stereotypical "Asian" than Indians and other South Asians is responsible for that. Likewise, there's another comment here about the Russians (North Asians). To the average American, Indian and Russian are probably separate categories from Asian.
I think this is a symptom of the continent of Asia being so extremely large and diverse. To wit, every definition of Asia also includes the Arabian Peninsula, but most people would probably not intuitively classify Arab Americans as Asian Americans. The appropriation of "Asian American" to almost universally mean "East Asian Americans" is probably due to the lack of a specific, pre-existing demonym to describe people from that region. It's like how South Americans can be rightfully irritated that "American" gets used to refer to someone from the US, which is also partly due to the fact that no more precise demonym ever emerged (not in English, anyway).
> To wit, every definition of Asia also includes the Arabian Peninsula
Specifically the first definition, it refers to Anatolia or the Persian empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continent_name_etymolo...) and the definition expanded from there as more and more land was being discovered. Then our terrible and arbitrary definitions of a continent got thrown into the mix.
Interesting how no mainstream media is reporting this. They sure were quick to label BLM rioters burning down Asian businesses as "peaceful protestors".
New York Magazine is mainstream media, no? Although as someone else noted there is an ethnocultural factor in these incidents that is conveniently under-emphasized because it's real awkward for everyone.
>Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council said: “Our data and evidence of the real-life stories confirm that Asian Americans are facing increasing racist and xenophobic attacks, catalyzed by rhetoric from the president and other government leadership.”
I don't think this is fully do to coronavirus. Media across the entire American political spectrum is beating the same drum: China is the enemy, and they need to be dealt with. Any Asian-American can tell you that the average American's ability to distinguish between people of Chinese ancestry vs. not is essentially nonexistent, so really this is just establishing that people who look East Asian are the enemy.
You'll see the above-mentioned drum beat in this very thread, where a suggestion that China is not the enemy will be met with accusations of being a genocide apologist. I suggest it is worth considering what dogpile you want to join in on, and who is served by you jumping in that dogpile. Consent is being manufactured.
I doubt that the teenagers running up to Asian elders to push them over are motivated by hawkish sentiment toward China. I'd be surprised if they have any awareness of geopolitics whatsoever.
This phenomenon isn't limited to dry discussion of foreign policy. You see it as an endless barrage of distorted, negative articles about every aspect of China posted all over social media. Try opening a reddit thread about China sometime. You won't have to scroll very far before you see someone wishing death upon some Chinese people.
First of all, you underestimate the intelligence of teens and their ability to perceive/think about the world. Second, if there's a pattern of attacks on Asian elders in America as discussed in the article, that isn't any accident. They are being identified and targeted because of their race, motivated by fearmongering about traditional nativist myths and the 'coronavirus made by Asians' myth.
I've often wondered if observing teens and even say ten-year-olds isn't indeed among the better ways of intuiting what attitudes and sentiments actually inhabit a community. Adults are likely to self-censor far more, whereas a young teen or eleven-year-old may simply echo what they've heard behind closed doors.
I have no good opinion on whether or not China, the nation and its government, should be considered an "enemy". But reasonable people can believe a government is an antagonist, while not blaming individuals from that nation.
If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.
But the way to solve it isn't by avoiding uncomfortable truths about governments (or about anything).
This "I hate the government, not the people" schtick is a cop out. The Chinese people overwhelmingly support the actions of their government.
Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.
The Chinese people overwhelmingly support the actions of their government.
How is that relevant? A person who disagrees with me isn't my enemy.
Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.
I can't figure out what you're saying here. What do they know they're doing? And do you have any evidence of your claim?
What they are doing is establishing a shared belief among Americans that Chinese people are deserving of punishment (implied: via military means). For evidence I refer you to the book Manufacturing Consent by well-known computer scientist & political activist Noam Chomsky, who details how the US media again and again has used a strategy of selective reporting to categorize the world's people as deserving or undeserving victims in line with America's foreign policy goals.
The media are colluding to purposefully shift the mindset of American citizens toward believing that Chinese people deserve punishment?
This has the ring of a full-on conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I don't believe for a second that the media could effectively collude on anything of that nature. Certainly not to the point of effectively gradually shifting American sentiment.
Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days. No one has time to read every book by every conspiracy theorist.
Chomsky's model does not rely on a conspiracy for the media to function the way it does. It simply follows from incentives. Cribbing from the wikipedia article, we have:
The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media. These five filters of editorial bias are:
(1) Size, ownership, and profit orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
(2) The advertising license to do business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority."[11] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
(3) Sourcing mass media news: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.[12]
(4) Flak and the enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.[12]
(5) Anti-communism/war on terror: Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism.
Also it must be remarked: calling Chomsky a conspiracy theorist? On hacker news? Come on, man. This is an extensively researched, respected, and cited work.
> But reasonable people can believe a government is an antagonist, while not blaming individuals from that nation.
That's the exception, not the rule, from my experience.
It takes very little to go from "fuck China" to "fuck Chinese people".
> If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.
Is this seen as a problem for the powers that be? Will it ever be addressed? It's just collateral damage from what I can see- same as how brown people were treated during the War on Terror. I'm glad that there's a bit more visibility on this topic, but it's nowhere near solved. I doubt it can ever be solved, cynical as it sounds.
More likely they're seen as vulnerable demographic or unwelcome in certain neighborhoods. The people perpetrating these crimes are not the sort of people tracking the US-China relations.
COVID plus a former social media influencer constantly complaining about China. I’d be more specific but the guy never got beyond „China has been SO UNFAIR to the America“.
Who are these "many", apart from the post author (the Royal "We", maybe), and why are these opinions supposedly worth noting in a factual news article? One can hope that one day that journalistic norms will preclude such weasel-word editorializations.
This isn't attempting to be a "factual news article" and therefore isn't betraying any "journalistic norms". I think a big part of this country's lack of faith in journalism is due to a basic ignorance of the different forms of journalism and how they each have different norms.
You can blame journalists for that. When hard news stories get littered with opinion and bias, the line between opinion and news gets so blurred as to become non-existent.
I‘m pretty sure it would be quite easy to find a reasonable number of people to agree with the statement to qualify as „many“.
Assuming we agree that the pandemic is motivating this violence, it also doesn’t seem particularly controversial that a president going out of his way to highlight the geographic origin of the virus may be a contributing factor.
There is semi-hidden animosity between the black and some Asian communities.
Chinese immigrants are often the ones first moving into and then buying out people in black neighborhoods.
Asian kids do disproportionately well in urban schools. Lowell High School is moving from a scoring based system to a lottery. Asian parents see this as unfair while black parents see the previous system as unfair.
Chinese are traditionally not seen as fighting back. Some criminals see elderly as easy marks due to the tendency to carry cash and due to their frailty.
The trade war with China has spread to demonization of Asians.
BLM riots and the lack of persecution and then the defund the police emboldened criminal activity including physical attacks.
This cycle of animosity and violence last occurred roughly 30 years ago.
If you are willing to pay there are overpriced sales and limited purchase options at your local gun store. There are four million new gun owners and it will take a while for the industry to catch up.
If I could downvote you, I would. You are promoting the use of a dangerous, lethal weapon loaded with the most damaging kind of ammunition on other people. How can you be so cruel?
Edit: people seem to be downvoting my comment without context. The original commenter was advocating for the usage of a gun to kill innocent people. It disgusts me that so many people on this website seem to agree/sympathize with them.
Hollow points don't shoot through people, whereas solid slugs do. Hollow points are the most damaging for only the 1 target, because it dissipates all the damage upon impact.
Do you really think the type of bullet matters? A bullet is a projectile whose sole purpose is to penetrate the human body at subsonic or supersonic speeds. The original commenter was advocating for carrying and using weapons that fire these bullets against innocent people. To me that's just depravity.
If violent people are anything like wild animals, pepper spray is safer and more effective. You actually have a good chance of hitting your attacker with a stream pepper spray, unlike with a tiny bullet. Your attacker (in the case of, say, a moose) is more likely to run away when hit with pepper than with a bullet. And you are less likely to have collateral damage.
Just throwing out there violent people are not like wild amnimals, and in 94% of cases simply drawing a firearm is enough to cause an attacker to flee.
Have you ever been involved with pepper spray? It’s generally terrible for self defense. An attacker isn’t instantly incapacitated — they are still deadly until the full effects of the spray kick in. In the Army, I was trained to keep operating even amongst tear gas. It is horrible, but a violent assailant, especially multiple violent assailants aren’t going to immediately drop to the ground or run away. Being trained and proficient with a firearm is a far better strategy than hoping the attacker happens to be downwind and hoping they aren’t on meth or other drugs that make them seemingly impervious to pepper spray.
All ethnicities go to war with each other in LA, it's such a hell hole. Certain Mexican gangs in the 90s were targeting blacks with extreme violence, not to say that it doesn't go both ways. Still to this day there is a lot of tension between Sureno gangs and Black gangs.
> The trade war with China has spread to demonization of Asians.
Has it really though? I agree with pretty much everything else you said (though I’m unsure if getting a gun is warranted).
I don’t think a trade war with China will spur too much in the way of anti-Asian sentiment. Americans were generally able to differentiate between Russians and their government during the Cold War.
I’m not saying there won’t be notable stories that pop here or there, but I don’t think this country is actually as Nativist as the press makes it out to be.
"Nativist" is a common historical term in the United States to mean someone who is anti-immigration and (usually) anti-immigrant, and tends to be strongly associated with white supremacy.
That was because the Allies expected the Germans to obey "rules of war" in the European tradition, and knew that the Japanese wouldn't. An American GI would be much happier as a POW of Germany than of Japan.
I am in solidarity with those Asian peoples who have been left behind by Tech Capital's H1-B cherry-picking, but I have absolutely no sympathy for Model Minority Settler Colonists Scabs who move into a neighborhood and threaten violence.
Do us a favor and turn that gun on yourself, invader.
You're displacing families in marginalized neighborhoods, you said it yourself. The reasons a family would immigrate here are their own, but the San Francisco Bay Area (especially Oakland) is a refuge of asylum for communities fleeing racist violence in their former homes in the South. Tech immigrants—especially those on this forum privileged by their sycophantic relationships to international Capital—spending the tech money which you were selected to receive in order to price out working class families who have been routinely and systematically denied those privileges which afford your financial leverage are an abomination. You are destroying families, and killing people with the resultant inequality.
We don't want you here. You deserve to be targeted by "criminals", because your "civilized" economic warfare is the greatest crime.
Edit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, "survival of the fittest," and "Kapitalismus Über Alles". You're all a bunch of sycophants for authoritarian power. You're brown-nosing suckup scabs who hate democracy, and love tyranny and that's why you love being placed in positions of privilege above all your former peers.
I never bought into those gentrifying neighborhoods. I don’t even live in those neighborhoods. I grew up in a poor historically Chinese neighborhood. Many of the attacks are occurring historically Asian neighborhoods like that (Oakland and SF Chinatowns). What kind of gentrification are you talking about?
Tech people buy into different neighborhoods from the poorer Asian immigrants. The black neighborhoods were initially gentrified by non tech working class immigrants. Think cooks, construction workers, etc who have their entire families working and who scrounge up money for a down payment. Think Hunter’s Point and the Silver District. Many of those people also fled violence in their home countries. Mine did as did a sister in law.
The historically black neighborhood that is being gentrified by tech is actually Hayes Valley. That isn’t very Asian at all. Rich Asian tech isn’t moving to that neighborhood disproportionately. Rich Asian tech tends to move to suburbs and rich immigrant Asian tech moves to specific neighborhoods like Cupertino.
> Chinese immigrants are often the ones first moving into and then buying out people in black neighborhoods.
My mistake, I took this for a confession. I'll admit I got angrier with you than I should have when you said you were "buying a gun". I took that as a threat of violence, and that is what I responded to.
It's not "Asians" I should be angry with, nor even "Immigrants" since, as you say, many flee violence and persecution to come here. My ancestors certainly did. It would be hypocritical of me to now want to draw up the ladder, and for that reason I fully support illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking immigration.
That being said, even being permitted to "scrounge up money for a down payment" when Black and Latino families have been kept unable to is unconscionable, in my thinking.
I know several H1-B holding Asian immigrants who are, in this decade, buying up real-estate that Black & Latino locals will never be able to afford. I have friends and coworkers on both sides of this arrangement, and it's really sickening to see. Can't you understand that?
There was discrimination against blacks and Latinos. There was lesser discrimination against Asians.
One big difference is that some Asian cultures were big on pooling resources and helping family. I suspect that black culture was weakened by discrimination and Latino culture is just a generation or two behind Asian cultures in terms of home ownership (there seems to be a lot of pooling in some of those cultures).
Many of the poor neighborhoods that Asians moved to are now Latino neighborhoods. Some of those Latino kids growing up in those neighborhoods are now in white collar jobs. The same thing happened to the previous generation of Asian kids.
What abuse? I am not talking about abuse, I am talking about its proper use in the normal course of events, which I consider deleterious to the global economic health: specifically the introduction of anti-union, anti-local workers to technology industry.
And I am uninterested in "white collar jobs besides tech". The tech industry is "eating the world" as Marc Andreessen put it. All meaningful political the power is in the hands of technology industrialists, so it matters who is represented in the technology industry.
Your two opinions contradict each other. On the one hand, you say you are for illegal immigration but on the other you are against the H1-B program. Those anti union, anti local workers as you call them are coming in via illegal immigration if you get your way.
There are many powers besides tech: Wall Street, government, education, medical, military industrial complex, intelligence services, law, media, energy, etc... As tech gets bigger, it appears to be splitting into coalitions based on self interest as well.
> anti union, anti local workers as you call them are coming in via illegal immigration
No they're not. What makes you think that? I have worked in the tech industry all my adult life, and worked closely with countless H1-B holders and they have all, as a rule, been egregiously anti workers-rights, elitist, chauvinistic, misogynistic, and racist; with _few_ exceptions.
I see no reason to assume the same of a different group.
As for these "many powers", they are all nodes of the same industrial tree, and across that tree we see poor representation of Black, Latino, Dalit, and Indigenous leadership and disproportionately representation from White, Han Chinese, and Brahmin communities (although there are obviously still significant prejudicial barriers before Indian workers of all stripes). None of the sectors you mentioned are free from systemic racial prejudice.
It irritates me to no end when Model Minorities complain of racial prejudice while deliberately ignoring the systemic factors which foment racial prejudice. To me it smacks of bad faith. Especially when it ends with "I am buying a gun".
You, a member of a relatively privileged class, threatening fatal violence against the untouchable caste? That willingness to violence to defend your Whiteness is what protects Whiteness from YOU.
First you presumed that I gentrified those neighborhoods when I did not. Now you fail to address the logic of my point about your contradictory views. Then you shift the goalpost from tech to all powers. Then you presume that I ignore systemic prejudice. Lastly your argument relies on the religion that everything is due to systemic prejudice.
If you were to look at actual facts, the picture is far more complex than your Disneyland view of the world. Go look at achievement rates or ethnic groups by generation from immigration. Go look at who from those ethnic groups immigrated. Go look at education levels of Nigerian-Americans. Go look at effects of poverty and cycles of poverty and how discrimination drove poverty. Go look at the rapidly increasing income of Latinos.
What do you hope to gain by denigrating my position as lacking "actual facts"? I don't see you having brought much to the table. This is the end of the discussion, for you? You simply call me delusional and walk away? We have to live on this planet, you know.
I suppose the only difference between the two of us is that you're buying a gun with the explicit purpose of killing Black people.
This is terribly concerning to hear about. It certainly has my attention. But I do ask if this is considered appropriate content for Hacker News. I do ask that we please avoid sharing articles that have no relevance to tech.
For most of 2020 the US gov (and much of the media) emphasized covid being not only from China but "a China virus". They never rejected or downplayed the baseless conspiracy theories that it was man made or a deliberate attack by the Chinese. The US actively promoted the equally baseless fear of espionage through tiktok or wechat (lmao) to the point of trying to ban these apps. Rather than quell peoples' fears and doubts in the midst of a national crisis, fuel was added to the fire. And now the xenophobia is in full force.
The man made "conspiracy theories" are not baseless. There is a substantial amount of evidence that it is at least a possibility. There is also a substantial amount of evidence that China intentionally or unintentionally flubbed the handling of this pandemic at the beginning, and is at least partly responsibly for it's rapid spread.
This article doesn’t back up its claim. The only evidence for an increase in hate crimes is: “a 1,900 percent increase anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City in the past year — there were 20 incidents in the first half of 2020 alone, compared to one in the whole of 2019.”
1900% sounds huge, but the absolute numbers are not. Show me that it’s not a process with mean of 10 and sd of 9. Better still, give me figures for all of the US and show me there’s been an increase. The absence of this statistic is telling. Overall: fake news until proven otherwise!
While not disputing the core point about escalating violence against Asian Americans, this article seems to view any crime or violence as racially motivated. There is a robbery in there, for example, which suggest an alternate motivation. Would be useful to be more clear on what the author considers a hate crime vs crime whose victim is Asian.
The article didn’t add any specific facts to suggest any of these crimes would be charged as “hate crimes” which is generally just an additional penalty to another crime and usually requires at least an acknowledgement of the protected class during the commission of the underlying crime suggesting the victims status as a member of the protected class was material to the criminal act.
The specific victims mentioned were all elderly which is also disturbing and seems to be a growing trend in itself. Since the BLM protests/riots there have been a lot of videos surfacing where a senior citizen is walking solo and gets senselessly sucker-punched and/or knocked out without warning by a lone wolf. I suppose when the elderly victim is Asian, it’s easy to conclude such an assault must be a hate crime, because they are so brutal and otherwise senseless.
I don’t like the idea of mass surveillance but these seem like the ideal types of cases to get a warrant to pinpoint the suspect’s phone to ID them.
Even on HN you can't speak anything good for China so this is no suprise at all unless you think these criminals can tell the difference between a government or a party and a group of people. And how can you ask these criminals for that if many Ivy League graduates fail to recognize it.
The only way for Asian Americans to survive is to protect yourself with whatever you have.
I am perfectly capable of holding nothing but contempt for the Chinese government while harboring exactly zero ill will against Chinese people in general.
I tend to assume Chinese people in the US are there because they feel similar about the government, and I have absolutely no clue how non-Chinese Asians figure into this.
I'm sorry but this article is straight assumption. We see a man push over a elderly man. This is hardly out if the norm for online attacks, I saw a nurse the other day beating a man almost to death while he was recording himself saying "Get off my wald".
The one other race attack they had to say "allegedly". Why allegedly, was their not a court case?
We should all live our neighbours, but the media stating things without solid evidence just bothers me.
In my country our biggest city has 20-30% Asians, our media also tried to say their was more hate crimes. When it turned out they had only started to record them. And something getting robbed counted as a hate crime. (Chinese are very rich on average, and its known they tend to carry large amounts or cash).
My anecdotal experience suggests this seems to be a Cali phenomenon. In Seattle, even with our insane number homeless, addicts, and the uptick in crime this year, we’ve had only a handful of attacks against our Asian citizens. All of which were dealt with swiftly and harshly.
> Many blame the Trump administration for inciting this violence; Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric language early on in the pandemic, repeatedly referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.”
First of all, geographic names for diseases is a very common pattern. There is no such outrage over Zika, Ebola, or West Nile, or even German Measles. The contrived name COVID was created out of deference to the Chinese Communist Party by the head of the WHO, who, as a former Minister in Ethiopia was the beneficiary of several billion dollars in Chinese investment. Note how he ignored Taiwan’s data and warnings in December 2019 and furthered CCP propaganda early in the pandemic despite independent evidence that contradicted the CCP statements. To suggest the WHO is immune from deep corruption among its top official is to ignore just how corrupt Ethiopia is and the vast influence of China over large swaths of Africa.
And secondly, the majority of these hate crime attacks are in deeply Democrat cities. I doubt Oakland feature many Trump acolytes nor does San Francisco or New York. There is a significant (mostly Vietnamese) population in East Texas and Louisiana (the heart of “redneck Trump country,” yet hate crimes against Asians are rare if they happen at all. So blaming Trump is just conveniently avoiding the racism of so-called liberals. The Jesse Smollett “attack” was in the middle of Chicago at night, yet initially it was blamed on Trump supporters. Is there a single Trump supporter in all of Chicago? How many are in downtown Oakland? Rhetorical question, but the point is that in deeply red areas, how many Asian hate crimes have occurred relative to those in deep blue areas?
Hate crimes against anyone is never over ok. Actually any crime is never ok. But blaming Trump is just lazy. Redneck bubbas aren’t the ones doing these crimes in general. People don’t want to confront the strong racism exhibited by minorities against other minorities. It’s always caused by white Trump supporters apparently.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadSo why are WHO representatives in Wuhan now? Are they xenophobic too? Is everybody?
The really ugly thing is that most evidence points at corona escaping from the Wuhan lab, which explains the CCP coverup.
Roof Koreans remember exactly who they were shooting at.
edit: I guess you win the bet. You were flagged within 12 minutes. For the awful amount of whining HN does when it comes to big tech censorship, it's guilty of the very same thing. The irony.
I predict my comments will soon be flagged and censored too for dare speaking the truth.
the koreans in LA all know the races of the people looting their stores. but the victims of the riots can't even point out the perpetrators and wat community they were from 30 years on.
hint: the looters weren't Asian Americans.
> NYPD date showed that there has been a 1,900 percent increase anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City in the past year... An 84-year-old Thai American man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was killed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco; a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman was assaulted in broad daylight in San Jose... caught on camera shoving a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown
Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City. Only 13% of the votes in San Francisco. Only 25% of the votes in San Jose. And 16% of the votes in Oakland. All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.
So? Do you think Trump supporters are more likely to feel persecuted and lash out in rage against vulnerable targets outside of government-sanctioned mechanisms where they are a majority and control local government and institutions or where they are a small minority with little influence on local government and institutions?
And do you think that, even that general factor aside, when looking specifically at attacks on Asians by Trump supporters, the number of Trump supporters in the area is really more important than the frequency of interaction between Trump supporters and Asians?
That's like 600,000 people...
And the fact that CA and NY are mentioned rather than Oklahoma and Idaho is far more likely to be the result of there actually being Asian people in New York and California.
Plus, of course, these two states are among the most populated. There are far more Trump voters in California than the Dakotas.
You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population. That's definitely not true outside the coastal states. If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters, the Trump-stronghold of Houston (which has one of the largest Asian-American populations of any American city) should be a hotbed of hate crimes. Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco. Clearly there's an x-factor that goes beyond Trump.
There's about 300,000 in the City of San Francisco.
Heck, there's more of both Asians and Trump supporters in California than any red state, and probably far more of both in just red counties in California than in Oklahoma.
> You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population.
No, you’re constructing a dichotomy where blue states consist entirely of blue counties and blue voters.
> If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters
What if it's driven primarily by Republican voters who are lashing out at highly visible targets outside of official channels where they don't control local and state governments and therefore feel disempowered?
> Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco
San Francisco has about twice as many Asians as Houston, with about 1/3 the total population, for about 6 times the concentration. The average Trump supporter in SF (where, sure, there are fewer) is going to encounter a lot more Asians in daily life than in Houston.
Yahya Muslim
Yep, definitely sounds like average Trump supporter names...
> It's Trump's fault Blacks in CA and NY are attacking Asians?
To the extent that it is blacks attacking Asians this is more plausible than it superficially might seem: people here love to cite the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, but if you think that that is a significant force dealing with content of intellectual interest in a single news source, you probably ought to recognize how much more powerful it is for messages playing on out-group fear relayed through multiple social channels.
Sure, the ground is prepped for it by preexisting background racial animosity, but then even if not Trump specifically, a lot of that is also from racist propaganda of a white supremacist origin permeating society and turning nonwhite groups against each other.
EDIT: Like clockwork.
ex) Ivy League admissions, quotas in professional schools, etc.
Now the above is real systematic racism. Speaking the truth is dangerous these days.
I had never heard of that place while in the US, its just “Russia” and an image of the part bordering the EU
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Russia
USA is the only country which has America in its name.
Specifically the first definition, it refers to Anatolia or the Persian empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continent_name_etymolo...) and the definition expanded from there as more and more land was being discovered. Then our terrible and arbitrary definitions of a continent got thrown into the mix.
The land bridge from Alaska into Russia means Americans are Asians.
In person, people will think you’re trying to recall Governor Newsom but I’m sure they’ll oblige on this petition too
https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-i...
Wow I hope Biden does something about this.
You'll see the above-mentioned drum beat in this very thread, where a suggestion that China is not the enemy will be met with accusations of being a genocide apologist. I suggest it is worth considering what dogpile you want to join in on, and who is served by you jumping in that dogpile. Consent is being manufactured.
If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.
But the way to solve it isn't by avoiding uncomfortable truths about governments (or about anything).
Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.
How is that relevant? A person who disagrees with me isn't my enemy.
Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.
I can't figure out what you're saying here. What do they know they're doing? And do you have any evidence of your claim?
This has the ring of a full-on conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I don't believe for a second that the media could effectively collude on anything of that nature. Certainly not to the point of effectively gradually shifting American sentiment.
Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days. No one has time to read every book by every conspiracy theorist.
The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media. These five filters of editorial bias are:
(1) Size, ownership, and profit orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
(2) The advertising license to do business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority."[11] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
(3) Sourcing mass media news: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.[12]
(4) Flak and the enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.[12]
(5) Anti-communism/war on terror: Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism.
Also it must be remarked: calling Chomsky a conspiracy theorist? On hacker news? Come on, man. This is an extensively researched, respected, and cited work.
In fact, laughably, you offered an argument that suggests anticommunism has been replaced.
Speaking of Chomsky, I believe he was very critical of Israel was he not? and I believe he was called an anti-semite for it, was he not?
I suppose you can be anti-Israel, but not be an anti-semite, but you can't be anti-CCP without being anti-asian?
After Weiss, Greenwald exposes, you still don't believe they're capable of colluding to stir division or drive certain narratives?
That's the exception, not the rule, from my experience. It takes very little to go from "fuck China" to "fuck Chinese people".
> If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.
Is this seen as a problem for the powers that be? Will it ever be addressed? It's just collateral damage from what I can see- same as how brown people were treated during the War on Terror. I'm glad that there's a bit more visibility on this topic, but it's nowhere near solved. I doubt it can ever be solved, cynical as it sounds.
Who are these "many", apart from the post author (the Royal "We", maybe), and why are these opinions supposedly worth noting in a factual news article? One can hope that one day that journalistic norms will preclude such weasel-word editorializations.
Assuming we agree that the pandemic is motivating this violence, it also doesn’t seem particularly controversial that a president going out of his way to highlight the geographic origin of the virus may be a contributing factor.
Chinese immigrants are often the ones first moving into and then buying out people in black neighborhoods.
Asian kids do disproportionately well in urban schools. Lowell High School is moving from a scoring based system to a lottery. Asian parents see this as unfair while black parents see the previous system as unfair.
Chinese are traditionally not seen as fighting back. Some criminals see elderly as easy marks due to the tendency to carry cash and due to their frailty.
The trade war with China has spread to demonization of Asians.
BLM riots and the lack of persecution and then the defund the police emboldened criminal activity including physical attacks.
This cycle of animosity and violence last occurred roughly 30 years ago.
I’m getting a gun.
good luck. ammo sold out across country.
Edit: people seem to be downvoting my comment without context. The original commenter was advocating for the usage of a gun to kill innocent people. It disgusts me that so many people on this website seem to agree/sympathize with them.
I mean clearly you though it mattered, so I was telling you why people prefer scary sounding hollow point ammo over FMJs.
We don't think, we know.
>A bullet is a projectile whose sole purpose is to penetrate the human body at subsonic or supersonic speeds.
Not even remotely true. There are bullets whose sole purpose is to penetrate paper targets accurately.
>The original commenter was advocating for carrying and using weapons that fire these bullets against innocent people.
Wrong, it was advocacy for carrying and using weapons that fire bullets against guilty felons.
>To me that's just depravity.
To those based in reality, it's a right to self-defense.
If violent people are anything like wild animals, pepper spray is safer and more effective. You actually have a good chance of hitting your attacker with a stream pepper spray, unlike with a tiny bullet. Your attacker (in the case of, say, a moose) is more likely to run away when hit with pepper than with a bullet. And you are less likely to have collateral damage.
Here is one example of why pepper spray is not ideal: https://mynbc15.com/news/local/mobile-woman-shot-after-peppe...
Had the lady shot the suspect, it’s unlikely that she would have been hurt.
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-protest-met-pepper-spray-at...
Has it really though? I agree with pretty much everything else you said (though I’m unsure if getting a gun is warranted).
I don’t think a trade war with China will spur too much in the way of anti-Asian sentiment. Americans were generally able to differentiate between Russians and their government during the Cold War.
I’m not saying there won’t be notable stories that pop here or there, but I don’t think this country is actually as Nativist as the press makes it out to be.
We’ll see I guess.
Stay safe!
And just 20 years before that the Japanese internment camps happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Do us a favor and turn that gun on yourself, invader.
You're displacing families in marginalized neighborhoods, you said it yourself. The reasons a family would immigrate here are their own, but the San Francisco Bay Area (especially Oakland) is a refuge of asylum for communities fleeing racist violence in their former homes in the South. Tech immigrants—especially those on this forum privileged by their sycophantic relationships to international Capital—spending the tech money which you were selected to receive in order to price out working class families who have been routinely and systematically denied those privileges which afford your financial leverage are an abomination. You are destroying families, and killing people with the resultant inequality.
We don't want you here. You deserve to be targeted by "criminals", because your "civilized" economic warfare is the greatest crime.
Edit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, "survival of the fittest," and "Kapitalismus Über Alles". You're all a bunch of sycophants for authoritarian power. You're brown-nosing suckup scabs who hate democracy, and love tyranny and that's why you love being placed in positions of privilege above all your former peers.
I never bought into those gentrifying neighborhoods. I don’t even live in those neighborhoods. I grew up in a poor historically Chinese neighborhood. Many of the attacks are occurring historically Asian neighborhoods like that (Oakland and SF Chinatowns). What kind of gentrification are you talking about?
Tech people buy into different neighborhoods from the poorer Asian immigrants. The black neighborhoods were initially gentrified by non tech working class immigrants. Think cooks, construction workers, etc who have their entire families working and who scrounge up money for a down payment. Think Hunter’s Point and the Silver District. Many of those people also fled violence in their home countries. Mine did as did a sister in law.
The historically black neighborhood that is being gentrified by tech is actually Hayes Valley. That isn’t very Asian at all. Rich Asian tech isn’t moving to that neighborhood disproportionately. Rich Asian tech tends to move to suburbs and rich immigrant Asian tech moves to specific neighborhoods like Cupertino.
My mistake, I took this for a confession. I'll admit I got angrier with you than I should have when you said you were "buying a gun". I took that as a threat of violence, and that is what I responded to.
It's not "Asians" I should be angry with, nor even "Immigrants" since, as you say, many flee violence and persecution to come here. My ancestors certainly did. It would be hypocritical of me to now want to draw up the ladder, and for that reason I fully support illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking immigration.
That being said, even being permitted to "scrounge up money for a down payment" when Black and Latino families have been kept unable to is unconscionable, in my thinking.
I know several H1-B holding Asian immigrants who are, in this decade, buying up real-estate that Black & Latino locals will never be able to afford. I have friends and coworkers on both sides of this arrangement, and it's really sickening to see. Can't you understand that?
One big difference is that some Asian cultures were big on pooling resources and helping family. I suspect that black culture was weakened by discrimination and Latino culture is just a generation or two behind Asian cultures in terms of home ownership (there seems to be a lot of pooling in some of those cultures).
Many of the poor neighborhoods that Asians moved to are now Latino neighborhoods. Some of those Latino kids growing up in those neighborhoods are now in white collar jobs. The same thing happened to the previous generation of Asian kids.
Tech companies are hiring 100x as many H1-B Asian immigrants as they are local Latino workers.
If you are against H1-B then so be it. There is definitely some abuse but there is some good too. I would say that it would be best to reform it.
What abuse? I am not talking about abuse, I am talking about its proper use in the normal course of events, which I consider deleterious to the global economic health: specifically the introduction of anti-union, anti-local workers to technology industry.
And I am uninterested in "white collar jobs besides tech". The tech industry is "eating the world" as Marc Andreessen put it. All meaningful political the power is in the hands of technology industrialists, so it matters who is represented in the technology industry.
There are many powers besides tech: Wall Street, government, education, medical, military industrial complex, intelligence services, law, media, energy, etc... As tech gets bigger, it appears to be splitting into coalitions based on self interest as well.
No they're not. What makes you think that? I have worked in the tech industry all my adult life, and worked closely with countless H1-B holders and they have all, as a rule, been egregiously anti workers-rights, elitist, chauvinistic, misogynistic, and racist; with _few_ exceptions.
I see no reason to assume the same of a different group.
As for these "many powers", they are all nodes of the same industrial tree, and across that tree we see poor representation of Black, Latino, Dalit, and Indigenous leadership and disproportionately representation from White, Han Chinese, and Brahmin communities (although there are obviously still significant prejudicial barriers before Indian workers of all stripes). None of the sectors you mentioned are free from systemic racial prejudice.
It irritates me to no end when Model Minorities complain of racial prejudice while deliberately ignoring the systemic factors which foment racial prejudice. To me it smacks of bad faith. Especially when it ends with "I am buying a gun".
You, a member of a relatively privileged class, threatening fatal violence against the untouchable caste? That willingness to violence to defend your Whiteness is what protects Whiteness from YOU.
If you were to look at actual facts, the picture is far more complex than your Disneyland view of the world. Go look at achievement rates or ethnic groups by generation from immigration. Go look at who from those ethnic groups immigrated. Go look at education levels of Nigerian-Americans. Go look at effects of poverty and cycles of poverty and how discrimination drove poverty. Go look at the rapidly increasing income of Latinos.
Your argument is strongly reminiscent of the political Disneyland as described in https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html. Everybody is either all good or all bad. Things are binary.
Good bye. Feel free to live in your own Disneyland.
I suppose the only difference between the two of us is that you're buying a gun with the explicit purpose of killing Black people.
Then maybe you will get a better understanding why some of those kids excel in school and why their parents were able to buy those houses.
People shouldn’t forget about the African-American and Korean animosity during the LA riots. This stuff goes way back.
1900% sounds huge, but the absolute numbers are not. Show me that it’s not a process with mean of 10 and sd of 9. Better still, give me figures for all of the US and show me there’s been an increase. The absence of this statistic is telling. Overall: fake news until proven otherwise!
The specific victims mentioned were all elderly which is also disturbing and seems to be a growing trend in itself. Since the BLM protests/riots there have been a lot of videos surfacing where a senior citizen is walking solo and gets senselessly sucker-punched and/or knocked out without warning by a lone wolf. I suppose when the elderly victim is Asian, it’s easy to conclude such an assault must be a hate crime, because they are so brutal and otherwise senseless.
I don’t like the idea of mass surveillance but these seem like the ideal types of cases to get a warrant to pinpoint the suspect’s phone to ID them.
The only way for Asian Americans to survive is to protect yourself with whatever you have.
Downvote me white boys.
I tend to assume Chinese people in the US are there because they feel similar about the government, and I have absolutely no clue how non-Chinese Asians figure into this.
The one other race attack they had to say "allegedly". Why allegedly, was their not a court case?
We should all live our neighbours, but the media stating things without solid evidence just bothers me.
In my country our biggest city has 20-30% Asians, our media also tried to say their was more hate crimes. When it turned out they had only started to record them. And something getting robbed counted as a hate crime. (Chinese are very rich on average, and its known they tend to carry large amounts or cash).
First of all, geographic names for diseases is a very common pattern. There is no such outrage over Zika, Ebola, or West Nile, or even German Measles. The contrived name COVID was created out of deference to the Chinese Communist Party by the head of the WHO, who, as a former Minister in Ethiopia was the beneficiary of several billion dollars in Chinese investment. Note how he ignored Taiwan’s data and warnings in December 2019 and furthered CCP propaganda early in the pandemic despite independent evidence that contradicted the CCP statements. To suggest the WHO is immune from deep corruption among its top official is to ignore just how corrupt Ethiopia is and the vast influence of China over large swaths of Africa.
And secondly, the majority of these hate crime attacks are in deeply Democrat cities. I doubt Oakland feature many Trump acolytes nor does San Francisco or New York. There is a significant (mostly Vietnamese) population in East Texas and Louisiana (the heart of “redneck Trump country,” yet hate crimes against Asians are rare if they happen at all. So blaming Trump is just conveniently avoiding the racism of so-called liberals. The Jesse Smollett “attack” was in the middle of Chicago at night, yet initially it was blamed on Trump supporters. Is there a single Trump supporter in all of Chicago? How many are in downtown Oakland? Rhetorical question, but the point is that in deeply red areas, how many Asian hate crimes have occurred relative to those in deep blue areas?
Hate crimes against anyone is never over ok. Actually any crime is never ok. But blaming Trump is just lazy. Redneck bubbas aren’t the ones doing these crimes in general. People don’t want to confront the strong racism exhibited by minorities against other minorities. It’s always caused by white Trump supporters apparently.