Were the murders you mention streamed live on video games?
I'm quite sad to see race-baiting on HN. I don't buy the naivete that, golly shucks, there just aren't any other differences between this case and the ones you listed above except for race.
> Were the murders you mention streamed live on video games?
My point exactly. No murders were streamed live on videogames (or anywhere, in 1993), yet they got congressional hearings. Live-streaming has never been a condition for dragging everyone remotely related to an atrocity through the mud.
Of all the sites being investigated, the killings were only streamed on Twitch. If live-streaming was the issue, why involve the other sites?
No, your point is that this reckoning is happening because the alleged killer is white and the victims are black.
Trying to change your point to which murders were live-streamed and the exact number of connections to follow for investigation is a smokescreen.
> No murders were streamed live on videogames (or anywhere, in 1993), yet they got congressional hearings.
Or is your point truly that no deaths 30 years ago resulted in congressional inquiry, and you're shocked that a mass murder planned and live-streamed on social media now is resulting in inquiry?
Every time innocent people are killed by a psychopath, everything should get a very hard and sharp "probe"... In hopes of discouraging the shockingly cowardly behavior.
Especially the killer(s).
There were numerous reports and investigations and even a documentary on the beltway snipers.
We shouldn't ask why one incident gets more scrutiny compared to another.
I thought we had come to the understanding that “probing” the killer, I.e. giving them, and not the victims, a lot of press, naming them, publishing their image, their ideas, etc. only encouraged other would be mass murderers.
> There were numerous reports and investigations and even a documentary on the beltway snipers.
Yes, on the snipers themselves. Aside from a gun-control related lawsuit, there was no spillover of negative attention to everyone remotely associated with the snipers' ideology or motives.
Oh, there was a Law & Order episode based on this massacre. But they took some artistic liberty with the perpetrators: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629419/
> We shouldn't ask why one incident gets more scrutiny compared to another.
why not? If the incidents had similar death counts and other neutral metrics, they ought to be similarly treated.
The problem with selective scrutiny is that it enables discriminatory, tactical politicalization of an event. If society is to move towards equality and equal treatment of all, remove racism and biases, it has to treat all events with equal importance.
In a similar vein, the johnny depp and amber heard suit has revealed that domestic violence is just as much a problem for men, but they are often not believed because society has assigned less importance to an event that otherwise should've been treated equally as the female counter-part.
The cases are different by circumstance and factors.
That is why we have the judicial system, which is meant to evaluate details and determine circumstances.
If outcomes are not fair for one case or another, which happens all the time, it should be traced back to accountability of involved parties on an individual basis.
Trying to create an inaccurate equivalence between two completely different instances of mass shooting events as a meter or proof of racial inequity does nothing useful and means nothing productive as a discussion. You'd need a lot more data than that. It's also not the key point to what I was posting about.
Johnny Depp and Amber Herd doesn't even register to me right now, there are far more serious issues affecting all of us, and they're wealthy and grown adults that don't need us or even the media involved in their personal issues in my opinion.
Seems like the NY AG felt like it, that’s how. It’s not like things weren’t investigated at all in those other situations, here they decided to make a press release about it.
For planning: The DC shooters meticulously planned their efforts over decades and fitted out a vehicle. The Waukesha perpetrator spent years describing in detail how much he disliked white people and all the ways he was going to kill them.
For mental illness: The Buffalo shooter, in his Discord conversations, admitted to permanently considering suicide for days at a time. He called himself a communist and an eco-terrorist in his manifesto. The DC shooters were determined to not be mentally unwell.
The DC attacks showed no regard for race, gender or age. The Waukesha attacker is clearly mentally ill, and has a history of mental illness.
The Buffalo shooter did try and commit suicide. That was the attack. But he decided to do so in a clearly racially aggravated way, above and beyond any of the other examples you listed.
He did it with forethought, planned online communities with both outright and subtle racist members, and live-streamed it.
If you cannot see the difference between this and the other incidents you listed, that’s the “ignoring reality” bit I mentioned earlier.
And FYI calling yourself an eco-terrorist isn’t on-par with saying lizard people run the world and FEMA run death camps. When it comes to mental illness people fall into a spectrum.
The Buffalo shooters victims also included victims that were not of the targeted ethnicity. Why are you so desperate to create some kind of twisted criteria to include some particular racially motivated attacks and not others?
I understand this is a heated subject, but please don't accuse people on HN of "ignoring reality". It's enough to just state the facts and make your argument persuasively; I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that many open minded people here who are indeed willing to change their mind when presented with strong evidence.
If you try hard enough, you can come up with a convoluted criterion that will exclude any murder you want to ignore, and include any you want to highlight.
> If you try hard enough, you can come up with a convoluted criterion that will exclude any murder you want to ignore, and include any you want to highlight.
The only criterion I used was "murders that, despite being ideologically charged, did not cause the government or media to tar any associated movements, ideologies, or people with it".
I don't find this very convoluted. Another point of difference is I merely gave examples - I did not claim the murders were more or less heinous because of some detail of the crime or perpetrators, such as the presence or absence of mental illness, planning, a manifesto, etc..
I don't view this as race baiting. OP made a perfectly valid criticism that other comparable mass killings seemed to get a very different treatment. Live streaming shouldn't be a deciding factor here, and there are "like-minded people" for almost any niche if one looks hard enough on the internet.
1) different jurisdictions, different people running them.
2) a planned conscious organized attempt to start a race war, versus apparent mental illness. A manifesto that explicitly invokes platforms and their roles.
3) yes it is race baiting because the proposal is literally that white people are treated harsher than black people when a mass shooter.
Shall we consider that proposal, Tucker Carlson , wink wink, or shall we say: “knock it off, you can’t be seriously proposing that”?
I personally think such a proposal can be answered “no“. Only in liberal blue NYC does a black shooter get taken into custody, elsewhere they get shot by cops. White shooters are always getting coddled and taken in alive by LEOs, in my limited 50 years on this planet, and I find the notion that someone in contemporary America suggests that white prole are treated worse than black people to be abhorrent and only used to stoke more sense of unearned victimhood where it doesn’t belong.
It’s a subtle push towards starting a race war, in my personal view. Disgusting.
> Only in liberal blue NYC does a black shooter get taken into custody, elsewhere they get shot by cops. White shooters are always getting coddled and taken in alive by LEOs
I'm afraid you're simply mistaken. Adjusted for rate of violent crime [1], police use of lethal force is similar for both whites and blacks [2]. But I understand why you think so - the journalist that dared honestly report this got fired for it.
> the proposal is literally that white people are treated harsher than black people when a mass shooter.
I didn't intend to comment on the treatment of the mass shooters themselves at all, but on how different mass shootings are treated in the national conversation.
[1] Defined by nearly any measure, including ones the police cannot (easily) fudge, such as homicide rate and victimization surveys that bypass the police entirely.
It is pretty simple. Probes like congressional hearings and public AG probes are a public governmental reaction to highly offensive or shocking crimes.
Simply put, white supremacist mass shootings are highly offensive and shocking.
Yes, they are more shocking and offensive than anti-white mass shootings for most people. And yes, that is racist too
Poor oppressed white people. Victims of racism. Fortunately, some white people have the courage to speak up. In a discussion about a mass murder of black people.
Yes it is asymmetric and stupid. What about it? If this is presented as evidence that reporting and public commentary has bias and inconsistencies, I think that is already known.
I'm not sure if your sarcasm is directed at me or someone else.
I do think it is unproductive to turn the conversation into a competition, or dismiss someone else's suffering. I think we can all agree it is both sad and disgusting when white or black people die in racially motivated violence.
Yes, sorry. Nowadays I'm more and more concerned about the sincerity of people seemingly genuinely asking "questions". You know... Supremacists aren't always open with their views, and I know for a fact that the non-open ones tend to ask toxic questions and say things that implicitly push such extreme political views. I hope you're not one of them.
I wasn't asking any questions, I was providing answers.
I don't particularly believe in "toxic" questions, but don't like beating around the bush either. I find the best way to deal with either is to cut through the crap and give an honest answer, as I tried to do here.
Extremists hold some contrarian views that are true, and some that are grossly untrue. Extremists only benefit when the mainstream opposition denies the views that are true. This is the primary conversion tactic.
extreme example: A White supremacist says the sky is blue and finds someone Mainstream to argue that it is red. A third party listens to the argument and sees the extremists making points about the color of the sky and wonders if they are right about white supremacy too.
This thread fits that mold perfectly.
Some argues that hate crimes are published differently in the media depending on the race of the perpetrators. My answer is: yeah, so what?
Why does reddit get a pass? The shooter was posting on reddit until the day of the shooting. He posted about tactical gear and ammo, which were actually relevant to the execution of the attack.
Who said there's any pass? From the AG press release:
> Specifically, the investigations will focus on those platforms that may have been used to stream, promote, or plan the event, including but not limited to Twitch (owned by Amazon), 4chan, 8chan, and Discord.
Sure, but why isn't it being called out explicitly?
Twitch was used to stream the event, 4chan/8chan/Discord were likely used to promote the event, and reddit was likely used to plan it. His post history suggests he used the site to obtain tactical gear [0], so it probably played a more important role than Twitch (a streaming site which is interchangeable with its competitors).
If we are to believe the shooter's manifesto; he heavily used Reddit and was a relatively new user of 4chan, which he initially browsed due to boredom when he heard about it having a board about firearms (something he obsessively posted about on Reddit) called '/k/' and a board about the outdoors called '/out/.' He then found a board about politics called '/pol/' which lead him to discover full fledged hardcore neo-nazi websites which promote violence, sites which he lists. These being; "The Daily Stormer," "World Truth Videos," and "Daily Archives." After this point he says he started agreeing with these distorted world views.
I believe the concern is that by focusing only on the platforms he used to "stream, promote, or plan the event" the probe is effectively neutered and won't lead to real change. It appears that the three neo-nazi websites he discovered through messages on the /pol/ board of 4chan are the most culpable in his radicalization, but these three key sites that hold this culpability are not mentioned as being targets of the probe. Also in his manifesto the 8chan link appears to go to a real working website called 8chan, but it is not the url of the actual 8chan website according to a quick google search.
This leads to even more questions too, like why did they not mention if they would also probe police conduct when they allowed him to have firearms. Despite him making a shooting threat that was investigated prior?
He was a reddit user for a long time pre-radicalizatiin. Then he went to /pol/ and became radicalized sometime after. He had to leave reddit to find the material that radicalized him.
America seems to have a blase culture about actually preventing these mass-shootings after they occur outside of virtue-signaling (see the popular Onion trope "No Way to Prevent This") but at the same time one could have the concern of certain entities unfairly targeting certain otherwise benign platforms that may have been used by individuals encouraging certain criminal acts with liability thus leading to concerns like the stripping of Section 230 publisher protections and the resulting chilling effects on free-speech.
>America seems to have a blase culture about actually preventing these mass-shootings after they occur outside of virtue-signaling
The truth is that people value the freedoms that allow these shootings more than they value preventing them.
It's simply not acceptable to say that you're okay with people dying sometimes but people make these decisions constantly when there's not someone publicly pleading to think of the children.
Guns is the example here but that's just where Europeans see a big discrepancy in conclusion but the same decisions are made everywhere. Americans just have a slightly different position but that slight difference is magnified because the vast majority of other positions are very similar.
I remember before Trump came and there were Islamist attacks across the world and praying was considered enough. (Besides worrying about victimized muslims). These actions seem excessive to me.
Just another naked grab for power and assault on the 1st Amendment by authoritarians in government.
The Buffalo murderer was flagged to police long before the attack for making violent threats. He was involuntarily held in a mental facility briefly as a result. Yet there are demands for "greater surveillance powers" for the government. It's sickening to see our so-called "leaders" exploit this tragedy to further carve way our freedoms, but unfortunately that is par for the course.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadSo that’s probably why.
Nor did all my examples precede MySpace.
I'm quite sad to see race-baiting on HN. I don't buy the naivete that, golly shucks, there just aren't any other differences between this case and the ones you listed above except for race.
My point exactly. No murders were streamed live on videogames (or anywhere, in 1993), yet they got congressional hearings. Live-streaming has never been a condition for dragging everyone remotely related to an atrocity through the mud.
Of all the sites being investigated, the killings were only streamed on Twitch. If live-streaming was the issue, why involve the other sites?
No, your point is that this reckoning is happening because the alleged killer is white and the victims are black.
Trying to change your point to which murders were live-streamed and the exact number of connections to follow for investigation is a smokescreen.
> No murders were streamed live on videogames (or anywhere, in 1993), yet they got congressional hearings.
Or is your point truly that no deaths 30 years ago resulted in congressional inquiry, and you're shocked that a mass murder planned and live-streamed on social media now is resulting in inquiry?
Especially the killer(s).
There were numerous reports and investigations and even a documentary on the beltway snipers.
We shouldn't ask why one incident gets more scrutiny compared to another.
Yes, on the snipers themselves. Aside from a gun-control related lawsuit, there was no spillover of negative attention to everyone remotely associated with the snipers' ideology or motives.
Oh, there was a Law & Order episode based on this massacre. But they took some artistic liberty with the perpetrators: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629419/
why not? If the incidents had similar death counts and other neutral metrics, they ought to be similarly treated.
The problem with selective scrutiny is that it enables discriminatory, tactical politicalization of an event. If society is to move towards equality and equal treatment of all, remove racism and biases, it has to treat all events with equal importance.
In a similar vein, the johnny depp and amber heard suit has revealed that domestic violence is just as much a problem for men, but they are often not believed because society has assigned less importance to an event that otherwise should've been treated equally as the female counter-part.
That is why we have the judicial system, which is meant to evaluate details and determine circumstances.
If outcomes are not fair for one case or another, which happens all the time, it should be traced back to accountability of involved parties on an individual basis.
Trying to create an inaccurate equivalence between two completely different instances of mass shooting events as a meter or proof of racial inequity does nothing useful and means nothing productive as a discussion. You'd need a lot more data than that. It's also not the key point to what I was posting about.
Johnny Depp and Amber Herd doesn't even register to me right now, there are far more serious issues affecting all of us, and they're wealthy and grown adults that don't need us or even the media involved in their personal issues in my opinion.
For mental illness: The Buffalo shooter, in his Discord conversations, admitted to permanently considering suicide for days at a time. He called himself a communist and an eco-terrorist in his manifesto. The DC shooters were determined to not be mentally unwell.
The Buffalo shooter did try and commit suicide. That was the attack. But he decided to do so in a clearly racially aggravated way, above and beyond any of the other examples you listed.
He did it with forethought, planned online communities with both outright and subtle racist members, and live-streamed it.
If you cannot see the difference between this and the other incidents you listed, that’s the “ignoring reality” bit I mentioned earlier.
And FYI calling yourself an eco-terrorist isn’t on-par with saying lizard people run the world and FEMA run death camps. When it comes to mental illness people fall into a spectrum.
"Muhammad's goal in Phase One was to kill six white people a day for 30 days." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
Conversations end when one side completely disregards reality.
Indeed, because in reality their victims where white, black and hispanic.
It's just not very persuasive.
Isn’t that exactly what you just did?
I don't find this very convoluted. Another point of difference is I merely gave examples - I did not claim the murders were more or less heinous because of some detail of the crime or perpetrators, such as the presence or absence of mental illness, planning, a manifesto, etc..
2) a planned conscious organized attempt to start a race war, versus apparent mental illness. A manifesto that explicitly invokes platforms and their roles.
3) yes it is race baiting because the proposal is literally that white people are treated harsher than black people when a mass shooter. Shall we consider that proposal, Tucker Carlson , wink wink, or shall we say: “knock it off, you can’t be seriously proposing that”?
I personally think such a proposal can be answered “no“. Only in liberal blue NYC does a black shooter get taken into custody, elsewhere they get shot by cops. White shooters are always getting coddled and taken in alive by LEOs, in my limited 50 years on this planet, and I find the notion that someone in contemporary America suggests that white prole are treated worse than black people to be abhorrent and only used to stoke more sense of unearned victimhood where it doesn’t belong. It’s a subtle push towards starting a race war, in my personal view. Disgusting.
I'm afraid you're simply mistaken. Adjusted for rate of violent crime [1], police use of lethal force is similar for both whites and blacks [2]. But I understand why you think so - the journalist that dared honestly report this got fired for it.
> the proposal is literally that white people are treated harsher than black people when a mass shooter.
I didn't intend to comment on the treatment of the mass shooters themselves at all, but on how different mass shootings are treated in the national conversation.
[1] Defined by nearly any measure, including ones the police cannot (easily) fudge, such as homicide rate and victimization surveys that bypass the police entirely.
[2] https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-...
It is pretty simple. Probes like congressional hearings and public AG probes are a public governmental reaction to highly offensive or shocking crimes.
Simply put, white supremacist mass shootings are highly offensive and shocking.
Yes, they are more shocking and offensive than anti-white mass shootings for most people. And yes, that is racist too
Can I recommend you a video? Please give it a chance. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cXZ6BZzQeCQ
Of course, when the victims are white, it's not a mass murder of white people - it's just a mass murder of people.
I do think it is unproductive to turn the conversation into a competition, or dismiss someone else's suffering. I think we can all agree it is both sad and disgusting when white or black people die in racially motivated violence.
Extremists hold some contrarian views that are true, and some that are grossly untrue. Extremists only benefit when the mainstream opposition denies the views that are true. This is the primary conversion tactic.
extreme example: A White supremacist says the sky is blue and finds someone Mainstream to argue that it is red. A third party listens to the argument and sees the extremists making points about the color of the sky and wonders if they are right about white supremacy too.
This thread fits that mold perfectly.
Some argues that hate crimes are published differently in the media depending on the race of the perpetrators. My answer is: yeah, so what?
I can think of two reasons. One, the perpetrators didn’t use social media, and two, there was no social media for them to use.
> Specifically, the investigations will focus on those platforms that may have been used to stream, promote, or plan the event, including but not limited to Twitch (owned by Amazon), 4chan, 8chan, and Discord.
Twitch was used to stream the event, 4chan/8chan/Discord were likely used to promote the event, and reddit was likely used to plan it. His post history suggests he used the site to obtain tactical gear [0], so it probably played a more important role than Twitch (a streaming site which is interchangeable with its competitors).
https://camas.unddit.com/#{%22author%22:%22Jimbo-boiii%22,%2...
I believe the concern is that by focusing only on the platforms he used to "stream, promote, or plan the event" the probe is effectively neutered and won't lead to real change. It appears that the three neo-nazi websites he discovered through messages on the /pol/ board of 4chan are the most culpable in his radicalization, but these three key sites that hold this culpability are not mentioned as being targets of the probe. Also in his manifesto the 8chan link appears to go to a real working website called 8chan, but it is not the url of the actual 8chan website according to a quick google search.
This leads to even more questions too, like why did they not mention if they would also probe police conduct when they allowed him to have firearms. Despite him making a shooting threat that was investigated prior?
The NRA has lobbyists and 4chan doesn’t.
The truth is that people value the freedoms that allow these shootings more than they value preventing them.
It's simply not acceptable to say that you're okay with people dying sometimes but people make these decisions constantly when there's not someone publicly pleading to think of the children.
Guns is the example here but that's just where Europeans see a big discrepancy in conclusion but the same decisions are made everywhere. Americans just have a slightly different position but that slight difference is magnified because the vast majority of other positions are very similar.
The Buffalo murderer was flagged to police long before the attack for making violent threats. He was involuntarily held in a mental facility briefly as a result. Yet there are demands for "greater surveillance powers" for the government. It's sickening to see our so-called "leaders" exploit this tragedy to further carve way our freedoms, but unfortunately that is par for the course.