It’s crazy how when a lie takes hold, it just stays forever.
Another is relayed to January 6th protests. A friend today, a conservative DeSantis supporter, told me that he knew that on January 6th, the protestors killed several police officers.
This is, as we know now, absolutely false. It was based on a rumor, and once the reporting caught up, it turned out to be false.
Similarly I’m sure there will be Canadians who know that there were these mass unmarked child graves at schools. But again: totally false.
My teenage son was shocked when I told him that none of the three people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black, and didn't believe me at first until he googled it (and even google showed, on every link, that both of the people he killed and the one he wounded were white). He told his friends, and they didn't believe him until they googled it.
Be careful with your wording here - the suicide of Officer Smith, at least, has been pretty unambiguously tied directly back to trauma suffered on Jan 6th. So while a police officer wasn't directly killed through physical violence on Jan 6th the actions of protestors can be fairly said to have instigated the death of a police officer.
I think the big misstatement of the media here was the unrelated natural causes death of an officer (from essentially a stroke) on January 7th - but law enforcement lives were lost due to January 6th.
This seems like total post-hoc reasoning like the debunked "violent video games cause real-life violence."
Ultimately Officer Smith chose to take his own life; no one made that choice for him. He may have been appalled or traumatized or whatever, but ultimately he's the one who did it. Doesn't make it any less tragic, but it's extremely tenuous absent additional evidence to lay blame at anyone but he himself.
If there was some evidence that he was subject to unique abuse and was personally targeted on that day, then maybe there might be some merit. But of the officers who were there, he experienced roughly what the other officers did, and he was the only one to commit suicide.
Sorry, I had omitted sourcing in my original comment but here:
> Dr. Jonathan Arden, the former Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia was hired by Smith's widow as part of her lawsuit to have her husband's suicide ruled "in the line of duty". His report stated that the "acute, precipitating event that caused the death of Officer Smith was his occupational exposure to the traumatic events he suffered on January 6, 2021".[1]
What is outrageous about investigating a person's motivations/psychology, and why does it become more outrageous if that person is deceased at the time of the investigation? You may disagree with the conclusion for some reason, but it seems like standard practice.
She hired an expert to get the ruling “line of duty” because it changes and increases his life insurance payouts. It also gives her access to survivors benefits and a slew of other things like part of his pension.
Yes, it was a precedent breaking ruling - which tend not to be given out lightly. That is a strong indicator that during this motion all of the evidence was under even higher scrutiny.
Ask around and be horrified as to how many people confidently think Kyle Rittenhouse shot one or more people who were
1. unarmed
2. black
(edit: I see now someone made the above point a few minutes before i finished typing my message, but I suppose that goes to show how widespread this myth is)
Conservatives get the brunt of blame for "conspiracy theories" and "disinformation" these days, and while I won't deny it doesn't happen (like it has for years), the left has just as much, if not more that I hear every day, but they never realize or take accountability for it because they have the popular narrative that runs all major corporations and the greater internet.
What's really horrifying is how many people seem unaware that the people he shot were under the impression that they were trying to stop an active shooter. You know, do that good-guy-with-a-gun thing, while acting on initially (but not eventually) incorrect information.
It's quite likely that if he were the one gunned down, and not the other way around, the people who did so would have walked, too.
At this point in time, shots had been fired, Rittenhouse shot and killed a man, and was identified by the crowd as an active shooter. Huber was trying to disarm Rittenhouse, when he was shot and killed. This happened in front of Grosskreutz, who at this point had every reason to believe that Rittenhouse was an active shooter (And was then shot and injured by Rittenhouse).
Since in an active shooter situation, both the 'good guy with a gun' and 'the good guy without a gun' can't sit around and wait for eight months for a jury trial to find the active shooter to actually be innocent, both Huber and Grosskreutz reacted rather reasonably.
It seems to me that legally, nobody, except maybe Rosenbaum (Who was dead by the time of the events of the second confrontation) was in the wrong in that whole situation. It's all 'good guys with a gun' shooting at eachother because sweet fuckin' Jesus, nobody ever has all the facts about who was justified about killing whom when there's a public gunfight happening.
I thought you were saying that he was initially chased and attacked because the (first) person he shot thought he was an active shooter.
You're saying that after he was an active shooter, people were chasing him because they thought he was an active shooter? If so, I don't think that no one knows this, I think no one cares.
-----
edit: The statement you made was "the people [Rittenhouse] shot were under the impression that they were trying to stop an active shooter." I asked for a reference. You begin and end the reply to that request by saying that the first person he shot wasn't under the impression he was an active shooter.
My problem is the deception. I am a proud left-winger, and I think Quillette is trash. I'm disturbed that people are intentionally trying to cloud the facts about issues to score political points. When you say that the people Rittenhouse shot were under the impression that he was an active shooter, and somebody looks that up and finds out that it is untrue, they'll think that people who hold the same opinions as you are liars. That affects me, and the things that I believe in.
Quillette is cynically using the exact same "social-panic" tactics they're criticizing to create exactly your conclusion.
The Q article has exactly two complaints about the facts reported by the media:
1. The media claimed bodies were unearthed, when in fact only scans were taken.
2. The media claimed there were mass graves, when in fact scans only detected masses of individual graves.
However, in "social-panic" style, conservatives are taking these two quibbles over terminology and turning them into an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy to deny the graves existence altogether.
Note also the subtle racism in the article, where they compare a hypothetical instant-response to the murder of white children to the "very odd" response of the first nation people. The implication being that first nations people are incompetent, uncaring, or untrustworthy by not immediately doing a certain kind of investigation.
I actually think "unearthed" as in "discovered" is the more reasonable read - along with someone thinking they're clever in making a pun. When history is "unearthed" with radar, we generally assume some folks took a big expensive machine aimed it at the ground and walked away with a strong indication that something exists down there - when it comes to delicate items (like, for instance a decaying longboat that exists in the earth merely as concentrations of plant fiber in a suspicious shape) and especially when it comes to human remains (that people are often very reluctant to move due for cultural reasons) that's especially the case.
The implication seemed (to me at least) to be that first nations people were not being afforded the same respect as their white counterparts would have been.
You seem determined to downplay these graves, but the kettle logic of "these graves don't exist and also they do exist and we all know about them but they aren't a problem" undermines your argument.
Are you seriously going to pretend that these suspected graves aren't being used to allege that the treatment of natives in Canada was worse than previously believed?
Yes? I think people are just generally a little underinforned about this kind of stuff, so the actual details can be shocking.
And some people still overreact and try to cover it up and whitewash it.
The US Civil war being about slavery still seems to be considered an eleborate hoax to some people.
And they do the same "yes well the centuries of slavery, death, rape and murder is all true, and well established historical fact obviously, but <minor historical innaccuracy>! So basically they're overreacting and undermining our great nation by talking about stuff that happened." and it's cringe in both cases.
To be fair 5 officers died not long after the attack. Brian Sidnick was pepper sprayed twice and died a day later suffering two strokes. Howard Liebengood and Jeffrey Smith died by suicide a few days after the attack, and Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida died by suicide a few months later.
A popular Facebook post claimed that Joe Biden said that several police officers died during the attack, which could be the source of the lie.
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.
Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing them? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and accept the punishment. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a person for their crimes or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy soldier.
Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.
The C.S. Lewis quote above (the one I replied to) is from Mere Christianity. As to whether the original quote is relevant to this Quillette story, your guess is as good as mine.
Later
I'm being coy, because I don't believe most people who deploy this quote have read Mere Christianity, which is ungracious of me (and technically a violation of our guidelines). So: to put it more directly:
Lewis isn't asking people to be skeptical of wrongdoing. The quote is from an essay on forgiveness. That chapter explicitly references the harm Germans inflicted on Poles and Jewish people. Lewis isn't skeptical of that harm (to say the least), and he's not exhorting people towards skepticism of wrongdoing in general.
What he's saying is that you should be careful not to attribute to random people, by dint of their belonging to some specific group, the worst possible harms you can come up with. And he's saying that you shouldn't because it's an impediment to the Christian virtue of forgiveness; to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love your imputed enemies as yourself, and to do that you have to find a way to forgive them their transgressions against you, and, more immediately, the transgressions of their groups.
I quoted the paragraph immediately following the quote offered (in implicit support of skepticism, as that quote is almost always used). I could just as easily have quoted the paragraph that immediately precedes it:
Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and
treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.
But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry
that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow,
sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
Even after all that exegesis, your presumptive point remains obscure. The top-level comment is relevant because it happens to describe the malicious credulity of the journalism consumers who chose to believe the mass graves narrative.
I don't think my point is obscure at all. It is, simply, that C.S. Lewis didn't write that quote to exhort people to skepticism of all wrongdoing; he was instead reminding people not to invent wrongdoing to impute to strangers by dint of them being "enemies". The quote, here, was ill used, as it so often is.
Again: when Lewis wrote this, he was talking about the Nazis, the authors of many of the worst crimes in history. Lewis was no Holocaust denier: he was acutely aware of --- and reminds his reader throughout Christian Behavior of --- the wrongdoings he's alluding to. It might be hard to find a more inapposite quote for this story.
I have no idea what happened in the residential schools in Canada, and no opinion about this particular article. But I do have an opinion about the abuse of C.S. Lewis on message boards.
FWIW, I read their quoting of C.S. Lewis as supporting precisely the viewpoint C.S. Lewis was intending — and the very same as you make a case for throughout this thread. Though I’ll admit I could be wrong.
However, applying Occam’s razor: GP merely quoted C.S. Lewis, so it would seem to me that the simplest (and most charitable) interpretation is that they understood the quote and we’re not using it in any ironic/sarcastic way.
I find your reaction/response to GP a little confusing, but as best as I can tell: are you thinking they were using the quote in an intentionally ironic way as a means of making a jab at C.S. Lewis’ character/beliefs?
This whole thread has been really confusing, so I’d love to understand where the (apparent) disconnect is between both parties :).
I understand Lewis to be saying that you shouldn't revel in revelations of wrongdoing or cling to them in the face of evidence, because your duty as a Christian is to find a way to forgive even your enemies; that you should hate (his word) the wrongdoing itself, not giving it an inch, but be careful not to needlessly attach it to specific people without cause, or to allow such an attachment to impede your process of forgiving them.
Then, he's not saying that you should, on spec, be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing, or especially generous to mitigating claims. One way you know that's the opposite of his intent is that the essay is framed around the crimes of the Nazis; there is no possible way Lewis is suggesting we should be wary of news stories about the Nazis. Again: Nazism is a backdrop for not just the essay, or Christian Behavior, but really most of Mere Christianity.
This is a thread where really all we have to go on is a story about whether a media claim about wrongdoing is true, or can be mitigated. The quote then reads as an affirmation of the story! The quote would be saying exactly the thing I just said I believe it doesn't say.
But Lewis' quote doesn't apply here at all, unless you not only strip it of its context, but also turn it against that context. Nobody (at least, nobody identified) is reveling in what may have happened at the residential schools, or using it as a device to avoid forgiving any particular person. Our interest in the truth of what happened, and even our skepticism of mitigating claims, is totally independent of our duty to forgive, just as Lewis points out that our willingness to punish (or even kill) transgressors is independent of our duty to forgive them.
I think the whole thing is a lot clearer if you include the paragraph before and after the super-popular "newspaper article" quote.
I'm not clear on how I misread the original intent of the quote! I'm still interested in hearing that. So I'm re-explaining my own original intent in responding to it, but wouldn't want to be construed as doubling down on it.
My personal stake in this discussion is: I think Mere Christianity is pretty neat, and I'm attentive of the ways it gets used in online discussions. I don't know enough about Canadian history to have a stake in the truth of the residential school claims, though note that there is an expert rebuttal of these Quillette claims, from an archeological authority, downthread.
> Nobody (at least, nobody identified) is reveling in what may have happened at the residential schools, or using it as a device to avoid forgiving any particular person.
I believe this is where the misunderstanding lies. I think the root commenter is implying that that's exactly what the media was trying to do when they chose to push this narrative in the first place. The idea is that the media organizations in the linked article were trying to highlight historical wrongs in an attempt to ensure those wrongs are kept at the forefront of everyone's minds and not forgiven, and that resulted in "a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible", even in the face of a lack of evidence.
The lack of skepticism isn't the point; it's what motivated the lack of skepticism in this case that the root comment was discussing. You can certainly disagree about whether that really was the media organizations' underlying motivation/bias, but I think the original quote is relevant.
Part of the problem is that CS Lewis wrote in a deeply ambiguous way, that makes it hard to see what he is trying to say. (And since he is writing about and from a position of religiousity, that ia an extra step backwards from sense-making philosophy.) Quoting him out of context make it even worse.
I said downthread that it might be hard to come up with a more inapposite quote for a story about skepticism of wrongdoing, and you'd've one-upped me here. :)
I believe the quote, with context excised and transported here, has value without its original subject. i.e. if someone had written it without being C.S.Lewis talking about Nazis, I would have upvoted them.
And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
If the quote hadn't been italicized and followed with "(C.S. Lewis)" I wouldn't have responded. And, if I'm misreading the intent of the quote --- that it isn't being used as a sort of generic "be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing and generous with mitigating claims", well, then, I'm just wrong. But if the quote was intended the way I think it was (see previous sentence): it's being used to say almost literally the opposite of what Lewis was saying.
More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
Absolutely understand. I was sort of alluding to that with the last line (one must, after all, source what one is repeating). And for what it's worth, I enjoyed what you and the other fellow mentioned because I am neither familiar with Lewis nor Bonhoeffer. More "I think that other guy meant this" intent from me, and less "you shouldn't have said what you did".
So when a child is raped (which definitely happened, by definition) we should avoid talking about it because it might hurt the case of the person accused of the crime? The justice system assumes innocence until proven guilty. The court of public opinion need hold no such lofty ideal. Nor should it.
There's a difference between talking thoughtfully about a child's lived experience/trauma and "using" it shamelessly as political points to own [the other side].
There should be a presumption of innocence in the sense that the public should assume the accused is innocent until evidence is publicly shared that suggests their guilt.
So far the only evidence shared with the public is a confession. Confessions are notoriously unreliability.
There will be more evidence. DNA tests are being done as we speak.
They were 10, if the other party was the suspected 27 year old adult then...
That is rape.
If the other party was some other person - then that 27 year old shouldn't be wrongly convicted, but someone raped that 10 year old. I, btw, haven't seen anyone chomping at the bit at the specific suspected other party - the discussion I've seen has been focused on the health care and trauma treatment for the 10 year old.
If the suspect is acquitted in both the legal system and court of public opinion, than there had been an additional injustice: an innocent man had his name drawn through the mud.
Right now the only evidence being presented is his confession: confessions suck as evidence. And it seems he is not a native English speaker. Non native English speakers are especially prone to false confessions (in America), because they don’t understand everything being said and signed.
“Sign this paper please, it’s a receipt for your goods. Now sign this paper, it’s consent to medical treatment by prison staff. Now sign this paper, it summarizes everything you told us so you won’t have to be questioned again.”
There are DNA tests being done as we speak. If raped her, the only way he’s getting away is if someone else raped her too and that other person impregnated her too (DNA is from fetus).
Need? No, you can’t force people to think things. Should? Yes, absolutely it should. People are accused of, but later found innocent of, crimes all the time.
Well certainly not you, you can't even remember the age. But all too happy to repeat the ole "don't politicize it" talking point. It's a political point because it is the 100% predictable outcome of these abortion policies.
> Reminds me of the story of the 11 year old who was raped and had to cross state lines for an abortion.
Unless it happened again already, it was a 9-10 year old, depending on whether you are referring to when she was raped or when she had left the state to get an abortion.
> Too many people treated it like a political point tally.
Side1: If your political position is enacted, Bad Thing will happen, hurting people.
Side2: You are inventing unlikely scenarios for political points, you aren't really concerned about the people that you pretend Bad Thing will happen to.
...Side2 policy adopted...
...Bad Thing immediately happens as predicted...
Side1: Look, Bad Thing just happened.
Side2: You don't care about the person Bad Thing happened to, you are just scoring political points.
More like Side3: Bad Things will happen sooner or later. So the report of a Bad Thing at a politically useful time is helpful even if it’s loosely supported. Because Bad Thing will happen eventually regardless.
Edit: I don’t think the time of the reports was particularly helpful. The day before the story was verified, someone had published an op-Ed in NYTimes titles “Laugh at my abortion with me.” Nobody’s laughing about a preteen being raped.
Does anyone care about an arbitrary other person? Sounds unlikely. Even at the 99th percentile of people, I think the most effort I'd expend to make their life better is zero. And, to be honest, I think most people would spend less than $1k to save an arbitrary life. Given that, it sounds rather trite.
Even if they did care (unlikely as that is), there is no way to intervene in an arbitrary 11-year-old's healthcare.
The scope of action is in the design of the society that permits harm as defined in one way or the other. And that's politics. So people are acting in the only way that makes sense.
The reason why I hold the political positions that I do at its foundations has the fact that I care if this is going on in the society that I live in, because I don't think anyone should have to go through that. Or ectopic pregnancies that can't be aborted, etc.
If you think I'm just trying to "score points" you're projecting. I don't support abortion in order to "own the Trumpers" and rub their noses in abortions, I really think it produces a worse society, with more suffering.
It's extremely unlikely these graves are fake. Why? Because the large number of deaths is not something newly-discovered. It has been known for a hundred years that large number of children were dying from disease (mainly turburculosis) due to overcrowding. For example Dr. Bryce wrote of the appaling conditions he saw in the 1920s https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft
One clarification I suppose is that it is unlikely the graves were always unmarked. Most likely they, like many poor people, were buried with wooden crosses which later disintegrated.
This is a dangerous path to go down without a really full understanding of the situation and the acknowledgement that your statement is covering hundreds of thousands of individual compacts between specific tribal leaders and specific administrators. Additionally "tribes wanted" is a really dangerous statement on its own since "tribes" can be hard to define fairly - if you've been following the news about pipelines you may have heard specific tribes both assent and dissenting to access through their lands. A lot of tribes have a pretty loose organization of leadership consisting of both Hereditary and Elected chiefs - and, when it's convenient, governments will occasionally just recognize any old rando they can find that agrees with them as a representative of the tribe.
This is a really hairy topic to begin with and it gets a lot more hairy when you also take into consideration that tribes were frequently being lied to. Canada doesn't have a great record of being either upfront nor fidelitous when it comes to compacts with native americans and if we only have primary contemporary accounts from the "winning side" you need to be highly skeptical of how biased those accounts are.
We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools - whether tribes were initially lied to and sold a rosy picture or whether that force was used initially is an interesting topic, but it's one that we will probably only have clarity on for a handful of tribes and it might take quite a while to settle on a narrative of that topic that can be well supported by evidence.
First, we need to dispense with rhetoric like 'this is a dangerous path'. I fully understand that tribes are different and people disagree and in particular, that 'tribes' are ruled by people who may not actually be in charge, may not reflect their tribe's real viewpoint, or may have ulterior motives.
However, it is equally dangerous to go down the path of 'Canada did this to massacre the tribes and eradicate their culture while no tribe wanted this'. This is also not the case. In certain cases, the tribes did have well defined boundaries, and leadership, and the leadership negotiated for many other concessions successfully, but didn't so much as put up a fuss about the schools.
> We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools
I believe I literally acknowledged such atrocities in my post above. Moreover, as I again stated, I understand that a tribe's leaders may not have the tribe's best interests at heart. It is actually possible, and still a regular occurrence today, for one's government to make decisions that are incredibly hurtful to individual citizens.
Other allegations against the government are also overstated. I didn't mention them above. One obvious example is the claim siblings were separated. This is actually unevidenced. The most evidence the TRC could produce was that brothers and sisters were sent to sex segregated schools or dorms. Uh... this is a good thing. If sexual abuse is what you're trying to prevent having girls in the same housing with boys, etc, is going to be extremely toxic.
I am in no way excusing Canada's actions. I am merely putting them into context. These are salient facts ignored from the debate for fear they may not make the tribes as sympathetic a target. Why? If the case is so strong for the abuses taking place (and I believe there was certainly abuse taking place that ought to be investigated), what is the point of ignoring salient information?
EDIT: Oh also I'm not referring to hundreds of thousands of compacts. I am referring to the numbered treaties, which refer to 11 treaties signed between Canada and the native tribes of various regions.
Isn't it possible that some indigenous people "saw the writing on the wall," realized that "if you can't beat 'em, join em," and capitulated with the institutions of their own genocide more enthusiastically than we might demand from the privilege of our armchairs and hindsight?
Yes. But if we're going by possibility it's also possible the chiefs sold out their own people and misrepresented their desires to the Canadian government.
After all in many treaties the financial compensation of the chief was drastically more than the common member. For example in treaty 11 chiefs got 25000 while lay people got 5 dollars. That is a pretty clear disincentive.
There are dangerous precedents that some groups, like procrastinators, learn about but other people seem to have to learn much more slowly.
If you insist on treating every interaction as if it happens in a vacuum and for both parties to see the events as isolated, you're gonna have a bad time. If you are chronically late for work nobody cares if your transmission exploded on the way into work and that's why you were legitimately an hour late. You've already played that card on previous encounters and you've used up all of your credits.
If two groups have a history of horrible interactions with each other, people are going to assume the latest incident is just true to form, even if it really was just a misunderstanding and a bad game of telephone. Because of course Group B pulled some shit again. They 'always' do. Trying to find someone's boundaries and living your life right on the edge of them is just a slower version of "fuck around and find out."
I learned recently that there are actually businesses that cater to the demographic of boomers whose children won't speak to them anymore. Like entrepreneurs are making business plans and incorporating to take money from these people. The stories I know are all about how they realized that their parents weren't even going to meet some fairly low bar set by the kids, and they thought their children were bluffing. You push and push and you'll be making your own retirement home arrangements, all the while repeating some narrative about how it was about pronouns or people of color.
Based on what facts? The tribes negotiated the treaties and negotiated fairly large changes from the governments initial proposals (mainly to do with more monetary funding). Yet, they said little about schooling.
Perhaps they didn't know what was going on (and I agree that abuses took place), but the desire for their children to be more European was absolutely there. It is very clearly documented. This is in stark contrast to the claim that such things were forced upon the tribes. It seemed that a shared goal of the Canadian government and tribes was the integration of the natives with the Canadian nation. I don't see how this is deniable. The claim that the government committed 'cultural genocide' honestly falls flat for me.
I have no idea what the tribes knew or did not know. Do you? I am amazed at some people's abilities to read other's minds.
As to the tribal leaders signing the documents. I can understand how the monetary promises given to them by the Canadian government would make them overlook the potential for atrocities yes; such things are well attested to in the history of humanity. But again, I have no idea. You asked me to speculate, so I did.
I don't understand why there is so much outrage today when one expresses that they do not know an unknowable fact.
What atrocities, exactly? You’re begging the question. One of the main atrocities we are talking about is forcing the children to adopt European culture.
If you’re simply saying that some bad things happened at these boarding schools… we’ll, yeah. That’s a known reality in all boarding schools. Doesn’t make it ok. But many many people knew about those sorts of things and cared and also didn’t think the solution was to ban boarding schools. (Others, of course, as in all ages, didn’t care.)
Stories recounting cruel physical and sexual abuse are only a google search away. Of thousands of children being disappeared. Of being woken in the middle of the night to dig graves.
Yeah, the other weird thing about the whole situation is that (1) these things likely happened in other European boarding schools of a similar nature and (2) the physical punishments the students were subject to were par for the course in that era. The forced kidnapping is still wrong, but that doesn't mean we also need to add in other less substantiated claims.
Some of those are fair, but he loses a lot of credibility by comparing an opinion article and a news article as evidence of the NY Times distorting the facts to fit some preconceived narrative.
It's hard to see that as an innocent mistake; rather, it seems in this case HE is distorting the facts to fit HIS narrative.
same as with covid, which is dangerous but not anymore so than many other preventable causes of death that are completely ignored instead of hyped as the end-of-the-world.
we are truly in an age of perpetual unfounded social panic. thanks twitter.
as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.
I used to believe that more education would help, but today it seems that the most educated are most likely to spread these dangerous kinds of misinformation, whereas uneducated people are most likely to question it. The educated seem to be more dangerous if for no other reason than they control the media.
Something I have noticed too, and it seems to be a common trend many are noticing. What do you think causes it? Anyone know any studied terms to explain this?
My thinking was that "smart" people are busier and outsource their thinking in other aspects to media they can trust. If that media lies to them, they are smart, so they don't want to admit they were wrong. They are too smart to be fooled! But I don't know if that explanation holds up.
Honestly, I have no idea. Being somewhat educated and by all other metrics part of the 'elite' I am flummoxed by people demographically like myself [1].
[1] By other metrics I mean, I live in a West Coast coastal city, in a rich neighborhood, work in tech, educated, etc. By all measurements I should be like others, but I'm not.
What if I told you that every single one of them tells themselves the exact same thing? You wouldn't believe me of course. But then, neither would they believe you.
You probably believe as much nonsense as they do, but you've only noticed what is actually a very small non-overlapping slice of the very large overlapping collection of nonsense beliefs you share with them.
> the most educated are most likely to spread these dangerous kinds
good observation and i completely see your point, but are those people really educated in a scientific sense (and know their confidence intervals) or did they just finish their liberal arts degree and learn some french words?
We can all tell you weren't actually listening to the experts you so detest because that wasn't their stated rationale. The rationale was "flatten the curve" -- some hospitals were two doubling periods away from having parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of ventilators. That's what the lockdowns were about. Making sure we never overwhelmed the medical infrastructure.
Subsequent R-control measures were about making sure it stayed that way. As better options for keeping the hospitals safely under-capacity appeared -- first vaccines, and then simply the fact that subsequent variants sent a smaller fraction of the infected to ventilators -- the measures were relaxed. As was appropriate.
What's amazing are the number people who continue to stick to Trump's initial February 2020 "ignore it and it will go away like magic" alternate reality, even though the man himself abandoned it in March 2020.
I ignored it and it went away. I worked as a cashier at Walmart during most of the pandemic lockdown times and came down with multiple bacterial illnesses as a direct result of having a piece of cloth over my face for eight hours a day, yet somehow never caught covid, despite remaining unvaccinated while working at a Walmart in a tourist town during tourist season. my local civic center set up an emergency clinic that remained 100% unused for the entire time it was active. the Sturgis Rally being nearby was supposed to make us (Rapid City, SD) a superspreader disease nexus, and that never happened either—more people died from traffic accidents (which were down from previous years!) than covid.
and now it's gone! look at that.
at some point, even if only years after the fact, one must reconcile the reality of the situation with the narrative they were sold on, and ask themselves if the two line up at all. how many Republican-voting Americans today still believe the Iraq invasion was ever really truly about weapons of mass destruction, or that the entire incursion was righteous in any way? how many Republican-voting Americans have any love left for the 43rd President at all, despite their fervor at the time?
>as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there. I think, empirically, you will find the opposite relationship.
Quick look at sources from Wikipedia confirms that the articles’ basic assumptions have a rather loose association with facts. And the site itself is known for propagating hoaxes and promoting alt-right (Noah Carl).
Yes - look at the table summarizing discoveries of bodies, then follow to the sources. Contrary to the article above, those are not “alleged” or “unproven”.
It's hard to believe that, given he only said one was wrong, you think he might have meant the others were wrong as well. You should try to rephrase your question to get at your eventual point, rather than try to lead people.
You can menstruate with one ovary, and get pregnant with none, so at the very least the other two are sloppily worded.
That's if you count them as three separate claims, to my count they're all combined into one statement, which means the whole thing is logically false if any part is false, which is the case here.
> Nature doesn’t decide where the category of “male” ends and the category of “intersex” begins, or where the category of “intersex” ends and the category of “female” begins. Humans decide.
Most humans have never met someone with red hair. Intersex people are about the same size group as a percentage but possibly more evenly distributed and harder to spot from a distance.
But yeah, 1 in 100 people, that's nothing, I don't care about or even believe in the existence of any group smaller than about 800 million myself, left-handed people only just make the cut at 1 in 10 but everyone else with made up genetic conditions like epilepsy, albinism, red hair or autism, or the mythical people with less than 2 arms and legs, just stop thinking you are special and be normal, that's what I say.
I think it's misleading to say that "men can't have babies" is taboo. What you're actually referring to is a semantic argument about gender identity, and the one-sentence version just omits that context so it can "look" objectively true.
If I admit that it's taboo, I've proved you wrong? That's backwards. Or if I admit that a biological man can't have a baby? Which, yes, I do admit (barring sci-fi-ish implant science I'm not informed on), but that doesn't prove you wrong either. Regardless, I'm confused about your point - if you're referring to people who literally think that biological men can have babies, it's hard to believe that you think they are so prevalent that they pervade all of public space. Unless you just mean that the unqualified act of declaring they can't in public will provoke a negative reaction, which seems reasonable - without context, that declaration is most often used as part of an implication that we should hate or mistreat certain people, whereas I, for example, am saying it in an honest/relevant (in my opinion) context.
"One sees cartoons of pregnant men, and yet that is impossible for a biological man. True or false?"
To interject in this conversation: if this sentence really is "taboo" I'd argue it's perhaps because you are not using the currently accepted term, like a person who insists on saying "negro" instead of "African American".
Or perhaps it's taboo because you bring it up at weird moments. I just watched an episode of Family Guy where family patriarch Peter Griffith says "I won't be in the next few storylines because I am real life pregnant." The show is a cartoon, so the joke is both that he's "real life" anything (which is impossible) and also suddenly inexplicably being written as female.
But if you watched that episode with friends and start ranting about how Peter Griffith, cartoon character, can't get "real life" pregnant cause he's biologically male, people might think there's something socially off about you because that's a pretty odd reaction to a Family Guy joke.
Is it "taboo" or isn't it? Maybe just skip the ad hominem stuff and the silly analogies.
> you are not using the currently accepted term
I think you mean the term that you use. Most humans continue to speak of "men" and "women" as those terms have always been used, with the understanding that exceptions do occur.
To recap: you used the nonstandard term "biological man".
I responded that biological man wasn't the currently accepted term people use.
You then claimed "Most humans continue to speak of "men" and "women" as those terms have always been used" with the term "biological man" mysteriously dropped from the response as if you realized how ridiculous it would sound if you claimed most people went around using the nonstandard term "biological man" but you felt like arguing with me for whatever reason anyway as if I wasn't going to notice you suddenly dropping the nonstandard term you were using when you responded to the statement I made about the nonstandard term you were using.
I don't really see anything in what I read as a wonderful genocide denial piece of the likes you see on catholic news sites right now, about how the decision to exhume or not exhume is being taken with a lot of care and the decisions lie with the tribes on how to do this. It sounds like at the Kamloops site, they're working on an archaeological dig. [1] These things take time for reasons of doing what may involve the respectful and dignified exhumation of potential corpses. If it's just some anomaly then the people writing shit like this have a LOT of words to eat. It's pretty much their word over elderly indigenous survivors who have pretty much pointed to where they remembered dead kids going in where to do some initial evidence gathering.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. This happened in Canada regardless of whether or not there's graves in these sites, but "oh yeah where's the dead kids bodies already" is in my opinion kind of a horrible point of view given light of the necessarily slow paced process that's happening to uncover the truth.
People die at schools esp. boarding schools of all kinds, all the time, of normal causes. There aren't really allegations that somehow these schools 'killed people' in the 1960's (i.e. in living memory as you suggest) - or even in the past (when people died at much higher rates than normal population of illness etc.) and your choice of words very clearly misrepresents the situation, which is actually the issue presented in the article: how people lie about serious and inflammatory issues.
There were major revelations about a century ago that Aboriginal children were dying at higher rates than otherwise, mostly due to tuberculosis, which spread rapidly at the shcools over a century ago - it was a 'huge controversy' even in 1922 - when the government commissioned an investigation into the situation. [1]
Also, note (same reference) that deaths from aboriginal kids since WW2/1945 is basically the same as death of kids from the general population overall, which abnegates some idea of even accidental physical genocidal acts due to systematic oppression. These facts, which adds nuance to the situation, create a more realistic dynamic to the historical situation than your choice of words (similar to those in the press) would imply. Hence - misrepresentation and hyperbole.
what issues have you found with the text of the article that makes it unsuitable to be posted here? I've never heard of this publication, but found the article to be an excellent read. I only had vaguely heard about the "mass graves" situation months and months ago and was completely unaware that no bodies have actually been found. this article does a great job of presenting this information, contrasting it with the blatantly false NYT reporting on the subject, and tying the whole thing together with warnings about media-fueled moral panic mass hysteria, which is a pretty important topic to learn more about these days.
I found the article well-reasoned and level-headed, completely free of political extremism of any sort.
what is the reason for why I'm supposed to hate this publication, so I know better next time to go into reading an article from it with the Consensus-Approved Morally-Correct Set of Preconceived Biases?
If you are coming at this from a neutral angle - please be aware that no bodies have been physically found but also that no bodies have not been physically found. There is radar evidence of bodies buried near the school that remains un-refuted, there was a decision not to exhume the graves out of respect.
By the same line of reasoning used in this article my grandmother might still be alive - sure we all went to a funeral but it was closed casket and very few attendees saw the body... but I can take you to the grave stone and probably dig up a few pictures of the service.
These techniques are not 100% reliable but they are very strong indicators - especially when seen en-masse as they were observed at this site - it is extremely unlikely the ground soil composition is due to any sort of a natural cause, but it is possible that something else is buried in the ground... in human shaped holes, at regular intervals.
Imagine you find an article on Sputnik talking about The Bucha massacre and in a well written piece presented evidences that it was all made up by Western Media (“contrasting it with the blatantly false NYT reporting on the subject”) should you believe it?
But maybe you're not aware of the fact that Sputnik is a Kremlin propaganda platform and you don't see the problem with the well-argued point the author is making.
You see what I mean?
You admit not knowing Quillette, but is a well-known alt-right website who notoriously don't care about facts and as such their content is no more reliable than Putin's Sputnik.
It's not about “Consensus-Approved Morally-Correct Set of Preconceived Biases”, it's about not sharing website who have made sharing blatant lies to push their political agenda their main business.
unfortunately, these absurd analogies and politico-ideological compliance tests do nothing to convince me of your worldview—you'll have to do better than that.
> You admit not knowing Quillette, but is a well-known alt-right website who notoriously don't care about facts and as such their content is no more reliable than Putin's Sputnik.
As a media outlet, Quillette is a valid target of criticism but these sorts of vague slurs are easily debunked with a modicum[1] of research[2].
Those are all related, in that in all of them, the media gave a lot of people a false impression about something, which is exactly what this article is about.
This story is about a New York Times portrayal of a Canadian event. It's actually not really about Canada in particular (although it certainly touches on it).
Wait, the article is silent on the cause of death. Are you saying these deaths were just the result of some disease? Everything in the media treatment of these deaths implies mistreatment of the kids. If it was just a virus, particularly in the early days of medicine, this would be a scandal created out of thin air.
Yes, the vast majority of residential school deaths were due to endemic diseases. The primary accusation regarding deaths is that the residential schools had a higher death rate than comparable populations, and the state should have provided more resources and better medical care.
The deaths at residential schools were higher than similar institutions - I don't understand what's hard to comprehend here when we're comparing a basket of 8 apples to a basket of 10 apples - 10 apples is more apples.
I'm not an epidemiologist, so file this under "baseless speculation by an armchair non-expert", but influenza is an Old World disease - is it possible that First Nations people are more vulnerable to it? Ten seconds of Googling provided this link https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22032099/
In this case I'd strongly suggest following up with an actual epidemiologist (which I also am not) but my assumption (also pretty baseless) is that when doing comparative population studies they do try and account for that affect.
There's a lot of literature trying to disentangle genetic and cultural background in epidemiology, especially with regard to indigenous peoples in the Americas. However, the general idea that the immune systems of indigenous Americans are somehow uniquely susceptible to disease was a popular idea in the 80s that is now regarded as unsupported by evidence. Most of the prominent advocates (like black) have walked back on it.
In the late 19th century up to about 1910, there were much higher rates of Aboriginal kids dying than normal, and it was mostly due to tuberculosis. It would 'set loose' at a residential school and mortality rates were high.
There were investigations and it was a 'big social issue' even 100 years ago.
Since about WW2, the rates of death at res schools have been fairly consistent with those in the general population.
The term 'genocide' may apply in the context of the government wishing to 'educate' Aboriginals purely in the Western sense and to suppress their culture, but the world folds all to nicely into 'killing' the children etc which is how the word is used in popular imagination.
The 'narrative managers' in the press are keenly aware of the power of their words, and that they will be misinterpreted, to great effect.
The factual reality of Residential Schools is absolutely worth of consideration, it's a serious issue, but it's also deeply misrepresented in the press.
"If it was just a virus, particularly in the early days of medicine, this would be a scandal created out of thin air."
I wouldn't entirely want to make the claim that 'because it's tuberculosis' fully exonerates the schools, but I'll bet $100 that tuberculosis at other remote boarding schools (non-aboriginal kids) would have somewhere near the same effect in most places during that era, where as you hint 'medicine was a mess'.
But either way, you're hinting at 'the distortion of information' begin presented by the narrative driven press, which is sad, because it's a serious issue.
Unless an out-group was being kept in a low social class on the basis of their ethnic identity. The entire residential school system was about ethnic identity - removing theirs and making them take on ours, by taking children away from their families and handing them over to religious authorities.
There's a whole bunch of people in this discussion thread who are clearly not Canadian and clearly not informed about this, who seem to believe they're railing against appropriating an issue for political points, by appropriating one of our most shameful national issues (and implicitly denying it, however artfully) in order to make political points.
The people railing are Canadian, and they are doing so because they know they have been lied to by the press. The 'problem' are those who continue to misrepresent the situation and fail to understand for some reason (especially after been given the facts) that this is going on.
Sending kids to boarding school where mostly people learned to speak English and do basic math - is not the same as sending kids to camps to kill them.
The liars want to have us believe they're essentially or historically the same thing, when there's no truth there at all.
And I'm not actually trying to say this was not an 'aboriginal specific' issue.
I think the issue with them was real, but decontextualized and misrepresented by the press, which is the focus of the article.
The press drives narratives and will ignore context if necessary.
Sadly, if you stray away from the press, most independent outlets are full if inanity and made up facts, it's very hard to get factual stuff, meaning any individual truth seeker has to become a kind of 'independent journalist' - it's very hard. I think most people end up down rabbit holes of misinformation, which is worse than the 'generally factual but biased' press.
Funnily enough, the "media bias fact checker" lists the NY Times as "High Credibility"[0] despite its sensationalized/false reporting about a "Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada."[1]
I'd say that there's a fairly huge gap between a mass grave, and a bunch of distortions in the soil that are detected by the radar that may (or may not) actually be graves.
As far as this particular story goes, a population that read this Quillette article would have a better recall of verifiable, agreed upon facts than a paired population exposed just to the NYT article talking about mass graves being unearthed.
Disbelieving the NYT doesn't mean taking everything Quillette says at face value; it only means noting that the NYT has a history of fabrication and bias, and that anything sensationalistic reported in it should not be given the presumption of truth.
Every newspaper that’s been around for over 150 years will have a history of fabrication and bias. That, on its own, means pretty much nothing.
Quillette and the New York Times are very different. Most of the New York Times’ energy is spent on regular gumshoe reporting. Very little energy is given over to opinion (including media criticism).
You’re obviously going to get a different reaction from reading a straight-up news article vs reading an opinion piece about media coverage.
I disagree with your contention that the Quillette reader comes away better-informed. I found the thing confusing. He seems to suggest that maybe the graves aren’t actually graves, but also says that thousands of children were known to have died there.
Surely the deaths of children is the real story, not the terminology used by some newspapers.
Yeah, the final clause of this sentence reveals he knows what he's doing:
> No one, to my knowledge, has found any human remains—i.e., body parts or tissue from decaying corpses—either at Kamloops or any of the other former Residential Schools, through the use of GPR.
Very holocaust denial-like. Reminded me of the people who point out that the "lampshade made of human skin" stories, haven't been proved:
Thank you for posting this. It’s good to be reminded that even people who think they are smart fall into the exact herd behavior built-in to human psychology.
"some journalists — in Canada and abroad — mistakenly called the unmarked graves being located "mass graves," inadvertently invoking the horrors of the Holocaust. But the vast majority, following the lead of Indigenous spokespeople, got it right"
The problem with this is that it's impossible to verify - who are "some journalists", and who is the "vast majority"? But anyway, if you google for "215 children bodies found", you'll find that claim plastered all over the Net. First-page search results include CBC itself, BBC, NPR, CNN etc. So this is, at best, misleading.
The other statement that made me go hmph is:
"Denialists, to be clear, do not deny the existence of residential schools or even some of the harms of the IRS system. Rather, they seek to downplay or distort basic IRS facts and question the validity of ongoing research to shake public confidence and undermine truth and reconciliation efforts. "
It is unclear which "basic facts" they claim to be distorted. The article admits that it's not the existence of schools or the abuse that happened in them in general. I've read some of the denialist articles, and the only claims regarding facts of the matter can find there are that no bodies - indeed, no graves! - have actually been verified in this one particular case. That claim is easy to verify.
The article seems to be claiming, in essence, that any skepticism in this regard is inherently wrong, regardless of facts or lack thereof.
We know for a fact that graves existed. We just don't know where some of them are, because they were abandoned.
So, what is being added to the story by saying "this particular discovery of a potential grave location hasn't yet dug up a dead child"?
There's other grave sites where actual bodies were discovered after floods or roadworks, where they've identified what they think are other graves via the same tech.
Those haven't been dug up either, because just randomly digging up graves on an arbitrary schedule to prove to some kook's satisfaction that you have the right to talk about something is absurd.
"I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Because the evidence so far can have many explanations, graves being only one among them. The place apparently has a history of agricultural use, too, with several rounds of irrigation works.
It doesn't disprove that those are graves, of course. It's quite plausible that at least some of them are. But I don't feel like, on the balance of probability, it makes sense to make claims about "200+ children bodies", given the evidence we have so far.
> "I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Well, for starters, nobody actually claimed to be a relative of some specific person that is ostensibly buried there. Indeed, it seems that there are no claims made of specific people being buried there at all - no names, just "N children". So the more accurate analogy would be "I think someone's grandfather died in WW1 and is buried somewhere in this field, but I don't actually know any of the people involved".
More importantly, if there are bodies there, a crime was committed - and many of the people responsible (if only for negligence allowing it to be committed) are still alive, so their reputation is directly affected by the claim. Organizational responsibility is also at stake; not that I have any love for the Catholic Church, mind you, but I'd rather blame them for the things they actually did.
If and when they dig up the holes, and they do indeed turn out to be graves of children - then I'll join the torches-and-pitchforks mob. But I resent the attempts to goad me into that before the facts are known - and it is exactly what the headlines in the media originally tried to do.
You're repeating the totally fallacious argument in the article that this was a "crime" in some Agatha Christie sense and therefore they have to dig up the children's bodies or they're liars and there are neither bodies nor crimes.
The original claim made by the people who did the survey was that they think they've found graves of children who went to the school.
You're talking about people overreacting and making things up in foreign newspapers, then making an argument based on stuff that you've just claimed isn't true.
And it appears intended to distract from the fact that we know for a fact there are graves and we know for a fact there were crimes. But by laser focussing and saying, this particular potential grave has not been proved to be a grave to my satisfaction, you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
> you're repeating the totally fallacious argument
I'm not repeating the argument that the bodies must be dug out because there was a crime (although I also don't see how it is invalid, because this discovery is combined with oral sources which do claim some very serious crimes).
What I'm saying is that if this is all true, then there are people responsible for it, who would be rightly held to account - if not legally, then in court of public opinion. So when newspapers publish articles that strongly imply that it's all definitive when it actually isn't, someone's reputation is ruined.
> you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
Here's the thing, though. Every denialist article I've looked at trying to figure out what exactly they claim - and there were like 5 - clearly spelled out that, yes, there was plenty of abuse in those schools in general, and that said abuse did result in dead children. On the other hand, almost every article criticizing them makes the same claim you do - that them casting doubt on the claims made in this particular case casts doubt on the whole thing, somehow. All disclaimers are ignored.
This looks like a classic strawman to me, not a good-faith attempt at fair discourse.
Yeah, and climate denialists don't actually deny that climate change isn't happening, they just think it wasn't human caused, and if it was it's not a bad thing, and if it is it's not fixable anyway, and if it is then it's not worth it and wind turbines cause noise cancer and on and on and on...
Except of course they did deny it was happening and very slowly retreated further and further as more and more proof mounted, only giving up when their lies are totally destroyed in the court of public opinion while still being shrilly outraged at every new "lie" or "exagerration" from the people who were right all along. Things that in future they'll deny believing when its convenient and then bring up again later.
So the climate or Holocaust victims are never allowed to make a single mistake, or its a media fueled panic, while the deniers get to construct their own reality as they please, again and again, and it's rude to point that out to them, because they're just being skeptical about children's graves for purely scientific reasons.
The story is about Canada, the phenomenon is applicable to society at large. Please familiarize yourself with how adults comment and have conversations before replying to others.
Just the opposite, it's a high quality piece from a high quality site.
This comment, which offers no argument for illustrating why the piece is misleading or unfactual, only hurts your credibility.
I myself was deeply moved about the 'grave discovery' revelations in Canada, and after just a bit of investigation I was 'shocked' to discover that the narratives were misrepresentations to the point of lying.
A short compendium about some of the ruthless misrepresentation can be found here [1], where they highlight some issues in the press that, were these revelations to be made in any other field, would be existentially damaging to those involved.
The press clearly misrepresented the views of even many of the aboriginal leaders responsible for these investigations, and much worse.
It's damaging to the integrity of the CBC and some others.
Please be aware, the entirety of the linked article and my statements below are both true.
There was a radar scan that revealed regular human-shaped anomalies in the soil.
Follow up investigations have reaffirmed that these anomalies were not equipment dysfunction.
In all of the digging that has taken place at this site no bodies have been uncovered.
No digging has taken place at this site.
To the best of my knowledge, no living person has ever seen a body located in one of these graves.
To the best of my knowledge, no one who would have been on hand to bury one of these bodies is still alive (or at least - none have come forward).
It is simultaneously true that no bodies were unearthed (specifically - removed from the earth) and that what is *strongly* believe to be a grave site was unearthed (specifically - discovered).
There appears to be a concerted campaign to spread "correct" information that strongly implies a state of the world that does not match the actual state of the world.
I appreciate your specifics, but the nature of the article here is not about the very detailed facts about an 'unearthing' but rather, how the information is being presented in the press.
Broadly, the story is 'kids killed in aboriginal genocide, bodies discovered all over the place' - which is not the case at all, it's much more complicated than that, and though there are surely newly discovered bodies here and there, most are not, and nobody was killed on purpose in some kind of genocidal act.
It's about 'popular narratives' vs. 'nuanced reality' - not so much 'a small detail vs. another small detail'.
I do not like to be 'one of those people' that laments the MSM, but this story in particular is a glowing example of the lies (and I mean 'lies', because the distortion is purposeful) to support narratives.
There was an extensive piece by the National Post documents some of the examples, it's bad. [1]
Ironically, even many of the aboriginal leaders themselves were purposefully misrepresented. In some cases, these were just regular graves that lost their headstones and relevant documentation, there was not discovery etc..
Consider this: when the population at large derives a completely false intuition for a set of events - the media is lying.
Some media 'misrepresents' the 2020 election by just repeating Trump's lies without questioning them, and though this might be hard for some to swallow, much of the real data behind police aggression etc. is hidden and misrepresented in light of emotional charges and BLM protests.
It's a really sad state of affairs but the MSM ('all sides') narratives are so strong, that almost every issue is quite strongly misrepresented due to 'sidedness' and/or attempt to create false impressions.
Double paradox is that most of the MSM is actually 'fairl factual' and if you go off the beaten path into YouTube and alt sources, there are some good voices, but most of it is 10x worse. Most 'independent thinkers' are not getting at the truth, just being led even further astray. It's sad.
It's really hard to consume information these days.
Edit: for a good exercise, pay attention to news about Ukraine right now. While I absolutely support their effort basically in every way and am repulsed by Putin's 'useful idiots' all over the web - we are engaging in a bit of misrepresentation ourselves (pro-Ukrainian propaganda), which is what happens during wartime. Ukraine is a bit of a mess of a country, a lot of corruption - but that will be suppressed at least for now, where we 'need' the public to be engaged in a way that's a bit more easy to swallow. This soft-propaganda is of a different nature than the ideological narratives in much of the press. 2 years after Ukraine/Russian war is over (hopefully soon, and Russia is kicked out of Ukraine) you'll see a lot more press about the conflicts of interest etc. within the Ukrainian government etc..
> I refuse to believe that anyone at the Times set out to tell lies. It seems more likely that they instinctively believed, on some gut level, that the GPR data signalled the existence of child murder victims. They treated it as a revealed moral truth, and so imagined themselves duty bound to use their Times platform to spread the story globally, advocate for Indigenous rights, and educate Canadians about a dark historical legacy. Numerous other journalists did exactly the same thing, and, in so doing, got swept up by the collective fervour.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadAnother is relayed to January 6th protests. A friend today, a conservative DeSantis supporter, told me that he knew that on January 6th, the protestors killed several police officers.
This is, as we know now, absolutely false. It was based on a rumor, and once the reporting caught up, it turned out to be false.
Similarly I’m sure there will be Canadians who know that there were these mass unmarked child graves at schools. But again: totally false.
I think the big misstatement of the media here was the unrelated natural causes death of an officer (from essentially a stroke) on January 7th - but law enforcement lives were lost due to January 6th.
Ultimately Officer Smith chose to take his own life; no one made that choice for him. He may have been appalled or traumatized or whatever, but ultimately he's the one who did it. Doesn't make it any less tragic, but it's extremely tenuous absent additional evidence to lay blame at anyone but he himself.
If there was some evidence that he was subject to unique abuse and was personally targeted on that day, then maybe there might be some merit. But of the officers who were there, he experienced roughly what the other officers did, and he was the only one to commit suicide.
> Dr. Jonathan Arden, the former Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia was hired by Smith's widow as part of her lawsuit to have her husband's suicide ruled "in the line of duty". His report stated that the "acute, precipitating event that caused the death of Officer Smith was his occupational exposure to the traumatic events he suffered on January 6, 2021".[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jeffrey_L._Smith
1. unarmed 2. black
(edit: I see now someone made the above point a few minutes before i finished typing my message, but I suppose that goes to show how widespread this myth is)
Conservatives get the brunt of blame for "conspiracy theories" and "disinformation" these days, and while I won't deny it doesn't happen (like it has for years), the left has just as much, if not more that I hear every day, but they never realize or take accountability for it because they have the popular narrative that runs all major corporations and the greater internet.
It's quite likely that if he were the one gunned down, and not the other way around, the people who did so would have walked, too.
I'm still unaware of that. Do you have a reference?
At this point in time, shots had been fired, Rittenhouse shot and killed a man, and was identified by the crowd as an active shooter. Huber was trying to disarm Rittenhouse, when he was shot and killed. This happened in front of Grosskreutz, who at this point had every reason to believe that Rittenhouse was an active shooter (And was then shot and injured by Rittenhouse).
Since in an active shooter situation, both the 'good guy with a gun' and 'the good guy without a gun' can't sit around and wait for eight months for a jury trial to find the active shooter to actually be innocent, both Huber and Grosskreutz reacted rather reasonably.
It seems to me that legally, nobody, except maybe Rosenbaum (Who was dead by the time of the events of the second confrontation) was in the wrong in that whole situation. It's all 'good guys with a gun' shooting at eachother because sweet fuckin' Jesus, nobody ever has all the facts about who was justified about killing whom when there's a public gunfight happening.
You're saying that after he was an active shooter, people were chasing him because they thought he was an active shooter? If so, I don't think that no one knows this, I think no one cares.
-----
edit: The statement you made was "the people [Rittenhouse] shot were under the impression that they were trying to stop an active shooter." I asked for a reference. You begin and end the reply to that request by saying that the first person he shot wasn't under the impression he was an active shooter.
My problem is the deception. I am a proud left-winger, and I think Quillette is trash. I'm disturbed that people are intentionally trying to cloud the facts about issues to score political points. When you say that the people Rittenhouse shot were under the impression that he was an active shooter, and somebody looks that up and finds out that it is untrue, they'll think that people who hold the same opinions as you are liars. That affects me, and the things that I believe in.
The Q article has exactly two complaints about the facts reported by the media:
1. The media claimed bodies were unearthed, when in fact only scans were taken.
2. The media claimed there were mass graves, when in fact scans only detected masses of individual graves.
However, in "social-panic" style, conservatives are taking these two quibbles over terminology and turning them into an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy to deny the graves existence altogether.
Note also the subtle racism in the article, where they compare a hypothetical instant-response to the murder of white children to the "very odd" response of the first nation people. The implication being that first nations people are incompetent, uncaring, or untrustworthy by not immediately doing a certain kind of investigation.
This is not a "quibble." It's a major falsehood.
It can also be used in a figurative sense, which in this case is almost certainly true.
So do you really believe everyone in Canada read that and thought "Oh, they're using the word in a figurative sense! Never mind."
If something is, by definition, in the earth and a story says it was "unearthed" it's sorta reasonable to believe it was dug up.
Possible graves. How many were unambiguously confirmed? And how many would we expect from normal high-at-the-time child mortality?
But if/when they are confirmed, then its not a big deal because it's just some of the graves that you know exist?
Do you see the contradiction here?
You seem determined to downplay these graves, but the kettle logic of "these graves don't exist and also they do exist and we all know about them but they aren't a problem" undermines your argument.
And some people still overreact and try to cover it up and whitewash it.
The US Civil war being about slavery still seems to be considered an eleborate hoax to some people.
And they do the same "yes well the centuries of slavery, death, rape and murder is all true, and well established historical fact obviously, but <minor historical innaccuracy>! So basically they're overreacting and undermining our great nation by talking about stuff that happened." and it's cringe in both cases.
A popular Facebook post claimed that Joe Biden said that several police officers died during the attack, which could be the source of the lie.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/19/facebook-p...
Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
(C.S. Lewis)
Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.
2. What does any of that have to do with Nazis? Your comment seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
Later
I'm being coy, because I don't believe most people who deploy this quote have read Mere Christianity, which is ungracious of me (and technically a violation of our guidelines). So: to put it more directly:
Lewis isn't asking people to be skeptical of wrongdoing. The quote is from an essay on forgiveness. That chapter explicitly references the harm Germans inflicted on Poles and Jewish people. Lewis isn't skeptical of that harm (to say the least), and he's not exhorting people towards skepticism of wrongdoing in general.
What he's saying is that you should be careful not to attribute to random people, by dint of their belonging to some specific group, the worst possible harms you can come up with. And he's saying that you shouldn't because it's an impediment to the Christian virtue of forgiveness; to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love your imputed enemies as yourself, and to do that you have to find a way to forgive them their transgressions against you, and, more immediately, the transgressions of their groups.
I quoted the paragraph immediately following the quote offered (in implicit support of skepticism, as that quote is almost always used). I could just as easily have quoted the paragraph that immediately precedes it:
Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
Again: when Lewis wrote this, he was talking about the Nazis, the authors of many of the worst crimes in history. Lewis was no Holocaust denier: he was acutely aware of --- and reminds his reader throughout Christian Behavior of --- the wrongdoings he's alluding to. It might be hard to find a more inapposite quote for this story.
I have no idea what happened in the residential schools in Canada, and no opinion about this particular article. But I do have an opinion about the abuse of C.S. Lewis on message boards.
You’ve misread me/my intent, i’m afraid.
However, applying Occam’s razor: GP merely quoted C.S. Lewis, so it would seem to me that the simplest (and most charitable) interpretation is that they understood the quote and we’re not using it in any ironic/sarcastic way.
I find your reaction/response to GP a little confusing, but as best as I can tell: are you thinking they were using the quote in an intentionally ironic way as a means of making a jab at C.S. Lewis’ character/beliefs?
This whole thread has been really confusing, so I’d love to understand where the (apparent) disconnect is between both parties :).
Then, he's not saying that you should, on spec, be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing, or especially generous to mitigating claims. One way you know that's the opposite of his intent is that the essay is framed around the crimes of the Nazis; there is no possible way Lewis is suggesting we should be wary of news stories about the Nazis. Again: Nazism is a backdrop for not just the essay, or Christian Behavior, but really most of Mere Christianity.
This is a thread where really all we have to go on is a story about whether a media claim about wrongdoing is true, or can be mitigated. The quote then reads as an affirmation of the story! The quote would be saying exactly the thing I just said I believe it doesn't say.
But Lewis' quote doesn't apply here at all, unless you not only strip it of its context, but also turn it against that context. Nobody (at least, nobody identified) is reveling in what may have happened at the residential schools, or using it as a device to avoid forgiving any particular person. Our interest in the truth of what happened, and even our skepticism of mitigating claims, is totally independent of our duty to forgive, just as Lewis points out that our willingness to punish (or even kill) transgressors is independent of our duty to forgive them.
I think the whole thing is a lot clearer if you include the paragraph before and after the super-popular "newspaper article" quote.
I'm not clear on how I misread the original intent of the quote! I'm still interested in hearing that. So I'm re-explaining my own original intent in responding to it, but wouldn't want to be construed as doubling down on it.
My personal stake in this discussion is: I think Mere Christianity is pretty neat, and I'm attentive of the ways it gets used in online discussions. I don't know enough about Canadian history to have a stake in the truth of the residential school claims, though note that there is an expert rebuttal of these Quillette claims, from an archeological authority, downthread.
I believe this is where the misunderstanding lies. I think the root commenter is implying that that's exactly what the media was trying to do when they chose to push this narrative in the first place. The idea is that the media organizations in the linked article were trying to highlight historical wrongs in an attempt to ensure those wrongs are kept at the forefront of everyone's minds and not forgiven, and that resulted in "a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible", even in the face of a lack of evidence.
The lack of skepticism isn't the point; it's what motivated the lack of skepticism in this case that the root comment was discussing. You can certainly disagree about whether that really was the media organizations' underlying motivation/bias, but I think the original quote is relevant.
And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
There should be a presumption of innocence in the sense that the public should assume the accused is innocent until evidence is publicly shared that suggests their guilt.
So far the only evidence shared with the public is a confession. Confessions are notoriously unreliability.
There will be more evidence. DNA tests are being done as we speak.
That is rape.
If the other party was some other person - then that 27 year old shouldn't be wrongly convicted, but someone raped that 10 year old. I, btw, haven't seen anyone chomping at the bit at the specific suspected other party - the discussion I've seen has been focused on the health care and trauma treatment for the 10 year old.
Right now the only evidence being presented is his confession: confessions suck as evidence. And it seems he is not a native English speaker. Non native English speakers are especially prone to false confessions (in America), because they don’t understand everything being said and signed.
“Sign this paper please, it’s a receipt for your goods. Now sign this paper, it’s consent to medical treatment by prison staff. Now sign this paper, it summarizes everything you told us so you won’t have to be questioned again.”
There are DNA tests being done as we speak. If raped her, the only way he’s getting away is if someone else raped her too and that other person impregnated her too (DNA is from fetus).
Need? No, you can’t force people to think things. Should? Yes, absolutely it should. People are accused of, but later found innocent of, crimes all the time.
Unless it happened again already, it was a 9-10 year old, depending on whether you are referring to when she was raped or when she had left the state to get an abortion.
> Too many people treated it like a political point tally.
Side1: If your political position is enacted, Bad Thing will happen, hurting people.
Side2: You are inventing unlikely scenarios for political points, you aren't really concerned about the people that you pretend Bad Thing will happen to.
...Side2 policy adopted...
...Bad Thing immediately happens as predicted...
Side1: Look, Bad Thing just happened.
Side2: You don't care about the person Bad Thing happened to, you are just scoring political points.
Odds are it has.
Edit: I don’t think the time of the reports was particularly helpful. The day before the story was verified, someone had published an op-Ed in NYTimes titles “Laugh at my abortion with me.” Nobody’s laughing about a preteen being raped.
Even if they did care (unlikely as that is), there is no way to intervene in an arbitrary 11-year-old's healthcare.
The scope of action is in the design of the society that permits harm as defined in one way or the other. And that's politics. So people are acting in the only way that makes sense.
The reason why I hold the political positions that I do at its foundations has the fact that I care if this is going on in the society that I live in, because I don't think anyone should have to go through that. Or ectopic pregnancies that can't be aborted, etc.
If you think I'm just trying to "score points" you're projecting. I don't support abortion in order to "own the Trumpers" and rub their noses in abortions, I really think it produces a worse society, with more suffering.
One clarification I suppose is that it is unlikely the graves were always unmarked. Most likely they, like many poor people, were buried with wooden crosses which later disintegrated.
This is a really hairy topic to begin with and it gets a lot more hairy when you also take into consideration that tribes were frequently being lied to. Canada doesn't have a great record of being either upfront nor fidelitous when it comes to compacts with native americans and if we only have primary contemporary accounts from the "winning side" you need to be highly skeptical of how biased those accounts are.
We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools - whether tribes were initially lied to and sold a rosy picture or whether that force was used initially is an interesting topic, but it's one that we will probably only have clarity on for a handful of tribes and it might take quite a while to settle on a narrative of that topic that can be well supported by evidence.
It's really complicated.
However, it is equally dangerous to go down the path of 'Canada did this to massacre the tribes and eradicate their culture while no tribe wanted this'. This is also not the case. In certain cases, the tribes did have well defined boundaries, and leadership, and the leadership negotiated for many other concessions successfully, but didn't so much as put up a fuss about the schools.
> We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools
I believe I literally acknowledged such atrocities in my post above. Moreover, as I again stated, I understand that a tribe's leaders may not have the tribe's best interests at heart. It is actually possible, and still a regular occurrence today, for one's government to make decisions that are incredibly hurtful to individual citizens.
Other allegations against the government are also overstated. I didn't mention them above. One obvious example is the claim siblings were separated. This is actually unevidenced. The most evidence the TRC could produce was that brothers and sisters were sent to sex segregated schools or dorms. Uh... this is a good thing. If sexual abuse is what you're trying to prevent having girls in the same housing with boys, etc, is going to be extremely toxic.
I am in no way excusing Canada's actions. I am merely putting them into context. These are salient facts ignored from the debate for fear they may not make the tribes as sympathetic a target. Why? If the case is so strong for the abuses taking place (and I believe there was certainly abuse taking place that ought to be investigated), what is the point of ignoring salient information?
EDIT: Oh also I'm not referring to hundreds of thousands of compacts. I am referring to the numbered treaties, which refer to 11 treaties signed between Canada and the native tribes of various regions.
After all in many treaties the financial compensation of the chief was drastically more than the common member. For example in treaty 11 chiefs got 25000 while lay people got 5 dollars. That is a pretty clear disincentive.
If you insist on treating every interaction as if it happens in a vacuum and for both parties to see the events as isolated, you're gonna have a bad time. If you are chronically late for work nobody cares if your transmission exploded on the way into work and that's why you were legitimately an hour late. You've already played that card on previous encounters and you've used up all of your credits.
If two groups have a history of horrible interactions with each other, people are going to assume the latest incident is just true to form, even if it really was just a misunderstanding and a bad game of telephone. Because of course Group B pulled some shit again. They 'always' do. Trying to find someone's boundaries and living your life right on the edge of them is just a slower version of "fuck around and find out."
I learned recently that there are actually businesses that cater to the demographic of boomers whose children won't speak to them anymore. Like entrepreneurs are making business plans and incorporating to take money from these people. The stories I know are all about how they realized that their parents weren't even going to meet some fairly low bar set by the kids, and they thought their children were bluffing. You push and push and you'll be making your own retirement home arrangements, all the while repeating some narrative about how it was about pronouns or people of color.
Perhaps they didn't know what was going on (and I agree that abuses took place), but the desire for their children to be more European was absolutely there. It is very clearly documented. This is in stark contrast to the claim that such things were forced upon the tribes. It seemed that a shared goal of the Canadian government and tribes was the integration of the natives with the Canadian nation. I don't see how this is deniable. The claim that the government committed 'cultural genocide' honestly falls flat for me.
As to the tribal leaders signing the documents. I can understand how the monetary promises given to them by the Canadian government would make them overlook the potential for atrocities yes; such things are well attested to in the history of humanity. But again, I have no idea. You asked me to speculate, so I did.
I don't understand why there is so much outrage today when one expresses that they do not know an unknowable fact.
Asking questions like “did they know why they were signing?” or “was there going to be a war if they refused to sign?” seem entirely reasonable to me
There's also outrage over the nebulous notion of 'pushing Canadian/European values'. I think that's misplaced.
If you’re simply saying that some bad things happened at these boarding schools… we’ll, yeah. That’s a known reality in all boarding schools. Doesn’t make it ok. But many many people knew about those sorts of things and cared and also didn’t think the solution was to ban boarding schools. (Others, of course, as in all ages, didn’t care.)
List of stuff he points out: https://thenetworkstate.com/if-the-news-is-fake-imagine-hist...
It's hard to see that as an innocent mistake; rather, it seems in this case HE is distorting the facts to fit HIS narrative.
we are truly in an age of perpetual unfounded social panic. thanks twitter.
as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.
My thinking was that "smart" people are busier and outsource their thinking in other aspects to media they can trust. If that media lies to them, they are smart, so they don't want to admit they were wrong. They are too smart to be fooled! But I don't know if that explanation holds up.
[1] By other metrics I mean, I live in a West Coast coastal city, in a rich neighborhood, work in tech, educated, etc. By all measurements I should be like others, but I'm not.
What if I told you that every single one of them tells themselves the exact same thing? You wouldn't believe me of course. But then, neither would they believe you.
You probably believe as much nonsense as they do, but you've only noticed what is actually a very small non-overlapping slice of the very large overlapping collection of nonsense beliefs you share with them.
good observation and i completely see your point, but are those people really educated in a scientific sense (and know their confidence intervals) or did they just finish their liberal arts degree and learn some french words?
This decently sums it up: https://www.piratewires.com/p/neurotic?s=r
… if you’re vaccinated.
We can all tell you weren't actually listening to the experts you so detest because that wasn't their stated rationale. The rationale was "flatten the curve" -- some hospitals were two doubling periods away from having parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of ventilators. That's what the lockdowns were about. Making sure we never overwhelmed the medical infrastructure.
Subsequent R-control measures were about making sure it stayed that way. As better options for keeping the hospitals safely under-capacity appeared -- first vaccines, and then simply the fact that subsequent variants sent a smaller fraction of the infected to ventilators -- the measures were relaxed. As was appropriate.
What's amazing are the number people who continue to stick to Trump's initial February 2020 "ignore it and it will go away like magic" alternate reality, even though the man himself abandoned it in March 2020.
and now it's gone! look at that.
at some point, even if only years after the fact, one must reconcile the reality of the situation with the narrative they were sold on, and ask themselves if the two line up at all. how many Republican-voting Americans today still believe the Iraq invasion was ever really truly about weapons of mass destruction, or that the entire incursion was righteous in any way? how many Republican-voting Americans have any love left for the 43rd President at all, despite their fervor at the time?
Not that I don't believe you, but why don't surgeons get bacterial illnesses from mask use? Did you regularly wash your mask?
>yet somehow never caught covid
I wonder if that has something to do with the mask you wore?
>the Sturgis Rally being nearby was supposed to make us (Rapid City, SD) a superspreader disease nexus
Are we in the same reality? The spike in cases made national news.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/02/covid-s...
yeah it's almost like the whole cloth mask phenomenon was total bullshit!
cases "surged", deaths didn't. the Civic Center was never used.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there. I think, empirically, you will find the opposite relationship.
Could you be more specific?
Wikipedia itself is awfully untrustworthy, though - look what they're doing with the "recession" page today.
This is D work (67%).
EDIT: For clarity, the last of the three claims is incorrect:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779241/
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/106/5/e2047/6123860
https://internationalbreastfeedingjournal.biomedcentral.com/...
That's if you count them as three separate claims, to my count they're all combined into one statement, which means the whole thing is logically false if any part is false, which is the case here.
But real life is very complicated and so people who actually care about this because it directly affects them aren't so quick to draw absolute lines:
https://interactadvocates.org/faq/
> Nature doesn’t decide where the category of “male” ends and the category of “intersex” begins, or where the category of “intersex” ends and the category of “female” begins. Humans decide.
But yeah, 1 in 100 people, that's nothing, I don't care about or even believe in the existence of any group smaller than about 800 million myself, left-handed people only just make the cut at 1 in 10 but everyone else with made up genetic conditions like epilepsy, albinism, red hair or autism, or the mythical people with less than 2 arms and legs, just stop thinking you are special and be normal, that's what I say.
To interject in this conversation: if this sentence really is "taboo" I'd argue it's perhaps because you are not using the currently accepted term, like a person who insists on saying "negro" instead of "African American".
Or perhaps it's taboo because you bring it up at weird moments. I just watched an episode of Family Guy where family patriarch Peter Griffith says "I won't be in the next few storylines because I am real life pregnant." The show is a cartoon, so the joke is both that he's "real life" anything (which is impossible) and also suddenly inexplicably being written as female.
But if you watched that episode with friends and start ranting about how Peter Griffith, cartoon character, can't get "real life" pregnant cause he's biologically male, people might think there's something socially off about you because that's a pretty odd reaction to a Family Guy joke.
> you are not using the currently accepted term
I think you mean the term that you use. Most humans continue to speak of "men" and "women" as those terms have always been used, with the understanding that exceptions do occur.
I responded that biological man wasn't the currently accepted term people use.
You then claimed "Most humans continue to speak of "men" and "women" as those terms have always been used" with the term "biological man" mysteriously dropped from the response as if you realized how ridiculous it would sound if you claimed most people went around using the nonstandard term "biological man" but you felt like arguing with me for whatever reason anyway as if I wasn't going to notice you suddenly dropping the nonstandard term you were using when you responded to the statement I made about the nonstandard term you were using.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. This happened in Canada regardless of whether or not there's graves in these sites, but "oh yeah where's the dead kids bodies already" is in my opinion kind of a horrible point of view given light of the necessarily slow paced process that's happening to uncover the truth.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BA...
There were major revelations about a century ago that Aboriginal children were dying at higher rates than otherwise, mostly due to tuberculosis, which spread rapidly at the shcools over a century ago - it was a 'huge controversy' even in 1922 - when the government commissioned an investigation into the situation. [1]
Also, note (same reference) that deaths from aboriginal kids since WW2/1945 is basically the same as death of kids from the general population overall, which abnegates some idea of even accidental physical genocidal acts due to systematic oppression. These facts, which adds nuance to the situation, create a more realistic dynamic to the historical situation than your choice of words (similar to those in the press) would imply. Hence - misrepresentation and hyperbole.
Residential School history matters, factually.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
It's stupid enough that I have to even explain this that I left Canada. I don't want anything to do with people who do this.
Good luck with the economy eh?
I found the article well-reasoned and level-headed, completely free of political extremism of any sort.
what is the reason for why I'm supposed to hate this publication, so I know better next time to go into reading an article from it with the Consensus-Approved Morally-Correct Set of Preconceived Biases?
By the same line of reasoning used in this article my grandmother might still be alive - sure we all went to a funeral but it was closed casket and very few attendees saw the body... but I can take you to the grave stone and probably dig up a few pictures of the service.
These techniques are not 100% reliable but they are very strong indicators - especially when seen en-masse as they were observed at this site - it is extremely unlikely the ground soil composition is due to any sort of a natural cause, but it is possible that something else is buried in the ground... in human shaped holes, at regular intervals.
But maybe you're not aware of the fact that Sputnik is a Kremlin propaganda platform and you don't see the problem with the well-argued point the author is making.
You see what I mean?
You admit not knowing Quillette, but is a well-known alt-right website who notoriously don't care about facts and as such their content is no more reliable than Putin's Sputnik.
It's not about “Consensus-Approved Morally-Correct Set of Preconceived Biases”, it's about not sharing website who have made sharing blatant lies to push their political agenda their main business.
As a media outlet, Quillette is a valid target of criticism but these sorts of vague slurs are easily debunked with a modicum[1] of research[2].
If you don't like the story, criticise the story.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette#Reception
[2] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/quillette-media-bias
A comment about January 6th
A comment about Kyle Rittenhouse
A comment about COVID
At least COVID is somewhat relevant to Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
The words "suspected" and "potential" are doing a lot of work there.
A local paper (in the US) interviewed survivors/graduates on “Indian” schools. The administrators sent kids home as soon as they were sick.
So there were no graveyards, even when lots of student were dying (Spanish flu).
In the late 19th century up to about 1910, there were much higher rates of Aboriginal kids dying than normal, and it was mostly due to tuberculosis. It would 'set loose' at a residential school and mortality rates were high.
There were investigations and it was a 'big social issue' even 100 years ago.
Since about WW2, the rates of death at res schools have been fairly consistent with those in the general population.
The term 'genocide' may apply in the context of the government wishing to 'educate' Aboriginals purely in the Western sense and to suppress their culture, but the world folds all to nicely into 'killing' the children etc which is how the word is used in popular imagination.
The 'narrative managers' in the press are keenly aware of the power of their words, and that they will be misinterpreted, to great effect.
The factual reality of Residential Schools is absolutely worth of consideration, it's a serious issue, but it's also deeply misrepresented in the press.
"If it was just a virus, particularly in the early days of medicine, this would be a scandal created out of thin air."
I wouldn't entirely want to make the claim that 'because it's tuberculosis' fully exonerates the schools, but I'll bet $100 that tuberculosis at other remote boarding schools (non-aboriginal kids) would have somewhere near the same effect in most places during that era, where as you hint 'medicine was a mess'.
But either way, you're hinting at 'the distortion of information' begin presented by the narrative driven press, which is sad, because it's a serious issue.
What was the fatality rate at Eton during this time?
There's a whole bunch of people in this discussion thread who are clearly not Canadian and clearly not informed about this, who seem to believe they're railing against appropriating an issue for political points, by appropriating one of our most shameful national issues (and implicitly denying it, however artfully) in order to make political points.
Sending kids to boarding school where mostly people learned to speak English and do basic math - is not the same as sending kids to camps to kill them.
The liars want to have us believe they're essentially or historically the same thing, when there's no truth there at all.
This false fact pattern is being amplified on both sides of the border.
My local American newspaper is trying very hard to tell horror stories about local Indian schools.
And I'm not actually trying to say this was not an 'aboriginal specific' issue.
I think the issue with them was real, but decontextualized and misrepresented by the press, which is the focus of the article.
The press drives narratives and will ignore context if necessary.
Sadly, if you stray away from the press, most independent outlets are full if inanity and made up facts, it's very hard to get factual stuff, meaning any individual truth seeker has to become a kind of 'independent journalist' - it's very hard. I think most people end up down rabbit holes of misinformation, which is worse than the 'generally factual but biased' press.
[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...
Quillette writers love to get on a high-horse about such discrepancies, while ignoring everything wrong with the right-wing media in America.
Disbelieving the NYT doesn't mean taking everything Quillette says at face value; it only means noting that the NYT has a history of fabrication and bias, and that anything sensationalistic reported in it should not be given the presumption of truth.
Quillette and the New York Times are very different. Most of the New York Times’ energy is spent on regular gumshoe reporting. Very little energy is given over to opinion (including media criticism).
You’re obviously going to get a different reaction from reading a straight-up news article vs reading an opinion piece about media coverage.
I disagree with your contention that the Quillette reader comes away better-informed. I found the thing confusing. He seems to suggest that maybe the graves aren’t actually graves, but also says that thousands of children were known to have died there.
Surely the deaths of children is the real story, not the terminology used by some newspapers.
> No one, to my knowledge, has found any human remains—i.e., body parts or tissue from decaying corpses—either at Kamloops or any of the other former Residential Schools, through the use of GPR.
Very holocaust denial-like. Reminded me of the people who point out that the "lampshade made of human skin" stories, haven't been proved:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-lampshad...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-...
"some journalists — in Canada and abroad — mistakenly called the unmarked graves being located "mass graves," inadvertently invoking the horrors of the Holocaust. But the vast majority, following the lead of Indigenous spokespeople, got it right"
The problem with this is that it's impossible to verify - who are "some journalists", and who is the "vast majority"? But anyway, if you google for "215 children bodies found", you'll find that claim plastered all over the Net. First-page search results include CBC itself, BBC, NPR, CNN etc. So this is, at best, misleading.
The other statement that made me go hmph is:
"Denialists, to be clear, do not deny the existence of residential schools or even some of the harms of the IRS system. Rather, they seek to downplay or distort basic IRS facts and question the validity of ongoing research to shake public confidence and undermine truth and reconciliation efforts. "
It is unclear which "basic facts" they claim to be distorted. The article admits that it's not the existence of schools or the abuse that happened in them in general. I've read some of the denialist articles, and the only claims regarding facts of the matter can find there are that no bodies - indeed, no graves! - have actually been verified in this one particular case. That claim is easy to verify.
The article seems to be claiming, in essence, that any skepticism in this regard is inherently wrong, regardless of facts or lack thereof.
We know for a fact that graves existed. We just don't know where some of them are, because they were abandoned.
So, what is being added to the story by saying "this particular discovery of a potential grave location hasn't yet dug up a dead child"?
There's other grave sites where actual bodies were discovered after floods or roadworks, where they've identified what they think are other graves via the same tech.
Those haven't been dug up either, because just randomly digging up graves on an arbitrary schedule to prove to some kook's satisfaction that you have the right to talk about something is absurd.
"I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Because the evidence so far can have many explanations, graves being only one among them. The place apparently has a history of agricultural use, too, with several rounds of irrigation works.
It doesn't disprove that those are graves, of course. It's quite plausible that at least some of them are. But I don't feel like, on the balance of probability, it makes sense to make claims about "200+ children bodies", given the evidence we have so far.
> "I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Well, for starters, nobody actually claimed to be a relative of some specific person that is ostensibly buried there. Indeed, it seems that there are no claims made of specific people being buried there at all - no names, just "N children". So the more accurate analogy would be "I think someone's grandfather died in WW1 and is buried somewhere in this field, but I don't actually know any of the people involved".
More importantly, if there are bodies there, a crime was committed - and many of the people responsible (if only for negligence allowing it to be committed) are still alive, so their reputation is directly affected by the claim. Organizational responsibility is also at stake; not that I have any love for the Catholic Church, mind you, but I'd rather blame them for the things they actually did.
If and when they dig up the holes, and they do indeed turn out to be graves of children - then I'll join the torches-and-pitchforks mob. But I resent the attempts to goad me into that before the facts are known - and it is exactly what the headlines in the media originally tried to do.
The original claim made by the people who did the survey was that they think they've found graves of children who went to the school.
You're talking about people overreacting and making things up in foreign newspapers, then making an argument based on stuff that you've just claimed isn't true.
And it appears intended to distract from the fact that we know for a fact there are graves and we know for a fact there were crimes. But by laser focussing and saying, this particular potential grave has not been proved to be a grave to my satisfaction, you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
I'm not repeating the argument that the bodies must be dug out because there was a crime (although I also don't see how it is invalid, because this discovery is combined with oral sources which do claim some very serious crimes).
What I'm saying is that if this is all true, then there are people responsible for it, who would be rightly held to account - if not legally, then in court of public opinion. So when newspapers publish articles that strongly imply that it's all definitive when it actually isn't, someone's reputation is ruined.
> you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
Here's the thing, though. Every denialist article I've looked at trying to figure out what exactly they claim - and there were like 5 - clearly spelled out that, yes, there was plenty of abuse in those schools in general, and that said abuse did result in dead children. On the other hand, almost every article criticizing them makes the same claim you do - that them casting doubt on the claims made in this particular case casts doubt on the whole thing, somehow. All disclaimers are ignored.
This looks like a classic strawman to me, not a good-faith attempt at fair discourse.
Except of course they did deny it was happening and very slowly retreated further and further as more and more proof mounted, only giving up when their lies are totally destroyed in the court of public opinion while still being shrilly outraged at every new "lie" or "exagerration" from the people who were right all along. Things that in future they'll deny believing when its convenient and then bring up again later.
So the climate or Holocaust victims are never allowed to make a single mistake, or its a media fueled panic, while the deniers get to construct their own reality as they please, again and again, and it's rude to point that out to them, because they're just being skeptical about children's graves for purely scientific reasons.
Make a retarded comment and condescend people who reply. Got it!
Perhaps some facts?
Or just accusations with no evidence?
This comment, which offers no argument for illustrating why the piece is misleading or unfactual, only hurts your credibility.
I myself was deeply moved about the 'grave discovery' revelations in Canada, and after just a bit of investigation I was 'shocked' to discover that the narratives were misrepresentations to the point of lying.
A short compendium about some of the ruthless misrepresentation can be found here [1], where they highlight some issues in the press that, were these revelations to be made in any other field, would be existentially damaging to those involved.
The press clearly misrepresented the views of even many of the aboriginal leaders responsible for these investigations, and much worse.
It's damaging to the integrity of the CBC and some others.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-year-of-the-graves-how-...
There was a radar scan that revealed regular human-shaped anomalies in the soil.
Follow up investigations have reaffirmed that these anomalies were not equipment dysfunction.
In all of the digging that has taken place at this site no bodies have been uncovered.
No digging has taken place at this site.
To the best of my knowledge, no living person has ever seen a body located in one of these graves.
To the best of my knowledge, no one who would have been on hand to bury one of these bodies is still alive (or at least - none have come forward).
It is simultaneously true that no bodies were unearthed (specifically - removed from the earth) and that what is *strongly* believe to be a grave site was unearthed (specifically - discovered).
There appears to be a concerted campaign to spread "correct" information that strongly implies a state of the world that does not match the actual state of the world.
Broadly, the story is 'kids killed in aboriginal genocide, bodies discovered all over the place' - which is not the case at all, it's much more complicated than that, and though there are surely newly discovered bodies here and there, most are not, and nobody was killed on purpose in some kind of genocidal act.
It's about 'popular narratives' vs. 'nuanced reality' - not so much 'a small detail vs. another small detail'.
There was an extensive piece by the National Post documents some of the examples, it's bad. [1]
Ironically, even many of the aboriginal leaders themselves were purposefully misrepresented. In some cases, these were just regular graves that lost their headstones and relevant documentation, there was not discovery etc..
Consider this: when the population at large derives a completely false intuition for a set of events - the media is lying.
Some media 'misrepresents' the 2020 election by just repeating Trump's lies without questioning them, and though this might be hard for some to swallow, much of the real data behind police aggression etc. is hidden and misrepresented in light of emotional charges and BLM protests.
It's a really sad state of affairs but the MSM ('all sides') narratives are so strong, that almost every issue is quite strongly misrepresented due to 'sidedness' and/or attempt to create false impressions.
Double paradox is that most of the MSM is actually 'fairl factual' and if you go off the beaten path into YouTube and alt sources, there are some good voices, but most of it is 10x worse. Most 'independent thinkers' are not getting at the truth, just being led even further astray. It's sad.
It's really hard to consume information these days.
Edit: for a good exercise, pay attention to news about Ukraine right now. While I absolutely support their effort basically in every way and am repulsed by Putin's 'useful idiots' all over the web - we are engaging in a bit of misrepresentation ourselves (pro-Ukrainian propaganda), which is what happens during wartime. Ukraine is a bit of a mess of a country, a lot of corruption - but that will be suppressed at least for now, where we 'need' the public to be engaged in a way that's a bit more easy to swallow. This soft-propaganda is of a different nature than the ideological narratives in much of the press. 2 years after Ukraine/Russian war is over (hopefully soon, and Russia is kicked out of Ukraine) you'll see a lot more press about the conflicts of interest etc. within the Ukrainian government etc..
[1] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-year-of-the-graves-how-...
This.