Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption. Had Long gone into a shopping mall that was 95% Caucasian and killed eight Asian women then racism would be conclusive. But this was a business where presumably the women came from the same culture and spoke Tagalog or whatever and it was where Long snapped.
Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption. Had Long gone into a shopping mall that was 95% Caucasian and killed eight Asian women then racism would be conclusive. But this was a business where presumably the women came from the same culture and spoke Tagalog or whatever and it was where Long snapped.
And as you already noted, this was during the peak of the pandemic with Trump tossing out "China virus" several times a day and a lot of people resenting masks and seeing mind control monsters in vaccines were attacking Asians in some perverse sort of revenge.
Yes we should be careful with our presumptions but not knowing details it's not exactly frivolous to at least initially ponder a racist motive.
"Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption"
Absolutely! Practically inescapable in fact. I wouldn't have blamed people for not even realising that anybody but the Asian women had been killed if they just scanned headlines or even read some of the articles. The erasure of the other victims was truly shocking.
Based on the headlines, it would have been silly not to ponder a racist motive. But we had other information so quickly afterwards that made a racist motive unlikely. Though we also had people like Trevor Noah outright lying about what Long had said, which didn't help matters.
I wonder sometimes if reading is going to be one of those phenomena like the middle class, a brief flowering that dies out.
Before the printing press books were copied by hand, wasting thousands of lives in the priesthood copying texts by candlelight. Then came printing, and newspapers and magazines and glorious books. Literacy went from almost unknown to common.
Now it seems to be fading. A brief care about grammar is giving way to pidgin speech and emoji, sentence structure is seen as effete. Your and you're are interchangeable.
In my industry most workers and much smarter than average and now most of them don't read. In the late 19th century writing was much more sophisticated than it is now. That we are losing ground in literacy is something I don't need to detail.
That most people read about this mass shooting and never read past the headline is no longer surprising. I confess that I thought it a racist crime for a few seconds but then I read the actual story and the rest and knew that presumption to be artifactual.
The number of people who never read a book after their formal education is astonishing. When my granddaughter told me that "the book is always better than the movie" it was one of my happy moments.
I can't imagine who I would be without the influence of reading. We may be part of a dying breed.
The "Silence of the Lambs" movie was much better than the book. The book had too many distracting subplots that the movie chopped out. For example, Clarice's boss at the FBI, played by Scott Glen, had a wife dying of cancer while Clarice pursued Buffalo Bill. It added nothing to the story.
But, yeah, I've read that the average American reads one book per year. So for someone like me who reads about a hundred there are 99 people who don't read books at all.
This is pretty obvious on social networks, and on signs at Trump rallies.
I saw a picture from a rally on the other side; one sign read
"Look at all the correctly-spelled signs." I howled.
All true. There are always exceptions. But in general, we clearly agree.
I am mildly dyslexic. I often don't notice misspellings since I have no difficulty reading misspelled words. It probably contributed to my tendency to not noticing typos or my own words that end up misspelled. In the case of signs carried in rallies and marches, you'd think that someone in the group would say, "Dude, that sign makes us look like dumb shits!" (In some cases, justifiably).
I almost envy you that. A lot of reading is painful for me. I've mentioned the singular "they" many times. I'll see something like "brutalness" and I get mad and want to email the writer, "it's BRUTALITY, dammit!"
And I am tired of being lectured that "language evolves," as if there is no such thing as a mistake.
Oh, I don't confuse mistakes and purposeful destruction of clear meaning, which irritates me more than error.
Books like "1984" and "Anthem" were meant to be a cautionary about the dystopia which follows the enforcement of language intended to prevent logical thought. They are now playbooks for those who prefer a dumbed down thoughtless society.
I initially wondered about that. It seemed that his primary target was Asian women and the others he killed were bug splat.
Was he an incel who wanted to kill the object of his shame if they represented his only sexual experiences? If so, it could have been the place where he had found them, rather than race unless he associated their ethnicity with their occupation. I've known guys who hypersexualized Asian women (probably the most common fetish) and got yellow fever, but I don't think that they wanted to kill the object of their lust.
While my wife was concerned about "Chinese Flu" violence because it could occur anywhere, this story was outside her environment and just another tragedy of violence in America. The "just" sounds awful, but it's life in America. If it bleeds it leads in the news media and then at the scuttlebutt. It usually, quickly becomes lost in the noise.
All that to say that my wonderment was short lived because I was not likely to know the cause, and what good could come of knowing it? Asians aren't assumed to be primed to loot and burn in protest of perceived racism. That is also a racist assumption with a value judgement that is different from assumptions about to non-Asians (a curse on the majority of black Americans who are not inclined to that). But people worry about what they perceive to be a threat to them.
One of my father's Navy friends was married to a Japanese woman. Their sons were about my age and we hung around a lot.
That American men preferred Asian wives for their personalities was one of those presumptions that nobody questioned; I never heard "subservient" but American women were regarded as too demanding, too (what we would call today) "high maintenance." It was not that Asian women were easier to boss around.
Over here (Vietnam) I get along fine with women of middle years but I don't like the girls, they are painfully superficial and fake (they *beam* at air because they're instructed to smile all the time), though there have been a few I regarded as friends.
That family my father knew ended up moving to Hawaii when the father retired, because they experienced too much bigotry in the USA.
I just engaged in comments on Medium pertaining to a man who moved to Europe because he had no interest in American women. Race was not even the issue. It had to do with men who perceive American women as wearing a chip on their shoulder that they don't want to deal with. While a monolithic view of a subset of women has issues, there is often "some" justification for generalities, averages being what they are.
My wife's father was a violent alcoholic. Before we married, she blew something I had accidentally done out of proportion. Looking back, it was a test. She was not about to marry a man prone to domestic violence and put herself in a situation that could have led to that (once) to see who I might be beyond my courtship self. She was also revealing who she could be to me. Eyes wide open, her understanding of human nature is orders of magnitude beyond my often-clumsy cluelessness. Who we are in the face of conflict with those we love is huge and probably a primary cause of the failure of relationships. Was that because she is Asian? I don't think so. That childhood circumstance is shared by people in all cultures, having nothing to do with race.
Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption. Had Long gone into a shopping mall that was 95% Caucasian and killed eight Asian women then racism would be conclusive. But this was a business where presumably the women came from the same culture and spoke Tagalog or whatever and it was where Long snapped.
And as you already noted, this was during the peak of the pandemic with Trump tossing out "China virus" several times a day and a lot of people resenting masks and seeing mind control monsters in vaccines were attacking Asians in some perverse sort of revenge.
Yes we should be careful with our presumptions but not knowing details it's not exactly frivolous to at least initially ponder a racist motive.
"Just scanning headlines, race would be a defensible presumption"
Absolutely! Practically inescapable in fact. I wouldn't have blamed people for not even realising that anybody but the Asian women had been killed if they just scanned headlines or even read some of the articles. The erasure of the other victims was truly shocking.
Based on the headlines, it would have been silly not to ponder a racist motive. But we had other information so quickly afterwards that made a racist motive unlikely. Though we also had people like Trevor Noah outright lying about what Long had said, which didn't help matters.
I wonder sometimes if reading is going to be one of those phenomena like the middle class, a brief flowering that dies out.
Before the printing press books were copied by hand, wasting thousands of lives in the priesthood copying texts by candlelight. Then came printing, and newspapers and magazines and glorious books. Literacy went from almost unknown to common.
Now it seems to be fading. A brief care about grammar is giving way to pidgin speech and emoji, sentence structure is seen as effete. Your and you're are interchangeable.
In my industry most workers and much smarter than average and now most of them don't read. In the late 19th century writing was much more sophisticated than it is now. That we are losing ground in literacy is something I don't need to detail.
That most people read about this mass shooting and never read past the headline is no longer surprising. I confess that I thought it a racist crime for a few seconds but then I read the actual story and the rest and knew that presumption to be artifactual.
I'm a reader. I feel like a dying breed.
The number of people who never read a book after their formal education is astonishing. When my granddaughter told me that "the book is always better than the movie" it was one of my happy moments.
I can't imagine who I would be without the influence of reading. We may be part of a dying breed.
The "Silence of the Lambs" movie was much better than the book. The book had too many distracting subplots that the movie chopped out. For example, Clarice's boss at the FBI, played by Scott Glen, had a wife dying of cancer while Clarice pursued Buffalo Bill. It added nothing to the story.
But, yeah, I've read that the average American reads one book per year. So for someone like me who reads about a hundred there are 99 people who don't read books at all.
This is pretty obvious on social networks, and on signs at Trump rallies.
I saw a picture from a rally on the other side; one sign read
"Look at all the correctly-spelled signs." I howled.
All true. There are always exceptions. But in general, we clearly agree.
I am mildly dyslexic. I often don't notice misspellings since I have no difficulty reading misspelled words. It probably contributed to my tendency to not noticing typos or my own words that end up misspelled. In the case of signs carried in rallies and marches, you'd think that someone in the group would say, "Dude, that sign makes us look like dumb shits!" (In some cases, justifiably).
<snip> putting that in an email.
I almost envy you that. A lot of reading is painful for me. I've mentioned the singular "they" many times. I'll see something like "brutalness" and I get mad and want to email the writer, "it's BRUTALITY, dammit!"
And I am tired of being lectured that "language evolves," as if there is no such thing as a mistake.
Oh, I don't confuse mistakes and purposeful destruction of clear meaning, which irritates me more than error.
Books like "1984" and "Anthem" were meant to be a cautionary about the dystopia which follows the enforcement of language intended to prevent logical thought. They are now playbooks for those who prefer a dumbed down thoughtless society.
I initially wondered about that. It seemed that his primary target was Asian women and the others he killed were bug splat.
Was he an incel who wanted to kill the object of his shame if they represented his only sexual experiences? If so, it could have been the place where he had found them, rather than race unless he associated their ethnicity with their occupation. I've known guys who hypersexualized Asian women (probably the most common fetish) and got yellow fever, but I don't think that they wanted to kill the object of their lust.
While my wife was concerned about "Chinese Flu" violence because it could occur anywhere, this story was outside her environment and just another tragedy of violence in America. The "just" sounds awful, but it's life in America. If it bleeds it leads in the news media and then at the scuttlebutt. It usually, quickly becomes lost in the noise.
All that to say that my wonderment was short lived because I was not likely to know the cause, and what good could come of knowing it? Asians aren't assumed to be primed to loot and burn in protest of perceived racism. That is also a racist assumption with a value judgement that is different from assumptions about to non-Asians (a curse on the majority of black Americans who are not inclined to that). But people worry about what they perceive to be a threat to them.
One of my father's Navy friends was married to a Japanese woman. Their sons were about my age and we hung around a lot.
That American men preferred Asian wives for their personalities was one of those presumptions that nobody questioned; I never heard "subservient" but American women were regarded as too demanding, too (what we would call today) "high maintenance." It was not that Asian women were easier to boss around.
Over here (Vietnam) I get along fine with women of middle years but I don't like the girls, they are painfully superficial and fake (they *beam* at air because they're instructed to smile all the time), though there have been a few I regarded as friends.
That family my father knew ended up moving to Hawaii when the father retired, because they experienced too much bigotry in the USA.
I just engaged in comments on Medium pertaining to a man who moved to Europe because he had no interest in American women. Race was not even the issue. It had to do with men who perceive American women as wearing a chip on their shoulder that they don't want to deal with. While a monolithic view of a subset of women has issues, there is often "some" justification for generalities, averages being what they are.
My wife's father was a violent alcoholic. Before we married, she blew something I had accidentally done out of proportion. Looking back, it was a test. She was not about to marry a man prone to domestic violence and put herself in a situation that could have led to that (once) to see who I might be beyond my courtship self. She was also revealing who she could be to me. Eyes wide open, her understanding of human nature is orders of magnitude beyond my often-clumsy cluelessness. Who we are in the face of conflict with those we love is huge and probably a primary cause of the failure of relationships. Was that because she is Asian? I don't think so. That childhood circumstance is shared by people in all cultures, having nothing to do with race.