It's despicable that innocent people got killed for doing their jobs. We all do jobs. We all have differing attitudes toward our jobs, but regardless of whether you work a grey market job you hate, or a completely above board job that you love, you don't want to be killed doing it. If you do happen to be killed doing it (as people from these massage parlors to folks at Charlie Hebdo have experienced) perhaps you might also prefer to avoid being dragged into a dead-end ratings-grabbing click-bait narrative. You would want to be remembered for being a person with thoughts and interests, not just as the INSERT RACE/INSERT VICTIM STATUS/INSERT POLITICAL BUZZWORD that people can use as paint on your corpse.
The bad faith narrative parade feasts on corpses, mostly because dead people can't pipe up and correct the record. These weren't just Asians, targeted by Whitey. They weren't just handjob artists targeted by some deranged addict. Those two labels are probably the least important parts of this story. Focusing on them doesn't help anyone except for the rich dickholes who benefit from the media chaos machine.
I think BJ does a good job with this piece, and I think the real question we should take away from awful events is: if I died like this, how would I want to be talked about in the media? Not like this, surely.
However diplomatic our grey market handjob policies, the fact that they're on the outside of the law puts the people in these markets at immense danger for a thousand reasons. Refusing to focus of this obvious downstream effect of dumbass prostitution laws only HURTS the next batch of victims of violence against sex workers. So, any air you give to these bad-faith narratives is being taken away from people who desperately need it to breathe.
Did you ever consider the simple possibility that there are few left in the media smart enough or socially interested enough to lead those conversations you wish would happen?
It's economics. Most of the smart kids left the business years ago because as a career journalism sucks. The revenue trends are bad and getting worse. It's pretty much guaranteed you're not going to make a comfortable living in a dying business.
It's the buggy whip trade problem.
So who goes into the business now? People who want attention, and how best does one get attention? Lead the mob.
Thus the goal becomes to lead the mob. That this works, at least in the short term, for the overseers of a dying industry creates a perfect synergy. It might even get the best of the mob leaders a raise.
As a result, every story is simplified into some good guys-bad guys scenario a mob can handle: racism, homophobia, guns (they often walk around by themselves killing people, don't you know?), religion (either good, Christian, or bad, Muslim, or vice versa), or even masks (we'll all die if we don't all wear them, or democracy will perish if we give in to this latest governmental suggestion).
And all of this is easy to justify for those with the intelligence of a 6-year-old. The whole story is actually a lesson in Media Logic 2021:
The dead are mainly Asian. The shooter was white. This is the data. What else could this be but racism? So shut up. It was clearly a hate crime targeting Asians.
Excellent analysis here, BJ. Our collective willingness to have hard conversations is belied by our collective desire for easy answers. For too many of us, as long as everything can blamed on the “whitecisheteropatriarchy,” as you call it, actual answers remain necessarily opaque. Seems to me this is because, to make the *problem* an abstraction is to pose an abstract *solution*, so people end up settling for non-answers and no longer expect or even ask for real results. Scott Alexander made a good post recently concerning trapped priors, and I think the in-vogue hypothesis that America is foundationally a whitecisheteropatriarchy has become a trapped prior for the majority of our shared sense-making institutions, further entrenched by perverse monetary incentives. Hence the proliferation of cobras. Interestingly, I do believe this problem is largely divorced from the masses. For example, the Grammys WAP scissoring affair... judging by social media immediately afterward, you’d have thought this was the one thing on the majority of American minds — that libs everywhere were exploiting these kinds of debauched cultural moments to pwn the cons while marking one up in the fight against the whitecisheteropatriarchy; and conversely, that conservatives all were decrying the befoulment of America and the minds of her youth while defending liberalism as we know it. In reality, the 2021 Grammys were the least watched in history - by half - and America is tuning out (CNN ratings down 50%) because they realize or intuit that the people directing traffic in the halls of power are actually snake handling soothsayers. Of course, here’s where the MSM grift comes in, with desperation attempting to bring people back to the cobra breeding grounds, hence the absolute shit coverage of these Atlanta massage parlor shootings. Perhaps what’s actually being bred is mass apathy, and we’re no closer to having the conversations you so rightly point out we need to have.
The media line is nearly always complete bullshit, but I do buy the idea that this was, at least in part, racially motivated. Not the killings themselves, but the sexual addiction part. I believe this guy fetishized asian women. If what HWFO says about his upbringing as a christian is true, he likely resented himself for doing so, and rather than do the adult thing (not that he was likely very emotionally mature at 21) and exercise some self control, he lashed out, not just against the the staff of the massage parlors he targeted, but also at other random people who just happened to be there at the time. The racial component is there, in my opinion, just not where the clickmongers are saying it is.
Absent other data, I would imagine he would have gone to a spa staffed by white women just as readily, and probably ended up behaving in the same way. That said, we're not going to know because there's no way to know.
It's despicable that innocent people got killed for doing their jobs. We all do jobs. We all have differing attitudes toward our jobs, but regardless of whether you work a grey market job you hate, or a completely above board job that you love, you don't want to be killed doing it. If you do happen to be killed doing it (as people from these massage parlors to folks at Charlie Hebdo have experienced) perhaps you might also prefer to avoid being dragged into a dead-end ratings-grabbing click-bait narrative. You would want to be remembered for being a person with thoughts and interests, not just as the INSERT RACE/INSERT VICTIM STATUS/INSERT POLITICAL BUZZWORD that people can use as paint on your corpse.
The bad faith narrative parade feasts on corpses, mostly because dead people can't pipe up and correct the record. These weren't just Asians, targeted by Whitey. They weren't just handjob artists targeted by some deranged addict. Those two labels are probably the least important parts of this story. Focusing on them doesn't help anyone except for the rich dickholes who benefit from the media chaos machine.
I think BJ does a good job with this piece, and I think the real question we should take away from awful events is: if I died like this, how would I want to be talked about in the media? Not like this, surely.
However diplomatic our grey market handjob policies, the fact that they're on the outside of the law puts the people in these markets at immense danger for a thousand reasons. Refusing to focus of this obvious downstream effect of dumbass prostitution laws only HURTS the next batch of victims of violence against sex workers. So, any air you give to these bad-faith narratives is being taken away from people who desperately need it to breathe.
Did you ever consider the simple possibility that there are few left in the media smart enough or socially interested enough to lead those conversations you wish would happen?
It's economics. Most of the smart kids left the business years ago because as a career journalism sucks. The revenue trends are bad and getting worse. It's pretty much guaranteed you're not going to make a comfortable living in a dying business.
It's the buggy whip trade problem.
So who goes into the business now? People who want attention, and how best does one get attention? Lead the mob.
Thus the goal becomes to lead the mob. That this works, at least in the short term, for the overseers of a dying industry creates a perfect synergy. It might even get the best of the mob leaders a raise.
As a result, every story is simplified into some good guys-bad guys scenario a mob can handle: racism, homophobia, guns (they often walk around by themselves killing people, don't you know?), religion (either good, Christian, or bad, Muslim, or vice versa), or even masks (we'll all die if we don't all wear them, or democracy will perish if we give in to this latest governmental suggestion).
And all of this is easy to justify for those with the intelligence of a 6-year-old. The whole story is actually a lesson in Media Logic 2021:
The dead are mainly Asian. The shooter was white. This is the data. What else could this be but racism? So shut up. It was clearly a hate crime targeting Asians.
Chickens and eggs. Eggs and chickens.
Excellent analysis here, BJ. Our collective willingness to have hard conversations is belied by our collective desire for easy answers. For too many of us, as long as everything can blamed on the “whitecisheteropatriarchy,” as you call it, actual answers remain necessarily opaque. Seems to me this is because, to make the *problem* an abstraction is to pose an abstract *solution*, so people end up settling for non-answers and no longer expect or even ask for real results. Scott Alexander made a good post recently concerning trapped priors, and I think the in-vogue hypothesis that America is foundationally a whitecisheteropatriarchy has become a trapped prior for the majority of our shared sense-making institutions, further entrenched by perverse monetary incentives. Hence the proliferation of cobras. Interestingly, I do believe this problem is largely divorced from the masses. For example, the Grammys WAP scissoring affair... judging by social media immediately afterward, you’d have thought this was the one thing on the majority of American minds — that libs everywhere were exploiting these kinds of debauched cultural moments to pwn the cons while marking one up in the fight against the whitecisheteropatriarchy; and conversely, that conservatives all were decrying the befoulment of America and the minds of her youth while defending liberalism as we know it. In reality, the 2021 Grammys were the least watched in history - by half - and America is tuning out (CNN ratings down 50%) because they realize or intuit that the people directing traffic in the halls of power are actually snake handling soothsayers. Of course, here’s where the MSM grift comes in, with desperation attempting to bring people back to the cobra breeding grounds, hence the absolute shit coverage of these Atlanta massage parlor shootings. Perhaps what’s actually being bred is mass apathy, and we’re no closer to having the conversations you so rightly point out we need to have.
Anyway, thanks for the insight.
The media line is nearly always complete bullshit, but I do buy the idea that this was, at least in part, racially motivated. Not the killings themselves, but the sexual addiction part. I believe this guy fetishized asian women. If what HWFO says about his upbringing as a christian is true, he likely resented himself for doing so, and rather than do the adult thing (not that he was likely very emotionally mature at 21) and exercise some self control, he lashed out, not just against the the staff of the massage parlors he targeted, but also at other random people who just happened to be there at the time. The racial component is there, in my opinion, just not where the clickmongers are saying it is.
Absent other data, I would imagine he would have gone to a spa staffed by white women just as readily, and probably ended up behaving in the same way. That said, we're not going to know because there's no way to know.