The News Thread

[Einherjar86]

what amazes me the most is that a gated community white boy like yourself is the one who thinks "he understands" what it's like to be black. Clearly you are nothing more than a product of this countries broken college system.

Couldn’t resist, could you?

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Couldn’t resist, could you?

 

[CiG]

It's actually not rational. You're as likely to catch COVID-19 from a non-Asian person in America (maybe more likely). Specifying the country of supposed origin doesn't actually make one any safer, and stigmatizes those who present as Asian because it leads people to believe that those of Asian descent are somehow dirtier or more susceptible to infection. The only purpose it really serves is to cultivate animosity toward Asian Americans.

The fuck does "present as Asian" mean? Are there Asians who don't identify as Asian? Caught me off-guard with that one. Anyway I don't want to dogpile you but I'll just say I don't really agree with you that it's not rational, as we know that it started in China, people flying in and out of China spread it elsewhere, and huge waves of the earliest infected outside of China were caused by people that had just recently visited China (Chinese or not) or had relatives who had done so and infected them. Our first death here was an old Asian man who had returned from China.

That aside, if what we're talking about here is people harassing and physically threatening Asians then yes they're just racist morons. Doing that kind of thing defeats the purpose of social distancing anyway.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Why does the nation of origin matter? That's what's really troubling here. We don't need to specify anything about where it supposedly came from. The desire to do so already betrays anti-Asian sentiment.

Call it COVID-19. That's its name.

Nation of origin matters because the GOP guy's point was that Hong Kong Fluey (HKF) came to Italy via Chinese people, and that more Chinese people elsewhere could have easily meant more HKF. Washington has such high levels of HKF due to a single Chinese arrival. How do you not understand that?

You have no argument here, so you distract from the issue.

Your numbers mean more than the actual math (which I don't believe is accurate to begin with). This fact doesn't speak for itself, and says nothing about the atmosphere of terror cultivated by the very threat of lynchings. Also, lynchings hardly account for all the crimes committed against African Americans during that time--so why would you act as though they do?

The second amendment means nothing here. Were African Americans allowed to own firearms to defend themselves, it wouldn't have changed the cultural atmosphere. In fact, it would have made it worse--can you imagine what would have happened if a black man murdered a white man?

Honestly, I can't express enough how little gravity there is to your response.

Apparently the numbers are closer to 3.5k rather than 5k. 3500 divided by 100 years = 3.5 lynchings per year. I'm not talking about pre-Civil War crimes against blacks because those have nothing to do with the 64 CRA; obviously I acknowledge the existence of those crimes.

I agree regarding "atmosphere of terror", but what does that have to do with it? Said atmosphere was already well on the downturn in the 50s and early 60s without the 64 CRA. One can enforce laws against civil rights violations (which had been on the books since Grant's presidency) without integrating idpol into every single facet of American life (which is what the 64 CRA and subsequent expansions did). Gun ownership probably would have accelerated violence in the short-term, sure, but with the positive trade-off of preventing oppression and ending said atmosphere of terror. Just look at how a few rooftop Koreans successfully defended their stores from the racist lynch mob of rioting blacks post-Rodney King police acquittal.

 

[Einherjar86]

The fuck does "present as Asian" mean? Are there Asians who don't identify as Asian? Caught me off-guard with that one.

Sorry, I was referring to nationality. So for example, my wife knows someone whose cousin was told to "go back to China," and subsequently spat on. But he wasn't even born in China; he was born here, and is American. So by "present as Asian," I meant someone who looks like they could be from an Asian country but is actually American. I should have been clearer.

I also have students being affected by this, some of whom aren't even Chinese. Ironically, racism doesn't discriminate--if you look vaguely Asian, racists tend to conflate you with whatever nationality they have a particular problem with.

Regarding nation of origin, I'll say more below.

Nation of origin matters because the GOP guy's point was that Hong Kong Fluey (HKF) came to Italy via Chinese people, and that more Chinese people elsewhere could have easily meant more HKF. Washington has such high levels of HKF due to a single Chinese arrival. How do you not understand that?

I do understand it, but I don't think I'm making my point clear.

The damage done by using this language is greater than any potential gain in specificity. I'm not even sure I understand what the gain is--why do we need to specify where it came from? It actually does virtually nothing for public health.

For example: the first person to have coronavirus in Boston was a student returning from Wuhan. He was immediately quarantined and so didn't affect anyone else. But if he hadn't been quarantined, specifying that it was of Chinese origin wouldn't have helped anyone.

I think the imagined scenario here is that Chinese people are coming over from China and interacting primarily with Asian American communities; but this more than often wasn't the case. It was students returning from seeing family, and people traveling for business. Avoiding high-volume areas of Asian Americans is no safer than avoiding high-volume areas of people in general.

What does happen from using phrases like "Chinese virus" is dumb people associate Asian Americans with a higher rate of contagion (and infectiousness generally), and also tend to assign blame.

Apparently the numbers are closer to 3.5k rather than 5k. 3500 divided by 100 years = 3.5 lynchings per year. I'm not talking about pre-Civil War crimes against blacks because those have nothing to do with the 64 CRA; obviously I acknowledge the existence of those crimes.

I'm confused--doesn't that math come out to 35 per year?

Also, one hundred years isn't the timespan you should be using. Lynching didn't become an instrument of mass social violence until Reconstruction, so the absence of it in the first ~15 years after the Civil War lowers the average.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html (I'm only counting lynchings of African Americans)

That being said, it doesn't mean that thirty-five lynchings happened every year. Some year there were fewer; some year there were many more (that's actually something you taught me, when I made a naive assumption about average lifespan). That's how the terror of it worked: no one remembers a year when there were only a couple lynchings, but everyone remembers the year when there were over a hundred. Also, lynchings were publicized, photographed, and widely attended spectacles. They were made into instruments of terror not simply through the physical violence they caused, but through the sensation of their taking place:

I agree regarding "atmosphere of terror", but what does that have to do with it? Said atmosphere was already well on the downturn in the 50s and early 60s without the 64 CRA. One can enforce laws against civil rights violations (which had been on the books since Grant's presidency) without integrating idpol into every single facet of American life (which is what the 64 CRA and subsequent expansions did). Gun ownership probably would have accelerated violence in the short-term, sure, but with the positive trade-off of preventing oppression and ending said atmosphere of terror. Just look at how a few rooftop Koreans successfully defended their stores from the racist lynch mob of rioting blacks post-Rodney King police acquittal.

The atmosphere of terror wasn't well on the downturn by the '50s and '60s though--at least, not if you talked to African Americans. The number of public lynchings went down, but that didn't mean they weren't still terrified to drive through southern towns or stage sit-ins. Just because the violence subsided didn't mean they were content. The waning in certain acts of publicized violence (like lynching) meant that they felt able to assemble and protest for civil rights, but that's not a sign that their fear lessened.

Lynchings may have subsided by the 1950s, but that didn't mean African Americans felt at home or safe in this country. Lynching still happened, especially if they made visible attempts to protest for civil rights. If you read memoirs of those who staged sit-ins or took part in the Freedom Highways campaign, they were still terrified and susceptible to violence.

Laws against civil rights violations meant nothing in the nineteenth century. As far as gun ownership goes, I don't think it's worth speculating. For my part, I don't think it would have evened anything out. I think it would have led to a race war and justification for practices of ethnic cleansing; but we can't know for sure.

 

[CiG]

So for example, my wife knows someone whose cousin was told to "go back to China," and subsequently spat on.

I hope someone beat their ass.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Re Einherjar86, fair enough, I am dumb regarding my inability to divide numbers by multiples of 10. I'll reply to other parts of your post later, just wanted to acknowledge that to start.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I do understand it, but I don't think I'm making my point clear.

The damage done by using this language is greater than any potential gain in specificity. I'm not even sure I understand what the gain is--why do we need to specify where it came from? It actually does virtually nothing for public health.

For example: the first person to have coronavirus in Boston was a student returning from Wuhan. He was immediately quarantined and so didn't affect anyone else. But if he hadn't been quarantined, specifying that it was of Chinese origin wouldn't have helped anyone.

I think the imagined scenario here is that Chinese people are coming over from China and interacting primarily with Asian American communities; but this more than often wasn't the case. It was students returning from seeing family, and people traveling for business. Avoiding high-volume areas of Asian Americans is no safer than avoiding high-volume areas of people in general.

What does happen from using phrases like "Chinese virus" is dumb people associate Asian Americans with a higher rate of contagion (and infectiousness generally), and also tend to assign blame.

The idea is that you identify the problem nation and then take appropriate measures to prevent people from said nation from entering until the problem has been resolved. In the case of Italy, it was a large number of Chinese from Wuhan that brought the virus over. The Republican guy you quoted (at least in the quote you posted; the main article is paywalled) didn't talk about Asians broadly and didn't talk about the Chinese ethnicity specifically. The quote was “there’s a garment industry and a lot of Chinese. If we were like Italy, we’d have it already.”, i.e. he's talking about foreign workers concentrated in one area bringing a disease, and making the (safe) assumption that if we had a similar situation, ours would have accelerated faster.

Also, one hundred years isn't the timespan you should be using. Lynching didn't become an instrument of mass social violence until Reconstruction, so the absence of it in the first ~15 years after the Civil War lowers the average.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html (I'm only counting lynchings of African Americans)

That being said, it doesn't mean that thirty-five lynchings happened every year. Some year there were fewer; some year there were many more (that's actually something you taught me, when I made a naive assumption about average lifespan). That's how the terror of it worked: no one remembers a year when there were only a couple lynchings, but everyone remembers the year when there were over a hundred. Also, lynchings were publicized, photographed, and widely attended spectacles. They were made into instruments of terror not simply through the physical violence they caused, but through the sensation of their taking place:

The atmosphere of terror wasn't well on the downturn by the '50s and '60s though--at least, not if you talked to African Americans. The number of public lynchings went down, but that didn't mean they weren't still terrified to drive through southern towns or stage sit-ins. Just because the violence subsided didn't mean they were content. The waning in certain acts of publicized violence (like lynching) meant that they felt able to assemble and protest for civil rights, but that's not a sign that their fear lessened.

Lynchings may have subsided by the 1950s, but that didn't mean African Americans felt at home or safe in this country. Lynching still happened, especially if they made visible attempts to protest for civil rights. If you read memoirs of those who staged sit-ins or took part in the Freedom Highways campaign, they were still terrified and susceptible to violence.

Laws against civil rights violations meant nothing in the nineteenth century. As far as gun ownership goes, I don't think it's worth speculating. For my part, I don't think it would have evened anything out. I think it would have led to a race war and justification for practices of ethnic cleansing; but we can't know for sure.

I dunno, your link seems to show that black lynchings hit their high point in the 1890s and gradually faded from then on, particularly by the exit of the Great Depression and afterwards. I agree of course that lynchings and the threat of being lynched were used to enforce segregation. Those lynchings should have been dealt with using federal law on the books rather than creating a system that makes it illegal to have certain political views and operate a business at the same time (see: gay wedding cakes, the Comcast "welfare" insult, etc).

 

[Einherjar86]

The idea is that you identify the problem nation and then take appropriate measures to prevent people from said nation from entering until the problem has been resolved. In the case of Italy, it was a large number of Chinese from Wuhan that brought the virus over. The Republican guy you quoted (at least in the quote you posted; the main article is paywalled) didn't talk about Asians broadly and didn't talk about the Chinese ethnicity specifically. The quote was “there’s a garment industry and a lot of Chinese. If we were like Italy, we’d have it already.”, i.e. he's talking about foreign workers concentrated in one area bringing a disease, and making the (safe) assumption that if we had a similar situation, ours would have accelerated faster.

I understand what his intended meaning was, but I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind it. People keep saying that specifying origin is a rational defense measure, but I don't get it. Even if specifying origin could help protect people in this country, all you have to say is "People traveling from China are more likely to have it" (that means people of any ethnicity). But it was way too late by the time these guys started saying it anyway. It was already here. By that point, having no or fewer Chinese isn't going to make a location any safer; all it takes is one person who doesn't know they're infected. Stigmatizing Asian people only stokes anti-Asian sentiments. And as of today, Kansas has hundreds of cases--some of which are in Reddi's county.

As I said to CIG, racism doesn't discriminate. If white Americans have anti-Chinese sentiments, they will exercise those sentiments toward anyone who looks remotely Asian.

I dunno, your link seems to show that black lynchings hit their high point in the 1890s and gradually faded from then on, particularly by the exit of the Great Depression and afterwards. I agree of course that lynchings and the threat of being lynched were used to enforce segregation. Those lynchings should have been dealt with using federal law on the books rather than creating a system that makes it illegal to have certain political views and operate a business at the same time (see: gay wedding cakes, the Comcast "welfare" insult, etc).

Lynchings did go down as you get into the 1930s; but they did still occur, and black Americans went about their days under no delusion that they were safe from white violence. Lynching still loomed as a mode of social terror. Civil rights activists who ventured into the South in the 1950s were terrified that they would be murdered, either by lynching or otherwise.

 

[Einherjar86]

During covid isolation, at least the entertainment is endless:

https://www.npr.org/sections/corona...-claims-on-u-s-testing-and-seoul-s-population

"I know South Korea better than anybody. It's a very tight — do you know how many people are in Seoul?" he asked. "Do you know how big the city of Seoul is?"

"Thirty-eight million people," Trump said,"That's bigger than anything we have. Thirty-eight million people, all tightly wound together."

That's incorrect. Seoul has a population of nearly 10 million. The population of South Korea itself is roughly 51.5 million.

It's unclear where the 38 million number came from, though there was some speculation. That includes a tweet about a potential mix-up between population and elevation.

 

[Dak]

Worldwide pandemic. The WHO lying to people. Economic depression incoming. None of this is nearly as important as correcting Trump on foreign city population sizes, which the authors had to look up themselves.

 

[Einherjar86]

It's important when the president's lying about testing--which is what the article's about.

 

[Dak]

It's important when the president's lying about testing--which is what the article's about.

"We have vast farmlands, we have vast areas where they don't have much of a problem. In some cases, they have no problem whatsoever," Trump said. "We have done more tests. I didn't talk about per capita. We have done more tests by far than any country in the world, by far."

No lie here. He got a foreign city population figure wrong. You would too. If you want to take issue with his reflexive, leading "I know X better than anybody" then suit yourself. It's a rhetorical tic and no one seriously reads anything into at this point. The media as of late has also been trying to dunk on him downplaying the threat originally, when until their borgmind realized they needed to abandon the impeachment narrative they did a 180 themselves, and pretended that "We've Always Been At War With The Coronavirus and we certainly never referred to it as the Chinese virus only two weeks ago."

Meanwhile, Douthat trying to single-handedly bring some credibility back to the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/covid-conservatism.html

This is where the pandemic-minimizing sort of conservative has ended up. They are confronted with a world crisis tailor-made for an anti-globalization, anti-deep-state worldview — a crisis in which China lit the fuse, the World Health Organization ran interference for Beijing, the American public health bureaucracy botched its one essential job, pious anti-racism inhibited an early public-health response, and outsourcing and offshoring left our economy exposed.

And their response? Too simple: Just a feint, a false flag, another deep state plot or power grab, another hoax to take down Trump. It can’t be real unless Hillary Clinton is somehow at the bottom of it.

Seen a lot of libertarians/ancaps laughing it off too/mad about responding to it at all. SMDH.

 

[Einherjar86]

No lie here. He got a foreign city population figure wrong.

No, he arbitrarily amplified a population number in an attempt to rationalize why they're testing more people per capita in South Korea. That's what he did.

The vast farmland of the U.S. is beside the point when we have people in dense population centers who can't get tests despite showing symptoms. I don't get why you think it's important to downplay things like this.

He's not just getting a population number wrong. Seoul doesn't have 38 million people; it has 9.7 million, and NYC has 8.6 million. Yet Seoul has done significantly more testing than the U.S. in places like New York. His bullshit is not insignificant here.

 

[CiG]

I just heard Fredo tested positive.

 

[Dak]

No, he arbitrarily amplified a population number in an attempt to rationalize why they're testing more people per capita in South Korea. That's what he did.

The vast farmland of the U.S. is beside the point when we have people in dense population centers who can't get tests despite showing symptoms. I don't get why you think it's important to downplay things like this.

He's not just getting a population number wrong. Seoul doesn't have 38 million people; it has 9.7 million, and NYC has 8.6 million. Yet Seoul has done significantly more testing than the U.S. in places like New York. His bullshit is not insignificant here.

It's not "important to downplay it". I'm doing an eyeroll because the whole thing isn't important, just like 90% of everything else that is breathlessly reported re: Trump. Did you know yesterday how many people live in Seoul? In SK? No. The US and other countries are behind all developed Asian countries in pandemic preparedness because 1. Asian countries have had to deal with them more and 2. the WHO, and various national CDC like bureaucracies are staffed by people more worried about political correctness than performing their nominal functions. NYC also was complicit in hollowing out its own capabilities. It's incompetence all the way up, down, left, right, and part of it is demonstrated on the continued "war on Drumpf."

 

[Einherjar86]

It's not "important to downplay it". I'm doing an eyeroll because the whole thing isn't important

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Trump using this as an opportunity to officially and publicly recognize Taiwan would be an amazing move. Especially since Jimmy Carter is still breathing air. Will probably never happen though.

 

[Dak]

Trump using this as an opportunity to officially and publicly recognize Taiwan would be an amazing move. Especially since Jimmy Carter is still breathing air. Will probably never happen though.

Zero geopolitical benefit to doing so. Not amazing.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I mean, Taiwan was a quickly-rising economic star until we ended formal relations, the PRC is boogeyman for a dozen reasons (some legitimate), of those reasons include rapidly expanding PRC claim over the sea and lack of American justification to counter it, and behind closed doors even establishment liberals like Hillary were pushing expansion in SEA, so now's as good a time as any. Obviously there would be immediate and drastic economic repercussions though.