Atlanta Shootings...

[DKW 86 7,437]

I know that Woke Culture has decided already without any real evidence that the shootings in Atlanta are racial-hate crimes.

But are they? 6 Asian Victims, 2 White Victims, a Latino Man injured. One man already in custody. This has my wait and see alarm going off.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/atlanta-shootings-massage-parlor.html?fbclid=IwAR1W0FtRfKVDO2W2zyIrTIqe-ABVLGTU2BJVdPT4UED61SgkDRsPe3BMFyo

 

[CoffeeTiger 5,153]

The other angle isn't really any better. Considering this dude was the very definition of the white, rural, conservative man where religion, guns, and family were the main focuses of his life. 

Next thing you know he snaps, goes and buys a gun that he uses to mass kill people who he considers sinful and encouraging his sexual urges. 

So far I'm not seeing the evidence to support the 'asian hate' angle, but at the same time It is pretty coincidental that all this happens at the exact time that       anti-Asian discrimination is being made a publicly talked about issue for really the first time in a long time. 

 

Either way, the conversation isn't going to go in a way that the Right will like or be comfortable with. 

 

 

 

 

 

[McLoofus 35,182]

41 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

The other angle isn't really any better. Considering this dude was the very definition of the white, rural, conservative man where religion, guns, and family were the main focuses of his life. 

Next thing you know he snaps, goes and buys a gun that he uses to mass kill people who he considers sinful and encouraging his sexual urges. 

So far I'm not seeing the evidence to support the 'asian hate' angle, but at the same time It is pretty coincidental that all this happens at the exact time that       anti-Asian discrimination is being made a publicly talked about issue for really the first time in a long time. 

Either way, the conversation isn't going to go in a way that the Right will like or be comfortable with. 

Agreed. So much of the Right's agenda is implicated by this event.

Personally, I'm a little uncomfortable with how part of the conversation is going. I see a lot of people who want this to be specifically about race, in some weird service of their personal agendas. I'm not saying that it's not, but the eagerness to label it as such from some- definitely not Asians or Pacific Islanders, as they are the ones who absolutely should be talking about it- is very off-putting and misguided. 

Regardless of his motivation, though, this has sparked a louder conversation that needs to be had. Whether or not this crime qualifies, anti-Asian violence is a very real and growing problem- again, thank the flaming orange a**hole and his cult of idiots- and it needs to be addressed. Quite honestly, I'm thankful to see Asian Americans speaking up in a way I haven't seen before. In trying to make tragedy mean something, that's the utility I see in this situation. 

And it's certainly easy to believe that even if this stupid, hateful, redneck POS wasn't targeting Asians specifically, he in some way found them to be less human and therefore less deserving of a continued life. Ditto for them being women, and sex workers. (As for the non-Asians, men, and non-sex workers he shot, there are any number of reasons- requiring very little imagination to conjure- that he might have shot people in open businesses/public spaces who were not on his original list of targets.) 

As a country, we are inarguably reaping what the outgoing administration and its many tentacles- several of which creep around this forum- sowed with their incessant, hateful, racist rhetoric, which of course embraced COVID as an opportunity to amplify itself many times over.

 

 

[homersapien 11,416]

Trump's 'coronavirus' tweet helped lead to rise in racist anti-Asian Twitter content: Study

"Don't attach locations or ethnicity to the disease," the WHO said.

By Dr. Mishal Reja

March 18, 202

A new study suggests that former President Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric around the coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in China, helped spark anti-Asian Twitter content and "likely perpetuated racist attitudes."

The Asian American community has experienced a striking rise in incidents of hate since the onset of COVID-19, according to officials and advocates, and critics say the former president's repeated use of "coronavirus" and other terms helped fuel an environment of hatred.

"Anti-Asian sentiment depicted in the tweets containing the term 'coronavirus' likely perpetuated racist attitudes and parallels the anti-Asian hate crimes that have occurred since," said Dr. Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UC, San Francisco and the study's lead author.

The results, published in the American Journal of Public Health, come in the wake of a string of attacks on Asian communities in the U.S., including a series of shootings in Georgia that left six women of Asian descent dead.

The study indicated a difference in anti-Asian sentiment when using neutral hashtags such as #COVID-19 versus racist hashtags like #Chinesevirus -- 20% of the hashtags associated with #COVID-19 demonstrated anti-Asian sentiment, compared to 50% of hashtags with #Chinesevirus.

Dr. John Brownstein, an ABC News Medical Unit contributor and author of the study, said that such online conversations can spark violent reactions.

"We often see that online conversations that contain messages of hate don't stay online," Brownstein said. "Oftentimes, the conversations that take place on social media results in real world consequences."

Dr. Daniel Rogers, an expert on misinformation at New York University, said that hateful content on social media can lead to more of the same being served up to users via platforms' algorithms.

"As platform algorithms pick up on engagement around this toxic content, they recommend increasingly more extreme content to users until their feeds are dominated by nothing but the most extreme stuff, goading those users with a propensity toward violence to potentially committing hate crimes," Rogers said.

Researchers also found that the timing of the former president's tweet was significant. The first time he used "ChineseVirus" was March 16, 2020, and the following week saw an increase in anti-Asian hashtags and a rise in hate crimes.

International health officials purposely avoided attaching geography to the virus, as had been done in the past, to avoid casting blame, but Trump insisted on tying China to COVID-19 at every turn.

Experts and policy makers warned against using inflammatory and racist tweets since they can serve as a rallying cry for hate crimes.

"Don't attach locations or ethnicity to the disease, this is not a 'coronavirus,' 'coronavirus' or 'Asian Virus," the World Health Organization wrote in a February 2020 bulletin.

In a wide-ranging press briefing on Wednesday, Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki said that damaging rhetoric from the prior administration led to "inaccurate, unfair" perceptions that threatened Asian Americans.

One year ago, at the start of the pandemic, Trump condemned xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans, but he continued to use incendiary rhetoric and deny doing so was racist.

On the night several Asian women were shot dead in Atlanta, he referred to COVID-19 as the "coronavirus" on Fox News.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

Hswen said it's more important now than ever for our leaders to use neutral language because inflammatory words can influence people's behavior toward particular groups.

The study results, Hswen said, "confirm that nationality, race, or ethnicity should not be attached to disease nomenclature, as these names can carry pejorative connotations that can stigmatize these communities."

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/trumps-chinese-virus-tweet-helped-lead-rise-racist/story?id=76530148

 

This is so illustrative of Trump's MO:  Play on fear and hate to divide the country and develop a political following.

 

 

[homersapien 11,416]

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new report says

From 2019 to 2020, the overall hate crime rate declined, while hate crimes targeting Asians increased, from three to 28 in New York and seven to 15 in Los Angeles.

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-nearly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264

 

"...........Ramakrishnan explained that research on Trump’s use of racist language in reference to other groups shows that his language did have a profound impact on how people behave toward marginalized groups.

He said a 2020 study that examined Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign — when he referred to them as “rapists” and declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best” — found that the inflammatory remarks emboldened certain members of the American public and gave them license to express deeply held prejudices. Researchers dubbed this the “Trump effect” or “emboldening effect.”

“Trump's rhetoric on Latinos in 2016 actually changed people's attitudes and behavior towards Latinos,” Ramakrishnan, who worked on the study, said. “So they were more likely to be punitive towards Latinos in the workplace.

A separate study revealed that the use of “coronavirus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “coronavirus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "coronavirus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.

“Research suggests that when people see Asian Americans as being more ‘foreign,’ they are more likely to express hostility toward them and engage in acts of violence and discrimination,” Rucker Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study, previously told NBC Asian America...........”

[I_M4_AU 7,915]

2 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

The other angle isn't really any better.

This is not the angle the media is pushing, but the white supremacy is the way our media wants the narrative to head.  Why not wait until more information comes out?  

 

2 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

Considering this dude was the very definition of the white, rural, conservative man where religion, guns, and family were the main focuses of his life. 

This sounds a little racist?  Did you mean to lump all white, rural, conservative males in with this guy?  If you have already made up your mind, I guess facts won’t matter.  That fact that he killed two white women lends credence to his sex addition theory.  Don’t misunderstand me here; I am not condoning his actions or defending this POS by any means, just the jumping on his race is just too convenient to what the media’s present narrative wants to be.

 

2 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

anti-Asian discrimination is being made a publicly talked about issue for really the first time in a long time. 

I will agree on this part:

He said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.

Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.

https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sat-cutoff-scores-based-on-race/

Talk about systemic racism, here you have it and it has been condoned for a long time.  And in NYC:

De Blasio changed the admissions standards so that a fifth of the seats at New York’s most renowned specialized high schools would be off-limits to students from middle schools such as Christa McAuliffe Intermediate School, which serves a large number of poor, Asian students.

Christa McAuliffe sent more students to specialized high schools than any other school in New York before the city revamped its admissions process in 2018. Out of the 274 eighth-graders who graduated that year, 205 went on to attend a specialized high school, despite the fact that about two-thirds of those students were poor.

Yet de Blasio changed a program intended to help underprivileged students at McAuliffe into one that hurts Asian students at the school. Going forward, students from McAuliffe cannot compete for 20 percent of the seats at specialized high schools, which creates a roadblock between the low-income Asian students at the school and the education opportunities that promise a better tomorrow.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/521696-de-blasios-obsession-with-racial-balance-in-schools-has-a-clear-victim

 

 

 

[DKW 86 7,437]

56 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new report says

From 2019 to 2020, the overall hate crime rate declined, while hate crimes targeting Asians increased, from three to 28 in New York and seven to 15 in Los Angeles.

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-nearly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264

 

"...........Ramakrishnan explained that research on Trump’s use of racist language in reference to other groups shows that his language did have a profound impact on how people behave toward marginalized groups.

He said a 2020 study that examined Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign — when he referred to them as “rapists” and declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best” — found that the inflammatory remarks emboldened certain members of the American public and gave them license to express deeply held prejudices. Researchers dubbed this the “Trump effect” or “emboldening effect.”

“Trump's rhetoric on Latinos in 2016 actually changed people's attitudes and behavior towards Latinos,” Ramakrishnan, who worked on the study, said. “So they were more likely to be punitive towards Latinos in the workplace.

A separate study revealed that the use of “coronavirus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “coronavirus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "coronavirus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.

“Research suggests that when people see Asian Americans as being more ‘foreign,’ they are more likely to express hostility toward them and engage in acts of violence and discrimination,” Rucker Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study, previously told NBC Asian America...........”

Because NY and LA are where all the Right Wing MAGA-sters are located....?????

[wdefromtx 3,159]

4 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Because NY and LA are where all the Right Wing MAGA-sters are located....?????

I know right!! Let's take it a little further.....the list they reference in the article has the largest cities in America. The most with the greatest increases are democratic strongholds. I doubt all the offenders are MAGA's, just saying. 

[DKW 86 7,437]

1 hour ago, wdefromtx said:

I know right!! Let's take it a little further.....the list they reference in the article has the largest cities in America. The most with the greatest increases are democratic strongholds. I doubt all the offenders are MAGA's, just saying. 

MY COMMENTS WERE TOTALLY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK...

 

[wdefromtx 3,159]

Just now, DKW 86 said:

MY COMMENTS WERE TOTALLY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK...

 

I know, but you should have expanded it further than just those too cities. lol 

[DKW 86 7,437]

49 minutes ago, wdefromtx said:

I know, but you should have expanded it further than just those too cities. lol 

Well, I was mocking the title of the post above.

[AU9377 5,018]

There is too much of a desire to disregard the actual facts in favor of making this some grand example of a hate crime.  The facts do not support this being a hate crime.  They just don't.  That doesn't cheapen the horrific events that took place or the fact that 8 people lost their lives. A mentally deranged individual did something that is unimaginable.  If, as is being discussed, he was a customer of these establishments, he was clearly attracted to Asian women.  I hope that there isn't someone reading this that actually believes that the "Asian Spas" offer spa treatments and are there to work the knots out of your back.  Having said that, regardless of what services they provide, nobody deserved to lose their life. 

The deranged redneck POS looks like the typical right wing extremist, but that alone isn't enough to make the bridge from what he did to Asian hate across the country.  Nobody should be harmed in any way due to the color of their skin, who they love or their faith.  I just think that it is important that we understand what is and isn't taking place and make every effort to be honest about the situations that exist.

[wdefromtx 3,159]

2 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Well, I was mocking the title of the post above.

His post are easy to mock. 

[wdefromtx 3,159]

2 hours ago, AU9377 said:

There is too much of a desire to disregard the actual facts in favor of making this some grand example of a hate crime.  The facts do not support this being a hate crime.  They just don't.  That doesn't cheapen the horrific events that took place or the fact that 8 people lost their lives. A mentally deranged individual did something that is unimaginable.  If, as is being discussed, he was a customer of these establishments, he was clearly attracted to Asian women.  I hope that there isn't someone reading this that actually believes that the "Asian Spas" offer spa treatments and are there to work the knots out of your back.  Having said that, regardless of what services they provide, nobody deserved to lose their life. 

The deranged redneck POS looks like the typical right wing extremist, but that alone isn't enough to make the bridge from what he did to Asian hate across the country.  Nobody should be harmed in any way due to the color of their skin, who they love or their faith.  I just think that it is important that we understand what is and isn't taking place and make every effort to be honest about the situations that exist.

When I was at school in Auburn we took a trip to Savannah. About the time we got near Atlanta there was a giant billboard with an Asian lady on it and the name of the place which was I don’t remember the name. But it said “Spa and Massage” and at the bottom in large font said “Truckers Welcome!” My wife and I look at each other and was like.....”Riiiighht?...Massages?” 

[homersapien 11,416]

19 hours ago, wdefromtx said:

I know right!! Let's take it a little further.....the list they reference in the article has the largest cities in America. The most with the greatest increases are democratic strongholds. I doubt all the offenders are MAGA's, just saying. 

Did it ever occur to you that Asian-Americans tend to be concentrated in our major cities?

As for "Democratic strongholds", I am sure there are more than enough MAGAs to account for the incidents of violence perpetuated against Asian-Americans in these cities.

[homersapien 11,416]

14 hours ago, wdefromtx said:

When I was at school in Auburn we took a trip to Savannah. About the time we got near Atlanta there was a giant billboard with an Asian lady on it and the name of the place which was I don’t remember the name. But it said “Spa and Massage” and at the bottom in large font said “Truckers Welcome!” My wife and I look at each other and was like.....”Riiiighht?...Massages?” 

Yeah, you know how those Asian women are!    It was just coincidental most of them were Asian-American.  What a self-own.

One of the women killed in this incident had a 8 month-old child at home. Another was there with her husband.

 

[homersapien 11,416]

"Over the past year, attacks on Asian Americans have increased more than 150% over the previous year, including the March 16 murders of eight people, including six Asian American women, in Atlanta.

Some of these attacks may be classified as hate crimes. But whether they meet that legal definition or not, they all fit a long history of viewing Asian Americans in particular ways that make discrimination and violence against them more likely.

I have researched and taught on Asian America for 20 years, including on the pernicious effects of stereotypes and attacks on individuals. Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.

Much remains unknown about the attacks in Atlanta, but the man charged with the murders has said he did not have a racial prejudice against people of Asian descent. Rather, he has claimed he has a sexual addiction. But that statement indicates that he assumed these women were prostitutes, whether that's true or not.

This assumption, and the resulting violence, is just one of many that Asian Americans have suffered through the years.

A long history of prejudice

The presupposed connection between Asian women and sex dates back almost 150 years: In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively barred Chinese women from immigrating, because it was impossible to tell if they were traveling "for lewd and immoral purposes," including "for purposes of prostitution." The assumption that all Chinese women were of questionable moral character placed the burden on the women themselves to somehow prove they were not prostitutes before being allowed to immigrate.

The U.S. military contributed to this conception of Asian women as hypersexualized. During the wars in the Philippines at the start of the 19th century, and during the mid-20th-century wars in Korea and Vietnam, servicemen took advantage of women who had turned to sex work in response to their lives being wrecked by war.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government brokered a deal with Thailand to be a "rest and relaxation" center for military personnel fighting in Vietnam. That bolstered what became the foundations of Thailand's modern-day sex tourism industry, which attracts men from the United States and Europe.

This association of Asian women with men's sexual fantasies has permeated popular culture, such as a scene in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick movie "Full Metal Jacket" in which a Vietnamese woman entices two servicemen by saying, "Me love you long time," and regular themes in the animated comedy "Family Guy." This makes Asian women more desirable to sex traffickers, brought over to serve male desires in spas and massage parlors such as the ones attacked in Atlanta.

This history of sexualization of Asian women, shaped by the U.S. military and patriarchy, creates the backdrop to the Atlanta shootings. It helped create the conditions for the Asian spas and massage parlors to be there in the first place. It presents Asian American women as submissive, responsive agents of sexual temptation.

Race and gender inform what happened, and the public response to it, whether the alleged shooter articulates racist motives or not.

Stereotypes and perceptions matter

Other crimes against Asian Americans may also lack clear evidence of racial bias, but still echo anti-Asian American stereotypes.

For instance, many elderly Asian Americans have been shoved to the ground in recent weeks, and Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old man, died in one such incident in February in San Francisco.

The public defender representing the accused perpetrator in Ratanapakdee's death denies that race motivated the crime. But that is different from saying race was not a factor at all.

Practically all Asian Americans, but elderly men in particular, are often viewed as nonaggressive, meek and unable or unwilling to fight back, in contrast to men of other races. They are easy targets.

It's not always a crime

Other anti-Asian American racism isn't criminal at all, but still fits with the nation's racist history. As COVID-19 spread across the U.S., Asian-owned restaurants and stores were the first to experience declining revenue, even though most of the earliest cases in the U.S. came from Europe.

There is a long history of suspecting Asian Americans of carrying disease into the U.S., which made it seem natural for people to avoid Asian American-owned businesses. President Donald Trump's repeated public declarations that the "'Rona" virus came from China reinforced those feelings.

This race-based and erroneous assumption has resulted in Asian Americans having among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, though they had among the lowest before the pandemic.

It defies logic to claim that race isn't relevant in attacks on Asian Americans unless the perpetrator actively references it. Research has found that most Americans assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born, unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as being overweight.

Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being "forever foreigners" in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.

Pawan Dhingra, Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Amherst College

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/20/racism-is-behind-anti-asian-american-violence-even-when-its-not-a-hate-crime_partner/

[cole256 17,084]

I'm still waiting for them to say the shooter is an animal, thug, drug in his system etc......

[homersapien 11,416]

What we know about the victims of the Atlanta shootings

https://www.vox.com/22336318/atlanta-shootings-victims-what-we-know

 

[wdefromtx 3,159]

21 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Yeah, you know how those Asian women are!    It was just coincidental most of them were Asian-American.  What a self-own.

One of the women killed in this incident had a 8 month-old child at home. Another was there with her husband.

 

You  are very naive then if you think the spa on the billboard was a legit spa. Some of the spas may be, but just a few months ago there was a huge sting operation here in Houston and guess what? It was all these massage parlors fronting that were actually running prostitution rings in them. 
 

Did I say all of them were? No. But AU9377 made a comment about this and I recalled this billboard. Even the the picture was very provocative on the billboard. It was obvious what they were really selling. 
 

 

[homersapien 11,416]

Just now, wdefromtx said:

You  are very naive then if you think the spa on the billboard was a legit spa. Some of the spas may be, but just a few months ago there was a huge sting operation here in Houston and guess what? It was all these massage parlors fronting that were actually running prostitution rings in them. 
 

Did I say all of them were? No. But AU9377 made a comment about this and I recalled this billboard. Even the the picture was very provocative on the billboard. It was obvious what they were really selling. 
 

 

 

[wdefromtx 3,159]

44 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Did it ever occur to you that Asian-Americans tend to be concentrated in our major cities?

As for "Democratic strongholds", I am sure there are more than enough MAGAs to account for the incidents of violence perpetuated against Asian-Americans in these cities.

Or wait for it......maybe some were also left wing nut jobs as well!! 
 

But I guess in your mind they all have to be MAGA and it’s all Trumps fault. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

[wdefromtx 3,159]

Just now, homersapien said:

 

You tried taking a cheap shot at a response I had to another poster....”what a self own.” 
 

You reap what you sow. 

[homersapien 11,416]

1 minute ago, wdefromtx said:

Or wait for it......maybe some were also left wing nut jobs as well!! 
 

But I guess in your mind they all have to be MAGA and it’s all Trumps fault. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Project much?  YOU were the one who alluded to "Democratic strongholds", as if that were relevant.

And yes, I believe most -if not all -  of the increase in racially-based attacks are perpetuated by MAGAs, for the obvious reason.

[homersapien 11,416]

3 minutes ago, wdefromtx said:

You tried taking a cheap shot at a response I had to another poster....”what a self own.” 
 

You reap what you sow. 

That makes no sense.

Any post made on this forum is subject to a response by anyone, which is what makes it a public forum.  

And the point of my post, which you apparently missed - is you were perpetuating a racial stereotype, unwittingly or not.