The long Western legacy of violence against Asian Americans

[Dill]

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I don't know.  To speak definitively on this I'd have to actually engage in studies to either prove or debunk the claim.  Do you know the answer?

There can always be "lone wolf" threats. Hard to predict where they come from. While the FBI is watching Somalis and Saudis, a Yemeni immigrant might decide the best way to call attention to his country's plight is an attack. The push to de-couple some Arab states from backing the Palestinian Authorities would have me concerned, were I in the FBI. (Though as a private citizen, I support Palestinian rights and deplore the occupation.) 

But no real national, state, or local threat in the sense that white supremacists groups do now. The destruction of the ISIS state and degrading of Al Qaeda has greatly diminished the threat of terrorism from those quarters.

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: OK, so let's completely concede your MSM point, which we obviously shouldn't do without being thorough, but still.  Are you saying there are no politicians who have made this analogy?  Are you saying none of the posters here have made this analogy?

There are more than 200 Dem representatives in the House, and 50 inn the Senate. Who knows how many hundreds more at the state level. I cannot assert with 100% confidence that no Dem politician somewhere sometime validated Tucker's claim. I can say no one with a national platform has been claiming that. As far as posters here, I have no idea. There are many threads I have never clicked on. Some of the longer ones, I check them maybe once every two weeks.  This is a message board and people frequently blurt out stuff without thinking, so I'd grant the possibility. Do not recall actually reading that, though. 

What we want to be careful of is this--Tucker wants us to talk about how the MSM identify ALL Republicans or Trump supporters with window-breaking, cop-beating, Capitol-desecrating insurrectionists. Isn't that something? And after tolerating BLM violence all summer!  But I don't think he expects his audience to check that closely.  So far as I can tell Tucker, and friends at Fox, are the primary source of the claim. It's like one of his recent segments on COVID, in which he keeps asking questions like "How effective is this Corona virus vaccine? How necessary is it to take the vaccine? Don't dismiss those questions from anti-vaxers; Don't kick people off social media for asking them--answer the questions!" The questions, of course are answered everyday and easy to find. But for people who don't "trust" the mainstream media and so never tune in, creating this issue of "unanswered" questions keeps viewer attention on a non-problem, on alternative facts created by Tucker and others like him. Same deal for the "MSM paints us all as rioters" theme.

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Quote:So I reject the fallacy of composition here, when constructing wholes from statistical parts. Like good MSM journalists, I have always disaggregated Trump voters into groups (often overlapping)  which may have very different interests and susceptibility to conspiracy theories and insurrection--the alt-right, Evangelicals, traditional Republicans, the military, police, Reagan Dems in the Rust Belt, and white people who own country clubs, casinos, and oil companies. QAnon supporters appear in all these groups as well. Some of these seem over-represented among the insurrectionists so far arrested, like the alt-right and QAnon supporters, if we are going by those with the most visibility so far, though the distribution is surprisingly broad. 

Forgive me, but this seems to be a back door way of saying exactly what you're claiming no one is saying.  

Well, you have to be clearer then if you want me to understand this point.  What do you think I am claiming?

Number one, that I've heard no one beyond some people at Fox insist that MSM journalists and Dems want us all to believe that 74 million Republican voters are as fanatic the insurrectionists, that all the Repub voters are like that, etc.

But I am not asserting there is NO connection between the insurrectionists and the Republican party and its leader, who sent them to the Capitol. 

I am definitely not claiming that ONLY some 2,000 out of 74 million share the insurrectionists views. 

In the passage above, I say the Republican party is composed of lots of groups--many, maybe even a majority of the 74 million, may have no more in common with the insurrectionists than garden-variety Dem voters. That is not a way of saying the insurrectionists symbolize or otherwise stand in for the whole of the Republican party, as Tucker claims MSM journalists do. Quite the opposite.

I am saying these groups exhibit different degrees of susceptibility to the insurrectionists' constitutional fundamentalism. Same for their representatives. That's why McConnell wants to condemn the whole show and its sponsor, while Hawley can contest certification of electoral ballots as the Capitol is stormed--and not fear being primaried. That's why someone like Marjorie Greene or Devin Nunes can win at all.  A January poll showed 53% of Republicans still thought the election had been stolen. That's millions of people and VERY scary and concerning to me. They have something in common there with the insurrectionists. But I'd be surprised if the number of people who might actually break Capitol windows and lynch Nancy Pelosi exceeded 100,000, if gathered from every locality in the U.S. Tucker's claim is more extreme. He wants us to believe MSM journalists identify the entire 74 million with that radical 100,000. Same same. No part, just a whole.

I think we can agree on some of this, can't we?