BALOCHISTAN
Protesters block Pakistan highway after arrest of women accused of attack plot
Tue, May 17, 2022
By Gul Yousafzai
QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Hundreds of protesters blocked a highway in Pakistan for second day on Tuesday to protest against the arrest of two women, one of whom security officials described as a would-be suicide bomber who was planning to target Chinese citizens.
Police arrested one woman who they said planned to blow herself up near a convoy of Chinese nationals and that they had recovered explosives and detonators from her.
On Tuesday officials confirmed a second woman had also been arrested.
Arrests of women are rare in southwestern Balochistan province and the detentions have enraged supporters. The protesters said they would continue their sit-in until the women, who they said were innocent, were freed.
"It is all lies," Dost Gulzar, a political activist who is leading the protest, told Reuters.
The arrests came two weeks after a woman suicide bomber blew herself up on a university campus in the southern port city of Karachi, killing three Chinese teachers.
The woman belonged to the militant separatist group the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which has waged a violent secessionist insurgency in Balochistan, and has targeted Chinese interests in the region.
The sit-in is taking place in the town where the women were arrested, Hoshab, some 415 miles (670 km) south of provincial capital Quetta. The highway links Quetta with Gwadar port and was built under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor initiative.
China, a close Pakistan ally, plans to invest over $65 billion in Pakistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor - a part of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative to seek road and sea trade routes to connect with the rest of the world.
Beijing is also developing the Gwadar deep-water port.
The local administration is negotiating with the protesters, asking them to unblock the highway as a large number of vehicles are stuck, a senior official from the Balochistan police told Reuters, requesting anonymity.
Rights activists have long accused security forces of extrajudicial abductions and killings in Balochistan. Security officials say the accusations are exaggerated and not always linked with the state.
(Writing by Syed Raza Hassan; Editing by Alison Williams)
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Christian Academy of Louisville homework shows indoctrination happening in private schools
Willie Carver
Tue, May 17, 2022
The Courier Journal
One needs but scroll through Facebook or watch Fox News for a few minutes to hear an accusation of indoctrination in public schools. Some would have people believe that indoctrination is utterly rampant in K-12, though The Common Core Standards, adopted by many public schools, including in Kentucky, the first state to adopt them, explicitly and intentionally guide students in critical thinking.
Indoctrination and critical thinking can’t coexist, since indoctrination is, by definition, “the act or process of forcing somebody to accept a particular belief or set of beliefs and not allowing them to consider any others.” There is no room for criticism, for objection, for individuality of thought with indoctrination.
If work coming out of The Louisville Christian Academy is any indication, it is private schools we might need to watch more carefully for indoctrination.
In a recent tweet by JP Davis, a Kentucky business owner, a leaked assignment shows one of the clearest examples of indoctrination and heartbreaking homophobia I’ve ever seen in any curriculum.
In the assignment, a student must imagine a friend of a similar age and gender that they’ve known “since kindergarten” who attends their church and is “struggling with homosexuality” (sic). Given eight short sentences, they are asked to use logic and scripture to show the friend that “homosexuality will not bring them satisfaction” while making sure to signal they “don’t approve of their lifestyle” all while making sure to communicate that they “love” them.
In short, the students are set up to fail, since the task is impossible.
More: Homework at Christian Academy of Louisville: Persuade your friend to stop being gay
Willie Carver
Tue, May 17, 2022
The Courier Journal
One needs but scroll through Facebook or watch Fox News for a few minutes to hear an accusation of indoctrination in public schools. Some would have people believe that indoctrination is utterly rampant in K-12, though The Common Core Standards, adopted by many public schools, including in Kentucky, the first state to adopt them, explicitly and intentionally guide students in critical thinking.
Indoctrination and critical thinking can’t coexist, since indoctrination is, by definition, “the act or process of forcing somebody to accept a particular belief or set of beliefs and not allowing them to consider any others.” There is no room for criticism, for objection, for individuality of thought with indoctrination.
If work coming out of The Louisville Christian Academy is any indication, it is private schools we might need to watch more carefully for indoctrination.
In a recent tweet by JP Davis, a Kentucky business owner, a leaked assignment shows one of the clearest examples of indoctrination and heartbreaking homophobia I’ve ever seen in any curriculum.
In the assignment, a student must imagine a friend of a similar age and gender that they’ve known “since kindergarten” who attends their church and is “struggling with homosexuality” (sic). Given eight short sentences, they are asked to use logic and scripture to show the friend that “homosexuality will not bring them satisfaction” while making sure to signal they “don’t approve of their lifestyle” all while making sure to communicate that they “love” them.
In short, the students are set up to fail, since the task is impossible.
More: Homework at Christian Academy of Louisville: Persuade your friend to stop being gay
How the assignment set students up to fail
First, being gay is not a choice. This is settled truth. No one asking a gay person to change can be acting in love towards them while doing it, because they erase basic truths about their personhood. Anyone asking a gay person to change is saying to them that who they are, at an intrinsic, immutable level, should not be - we can’t be acting in love while we are actively telling someone that a fixed part of them shouldn’t exist.
Secondly, it is utterly impossible, and I speak as an English teacher, to appeal to logic when telling someone that being gay won’t bring them satisfaction, since, despite heavy discrimination, gay people tend to be happier in marriage than their straight counterparts. More importantly, gay people are equally satisfied in life only when they are accepted, so not accepting a person because of a characteristic and then blaming the characteristic for their unhappiness over not being accepted is not only a textbook example of a fallacy of cause and effect, it’s cruel.
This assignment, given by a school purporting to prepare students “to reason logically” sets students up not to understand rational thinking and equally conflates love and cruelty.
Moreover, the assignment utterly lacks critical thinking because it is indoctrination.
Despite the fact that many mainstream churches (and the majority of Christians) believe homosexuality should be accepted, this assignment is predicated upon one narrow understanding and requires all students to comply with it to get points. In fact, according to the rubric, a student can receive a “fair” grade if they employ “little love” and “no scripture”. The lowest descriptor on the rubric, interestingly, requires at least “one truth” - but it requires “little love” and neither logic nor scripture.
In a school system based upon Christ, neither love nor scripture are required for minimum points. The assignment does, however, mandate truth – but as the school defines it.
From where, then, does that truth come?
This is indoctrination
David Gooblar explains that indoctrination is “an effort to change … beliefs and instill a fear or reluctance to consider conflicting evidence.”
It is in this fear that the rejection of LGBTQ people (and any other people) resides.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based upon love. It’s impossible because love is the opposite of hate. This is why the rubric still gives points even if little love is shown.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based purely upon scripture; denominations are divided, but plenty of scripture-bound churches affirm gay people. This is why the rubric still gives points even if no scripture is shown.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based upon logic. It’s impossible because homophobia is recklessly illogical. This is why the rubric still gives points even if no logic is shown.
Students will only come to reject LGBTQ people as people always have: through indoctrination. This is why the rubric requires at least “one truth” for even the lowest-performing students to get a minimum score–the “truth” that being gay is wrong.
This is the “one truth” on which the assignment rests, the “one truth” that must be confessed for a student to get any points, the “one truth” for which the entire assignment was made.
Willie Carver
This is the thing about indoctrination - it necessarily requires coercion, because, were it to use any other approach, like truth, logic, or love, the lesson simply falls apart.
Willie Carver teaches French and English at Montgomery County Schools in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. He is the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: CAL homework shows indoctrination happening in private school: Opinion
First, being gay is not a choice. This is settled truth. No one asking a gay person to change can be acting in love towards them while doing it, because they erase basic truths about their personhood. Anyone asking a gay person to change is saying to them that who they are, at an intrinsic, immutable level, should not be - we can’t be acting in love while we are actively telling someone that a fixed part of them shouldn’t exist.
Secondly, it is utterly impossible, and I speak as an English teacher, to appeal to logic when telling someone that being gay won’t bring them satisfaction, since, despite heavy discrimination, gay people tend to be happier in marriage than their straight counterparts. More importantly, gay people are equally satisfied in life only when they are accepted, so not accepting a person because of a characteristic and then blaming the characteristic for their unhappiness over not being accepted is not only a textbook example of a fallacy of cause and effect, it’s cruel.
This assignment, given by a school purporting to prepare students “to reason logically” sets students up not to understand rational thinking and equally conflates love and cruelty.
Moreover, the assignment utterly lacks critical thinking because it is indoctrination.
Despite the fact that many mainstream churches (and the majority of Christians) believe homosexuality should be accepted, this assignment is predicated upon one narrow understanding and requires all students to comply with it to get points. In fact, according to the rubric, a student can receive a “fair” grade if they employ “little love” and “no scripture”. The lowest descriptor on the rubric, interestingly, requires at least “one truth” - but it requires “little love” and neither logic nor scripture.
In a school system based upon Christ, neither love nor scripture are required for minimum points. The assignment does, however, mandate truth – but as the school defines it.
From where, then, does that truth come?
This is indoctrination
David Gooblar explains that indoctrination is “an effort to change … beliefs and instill a fear or reluctance to consider conflicting evidence.”
It is in this fear that the rejection of LGBTQ people (and any other people) resides.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based upon love. It’s impossible because love is the opposite of hate. This is why the rubric still gives points even if little love is shown.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based purely upon scripture; denominations are divided, but plenty of scripture-bound churches affirm gay people. This is why the rubric still gives points even if no scripture is shown.
Students will not come to reject LGBTQ people based upon logic. It’s impossible because homophobia is recklessly illogical. This is why the rubric still gives points even if no logic is shown.
Students will only come to reject LGBTQ people as people always have: through indoctrination. This is why the rubric requires at least “one truth” for even the lowest-performing students to get a minimum score–the “truth” that being gay is wrong.
This is the “one truth” on which the assignment rests, the “one truth” that must be confessed for a student to get any points, the “one truth” for which the entire assignment was made.
Willie Carver
This is the thing about indoctrination - it necessarily requires coercion, because, were it to use any other approach, like truth, logic, or love, the lesson simply falls apart.
Willie Carver teaches French and English at Montgomery County Schools in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. He is the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: CAL homework shows indoctrination happening in private school: Opinion
Nigerian entrepreneur builds electric mini-buses in clean energy push
Mon, May 16, 2022,
By Seun Sanni
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigerian entrepreneur Mustapha Gajibo has been converting petrol mini-buses into electric vehicles at his workshop, but he is now going a step further to build solar battery-powered buses from scratch in a push to promote clean energy and curb pollution.
Africa's top producer and exporter of crude oil has heavily-subsidised gasoline and a patchy supply of electricity -- a combination that might discourage anyone from investing in electric vehicles.
But Gajibo, a 30-year-old university drop-out and resident of Maiduguri city in Nigeria's northeast, is undaunted. He says rising global oil prices and pollution make electric vehicles a worthwhile alternative in Nigeria.
At his workshop, he has already stripped combustion engines from 10 mini-buses, powering them with solar batteries. The buses, which have been operating for just over a month, cover a distance of 100 km on a single charge, he said.
His most ambitious project is building the buses from scratch. They will be equipped with solar panels and batteries.
"As I am speaking to you now at our workshop, we are building a 12-seater bus which can cover up to 200 kilometres on one charge," Gajibo said.
"Before the end of this month we are going to unveil that bus, which will be the first of its kind in the whole of Nigeria," he said, adding that his workshop had capacity to produce 15 buses a month.
In Nigeria, like most of Africa, electric vehicles have not yet gained traction because they are more expensive and there is little electricity and no infrastructure to charge vehicles.
For now, Gajibo has one charging station powered by solar.
There are other hurdles like foreign currency shortages that make it difficult to import parts. So, he is looking to source them in Nigeria.
"We have been substituting some materials with local materials to bring our costs down and maximise profit," said Gajibo.
(Additional reporting by Abraham Archiga in Abuja, Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe, Editing by Christina Fincher)
Mon, May 16, 2022,
By Seun Sanni
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigerian entrepreneur Mustapha Gajibo has been converting petrol mini-buses into electric vehicles at his workshop, but he is now going a step further to build solar battery-powered buses from scratch in a push to promote clean energy and curb pollution.
Africa's top producer and exporter of crude oil has heavily-subsidised gasoline and a patchy supply of electricity -- a combination that might discourage anyone from investing in electric vehicles.
But Gajibo, a 30-year-old university drop-out and resident of Maiduguri city in Nigeria's northeast, is undaunted. He says rising global oil prices and pollution make electric vehicles a worthwhile alternative in Nigeria.
At his workshop, he has already stripped combustion engines from 10 mini-buses, powering them with solar batteries. The buses, which have been operating for just over a month, cover a distance of 100 km on a single charge, he said.
His most ambitious project is building the buses from scratch. They will be equipped with solar panels and batteries.
"As I am speaking to you now at our workshop, we are building a 12-seater bus which can cover up to 200 kilometres on one charge," Gajibo said.
"Before the end of this month we are going to unveil that bus, which will be the first of its kind in the whole of Nigeria," he said, adding that his workshop had capacity to produce 15 buses a month.
In Nigeria, like most of Africa, electric vehicles have not yet gained traction because they are more expensive and there is little electricity and no infrastructure to charge vehicles.
For now, Gajibo has one charging station powered by solar.
There are other hurdles like foreign currency shortages that make it difficult to import parts. So, he is looking to source them in Nigeria.
"We have been substituting some materials with local materials to bring our costs down and maximise profit," said Gajibo.
(Additional reporting by Abraham Archiga in Abuja, Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe, Editing by Christina Fincher)
Tucker Carlson Tries, and Fails, to Distance Himself From Buffalo Shooter’s Manifesto
Ryan Bort
Tue, May 17, 2022
Tucker-Carlson - Credit: (Photo by Janos Kummer/Getty Images)
Tucker Carlson has long promoted the idea of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory holding that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants. The theory was present throughout the 180-page manifesto of the teenager who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, leading to renewed scrutiny of the mega-popular Fox News host. Carlson addressed that scrutiny on Monday night, essentially arguing that anyone espousing white supremacist views should be able to do so without fear of criticism.
“Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and a justification.”
There isn’t any significant contingent of people responding to the Buffalo shooting by saying Carlson or anyone else shouldn’t be able to express their views. Carlson is merely mad that his critics are expressing their views, which is that Carlson is a racist, and that the work he’s done to mainstream the “great replacement” theory and the fact that the shooter’s manifesto is filled with it may not be totally coincidental. Go ahead and have a look at some of the uncanny similarities between what the shooter wrote and what Carlson has pushed on his show:
Carlson understandably had a difficult time distancing himself from the ideologies that inspired the shooter, so he instead focused on how the manifesto was “rambling” and “disjointed” and “paranoid.” He bashed the media for blaming “Trumpism” for the massacre, before circling back to the ludicrous idea that criticizing a popular cable news host for pushing unvarnished white supremacy to millions of Americans amounts to wanting to “suspend the First Amendment.”
Carlson wants everyone to be aware that the shooter’s manifesto contains ideas far more deranged than anything he’s uttered on his show. This is certainly true, but its operating principle is the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which Carlson has helped lift out of the fringes and into the political mainstream. It clearly and catastrophically took hold in the shooter’s mind, which Carlson described on Monday as “diseased and disorganized.” The question he should probably be asking, and that Americans are plenty justified in asking themselves, is why the views of one of the influential figure in conservative media are so closely aligned with those of a mentally ill teenager who felt slaughtering 10 people at a supermarket was a righteous act.
State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag
Josephine Harvey
Mon, May 16, 2022,
A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogerswrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.
Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black.
The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.
“Great replacement” rhetoric has been found in the online writings of several mass shooters, including the 2019 El Paso, Texas, gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart, and the New Zealand shooter who massacred 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.
Rogers, along with Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and top House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, has echoed “great replacement” ideologies herself.
“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted in July. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists & our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations & other strategies to accomplish this.”
In March, she drew bipartisan condemnation and was censured by the Arizona Senate over her violent rhetoric. In February, she spoke at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida. During her address, she praised Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier, as a “patriot.”
Fuentes is among the other extremists to have baselessly suggested the Buffalo attack was a false flag.
Ryan Bort
Tue, May 17, 2022
Tucker-Carlson - Credit: (Photo by Janos Kummer/Getty Images)
Tucker Carlson has long promoted the idea of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory holding that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants. The theory was present throughout the 180-page manifesto of the teenager who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, leading to renewed scrutiny of the mega-popular Fox News host. Carlson addressed that scrutiny on Monday night, essentially arguing that anyone espousing white supremacist views should be able to do so without fear of criticism.
“Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and a justification.”
There isn’t any significant contingent of people responding to the Buffalo shooting by saying Carlson or anyone else shouldn’t be able to express their views. Carlson is merely mad that his critics are expressing their views, which is that Carlson is a racist, and that the work he’s done to mainstream the “great replacement” theory and the fact that the shooter’s manifesto is filled with it may not be totally coincidental. Go ahead and have a look at some of the uncanny similarities between what the shooter wrote and what Carlson has pushed on his show:
Carlson understandably had a difficult time distancing himself from the ideologies that inspired the shooter, so he instead focused on how the manifesto was “rambling” and “disjointed” and “paranoid.” He bashed the media for blaming “Trumpism” for the massacre, before circling back to the ludicrous idea that criticizing a popular cable news host for pushing unvarnished white supremacy to millions of Americans amounts to wanting to “suspend the First Amendment.”
Carlson wants everyone to be aware that the shooter’s manifesto contains ideas far more deranged than anything he’s uttered on his show. This is certainly true, but its operating principle is the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which Carlson has helped lift out of the fringes and into the political mainstream. It clearly and catastrophically took hold in the shooter’s mind, which Carlson described on Monday as “diseased and disorganized.” The question he should probably be asking, and that Americans are plenty justified in asking themselves, is why the views of one of the influential figure in conservative media are so closely aligned with those of a mentally ill teenager who felt slaughtering 10 people at a supermarket was a righteous act.
More from Rolling Stone
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The Buffalo Shooter Recorded His Deadly Attack. Twitter Let the Video Go Viral
Families Remember the People Stolen by the Buffalo Shooting
Body Armor Helped the Buffalo Shooter Carry Out His Rampage. This Bill Could've Banned It
State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag
Josephine Harvey
Mon, May 16, 2022,
A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogerswrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.
Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black.
The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.
“Great replacement” rhetoric has been found in the online writings of several mass shooters, including the 2019 El Paso, Texas, gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart, and the New Zealand shooter who massacred 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.
Rogers, along with Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and top House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, has echoed “great replacement” ideologies herself.
“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted in July. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists & our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations & other strategies to accomplish this.”
In March, she drew bipartisan condemnation and was censured by the Arizona Senate over her violent rhetoric. In February, she spoke at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida. During her address, she praised Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier, as a “patriot.”
Fuentes is among the other extremists to have baselessly suggested the Buffalo attack was a false flag.
Livestreamed carnage: Tech's hard lessons from mass killings
BARBARA ORTUTAY, HALELUYA HADERO and MATT O'BRIEN
Tue, May 17, 2022,
These days, mass shooters like the one now held in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket attack don’t stop with planning out their brutal attacks. They also create marketing plans while arranging to livestream their massacres on social platforms in hopes of fomenting more violence.
Sites like Twitter, Facebook and now the game-streaming platform Twitch have learned painful lessons from dealing with the violent videos that often accompany such shootings. But experts are calling for a broader discussion around livestreams, including whether they should exist at all, since once such videos go online, they're almost impossible to erase completely.
The self-described white supremacist gunman who police say killed 10 people, all of them Black, at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday had mounted a GoPro camera to his helmet to stream his assault live on Twitch, the video game streaming platform used by another shooter in 2019 who killed two people at a synagogue in Halle, Germany.
He had previously outlined his plan in a detailed but rambling set of online diary entries that were apparently posted publicly ahead of the attack, although it's not clear how may people might have seen them. His goal: to inspire copycats and spread his racist beliefs. After all, he was a copycat himself.
He decided against streaming on Facebook, as yet another mass shooter did when he killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago. Unlike Twitch, Facebook requires users to sign up for an account in order to watch livestreams.
Still, not everything went according to plan. By most accounts the platforms responded more quickly to halt the spread of the Buffalo video than they did after the 2019 Christchurch shooting, said Megan Squire, a senior fellow and technology expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Another Twitch user watching the live video likely flagged it to the attention of Twitch’s content moderators, she said, which would have helped Twitch pull down the stream less than two minutes after the first gunshots per a company spokesperson. Twitch has not said how the video was flagged. In a statement about the shooting Tuesday, the company expressed thanks “for the user reports that help us catch and remove harmful content in real time.”
“In this case, they did pretty well,” Squire said. “The fact that the video is so hard to find right now is proof of that.”
That was little consolation to family members of the victims. Celestine Chaney’s son, Wayne Jones, found out his mother had been killed when someone sent him a video screenshot from the livestream. Not long after, he saw the video itself.
“I didn’t find out, nobody knocked on my door like the usual process,” he said. “I found out in a Facebook picture that my mom was gunned down. Then I watched the video on social media.”
Danielle Simpson, the girlfriend of Chaney’s grandson, said she reported dozens of sites after the video kept appearing over and over in her Facebook feed and she worried that Chaney’s family would see them.
“I think I reported about 100 pages on Sunday because every time I got on Facebook it was either pictures or the video was right there,” she said. “You couldn’t escape it. There was nowhere you could go.”
In 2019, the Christchurch shooting was streamed live on Facebook for 17 minutes and quickly spread to other platforms. This time, the platforms generally seemed to coordinate better, particularly by sharing digital “signatures” of the video used to detect and remove copies.
But platform algorithms can have a harder time identifying a copycat video if someone has edited it. That's created problems, such as when some internet forums users remade the Buffalo video with twisted attempts at humor. Tech companies would have needed to use “more fancy algorithms” to detect those partial matches, Squire said.
“It seems darker and more cynical,” she said of the attempts to spread the shooting video in recent days.
Twitch has more than 2.5 million viewers at any given moment; roughly 8 million content creators stream video on the platform each month, according to the company. The site uses a combination of user reports, algorithms and moderators to detect and remove any violence that occurs on the platform. The company said that it quickly removed the gunman’s stream, but hasn’t shared many details about what happened on Saturday — including whether the stream was reported or how many people watched the rampage live.
A Twitch spokesperson said the company shared the livestream with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit group set up by tech companies to help others monitor their own platforms for rebroadcasts. But clips from the video still made their way to other platforms, including the site Streamable, where it was available for millions to view. A spokesperson for Hopin, the company that owns Streamable, said Monday that it's working to remove the videos and terminate the accounts of those who uploaded them.
Looking ahead, platforms may face future moderation complications from a Texas law — reinstated by an appellate court last week — that bans big social media companies from “censoring” users’ viewpoints. The shooter “had a very specific viewpoint” and the law is unclear enough to create a risk for platforms that moderate people like him, said Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. “It really puts the finger on the scale of keeping up harmful content,” he said.
Some lawmakers have called for social media companies to further police their platforms following the gunman’s livestream. President Joe Biden did not bring up such calls during his remarks Tuesday in Buffalo.
Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said there's been a shift in how tech companies are responding to such events. In particular, Koenig said, coordination between the companies to create fingerprint repositories for extremist videos so they can't be re-uploaded to other platforms “has been an incredibly important development.”
A Twitch spokesperson said the company will review how it responded to the gunman’s livestream.
Experts suggest that sites such as Twitch could exercise more control over who can livestream and when — for instance, by building in delays or whitelisting valid users while banning rules violators. More broadly, Koenig said, “there’s also a general societal conversation that needs to happen around the utility of livestreaming and when it’s valuable, when it’s not, and how we put safe norms around how it’s used and what happens if you use it.”
Another option, of course, would be to end livestreaming altogether. But that's almost impossible to imagine given how much tech companies rely on livestreams to attract and keep users engaged in order to bring in money.
Free speech, Koenig said, is often the reason tech platforms give for allowing this form of technology — beyond the unspoken profit component. But that should be balanced "with rights to privacy and some of the other issues that arise in this instance,” Koenig said.
___
AP journalists Robert Bumsted and Carolyn Thompson contributed from Buffalo.
___
This story has been updated to clarify that all 10 of the people killed in the shooting were Black.
BARBARA ORTUTAY, HALELUYA HADERO and MATT O'BRIEN
Tue, May 17, 2022,
These days, mass shooters like the one now held in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket attack don’t stop with planning out their brutal attacks. They also create marketing plans while arranging to livestream their massacres on social platforms in hopes of fomenting more violence.
Sites like Twitter, Facebook and now the game-streaming platform Twitch have learned painful lessons from dealing with the violent videos that often accompany such shootings. But experts are calling for a broader discussion around livestreams, including whether they should exist at all, since once such videos go online, they're almost impossible to erase completely.
The self-described white supremacist gunman who police say killed 10 people, all of them Black, at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday had mounted a GoPro camera to his helmet to stream his assault live on Twitch, the video game streaming platform used by another shooter in 2019 who killed two people at a synagogue in Halle, Germany.
He had previously outlined his plan in a detailed but rambling set of online diary entries that were apparently posted publicly ahead of the attack, although it's not clear how may people might have seen them. His goal: to inspire copycats and spread his racist beliefs. After all, he was a copycat himself.
He decided against streaming on Facebook, as yet another mass shooter did when he killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago. Unlike Twitch, Facebook requires users to sign up for an account in order to watch livestreams.
Still, not everything went according to plan. By most accounts the platforms responded more quickly to halt the spread of the Buffalo video than they did after the 2019 Christchurch shooting, said Megan Squire, a senior fellow and technology expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Another Twitch user watching the live video likely flagged it to the attention of Twitch’s content moderators, she said, which would have helped Twitch pull down the stream less than two minutes after the first gunshots per a company spokesperson. Twitch has not said how the video was flagged. In a statement about the shooting Tuesday, the company expressed thanks “for the user reports that help us catch and remove harmful content in real time.”
“In this case, they did pretty well,” Squire said. “The fact that the video is so hard to find right now is proof of that.”
That was little consolation to family members of the victims. Celestine Chaney’s son, Wayne Jones, found out his mother had been killed when someone sent him a video screenshot from the livestream. Not long after, he saw the video itself.
“I didn’t find out, nobody knocked on my door like the usual process,” he said. “I found out in a Facebook picture that my mom was gunned down. Then I watched the video on social media.”
Danielle Simpson, the girlfriend of Chaney’s grandson, said she reported dozens of sites after the video kept appearing over and over in her Facebook feed and she worried that Chaney’s family would see them.
“I think I reported about 100 pages on Sunday because every time I got on Facebook it was either pictures or the video was right there,” she said. “You couldn’t escape it. There was nowhere you could go.”
In 2019, the Christchurch shooting was streamed live on Facebook for 17 minutes and quickly spread to other platforms. This time, the platforms generally seemed to coordinate better, particularly by sharing digital “signatures” of the video used to detect and remove copies.
But platform algorithms can have a harder time identifying a copycat video if someone has edited it. That's created problems, such as when some internet forums users remade the Buffalo video with twisted attempts at humor. Tech companies would have needed to use “more fancy algorithms” to detect those partial matches, Squire said.
“It seems darker and more cynical,” she said of the attempts to spread the shooting video in recent days.
Twitch has more than 2.5 million viewers at any given moment; roughly 8 million content creators stream video on the platform each month, according to the company. The site uses a combination of user reports, algorithms and moderators to detect and remove any violence that occurs on the platform. The company said that it quickly removed the gunman’s stream, but hasn’t shared many details about what happened on Saturday — including whether the stream was reported or how many people watched the rampage live.
A Twitch spokesperson said the company shared the livestream with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit group set up by tech companies to help others monitor their own platforms for rebroadcasts. But clips from the video still made their way to other platforms, including the site Streamable, where it was available for millions to view. A spokesperson for Hopin, the company that owns Streamable, said Monday that it's working to remove the videos and terminate the accounts of those who uploaded them.
Looking ahead, platforms may face future moderation complications from a Texas law — reinstated by an appellate court last week — that bans big social media companies from “censoring” users’ viewpoints. The shooter “had a very specific viewpoint” and the law is unclear enough to create a risk for platforms that moderate people like him, said Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. “It really puts the finger on the scale of keeping up harmful content,” he said.
Some lawmakers have called for social media companies to further police their platforms following the gunman’s livestream. President Joe Biden did not bring up such calls during his remarks Tuesday in Buffalo.
Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said there's been a shift in how tech companies are responding to such events. In particular, Koenig said, coordination between the companies to create fingerprint repositories for extremist videos so they can't be re-uploaded to other platforms “has been an incredibly important development.”
A Twitch spokesperson said the company will review how it responded to the gunman’s livestream.
Experts suggest that sites such as Twitch could exercise more control over who can livestream and when — for instance, by building in delays or whitelisting valid users while banning rules violators. More broadly, Koenig said, “there’s also a general societal conversation that needs to happen around the utility of livestreaming and when it’s valuable, when it’s not, and how we put safe norms around how it’s used and what happens if you use it.”
Another option, of course, would be to end livestreaming altogether. But that's almost impossible to imagine given how much tech companies rely on livestreams to attract and keep users engaged in order to bring in money.
Free speech, Koenig said, is often the reason tech platforms give for allowing this form of technology — beyond the unspoken profit component. But that should be balanced "with rights to privacy and some of the other issues that arise in this instance,” Koenig said.
___
AP journalists Robert Bumsted and Carolyn Thompson contributed from Buffalo.
___
This story has been updated to clarify that all 10 of the people killed in the shooting were Black.
After Buffalo Shooting Video Spreads, Social Platforms Face Questions
In March 2019, before a gunman murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, he went live on Facebook to broadcast his attack. In October of that year, a man in Germany broadcast his own mass shooting live on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site popular with gamers.
On Saturday, a gunman in Buffalo, New York, mounted a camera to his helmet and livestreamed on Twitch as he killed 10 people and injured three more at a grocery store in what authorities said was a racist attack. In a manifesto posted online, Payton S. Gendron, the 18-year-old whom authorities identified as the shooter, wrote that he had been inspired by the Christchurch gunman and others.
Twitch said it reacted swiftly to take down the video of the Buffalo shooting, removing the stream within two minutes of the start of the violence. But two minutes was enough time for the video to be shared elsewhere.
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By Sunday, links to recordings of the video had circulated widely on other social platforms. A clip from the original video — which bore a watermark that suggested it had been recorded with a free screen-recording software — was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than 3 million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.
Mass shootings — and live broadcasts — raise questions about the role and responsibility of social media sites in allowing violent and hateful content to proliferate. Many of the gunmen in the shootings have written that they developed their racist and antisemitic beliefs trawling online forums like Reddit and 4chan, and were spurred on by watching other shooters stream their attacks live.
“It’s a sad fact of the world that these kind of attacks are going to keep on happening, and the way that it works now is there’s a social media aspect as well,” said Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute who studies content moderation. “It’s totally inevitable and foreseeable these days. It’s just a matter of when.”
Questions about the responsibilities of social media sites are part of a broader debate over how aggressively platforms should moderate their content. That discussion has been escalated since Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recently agreed to purchase Twitter and has said he wants to make unfettered speech on the site a primary objective.
Social media and content moderation experts said Twitch’s quick response was the best that could reasonably be expected. But the fact that the response did not prevent the video of the attack from being spread widely on other sites also raises the issue of whether the ability to livestream should be so easily accessible.
“I’m impressed that they got it down in two minutes,” said Micah Schaffer, a consultant who has led trust and safety decisions at Snapchat and YouTube. “But if the feeling is that even that’s too much, then you really are at an impasse: Is it worth having this?”
In a statement, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice president of trust and safety, said the site’s rapid action was a “very strong response time considering the challenges of live content moderation, and shows good progress.” Hession said the site was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit coalition of social media sites, as well as other social platforms to prevent the spread of the video.
“In the end, we are all part of one internet, and we know by now that that content or behavior rarely — if ever — will stay contained on one platform,” she said.
In a document that appeared to be posted to the forum 4chan and the messaging platform Discord before the attack, Gendron explained why he had chosen to stream on Twitch, writing that “it was compatible with livestreaming for free and all people with the internet could watch and record.” (Discord said it was working with law enforcement to investigate.)
Twitch also allows anyone with an account to go live, unlike sites like YouTube, which requires users to verify their account to do so and to have at least 50 subscribers to stream from a mobile device.
“I think that livestreaming this attack gives me some motivation in the way that I know that some people will be cheering for me,” Gendron wrote.
He also said he had been inspired by Reddit, far-right sites like The Daily Stormer and the writings of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter.
In remarks Saturday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized social media platforms for their role in influencing Gendron’s racist beliefs and allowing video of his attack to circulate.
“This spreads like a virus,” Hochul said, demanding that social media executives evaluate their policies to ensure that “everything is being done that they can to make sure that this information is not spread.”
There may be no easy answers. Platforms like Facebook, Twitch and Twitter have made strides in recent years, the experts said, in removing violent content and videos faster. In the wake of the shooting in New Zealand, social platforms and countries around the world joined an initiative called the Christchurch Call to Action and agreed to work closely to combat terrorism and violent extremism content. One tool that social sites have used is a shared database of hashes, or digital footprints of images, that can flag inappropriate content and have it taken down quickly.
But in this case, Douek said, Facebook seemed to have fallen short despite the hash system. Facebook posts that linked to the video posted on Streamable generated more than 43,000 interactions, according to CrowdTangle, a web analytics tool, and some posts were up for more than nine hours.
When users tried to flag the content as violating Facebook’s rules, which do not permit content that “glorifies violence,” they were told in some cases that the links did not run afoul of Facebook’s policies, according to screenshots viewed by The New York Times.
Facebook has since started to remove posts with links to the video, and a Facebook spokesperson said the posts do violate the platform’s rules. Asked why some users were notified that posts with links to the video did not violate its standards, the spokesperson did not have an answer.
Twitter had not removed many posts with links to the shooting video, and in several cases, the video had been uploaded directly to the platform. A company spokesperson initially said the site might remove some instances of the video or add a sensitive content warning, then later said Twitter would remove all videos related to the attack after the Times asked for clarification.
A spokesperson at Hopin, the video conferencing service that owns Streamable, said the platform was working to remove the video and delete the accounts of people who had uploaded it.
Removing violent content is “like trying to plug your fingers into leaks in a dam,” Douek said. “It’s going to be fundamentally really difficult to find stuff, especially at the speed that this stuff spreads now.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Ten Black people were murdered for merely being.
Pitts
Silly me, I thought they were the real victims
| Opinion
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Tue, May 17, 2022, 2:10 PM·3 min read
Come and let us pity white people. They are the real victims here.
That, in essence, is the battle cry that’s powered much of American politics for the last 30 years, the last 15 in particular. It has echoed from the halls of government to the set of Fox “News” to the far-flung strands of the world wide web.
Poor white people. They are being overrun by caravans when not murdered by illegals or terrorized by Muslims or tyrannized by masks or oppressed by vaccinations or canceled by culture or lied to by media or lied upon by media or cheated by elections or blamed by Blacks or vexed by “Press 1 for English.”
Or replaced — evicted from their God-ordained preeminence by “others” who will be obedient voters for the liberal left. So says the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which originated in the fever swamps of white supremacy and now has a regular megaphone on Fox, courtesy of Tucker Carlson.
But that hasn’t been his message alone. It’s also been the message of New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, would-be Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, of conservatism as a whole, in response to a demographic shift first forecast years ago: that by 2050, people of color will constitute a majority of the population. Where some of us saw in that prediction change and challenge, they saw the gains to be made by fomenting white panic.
Thus, it was shocking and painful, but also predictable, that a stupid white boy with a stated belief in the replacement theory allegedly walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and shot 10 Black people to death. Indeed, this was no more surprising than last year’s massacre of Asians in Atlanta, 2019’s massacre of Latinos in El Paso or 2015’s massacre of African Americans at a church in Charleston. Panicked people do terrible things.
But yes, come and let us pity white people. Many certainly pity themselves.
That’s how you get a country where Critical Race Theory is banned by law, but you can learn Great Replacement Theory by turning on Fox. Where voting keeps getting harder and gun ownership easier. Where Colin Kaepernick is unemployed, and Carlson is not.
Speaking of which, he addressed the shooting Monday on his show, somehow managing to blame “professional Democrats” without once mentioning the racist theory that he and the alleged shooter both happen to believe.
Garnell Whitfield Jr. was also on television that day. In a grief-tattered voice, he spoke of his family’s anguish at the loss of his 86-year-old mother, Ruth, who died in the shooting. “But we’re not just hurtin’,” he said. “We’re angry. This shouldn’t have happened. We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God. We trust Him. We treat people with decency and we love even our enemies. And you expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again. Forgive and forget. While the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal, not to love us back.”
And suddenly, you knew he was speaking out of a bereft exhaustion that encompassed not just him and his family but all of us who have been betrayed by America and its dream. “What are we supposed to do with all of this anger,” he pleaded, “with all of this pain?”
The question resonated, as it has for years unending. And, as for years unending, no answer immediately presented itself.
But yeah, sure, let’s pity white people. Let’s never forget who the real victims are.
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Tue, May 17, 2022, 2:10 PM·3 min read
Come and let us pity white people. They are the real victims here.
That, in essence, is the battle cry that’s powered much of American politics for the last 30 years, the last 15 in particular. It has echoed from the halls of government to the set of Fox “News” to the far-flung strands of the world wide web.
Poor white people. They are being overrun by caravans when not murdered by illegals or terrorized by Muslims or tyrannized by masks or oppressed by vaccinations or canceled by culture or lied to by media or lied upon by media or cheated by elections or blamed by Blacks or vexed by “Press 1 for English.”
Or replaced — evicted from their God-ordained preeminence by “others” who will be obedient voters for the liberal left. So says the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which originated in the fever swamps of white supremacy and now has a regular megaphone on Fox, courtesy of Tucker Carlson.
But that hasn’t been his message alone. It’s also been the message of New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, would-be Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, of conservatism as a whole, in response to a demographic shift first forecast years ago: that by 2050, people of color will constitute a majority of the population. Where some of us saw in that prediction change and challenge, they saw the gains to be made by fomenting white panic.
Thus, it was shocking and painful, but also predictable, that a stupid white boy with a stated belief in the replacement theory allegedly walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and shot 10 Black people to death. Indeed, this was no more surprising than last year’s massacre of Asians in Atlanta, 2019’s massacre of Latinos in El Paso or 2015’s massacre of African Americans at a church in Charleston. Panicked people do terrible things.
But yes, come and let us pity white people. Many certainly pity themselves.
That’s how you get a country where Critical Race Theory is banned by law, but you can learn Great Replacement Theory by turning on Fox. Where voting keeps getting harder and gun ownership easier. Where Colin Kaepernick is unemployed, and Carlson is not.
Speaking of which, he addressed the shooting Monday on his show, somehow managing to blame “professional Democrats” without once mentioning the racist theory that he and the alleged shooter both happen to believe.
Garnell Whitfield Jr. was also on television that day. In a grief-tattered voice, he spoke of his family’s anguish at the loss of his 86-year-old mother, Ruth, who died in the shooting. “But we’re not just hurtin’,” he said. “We’re angry. This shouldn’t have happened. We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God. We trust Him. We treat people with decency and we love even our enemies. And you expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again. Forgive and forget. While the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal, not to love us back.”
And suddenly, you knew he was speaking out of a bereft exhaustion that encompassed not just him and his family but all of us who have been betrayed by America and its dream. “What are we supposed to do with all of this anger,” he pleaded, “with all of this pain?”
The question resonated, as it has for years unending. And, as for years unending, no answer immediately presented itself.
But yeah, sure, let’s pity white people. Let’s never forget who the real victims are.
Pitts
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Twitter Compares Cops' Treatment Of Buffalo Gunman With That Of Black Boy Accused Of Stealing Chips
Yolanda Baruch
Mon, May 16, 2022,
After 13 people were shot, including 10 who were killed, during the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, people took to Twitter to criticize the police handling of the gunman.
Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly Black neighborhood, The Independent reports.
Authorities said the 18-year-old arrived at the grocery store around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, wearing tactical gear and a helmet while carrying an AR-15 and a camera to livestream the assault on Twitch, which the service later removed.
When police took Gendron into custody, pictures captured the calm interaction between the officer and gunman.
The New York Times reports that Gendron was held for a mental evaluation in 2021.
The Associated Press also notes that Gendron’s mental health possibly played a role in his racially motivated massacre.
Twitter immediately noticed the treatment Gendron received after the shooting.
People also compared the police treatment of Gendron with the treatment a young Black boy who was recently accused of stealing a bag of chips.
People resurfaced a tweet from 2018 that compared the media’s perception of Michael Brown and the Austin bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt.
Despite the media’s perception of the gunman, video footage showed up-close shots of his weapon with the N-word and the number 14 — a known white supremacist code — scrawled in white paint on the barrel of his gun, according to The Independent.
Gendron also described himself as a fascist, white supremacist and anti-Semite. He allegedly regularly visited far-right platforms and message boards, including 4chan and Gab, that espoused white supremacist ideologies and conspiracy theories.
Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia described the act as an “absolute racist hate crime,” CNN reports.
Fox News Is Already Using 'Violent' Video Games As Scapegoat For Mass Shooting
THAT AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Sisi Jiang
Mon, May 16, 2022
An image of the supermarket where a shooter opened fire.
Time is a flat circle. The year is 2022, and a Fox News anchor recently asked an on-air guest whether or not he believed that video games enable mass shootings.
On Saturday, an 18-year-old white man named Payton Gendron opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He killed 10 people and injured three, the majority of which were Black residents. After planning his crime over Discord, he drove 200 miles in full tactical gear and streamed the shooting on Twitch. Gendron has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
Fox News brought in Bernard Zapor to discuss the causes of mass shootings. Zapor was a former special agent for the firearms division of the Department of Justice and a current college instructor in criminal justice. The news anchor Jon Scott asked Zapor: “It seems like things have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violent. Have you done research or learned that video games tend to just desensitize people to the actual result of pulling a trigger?” He made no mention of the shooter’s 180 page manifesto about being a committed racist.
While Zapor wasn’t as eager to relitigate the video game controversies of the 1990s, his response wasn’t necessarily more coherent: “I think in terms of causation, what the information shows us is as we become more disfranchised as individuals, and groups, people leave a faith for example, the family units become smaller or more disconnected, we live further distances. We’re communicating through a medium that was never really intended for human beings, which is online. Or through texting. Or these kinds of things. We get separated as humans to have connections that build inner morality.” So there you have it, folks: It’s not Call of Duty. It’s actually your cell phones and your social media accounts that are chipping away at your reluctance to open fire on innocent people.
No, it isn’t. It’s about the Great Replacement Theory, a false belief that there is a concerted effort to eliminate the white majority. It turns out, if you give white supremacists easy access to guns and tell them that minorities are going to spell the end of your race, they sometimes decide to commit horrible acts of violence. But Fox News is not going to make that connection while they play a national role in stoking fear about ‘illegal immigration’ and the declining dominance of white Christians.
The tragedy at Buffalo is not the first time that video games were blamed for mass shootings. The most famous example was the 1999 Columbine shootings. The Chicago Tribune reported that the perpetrators were fans of the video game Doom, and “used it to get ready for their attack.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Senator Joseph Lieberman said that young men like the shooter had a “hypnotic involvement with violent video games.” When asked about whether or not stronger gun control was the answer to gun violence, a Republican congressman said to NPR: “The biggest pusher of violence is, hands down, Hollywood movies, hands down, the video game market.” Fox News has previously written an article that connected first person shooter games with a gunman who attacked a Washington Navy Yard.
Despite politicians’ eagerness to find a plausible scapegoat for their own policy failures, major video game markets such as Canada, Europe, and Asia aren’t reporting hundreds of mass shootings every year compared to the United States.
The Department of Justice is currently investigating the Buffalo shooting as a hate crime.
THAT AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Sisi Jiang
Mon, May 16, 2022
An image of the supermarket where a shooter opened fire.
Time is a flat circle. The year is 2022, and a Fox News anchor recently asked an on-air guest whether or not he believed that video games enable mass shootings.
On Saturday, an 18-year-old white man named Payton Gendron opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He killed 10 people and injured three, the majority of which were Black residents. After planning his crime over Discord, he drove 200 miles in full tactical gear and streamed the shooting on Twitch. Gendron has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
Fox News brought in Bernard Zapor to discuss the causes of mass shootings. Zapor was a former special agent for the firearms division of the Department of Justice and a current college instructor in criminal justice. The news anchor Jon Scott asked Zapor: “It seems like things have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violent. Have you done research or learned that video games tend to just desensitize people to the actual result of pulling a trigger?” He made no mention of the shooter’s 180 page manifesto about being a committed racist.
While Zapor wasn’t as eager to relitigate the video game controversies of the 1990s, his response wasn’t necessarily more coherent: “I think in terms of causation, what the information shows us is as we become more disfranchised as individuals, and groups, people leave a faith for example, the family units become smaller or more disconnected, we live further distances. We’re communicating through a medium that was never really intended for human beings, which is online. Or through texting. Or these kinds of things. We get separated as humans to have connections that build inner morality.” So there you have it, folks: It’s not Call of Duty. It’s actually your cell phones and your social media accounts that are chipping away at your reluctance to open fire on innocent people.
No, it isn’t. It’s about the Great Replacement Theory, a false belief that there is a concerted effort to eliminate the white majority. It turns out, if you give white supremacists easy access to guns and tell them that minorities are going to spell the end of your race, they sometimes decide to commit horrible acts of violence. But Fox News is not going to make that connection while they play a national role in stoking fear about ‘illegal immigration’ and the declining dominance of white Christians.
The tragedy at Buffalo is not the first time that video games were blamed for mass shootings. The most famous example was the 1999 Columbine shootings. The Chicago Tribune reported that the perpetrators were fans of the video game Doom, and “used it to get ready for their attack.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Senator Joseph Lieberman said that young men like the shooter had a “hypnotic involvement with violent video games.” When asked about whether or not stronger gun control was the answer to gun violence, a Republican congressman said to NPR: “The biggest pusher of violence is, hands down, Hollywood movies, hands down, the video game market.” Fox News has previously written an article that connected first person shooter games with a gunman who attacked a Washington Navy Yard.
Despite politicians’ eagerness to find a plausible scapegoat for their own policy failures, major video game markets such as Canada, Europe, and Asia aren’t reporting hundreds of mass shootings every year compared to the United States.
The Department of Justice is currently investigating the Buffalo shooting as a hate crime.
Girlfriend: Dallas shooting suspect feared
Asian Americans
JAKE BLEIBERG and JAMIE STENGLE
Tue, May 17, 2022,
DALLAS (AP) — The girlfriend of a man arrested Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three women of Asian descent in a hair salon in Dallas’ Koreatown told police that he has delusions that Asian Americans are trying to harm him, an arrest warrant affidavit states.
Jeremy Smith faces three charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, police said. Smith is being held on $300,000 bond, according to jail records that do not list an attorney for him. In public records, his age is listed as both 36 and 37.
When asked at a news conference Tuesday if he considered the shooting an issue of racism, mental health or both, Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia said it’s too early to tell.
“Right now, it’s an issue of hate. It’s a hate crime. However that manifests itself, I’m not here to say that. I can tell you that I know our community sees it as a hate crime. I see it as a hate crime and so do our men and women,” Garcia said.
Earlier Tuesday, the FBI said it has opened a federal hate crime investigation along with federal prosecutors in Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
Police have said the shooting last Wednesday at Hair World Salon might be connected to two previous drive-by shootings at businesses run by Asian Americans. But Garcia said Tuesday that police are still investigating whether Smith, who is Black, was involved. The description of the suspect's vehicle was similar in all three shootings.
According to the affidavit, Smith’s girlfriend told detectives that he had been delusional about Asian Americans ever since being involved in a car crash two years ago with a man of Asian descent. She said he had been admitted to several mental health facilities because of the delusions.
Whenever Smith is around an Asian American, “he begins having delusions that the Asian mob is after him or attempting to harm him,” his girlfriend told police. She said he was fired for “verbally attacking” his boss, who was of Asian descent.
Garcia declined to comment on whether Smith has been diagnosed with a mental illness or whether Smith legally obtained the gun used in the shooting, saying both questions are still being investigated.
The shooting in Dallas occurred a few days before a white gunman killed 10 Black people Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a gunman who authorities said was motivated by political hatred for Taiwan killed one person and wounded five Sunday at a southern California church where mostly elderly Taiwanese parishioners had gathered.
Anti-Asian violence has risen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic of COVID-19, which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Last year, six women of Asian descent were among the eight killed in a shooting at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, heightening anger and fear among Asian Americans. In February, a man from Midland, 330 miles (531 kilometers) west of Dallas, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes for an attack in 2020 on an Asian family because he believed they were Chinese and responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The salon in Dallas where the shooting happened is in the heart of Koreatown, which is in a part of the city that was transformed in the 1980s from an industrial area to a thriving district with shopping, dining, markets, medical offices and salons.
Authorities have said a man dressed all in black opened fire in the salon, then drove away in a maroon minivan. Garcia said investigators found that a similar vehicle had been reported as involved in two other recent shootings. Someone opened fire in an April 2 drive-by near the salon and Garcia said a similar vehicle was also linked to a May 10 shooting about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of there. No one was injured in either of those shootings.
Garcia said the suspect walked into the salon with a .22-caliber rifle and fired about 13 times. One woman was injured in her arm, one in her foot and another in her lower back, he said. They have all been released from the hospital and are recovering, according to police.
One of the women injured in the shooting spoke Monday night at a community meeting with police. Her arm in a sling, she said in Korean that she was worried about how she would continue to make a living.
“There are lives that have changed forever because of this,” Garcia said Tuesday.
Police Sr. Cpl. Soo Nam also addressed the reporters at Tuesday’s news conference, delivering a statement on the arrest in Korean for Texas-based Korean-language journalists in attendance. Garcia said the department has 10 officers who speak Korean.
Dozens of people had filled a room at the Korean Culture Center of Dallas on Monday evening for the town hall meeting with police on safety. At the meeting, Garcia had assured attendees that detectives were working nonstop on the case. Some attendees expressed thanks to police while others asked questions on what was being done to make the community safer.
John Lee, a board member and previous president of the Greater Dallas Korean American Chamber of Commerce, said he thought it was healing for attendees get reassurances from police. He noted some attendees “were more angry and let it be known and some were a little more appreciative."
“I think the emotions ran the entire gamut from anger to pain to fear to all of that,” Lee said.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed to this report.
Asian Americans
JAKE BLEIBERG and JAMIE STENGLE
Tue, May 17, 2022,
DALLAS (AP) — The girlfriend of a man arrested Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three women of Asian descent in a hair salon in Dallas’ Koreatown told police that he has delusions that Asian Americans are trying to harm him, an arrest warrant affidavit states.
Jeremy Smith faces three charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, police said. Smith is being held on $300,000 bond, according to jail records that do not list an attorney for him. In public records, his age is listed as both 36 and 37.
When asked at a news conference Tuesday if he considered the shooting an issue of racism, mental health or both, Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia said it’s too early to tell.
“Right now, it’s an issue of hate. It’s a hate crime. However that manifests itself, I’m not here to say that. I can tell you that I know our community sees it as a hate crime. I see it as a hate crime and so do our men and women,” Garcia said.
Earlier Tuesday, the FBI said it has opened a federal hate crime investigation along with federal prosecutors in Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
Police have said the shooting last Wednesday at Hair World Salon might be connected to two previous drive-by shootings at businesses run by Asian Americans. But Garcia said Tuesday that police are still investigating whether Smith, who is Black, was involved. The description of the suspect's vehicle was similar in all three shootings.
According to the affidavit, Smith’s girlfriend told detectives that he had been delusional about Asian Americans ever since being involved in a car crash two years ago with a man of Asian descent. She said he had been admitted to several mental health facilities because of the delusions.
Whenever Smith is around an Asian American, “he begins having delusions that the Asian mob is after him or attempting to harm him,” his girlfriend told police. She said he was fired for “verbally attacking” his boss, who was of Asian descent.
Garcia declined to comment on whether Smith has been diagnosed with a mental illness or whether Smith legally obtained the gun used in the shooting, saying both questions are still being investigated.
The shooting in Dallas occurred a few days before a white gunman killed 10 Black people Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a gunman who authorities said was motivated by political hatred for Taiwan killed one person and wounded five Sunday at a southern California church where mostly elderly Taiwanese parishioners had gathered.
Anti-Asian violence has risen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic of COVID-19, which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Last year, six women of Asian descent were among the eight killed in a shooting at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, heightening anger and fear among Asian Americans. In February, a man from Midland, 330 miles (531 kilometers) west of Dallas, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes for an attack in 2020 on an Asian family because he believed they were Chinese and responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The salon in Dallas where the shooting happened is in the heart of Koreatown, which is in a part of the city that was transformed in the 1980s from an industrial area to a thriving district with shopping, dining, markets, medical offices and salons.
Authorities have said a man dressed all in black opened fire in the salon, then drove away in a maroon minivan. Garcia said investigators found that a similar vehicle had been reported as involved in two other recent shootings. Someone opened fire in an April 2 drive-by near the salon and Garcia said a similar vehicle was also linked to a May 10 shooting about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of there. No one was injured in either of those shootings.
Garcia said the suspect walked into the salon with a .22-caliber rifle and fired about 13 times. One woman was injured in her arm, one in her foot and another in her lower back, he said. They have all been released from the hospital and are recovering, according to police.
One of the women injured in the shooting spoke Monday night at a community meeting with police. Her arm in a sling, she said in Korean that she was worried about how she would continue to make a living.
“There are lives that have changed forever because of this,” Garcia said Tuesday.
Police Sr. Cpl. Soo Nam also addressed the reporters at Tuesday’s news conference, delivering a statement on the arrest in Korean for Texas-based Korean-language journalists in attendance. Garcia said the department has 10 officers who speak Korean.
Dozens of people had filled a room at the Korean Culture Center of Dallas on Monday evening for the town hall meeting with police on safety. At the meeting, Garcia had assured attendees that detectives were working nonstop on the case. Some attendees expressed thanks to police while others asked questions on what was being done to make the community safer.
John Lee, a board member and previous president of the Greater Dallas Korean American Chamber of Commerce, said he thought it was healing for attendees get reassurances from police. He noted some attendees “were more angry and let it be known and some were a little more appreciative."
“I think the emotions ran the entire gamut from anger to pain to fear to all of that,” Lee said.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed to this report.
Mexican president slams U.S. embargo on Cuba as 'genocidal policy'
Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attends
Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attends
news conference at a military base, in Apodaca
Tue, May 17, 2022
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba was "genocidal policy," raising the stakes in a standoff with Washington over its treatment of the Communist-ruled Caribbean island.
Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has repeatedly called for the United States to end the embargo, said earlier in May that he would not attend the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas next month unless all countries in the region were invited.
Speaking at a regular government news conference, Lopez Obrador said the United States "looked bad" in how it was treating Cuba, and urged Washington to end the embargo.
"It's a genocidal policy," Lopez Obrador said.
Still, he welcomed moves by the U.S. government on Monday that will ease some Trump-era restrictions on the island and increase processing of U.S. visas for Cubans.
Lopez Obrador on Wednesday is due to meet with a U.S. delegation for the Summit of the Americas in which he plans to explain why Mexico wants all countries in the region to attend.
(Reporting by Kylie MadryEditing by Dave Graham)
Tue, May 17, 2022
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba was "genocidal policy," raising the stakes in a standoff with Washington over its treatment of the Communist-ruled Caribbean island.
Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has repeatedly called for the United States to end the embargo, said earlier in May that he would not attend the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas next month unless all countries in the region were invited.
Speaking at a regular government news conference, Lopez Obrador said the United States "looked bad" in how it was treating Cuba, and urged Washington to end the embargo.
"It's a genocidal policy," Lopez Obrador said.
Still, he welcomed moves by the U.S. government on Monday that will ease some Trump-era restrictions on the island and increase processing of U.S. visas for Cubans.
Lopez Obrador on Wednesday is due to meet with a U.S. delegation for the Summit of the Americas in which he plans to explain why Mexico wants all countries in the region to attend.
(Reporting by Kylie MadryEditing by Dave Graham)
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