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Forums - Politics - Active shooter situation reported in Christchurch, New Zealand

i hate to be that guy that defends people like candace owens(personally i think she's just an attention seeker and she's banking off of how polarised people are becoming) but i'm concerned with how people are completely willing to jump to conclusions about others so hastily... that is a massive problem and it is going to bite a lot of the people championing it in the ass if it goes too far
the presumption of innocence and giving the benefit of doubt are things for a reason and we are throwing them away carelessly



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o_O.Q said:
i hate to be that guy that defends people like candace owens(personally i think she's just an attention seeker and she's banking off of how polarised people are becoming) but i'm concerned with how people are completely willing to jump to conclusions about others so hastily... that is a massive problem and it is going to bite a lot of the people championing it in the ass if it goes too far
the presumption of innocence and giving the benefit of doubt are things for a reason and we are throwing them away carelessly

I think people are astoundingly in agreement in this thread, actually. Most people just think this is a horrible tragedy. There are some people angry at the rhetoric we see on Twitter and the like. No one is actually saying Candace isn't innocent, or that she should be punished, they're just saying that Twitter is toxic and its toxicity has real world consequences when crazy people draw inspiration from them, and that Candace is an example of that toxicity. The most I really see as a suggestion here is that we either tone down our rhetoric on highly public social media forums like Twitter, or accept that Twitter is just going to damage our society.



Torillian said:
o_O.Q said:

if her argument was that france should build an army to attack muslims why didn't she just say that instead of talking about birth rate?

and you seriously take everything someone says completely literally like this?

when people talk about combating declining birth rates in japan do you believe they are advocating for the mass rape of japanese women?

Because she likes to dog whistle, because the organization she works for wouldn't abide for obvious racist shit but will allow the less obvious? Got me, not everyone who believes in awful shit wants to broadcast it to the world in an obvious way. 

I'm giving you how her post could be viewed as anti-muslim and advocate violence against them without a crazy amount of reinterpretation. Now I don't think the shooter is being genuine when he says Candice was in inspiration but this idea that she's never said anything on Muslims or the second amendment is just stupid.

"“LOL! FACT: I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam,”"

fucking ridiculous.  

Again, if they said they need to combat them because otherwise they'll be majority Chinese, and that if anything they need to make an army to combat being majority Chinese I could pretty easily come to the conclusion that they were saying the army should kick out the Chinese that apparently being majority of would be bad. 

"Because she likes to dog whistle"

in what sense? you think candace owens... a black woman( i bring up race because you did later on and its generally the focus when "dog whistling" is brought up) is a white supremacist?

 

"obvious racist shit"

islam is not a race and candace owens is black

 

"I'm giving you how her post could be viewed as anti-muslim"

the things people say can very often very easily be twisted to fit whatever conclusions we need to justify going after someone... what most people pushing this don't seem to get is that this can happen to you too

 

"but this idea that she's never said anything on Muslims or the second amendment"

which i didn't say, and i don't follow candace owens... to be honest i don't really care about her, i saw one interview with her and that's it

 

"Again, if they said they need to combat them because otherwise they'll be majority Chinese"

i asked you a direct question which you have not addressed here so i'll repeat it again

"when people talk about combating declining birth rates in japan do you believe they are advocating for the mass rape of japanese women?"



o_O.Q said:
i hate to be that guy that defends people like candace owens(personally i think she's just an attention seeker and she's banking off of how polarised people are becoming) but i'm concerned with how people are completely willing to jump to conclusions about others so hastily... that is a massive problem and it is going to bite a lot of the people championing it in the ass if it goes too far
the presumption of innocence and giving the benefit of doubt are things for a reason and we are throwing them away carelessly

That's all well and good, but it's something that people with these beliefs take for granted as well. Not everyone will shout from the rooftops that they're a bigot, sometimes they like to be more coded with it and that doesn't mean it's any less problematic. 

This is an imperfect analogy, but it's similar to the comparison of racism in the 1930's and now. Used to be that racism was a lot more blatant and easy to spot. Looking now, we have made gigantic strides and it's obvious that things are better, but racism still exists in many fields. It's seen when people get less call backs if they have a black sounding name, or in how the justice system interacts with black vs. white people for drug crimes. These things are not obvious "well the police are all card carrying KKK members" but they are still problems that should be addressed.

In a similar way, it's all well and good to presume innocent until proven guilty, but very few people are going to be an obvious 1930's bigot. Now we're dealing with a more sophisticated problem that takes deeper inspection than "well she didn't say to kill all *insert crazy racist slur for brown people here*" so she probably doesn't have any problematic views towards muslims. 



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o_O.Q said:
Torillian said:

 

"when people talk about combating declining birth rates in japan do you believe they are advocating for the mass rape of japanese women?"

No, but I reject your implicit conclusion that these are similar. Thought that was obvious by my ignoring it as a pointless "gotcha" question, but here we go. 

I'll ask you an obvious question then: What are the two ways that one can stop your country from being majority non-native? And which method is more applicable to an army?



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o_O.Q said:
Torillian said:

 

"Because she likes to dog whistle"

in what sense? you think candace owens... a black woman( i bring up race because you did later on and its generally the focus when "dog whistling" is brought up) is a white supremacist?

 

"obvious racist shit"

islam is not a race and candace owens is black

 

"

Black people can be racist....Black people can be white supremacists too. Go watch Jesse Lee Peterson and tell me that dude doesn't think white people are better than black people. 

Yes yes.....Islam isn't a race and neither is Mexican so you can't technically be racist against either. So I'll amend that to "obvious islamophobic shit" or if you don't like that term "obvious bigoted shit".



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Torillian said:
Immersiveunreality said:

Yeah but just because armies usually defend by destroying does not change the context of its use in Owens tweet,cause she specificaly mentioned the procreating we cannot make it mean anything different by taking that aspect away.

Other than that, Candice Owens is not the smartest when it comes to tweets and in general saying things that can be used against her.

I guess I just disagree with this notion that there's no way one can read it that she's advocating violence against muslims. You start talking about armies in the same breath as you talk about how shitty it would be if France were muslim majority and I think you can make a pretty easy connection. Again, I don't think the shooter is being genuine when he mentions Candice, but I also don't agree with the idea that she's never said anything problematic in these realms. 

She's an idiot, no argument there. 

First bolded:Oh alright yes but this lunatic could have pulled the same advocacy out of a childrens book so i do not think this is something valid to put the focus on and surely not when the motive for what he did suggested he wanted people to attack eachother for political differences.

Second bolded: A matter of perception i guess,i rather call it stupid.

Lets end this with agreeing on her being an idiot. :p



o_O.Q said:
Torillian said:

Because she likes to dog whistle, because the organization she works for wouldn't abide for obvious racist shit but will allow the less obvious? Got me, not everyone who believes in awful shit wants to broadcast it to the world in an obvious way. 

I'm giving you how her post could be viewed as anti-muslim and advocate violence against them without a crazy amount of reinterpretation. Now I don't think the shooter is being genuine when he says Candice was in inspiration but this idea that she's never said anything on Muslims or the second amendment is just stupid.

"“LOL! FACT: I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam,”"

fucking ridiculous.  

Again, if they said they need to combat them because otherwise they'll be majority Chinese, and that if anything they need to make an army to combat being majority Chinese I could pretty easily come to the conclusion that they were saying the army should kick out the Chinese that apparently being majority of would be bad. 

"Because she likes to dog whistle"

in what sense? you think candace owens... a black woman( i bring up race because you did later on and its generally the focus when "dog whistling" is brought up) is a white supremacist?

Well dog whistle is just slang for saying something you think isn't okay to say without actually saying it. It doesn't have to apply specifically to race.

"obvious racist shit"

islam is not a race and candace owens is black

Yeah it's not. But there's 2 billion practicing Muslims out there and they all tend to come from the same regions for the most part, so it's easy to profile them and be prejudiced against them, and people do. It kind of becomes an ethnicity or nationality thing at some point. Like when we used to be prejudiced against Italians, you know? Except this time the rationale is based in a religion, that's usually connected by region and culture, so it's not racist but it's still ethnic, and when you're dealing with a group that's 2 billion strong, and most of them aren't extremists, it's not really fair to just treat them all like they're some kind of menace.

"I'm giving you how her post could be viewed as anti-muslim"

the things people say can very often very easily be twisted to fit whatever conclusions we need to justify going after someone... what most people pushing this don't seem to get is that this can happen to you too

This is what I meant earlier about people thinking that toxicity spreads outside the internet. They're not "going after Candace Owens" they're just denouncing all the toxicity on Twitter and the effect it seems to have on the world. I mean the crazy guy flat out name-dropped her, no? So obviously even if most people aren't twisting it to fit their conclusions, he was, and while she may not have meant it to be taken that exact way, she definitely meant something toxic by it, or "mean" as you said earlier.

"but this idea that she's never said anything on Muslims or the second amendment"

which i didn't say, and i don't follow candace owens... to be honest i don't really care about her, i saw one interview with her and that's it

I wasn't totally following the whole conversation so I don't know where the 2nd amendment comes in, but you asked a couple times about her thoughts on Muslims, and there seems to be a larger conversation going on about the potential connection of that tweet and the shooters actions since I mentioned it. I think here he's actually just referring to that tweet he quoted, it isn't related to anything you said specifically.

"Again, if they said they need to combat them because otherwise they'll be majority Chinese"

i asked you a direct question which you have not addressed here so i'll repeat it again

"when people talk about combating declining birth rates in japan do you believe they are advocating for the mass rape of japanese women?"

He probably thought that was rhetorical. It sounds rhetorical. No, they're not talking about mass rape of Japanese women, no one thinks that, he doesn't either, I'll bet my bottom dollar he doesn't, that would be silly. He seems to agree with me that if the shooter saw that tweet I mentioned earlier, he could draw the conclusion that she meant genocide, and he made an imperfect analogy. It's still a pretty fair analogy though.



Immersiveunreality said:
Torillian said:

I guess I just disagree with this notion that there's no way one can read it that she's advocating violence against muslims. You start talking about armies in the same breath as you talk about how shitty it would be if France were muslim majority and I think you can make a pretty easy connection. Again, I don't think the shooter is being genuine when he mentions Candice, but I also don't agree with the idea that she's never said anything problematic in these realms. 

She's an idiot, no argument there. 

First bolded:Oh alright yes but this lunatic could have pulled the same advocacy out of a childrens book so i do not think this is something valid to put the focus on and surely not when the motive for what he did suggested he wanted people to attack eachother for political differences.

Second bolded: A matter of perception i guess,i rather call it stupid.

Lets end this with agreeing on her being an idiot. :p

I think my overall issue is that I believe there's a connection between people who fear monger about muslims and crazy people that shoot them. So I can't look at someone saying "If France doesn't get their shit together they'll be majority muslim" as totally unrelated to some crazy dickhead killing a bunch of muslims. It's similar to how I think there's a connection between someone calling an abortion doctor "baby killer" over and over again and some crazy asshole killing said doctor. I highly doubt that Candice's brief foray into this particular brand of conservative douchebaggery has had an affect on anyone really, but the general sentiment she's espousing, that muslims are coming to take over all the nice white European countries that need to protect their culture, is definitely to blame for what this dickhead did. 



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Immersiveunreality said:
Torillian said:

I guess I just disagree with this notion that there's no way one can read it that she's advocating violence against muslims. You start talking about armies in the same breath as you talk about how shitty it would be if France were muslim majority and I think you can make a pretty easy connection. Again, I don't think the shooter is being genuine when he mentions Candice, but I also don't agree with the idea that she's never said anything problematic in these realms. 

She's an idiot, no argument there. 

First bolded:Oh alright yes but this lunatic could have pulled the same advocacy out of a childrens book so i do not think this is something valid to put the focus on and surely not when the motive for what he did suggested he wanted people to attack eachother for political differences.

Second bolded: A matter of perception i guess,i rather call it stupid.

Lets end this with agreeing on her being an idiot. :p

I think Twitter is an easier place to draw it from than a children's book. Twitter is super toxic. Can we all agree on that?