Privilege and Responsibility

[biggentleben]

 

Josh Marshall gives a clear-eyed run down of the events, providing video links etc.   I tend to agree with his conclusions, that both the Black Israelites and the MAGA kids were acting inappropriately. 

 

This was a great run down as well, with a lot of thought to the mentality of Natives that would have been present.

[biggentleben]

 

Twitter has suspended the user who tweeted the original, misleading one minute video.

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN Business, "Deliberate attempts to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter by using misleading account information is a violation of the Twitter Rules."

 

This is shameful. The vile stuff they leave up and won't even remove, let alone ban, the continued presence of Donald Trump on the platform, and this is what gets the ban hammer?!

[LaBombo]

 

Multiple videos that have come out have shown that Phillips was attempting to walk to a place between the two groups and Sandmann stepped in front of him to stop him after the crowd had opened up to allow Phillips through, knowing what his intent was.

 

The boys are also on video adorning their MAGA gear after the rally and then harassing multiple women on their way to the mall. They were not supposed to be anywhere near the Lincoln Memorial, however, and they were told of the IPMDC19 going on at Lincoln Memorial and told to give space, so their presence there was not accidental at all.

 

There are many more videos that have come out from members of the IPMDC19 group and the Black Israelites that show very different things than the first longer video. Odd that none of those videos has been retweeted by every Faux News fanboy/fangirl online.

 

 

Then post those links and walk us through your unbiased interpretation.

 

Until then, this is just another pathetic, hyper- partisan attempt to smear children and shift the real conversation, which is that what started as essentially a non-event has caused a substantial portion of the Left to become morally and rationally unmoored.

 

All it's missing is a nonsensical blaming of Trump.

 

 

Edit: My apologies. With death threats still keeping Covington closed (which should please the anti-Catholic bigots in the Hirono/Harris camp) you did manage to cut through to what's reeeally important by hauling butbutbutTrump! and "Faux" (clever for about 20 minutes... in 1998) into this with a separate post.

[Mr. Brooks]

This is shameful. The vile stuff they leave up and won't even remove, let alone ban, the continued presence of Donald Trump on the platform, and this is what gets the ban hammer?!

I agree there is plenty of garbage that could be removed from Twitter, that's why I don't participate in social media.

But, two wrongs don't make a right. Removing garbage from Twitter is never going to seem "shameful" to me, no matter how inconsistent it is, and regardless of which side of the political spectrum is posting said garbage.

 

I'm certainly not defending these kids, some of their behavior is abhorrent. But so is manipulating the video to make it look worse than it is. The "smirking kid" especially, even if he didn't show the best character, was clearly not acting like the monster that first video tried to depict him as.

[Vanimal46]

This is shameful. The vile stuff they leave up and won't even remove, let alone ban, the continued presence of Donald Trump on the platform, and this is what gets the ban hammer?!

Twitter would be dead if Trump stopped using their platform. His controversial tweets are keeping the lights on for them.

[Craig Arko]

 

Twitter would be dead if Trump stopped using their platform. His controversial tweets are keeping the lights on for them.

Uh, no.

[biggentleben]

 

Uh, no.

 

Exactly. I have an incredibly busy news feed. The majority of baseball writers/scouts/news folks converse over Twitter or various Slack channels. It's used often without the tweeter in chief.

[Vanimal46]

Uh, no.

Who else generates 50k+ likes, 10k+ retweets, and 10k+ responses (mostly hateful) with every tweet they make?

[biggentleben]

 

Then post those links and walk us through your unbiased interpretation.

 

Until then, this is just another pathetic, hyper- partisan attempt to smear children and shift the real conversation, which is that what started as essentially a non-event has caused a substantial portion of the Left to become morally and rationally unmoored.

 

All it's missing is a nonsensical blaming of Trump.

 

 

Edit: My apologies. With death threats still keeping Covington closed (which should please the anti-Catholic bigots in the Hirono/Harris camp) you did manage to cut through to what's reeeally important by hauling butbutbutTrump! and "Faux" (clever for about 20 minutes... in 1998) into this with a separate post.

 

"My apologies" and then continuing an unbased bashing is akin to "with all respect" and then continuing with the disrespectful comment. It negates any need to reply to the content of the message for sure.

[biggentleben]

 

Who else generates 50k+ likes, 10k+ retweets, and 10k+ responses (mostly hateful) with every tweet they make?

 

One tweet from a top athlete can have 5 figures in likes and retweets.

 

You do realize that a large majority of the responses to a Trump tweet are automated and not real, right?

 

Influencers are not considered based on their responses for sure.

[Craig Arko]

I've heard rumors there are other topics besides sports and politics in the universe.

[LaBombo]

 

This was a great run down as well, with a lot of thought to the mentality of Natives that would have been present.

 

Here's your link's description of the Westboroian sociopaths of Black Hebrew who showered obscenities and threats of violence throughout the event: 

 

"The Black Hebrews sect, is an American-based evangelistic group that tends to use aggressive provocation to engage with passersby--usually in major cities. They are a regular fixture on street corners in cities like NYC, Phila, and DC."

 

 

And by posting the link to the rant which you purport to have read, you are undeniably endorsing that wholly dishonest defense of people who even the Leftbots of SPLC categorize as a hate group.

[LaBombo]

 

"My apologies" and then continuing an unbased bashing is akin to "with all respect" and then continuing with the disrespectful comment. It negates any need to reply to the content of the message for sure.

 

If all you can do is take a dive and hope for a penalty, then that says all I need to know about the validity of your alleged video revelations, which would, if they actually existed, be booming throughout the mainstream media by now if they showed anything like a credible defense of their initial, eager smears of the students.

[KirbyDome89]

Twitter made this mess for themselves when they started picking and choosing who could and couldn't use their platform. They also tend to lean hard in one direction when it comes to what is deemed "tolerable." This banning bucks that trend a bit. I'm not a fan of censorship at all, so in a sense I agree that the banning is ridiculous, albeit for entirely different reasons. 

 

If we're upset about how Twitter handled this firestorm I think we need to be a little more honest about what was going on. There were prominent social figures, individuals with blue checks, calling for violence directed towards a 16 year old kid. That's INSANE. It's embarrassing for myself, who leans left in a lot of ways, to witness the cognitive dissonance present within the coverage and subsequent reactions.

 

 It's apparently impossible to withhold any judgement until the dust settles, because the faux moral high ground holds so much power. Rather than admit any sort of mistake, or lapse in judgement regarding the handling of the event, we're treated to media outlets attempting to rationalize the extreme positions taken by racing to find out "who started it," as if that absolves anything, or as in most cases, complete silence and removal of any potentially damning social media content. 

[LaBombo]

 

 

If we're upset about how Twitter handled this firestorm I think we need to be a little more honest about what was going on. There were prominent social figures, individuals with blue checks, calling for violence directed towards a 16 year old kid. That's INSANE. It's embarrassing for myself, who leans left in a lot of ways, to witness the cognitive dissonance present within the coverage and subsequent reactions.

 

 

 

Anybody who would lump you in with the extremists who posted violent fantasies on Twitter has infinitely more cause to be embarrassed than you. There's no guilt by association in this one. None.

 

In fact, it seems to me that one of the more dramatic aspects of this whole mess is how polarizing it is not to left and right, but within the left itself.

 

After the initial outrage, the additional video revelations quickly caused many (most, I think) people on the left, including some of those here, to undertake the thankless task of drawing attention to how misleading the initial video was.

 

And it could have ended there, with a sort of Ron Burgundy "That escalated quickly!" shrug of the shoulders and a dirty look in the direction of Twitter, followed by a collective return to the nation's more pressing business at hand.

 

But then the Double Down brigade showed up... infuriated by both gloaters on the right and apologetic former angry mob members on the left, screaming for a doxxin', and scouring phone videos like the Zapruder film, hoping to dredge up a damning sound bite of the boys that might rise above the din of constant obscenities from the other group.

 

This group's moral and intellectual standing is nicely summarized by Kathy Griffin posting a picture of a Covington basketball player making the thumb/index finger three point gesture during a game, and breathlessly proclaiming it to be a "Nazi sign".

 

 

[TheLeviathan]

 

And then you zoom out even more, and it starts to look pretty much like it looked originally. A bunch of private school kids (mostly white) wearing MAGA hats haranguing some minorities.

The black Israelites are provocative, to be sure. But their numbers are too small to be of any concern.

 

I'm sorry, but this is where partisanship the other way is unacceptable.  A group of adults provoking children is not ok no matter what stupid hats the kids wear or how the numbers compare.  This group appears to have been provoking in racial and crude ways that are unacceptable and started this conflict.

 

Full stop.  That needs to be fully acknowledged here.  Kids, especially a young black man, were being unfairly verbally assaulted.  Everything that happened after that was more about the strange confluence of groups.  (And yes, utter failure by chaperones) Many people in that scrum could've made better choices, some more than others, but some of you are trying really hard to "hold the left!" as much as schmucks on the right are putting these kids on a pedestal.

 

Knock it off.  It's not ok no matter how righteous you think you are being.

 

  (Not directed at you Hosken - I appreciate you rethinking this post.  That's part of why I used it)

 

 

[ashbury]

Moderator's note: Some of the posts here have gotten unnecessarily personal toward one another. I'd ask all posters to think about what they can do to turn down the wattage a bit, toward fellow posters, whether singly or as a group.

[PseudoSABR]

First, all forms of overreaction are problematic.  However, I hardly blame liberals for the environment that allows for them to prejudge a smug-MAGA wearing teenager for standing face-to-face with an elder Native American.  Context matters.  But that isolated shot and initial video are symbols of the larger cultural moment, whether or not that the specific moment stands on all fours with people's initial criticism.  

 

If you want to go around wearing a MAGA hat, such is your right, but the expectation to be free from judgement is both unrealistic and disingenuous.  When wearing a MAGA hat, people might think you're a racist, and especially so when you do what looks to be racist things; it's not on everyone else to root out the context to disspell what's a reasonable first impression given the cultural climate.  

 

 

[TheLeviathan]

First, all forms of overreaction are problematic. However, I hardly blame liberals for the environment that allows for them to prejudge a smug-MAGA wearing teenager for standing face-to-face with an elder Native American. Context matters. But that isolated shot and initial video are symbols of the larger cultural moment, whether or note that the specific moment stand on all fours with people's initial criticism.

 

If you want to go around wearing a MAGA hat, such is your right, but the expectation to be free from judgement is both unrealistic and disingenuous. When wearing a MAGA hat, people might think you're a racist, and especially so when you do what looks to be racist things; it's not on everyone else to root out the context to disspell what's a reasonable first impression.

 

That first paragraph is....ugh. But leaving that aside, this isn't about blame for some larger context. Social media flashmobbing is a problem for many people, but when the truth exposes your reaction as misguided? That's the issue. It's about how you need to eat crow when the truth demands it. If you refuse, you cede an awful lot of high ground on the value of truth.

 

Maybe it can/should be a lesson on overreacting but I've long given up on that. Ditto the idea that people are worth hearing before we publicly execute them.

[PseudoSABR]

 

That first paragraph is....ugh. But leaving that aside, this isn't about blame for some larger context. Social media flashmobbing is a problem for many people, but when the truth exposes your reaction as misguided? That's the issue. It's about how you need to eat crow when the truth demands it. If you refuse, you cede an awful lot of high ground on the value of truth.

Maybe it can/should be a lesson on overreacting but I've long given up on that.

I mean, I think there's a lot of assumptions about what people here and elsewhere thought when looking at the initial video.  Does the fact some Black Isrealites were the real a-holes change the Native American's reaction to how he felt when faced with the MAGA kids?  We should only be willing to eat crow about what we're actually wrong about.  

 

Maybe there's a bunch of people in twitter-verse who should be eating crow, but no one here should.  The righteousness of few posters criticizing the overreaction is a bit of kettle-meet-pot, to me.  

[PseudoSABR]

Also, we should tread carefully, it looks like this is the 666th thread in the Sport Bar.  

[TheLeviathan]

I mean, I think there's a lot of assumptions about what people here and elsewhere thought when looking at the initial video. Does the fact some Black Isrealites were the real a-holes change the Native American's reaction to how he felt when faced with the MAGA kids? We should only be willing to eat crow about what we're actually wrong about.

 

Maybe there's a bunch of people in twitter-verse who should be eating crow, but no one here should. The righteousness of few posters criticizing the overreaction is a bit of kettle-meet-pot, to me.

 

The conversation is about the broader reaction. You taking it personally is on you. That was nowhere implied.

 

The entire early narrative on this story was wrong. If you participated, a plate of crow is earned. The more you try to hedge and wiggle out of it, the more earned. Perhaps even moreso since now you have the truth and you still try to give yourself excuses.

 

Wear whatever shoe fits you. I bought into that initial story too and was disgusted. I eat my crow, I got sucked in.

[PseudoSABR]

 

The entire early narrative on this story was wrong. 

I don't think this kind of absolute statement is true.  The early narrative lacked context (from which people overreacted/made assumptions), but it wasn't entirely wrong.  You're not suggesting that the MAGA teens were completely innocent, are you?   

 

And to be fair, we probably encountered the story for the first time in a variety of contexts with varying depth/factual accounting.  

[TheLeviathan]

I don't think this kind of absolute statement is true.  The early narrative lacked context (from which people overreacted/made assumptions), but it wasn't entirely wrong.  You're not suggesting that the MAGA teens were completely innocent, are you?

 

Was the early story merely accusing them of mild non-innocence?

 

What's Chief's rule about holes?

[PseudoSABR]

 

Was the early story merely accusing them of mild non-innocence?

What's Chief's rule about holes?

I just thought they were asshats, and I still think they are.  The first stories I read mentioned the Black Isrealites and contained quotes from the Native American guy.  I still think his valid perspective and reaction is being poo-pooed in favor a more innocent explanation for the MAGA kids.  

 

This isn't the case of people getting inflamed by a total non-truth, like Pizzagate or something, but rather that people lacked context and overreated to what was still problematic behavior.   Indeed, in my mind, the reaction to the overreation is totally overblown. 

[TheLeviathan]

I like my intellectual integrity, even with the ccassional crow. I prefer not to double down on foolishness.

 

Guess I'm the odd duck. I'm out, crow is tough when it's cooked.

[biggentleben]

 

I'm sorry, but this is where partisanship the other way is unacceptable.  A group of adults provoking children is not ok no matter what stupid hats the kids wear or how the numbers compare.  This group appears to have been provoking in racial and crude ways that are unacceptable and started this conflict.

 

The Black Israelites provoke anyone and everyone and did such to plenty of the people in the Native rally. That is not a statement attempting to say their actions toward the youth walking by were acceptable by any means, and that gross misrepresentation has already been attempted earlier. It's a statement of fact in that situation. They were trying to engage and enrage, and they found an easy mark in youth who had put on MAGA hats in order to provoke a reaction when they got to what they knew would be a crowd not for them.

 

These boys were warned not to go to the Lincoln Memorial due to the Indigenous gathering and made the conscious choice to do so, and they added the hats along the way. Phillips was attempting to work to the middle of the Black Israelites and the boys to stand between both groups and was blocked by one of the boys intentionally.

 

Phillips also then led a group to the church in DC that sponsored the rally the boys used taxpayer funds to attend, and he protested during their service, attempting to force his way into the service.

 

There really were no persons involved here without tarnish. However, attempting to show tarnish on any one of them seems to turn into an explosion of misperceptions of what is truly said.

 

 

[TheLeviathan]

 

There really were no persons involved here without tarnish. However, attempting to show tarnish on any one of them seems to turn into an explosion of misperceptions of what is truly said.

 

It's fine to say everyone could've done better.  The original narrative was not that, however.  They are not guilty of anything overt or antagonistic, they're just guilty of being buffoons who should've walked away.  I don't think Phillips was doing anything overt or antagonistic either, perhaps just a flawed strategy.,  His subsequent emotions are just that: emotions.  Those are not substitutes for facts.

 

Given what we now know of the facts, the initial narrative was very, very mistaken.  That shouldn't be hard for honest people to acknowledge, but at the end of the day the real beef is with the hats they were wearing.  And, as such, it's a political belief being disguised self-righteously behind trumped up attacks on their conduct.  

 

I too despise the MAGA hats and what they stand for, but truth comes before politics for me.  That reversal is a major part of our problems right now.

[Brock Beauchamp]

No excuses for the behavior of the Black Israelites - from the research I've done, they're pretty awful, to be honest - but if you're proudly stomping around town wearing MAGA hats and come across various protests/demonstrations by people of color, that in itself is a mild instigation.

 

And the ADULTS around those kids should have known better. While the kids may not be entirely at fault here, I think this is a good example of "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" and an example of how these kind of (maybe sorta crappy) kids turn into truly crappy adults through insulation, arrogance, and lack of repercussions for their actions.

 

When the kids started chanting and pretty openly mocking the native American(s), that's when I stopped caring about who started it and (once again) just became embarrassed for white Americans and their continued tone deafness to anything that doesn't fit into their nice little box of a worldview.

[LaBombo]

 

No excuses for the behavior of the Black Israelites - from the research I've done, they're pretty awful, to be honest - but if you're proudly stomping around town wearing MAGA hats and come across various protests/demonstrations by people of color, that in itself is a mild instigation.

 

And the ADULTS around those kids should have known better. While the kids may not be entirely at fault here, I think this is a good example of "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" and an example of how these kind of (maybe sorta crappy) kids turn into truly crappy adults through insulation, arrogance, and lack of repercussions for their actions.

 

When the kids started chanting and pretty openly mocking the native American(s), that's when I stopped caring about who started it and (once again) just became embarrassed for white Americans and their continued tone deafness to anything that doesn't fit into their nice little box of a worldview.