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Re:Outrage culture is out of control by leereeves on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:19AM (#19225485)
What I find disturbing about events like the Smolett case (also Covington Catholic, "A Rape on Campus", etc) isn't that one person would fake such a thing, but that so many would eagerly promote and support a claim that fit their agenda without questioning it.
Re:Outrage culture is out of control by pjc50 on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:20AM (#19225499)
How many of the people promoting it do you think knew, or should reasonably have believed, it was falsified?
Re:Outrage culture is out of control by leereeves on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:21AM (#19225501)
In the case of Nathan Phillips and the students from Convington Catholic, video evidence was available if they'd cared to investigate.

In other cases, they should have withheld judgement until they did know.

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by mikepurvis on Friday February 22, 2019 @10:48AM (#19226284)
Isn't part of the outrage though that only straight white males enjoy the benefit of "withheld judgment" and an expectation of getting a fair hearing?

And I'm not just talking about the court of public opinion here— the point of BLM is that many POC don't even get the benefit of the doubt from law enforcement when lethal force is in play.

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by leereeves on Friday February 22, 2019 @11:23AM (#19226555)
Let's not be sidetracked by BLM and all the surrounding controversy. Focusing on the issue, not the politics: are black people less likely to "get the benefit of the doubt from law enforcement when lethal force is in play"?

One does get that impression from a superficial examination of the stats, but Roland Fryer, professor of economics at Harvard and himself a black man from an underprivileged background, looked deeper and concluded that, if all other factors are the same, police are actually more likely to shoot white people:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...

(Postscript: in my personal opinion, this divisive issue is unproductive. Why can't we oppose the aggressive policing of America (a problem that undeniably affects people of all races to some degree) without making it a racial issue?)

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by mikepurvis on Friday February 22, 2019 @02:35PM (#19228384)
Because it is a racial issue. Arguing otherwise is just advancing the standard "all lives matter" response— telling the occupant of a burning building that "all houses matter" as the firetruck busily sprays the building next door and ignores the actual inferno.

There's a pretty widely-cited and thoughtful rebuttal to the Fryer paper, which I'd encourage you to read in its entirety: https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong...

"Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings."

"It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term 'racial bias' in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist."

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by leereeves on Friday February 22, 2019 @05:59PM (#19229947)
All lives do matter. The lives of white people killed by police do matter. Why would you insist 100% of coverage be about your personal (racially scoped) cause?

"All lives matter" is not suggesting the "firetruck" should ignore the "house next door" (black victims of police violence).

BLM, on the other hand, is suggesting exactly that: the firetruck should ignore the white victims.

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by mikepurvis on Sunday February 24, 2019 @03:30PM (#19240448)
I'm just some guy on the internet, so my words won't mean anything to you; you'll need to hear it from someone you're able to hear.

But your argument is against a strawman. No one is asking for white victims to be ignored, and no one is asking for "100% of coverage" to be about injustices against blacks. Obviously the lives of white people murdered by cops matter, but those murders get attention and sympathetic coverage by default. Those are the crimes where people start to ask whether policing as an institution needs to be reformed, instead of asking whether the victim was wearing the right clothing or was sufficient subservient or had just committed a petty theft. All that BLM activists and their sympathizers are asking for is to see similar coverage across the spectrum. That so many whites see this as an attack is just indicative of how much work there is yet to do.

Re:Outrage culture is out of control by badcede on Friday February 22, 2019 @01:17PM (#19227634)
Is that a reason to do the same thing to others?
Re:Outrage culture is out of control by mikepurvis on Friday February 22, 2019 @02:28PM (#19228323)
It's a reason to be cautious about making hand-wavy dismissals based on a handful of counterexample cases when some of the underlying outrage is based on real, systemic injustices.