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Just No

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They’ve taken the tweet down and changed the headline, but for most of yesterday, The Seattle Times had headlined their story copy of an AP soty and tweeted “Concentrated evil” or “sweet kid”: Details on the suspect in Charleston church shootings. Ansel at Slog gives some context to the harm done by various attempts by the media to humanize these killers. And that’s an important thing to say.

That context is important, but this case it’s ugly enough on its own. We’re talking about a racist crime. We’re talking about terrorizing a community. We’re talking about a man who committed the grossest of acts. And it doesn’t matter if you can find some friend’s parent who vouched for him at some point “sweet kid” is disgusting.

Look, I’m all for finding out all about how the people who knew him felt about him before. If it’s in the wire story, I guess run it. But The Seattle Times chose to highlight that. And it’s a fucking disgrace.

Comments

  2. 2

    Meanwhile, the Charleston shooter turns out to be a pea-witted dittohead:

    “The racist statements attributed to accused murderer Dylann Roof in South Carolina … track almost word-for-word with hate messages posted on line by white supremacist groups, according to Heidi Beirich, Intelligence Project Director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who studies such groups.”

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-.....d=31899443

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Kinda reminds me of the South Carolina teacher who swallowed whole an internet hoax that claimed Obama tried to nuke Charleston harbor. The far right is populated with a surfeit of such morons.

  5. 5

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....onfederacy

    FRI JUN 19, 2015 AT 09:47 AM PDT
    Connecting the dots: Charleston shooter, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, and the American Confederacy
    byShaun King

    Dylann Roof is a terrorist. All terrorists have inspiration. Daily, we are learning more and more about the motivating factors that caused this man to walk into a Charleston church and brutally murder nine African Americans. Here is where we will discuss those factors and how much like millions of Americans Dylann Roof truly is.

  6. 6

    http://www.newyorker.com/news/.....e-of-obama

    Daily Comment

    TODAY 2:46 AM
    Charleston and the Age of Obama
    BY DAVID REMNICK

    Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom.” (Twain shelved the essay and plans for a full-length book on lynching because, he told his publisher, if he went forward, “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left down [South].”) These thousands of murders, as studied by the Tuskegee Institute and others, were a means of enforcing white supremacy in the political and economic marketplaces; they served to terrorize black men who might dare to sleep, or even talk, with white women, and to silence black children, like Emmett Till, who were deemed “insolent.”

    Let’s see that again:

    Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country…”

    We are barbarians…

    …and the battle flag of the confederacy, the emblem of hate, bigotry and treason still waves over the South.

  7. 7

    Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country…

    almost all by the DUMMOCRETIN Party right?

  8. 8

    @5,

    No Mike Gentle Giant Brown?

  10. 10

    @ 7

    Well, really they were lynched by Conservative Christians.

    But lets not quibble over petty details like that.

  11. 11

    @7 The southern racist lynchers left “our” party 50 years ago. They’re in *your* party now. They’re the folks you choose to associate and fellow-travel with.

  12. 12

    There’s some discussion going on now about the role of gun laws in the Charleston massacre, inasmuch as Obama has revived talk of stricter gun laws. Meanwhile, an NRA board member has drawn attention to that organization by claiming it’s Rev. Pinckney’s own damn fault he’s dead, because as a state senator, he voted against liberalizing South Carolina’s concealed carry law. Aside from the sheer vicious nature of that remark, it’s not accurate and in any case misses the mark (a bad habit for shooting enthusiasts to get into; see, e.g., the Ohio cop who shot at a dog and hit a kid today). South Carolina gun laws are complicated; I discuss them, and whether Sen. Pinckney’s legislative voting had anything to do with this shooting here:

    http://handbill.us/?p=54023

    (Spoiler: It wasn’t Sen. Pinckney, but opposition from law enforcement, that stalled the bill doing away with South Carolina’s permit requirement for concealed carry in this legislative session.)

  13. 13

    @7 squid ink to muddy the waters, confuse the discussion. Stop being willfully disingenuous.

  15. 15

    The Confederate flag is modeled after the Scottish flag because A lot of Scots from Scotland and Scots from the Ulster Plantation in Ireland made their ways to the Southern U.S., starting about 1640 or so. I don’t have the exact year, but it’s somewhere around then.

  16. 16

    @15 It doesn’t matter where it came from. The swastika was a benign symbol, too, until Hitler co-opted it and imbued it with the racism and mass murder of his twisted ideology. What’s important is what the Confederate flag stands for today. It means different things to different people;, but those who defend it as a symbol of “southern tradition” or perhaps the bravery and soldierly qualities of their Confederate ancestors are, at a minimum, ignoring the feelings of the millions of people in this country for whom it is a symbol of slavery, racism, oppression, the KKK, lynchings, secession, and a bloody civil war.

  17. 17

    @2 from the link
    “On the more general white nationalist internet message boards, a similar sentiment of sympathy was common, but it could not drown out allegations that the killing was a “false flag” operation somehow orchestrated by gun-control supporters, or the feeling by others that while the killing was bad, black crime was worse”

    No point in solving white on black crime until we solve black on black crime first, Isn’t that what puddy and bickle argue often?

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