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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

A few days late and dollars short there.

Meanwhile, it's not the partisan purge you think it is:

Kevin Allred posted "would conservatives care as much abt the 2nd amendment if guns killed more white people? a question meant to expose double standard" https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798751660340195328

and gets the police coming to him https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798729156557205504 and twitter ordering him to take it down (but not the quote??) https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798925131288641536

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Is there more to this story? I'm blown away. That's insane and very troubling.

EDIT: It seems that the poster above may have left out some important details. According to an alleged screenshot linked below, the tweet actually said: "Will the 2nd amendment be as cool when I buy a gun start shooting at random white people?"

This is not obviously just an abstract political point. It could understandably be interpreted as a direct threat.

https://twitter.com/Travesham/status/798941639909609472

Here are the since deleted tweets. I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

How do we know those are the actual deleted tweets?

(Now we have a truth problem don't we? I could be lying, the guy posting the screenshots could be lying, the original poster could be lying. Turtles all the way down)

I mean, there's some MSM coverage of this which says essentially what I did: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rutgers-professor-psych-...

Yes there is. The actual tweet, verbatim was "will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting atrandom white people or no...[two eyes emoji]". Scroll down in the thread to see it.

This is exactly the kind of misinformation bubble that people are talking about. Kevin Allred is clearly misrepresenting his original tweet.

I agree misinformation/misrepresentation is a problem. Do you think this misinformation bubble is happening more on one side or the other, or is more evenly split?

I think the left tends to deal in half truths or highly questionable interpretations of facts passed off as facts, while the right deals more in outright lies.

But the left has the ability to get you fired if you question their assertions too much. So their falsehoods are actually more effective

It'd be interesting to dig in and see what the distribution of methods is. There should be enough out there on line now, if someone wanted to take it on.

Then again, who'd believe the results? :) Who fact checks the fact checkers?

"But the left has the ability to get you fired if you question their assertions too much."

Would you expand on this?

Sure, I will give an example. Most people on the left believe that black Americans commit more crime per capita then whites, and that this is due to various sociostructural phenomena. However another common viewpoint is that the gap in conviction rates is actually due to a biased justice system and blacks do not actually commit more crime.

The latter view is rarely argued in academic circles so I've never seen it rigorously defended. But it is passed off as fact to the general public.

Now I am not able to correct this later group because if I do so, not only will they attack me as racist, but the former group will not defend me. In fact the former group will say "the only reason you would present this fact in isolation is because you want to imply black people are genetically inclined to crime". This would most likely result in disciplinary action in my workplace.

Thanks for the response. What I was hoping to see was some support based on some broad, non-anecdotal, cross-domain research that showed that the left (by some definition) exerts statistically more power in actually firing people for ideological reasons. Please don't take that as a criticism. I'm not looking to score points. I suspect this kind of research is hard to do in a convincing manner.

> "would conservatives care as much abt the 2nd amendment if guns killed more white people? a question meant to expose double standard"

We already have the answer to that question and it is a resounding YES. When the Black Panthers decided to open carry in California in the 70s (I think it was the 70s) conservatives freaked out and passed legislation (led by Reagan I believe) to limit the rights of Californian citizens to open carry.

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