Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

As far as I'm aware, the cult leader targeted trans women for recruitment.

I think it's natural for people who are going through many changes with their body and their self-perception as well as their relationship to society to be vulnerable to certain kinds of cognitive biases and perhaps susceptible to millenarian philosophies presented by charismatic leaders. If you feel like you don't fit in your body, don't fit into society's categories and expectations for you, it may be easier for you to be persuaded to join a movement which rejects the current social construct.

As far as media reporting or ignoring certain details, that's normal these days when it comes to politically sensitive topics or groups. I have seen many news stories about more mundane murder cases where the prime suspect was a minority and the media did not report it. Here in Canada, it's particularly common for the media to ignore the fact that a crime suspect is Indigenous, presumably to avoid feeding the stereotype that Indigenous people are more likely to commit crimes (Indigenous people are massively overrepresented in the incarceration statistics here).

I feel like I'm losing my mind I'm almost positive I've read these two comments on hacker news before about the exact same subject.

This sometimes happens when an old thread gets merged or bumped - timestamps get changed. It can be pretty disorienting.

Yea... did the comments get merged from the other post?

Haha same. I had to check the timestamp

Same. I searched HN and I think it might have been this subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880817

This is an offshoot of another cult, they didn't recruit trans people, they just got kicked out of the other cult.

There have been several instances where the QAnon types (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene) have baselessly accused mass murder suspects of being trans, or incorrectly accusing trans people of being the culprit in a violent incident. There is good reason to try to protect a vulnerable group as it can result in ostracization and violence against people who have nothing to do with the violent incident and are only connected by being a member of that group.

But do you think the media ignoring the connection makes the situation better or worse? I feel like it feeds into the bigoted narratives like "x group is doing y crimes and the media doesn't want you to know!".

I agree with this idea and line of thinking, and it's well-intentioned but it comes with its own costs. There's a risk that over time, people might start to feel like they're being gaslit by a media conspiracy, and this feeling may build up until eventually society snaps into an extreme backlash, which may be worse than the original prejudice.

Present events feel like one example of this.

I think a similar thing happened with COVID; early on the media and government went hard on filtering information, in order to suppress anti-asian discrimination (as a sibling commenter mentions) or to prevent shortages of masks, but it ended up like squeezing a water balloon. Trying to control public opinion this way might have had short-term success but caused all sorts of radical conspiracy outbursts and a loss of trust in institutions.

So as a long term strategy, it might just not work that well.

I see what you're saying. Perhaps an upfront messaging would have been sensible, e.g. stating that Americans of Asian descent have no connection to this virus. But I'm unsure of how much effect it would have on bigots who will be bigots. During that administration bigots were emboldened, as they are even more so during this one.

This is always brought up as if it’s a conspiracy, but why do you expect the media to report on the ethnicity of the people involved?

> why do you expect the media to report on the ethnicity of the people involved?

Because they do - albeit selectively. Since the original source of this story (https://apnews.com/article/zizians-killings-border-patrol-bf...) is the Associated Press, here are the results of "killed by white site:apnews.com" from duckduckgo.com:

- Black Florida mother killed by white neighbor remembered for faith, devotion to 4 kids - https://apnews.com/article/neighbor-shooting-florida-manslau...

- White Florida woman sentenced to 25 years in prison for shooting Black neighbor in lengthy dispute - https://apnews.com/article/neighbor-killing-florida-prison-s...

- Vigil honors 2 Black residents killed by white man - https://apnews.com/article/ri-state-wire-ma-state-wire-shoot...

- Body camera video shows fatal shooting of Black airman by Florida deputy in apartment doorway - https://apnews.com/article/florida-deputies-black-airman-kil...

- White Nebraska man shoots and wounds 7 Guatemalan immigrant neighbors - https://apnews.com/article/man-shoots-immigrant-neighbors-7e...

- Attorneys for family of absolved Black man killed by deputy seeking $16M from Georgia sheriff - https://apnews.com/article/georgia-deputy-kills-exonerated-m...

- Mississippi judge declares mistrial for 2 white men charged in attack on Black FedEx driver - https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-fedex-driver-shooting...

- St. Louis chief: Black male shot, killed by white officer - https://apnews.com/general-news-9e94f2803d4f486da57c94707304...

I've filtered it down to only where race is mentioned in the title itself. Plenty of results for the intended query. Notably, there were zero results (in this search, and judging by the title only, in the first ~5 pages) for white victims - it correctly parsed "killed by white" to include only white perpetrators. Results for "killed by black site:apnews.com":

- Killing of an airman by Florida deputy is among cases of Black people being shot in their homes - https://apnews.com/article/police-shootings-home-roger-forts...

- Family of exonerated Black man killed by a Georgia deputy is suing him in federal court - https://apnews.com/article/deputy-kills-exonerated-man-lawsu...

- Guilty verdict means “some justice” for Black mother killed by white neighbor in Florida - https://apnews.com/video/ajike-owens-florida-crime-juries-ho...

- Bodycam video reveals chaotic scene of deputy fatally shooting Black woman who called 911 for help - https://apnews.com/video/illinois-shootings-law-enforcement-...

- Arrest made in beating death of pioneering Black Bronx rocker - https://apnews.com/article/peter-forrest-247-spyz-rock-band-...

- Homeowner pleads guilty to shooting Black teen Ralph Yarl who rang the wrong doorbell - https://apnews.com/article/ralph-yarl-shooting-andrew-lester...

- Investigators name the trooper who fatally shot a Black Minnesota man during a traffic stop - https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-black-man-shot-traffic-...

Again filtered for only cases reporting on killings, where race is mentioned in the title. In the first ~5 pages, there were zero results (judging by title alone) about black perpetrators - all the stories were about black victims, even though it had no trouble parsing the query correctly when asking about white perpetrators.

This is despite the fact that in 2019 (the most recent year for which the FBI published this data [1]), there were 566 black-on-white killings, and 246 white-on-black killings (where the FBI includes latinos in "white"). So it's not that the AP's reporting simply reflects reality. Their journalists are simply following the official AP style on race - only identify it when it is "pertinent" [2]. It just so happens that when a white kills a black, race is pertinent, and when a black kills a white, it is a "random act of violence".

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] Consider carefully when deciding whether to identify people by race. Often, it is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone’s race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry. There are, however, occasions when race is pertinent - https://web.archive.org/web/20220715000414/https://www.apsty...

Yes that’s a bit disturbing when presented like that.

I doubt the perpetrator being white was a necessary part of the headline in all those stories. Though I definitely don’t think including race in the story more often would make things better.

Thanks for doing the work and bringing the receipts. I don't consider this some "grand conspiracy" in the sense that it's well coordinated amongst organizations. It's just been politically expedient to act this way in the last decade or so.

The false appearance of conspiracy can easily arise when you have numerous people with roughly aligned ideologies and incentives independently responding to similar stimuli in whatever way they personally think is the most prudent. That's probably what's going on here.

This idea was explained by Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.

By those criteria human society would appear to be a conspiracy.

No, a conspiracy has a very specific definition that has gotten lost in all the noise:

noun (plural conspiracies)

a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful: she served five years in prison for taking part in a conspiracy to sell stolen art works.

The key is that it's a secret plan. People have to have gotten together to meet, in secret, and agree on a plan. This is why true grand conspiracies are so rare: it's hard to get a lot of people together in one room, get them all to agree on a plan, and get them all to keep it a secret. The more people involved, the more likely there will be a leaker.

Criminal conspiracies are quite common though. Of course, those can involve as few as 2 people making a plan to commit a crime together.

People who live far outside of the mainstream do often come to believe that mainstream society is all one grand conspiracy. That perception is an illusion, created by the mechanism I described.

Your filtered results appear to be nearly all cops or castle-doctrine related. Race is pertinent.

I agree with your criticism, so I was pleasantly surprised that the SFGate story from a couple days ago seemed to cover this aspect well: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/new-details-bay-area-...

I do wonder how much it's people in the media trying to protect the rest of the trans community from association with this story, and how much it's just people writing stories based on the other coverage and not realizing that the trans connection even exists.

In any case, I find it encouraging that the more recent coverage has often been more complete than that of the first couple weeks.

> I do wonder how much it's people in the media trying to protect the rest of the trans community from association with this story, and how much it's just people writing stories based on the other coverage and not realizing that the trans connection even exists.

There is also the possibility that writers or editors feared being unpersonned.

Thanks, that looks like a good read too. I'll add it to my list.

it's very common for violent cults of personality to target potential members who are social outsiders, there's a dual benefit that such individual are more likely to offer loyalty in exchange for membership and they also provide ideological cover as the cult can blend in to a larger perceived movement

the fact that this particular set of outsiders creates skewed media reactions (from total misdirection on one end to unfair over indexing on the other) is a novel third benefit

I don't doubt at all that that's a major or even complete explanation of why trans women have been targeted by this cult. I am most certainly not making the claim that they're doing this because they are trans.

I just think that it's interesting that this very notable fact is being ignored - if this group were made up entirely of right wing men, or ballet dancers, or museum curators this would no doubt be reported on.

How is it being ignored? It's literally the primary thing which is being reported on about this, because 6 murders in the US is a drop in the bucket of murders which happen in a non-mass shooting week.

Is it? In the linked article as well as the source article posted elsewhere in this thread it's not mentioned at all. I confirmed this by googling the story and clicking on other mainstream websites like The Guardian and it was the same. They mentioned the gender situation of LaSota but not that the cult is almost entirely the same.

Yeah I agree, I think that this is just a case where the transness of the cult members was actually beneficial in a Darwinian memetics sense - there have been public warnings about the Zizians for half a decade but they were all pattern matched to 'bigoted transphobic fear mongering' and excluded from the Overton Window. It took the random murder of a federal agent (which got media coverage on an entirely separate axis of attention) to break this, and I wonder how long Ziz would have walked free even if the group continued to commit less headline worthy crimes.

The Overton Window has also shifted significantly within the past year or so.

Bigotry causes cover for this shit. If trans people were just accepted for humans who just want to live their lives, then the pattern matching defense wouldn't need to exist. There'd be no need to assume "well, first and foremost, this is probably just some bigot claiming trans people are evil again".

But no, some people have to punch down, which means others have to develop defenses that assume all punches are punching down.

If nothing else, it would seem bigotry is highly inefficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com