Snagged from tumblr: 24-hour News

 So the other day I said a thing about how I felt like a line could be drawn between antis, and the rise of 24-hour news networks. I’ve given that thought some time to bubble to see what, exactly, my brain meant by that statement, and here’s what I’ve got:

When I was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1990s), we had three major news stations in my town: Channel 12, Channel 24, and Channel 35. These corresponded to NBC, ABC, and CBS, but I don’t remember which one was which so don’t ask me. Anyway–you had a half hour of news at 8 or 9 am (depending on which station you watched), an hourlong program at noon in which half the program was stuff like “here are today’s beach closures and some recipes and also if you’re looking for stuff to do with the kids this weekend here are local promotions,” and half an hour at either 5, 5:30, or 6 (again, depending on which channel you watched). One of the three stations also did a half-hour capper at 10pm. So unless you were watching all three stations, and picking the news every single time, the max amount of news you were going to get was like an hour and a half. If you wanted more news than that, you read the newspaper. When my mom was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1960s), this would have seemed like an inordinate amount of news–for her, it was half an hour at 6pm and ten minutes at 10pm and then the station (there was only one station that did the news) played the National Anthem and went off the air until 6am, at which time you might get like … the weather and a traffic report.

For anything else, you read the newspaper.

Now with only half an hour to present a whole lot of news, what are you going to do? You are going to stick to the facts. You don’t have a choice. You have a very short time to fit a whole lot of information. “Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire today. French firefighters are working to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. In local news … “ And that’s it! If you want more information, you’ve got to wait for the newspaper in the morning, and you’re going to have to get a copy of the New York Times or USA Today, because the local paper will only have a blurb, and that blurb will mostly cover what you just heard!

But then the news changed.

By the time I was a teenager, the non-cable news looked like this: All three channels had a morning show that started at 5 or 6 am (depending on your station) and ran until 8 or 9 (depending on your station). The station that ended at 8am then had a half-hour morning news show. The mid-day news at 11 or 12 was still an hour. Channel 35 did a half-hour news segment at 5 and another at 5:30, back to back. The other two stations simply did an hourlong segment. And then one station did half an hour at 10:30, and the other two did hourlong segments at 10pm.

What do you do with that much time? Well, you expand. Yes, you can fit more news, but you can also fit more about the news. “Notre Dame cathedral in Paris went up in flames today. The fire began in the famous historic bell tower, and spread to the roof. At this time, portions of the roof appear to have caved in, and there are concerns about the integrity of the medieval stonework in the cathedral walls. French firefighters have been working since 8am Paris time to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. Some firefighters are also helping with this project, as portions of the building have become too unsafe to enter. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation late this evening and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. Of the cathedral itself, Somebody said, ‘Our Lady has weathered worse troubles than this. Paris as a city, and France as a nation, will overcome.’ In local news … ”

Still facts, but a few more facts. At this point the internet as a public thing is just past its infancy, and in theory you could go look up some stuff on, like, AOL, maybe, about what was happening.

(Nina, you were talking about antis … ?)

(Yes, I was. Bear with me.)

But at this point you also saw the rise of Fox News and CNN.

Now up to this point, I could trust the news. That is important to know. “Nina, American news is full of propaganda–” Listen, you’re not wrong, but the point is, if Scott Brennan told me Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics, I could safely assume Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics. If Channel 24 told me “the blizzard of the century” had occurred the night before, I could look out the window of my snowed-in house and go “yeah, that seems legit.”

I grew up, in other words, in a world in which facts were facts. We didn’t waffle or wring our hands over whether or not Notre Dame was on fire. And this allowed me to take a similar approach to fiction: it is a fact that murder is wrong, and knowing this, I can read a book in which someone commits murder for very good reasons, but still know they did something wrong.

But now you have 24 hours of news to fill.

No matter how you pad it, no matter how many voice clips you play or retrospectives you do, you cannot find enough news in the world to fill 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You just can’t.

So they started adding “opinion pieces.”

Notre Dame is on fire–is it worth saving? Notre Dame is on fire–but is it as big a catastrophe as it’s made out to be? Notre Dame is on fire–but France has been steadily calling themselves a secular nation, so is this the punishment of G-d? Notre Dame is on fire–

–wait, what was that?

Yep. You saw it, I saw it, we all saw it. But as the “opinion pieces” slowly took over the regular news and stopped being called “opinion pieces” and started being called “programs,” it became less and less clear what was and wasn’t fact.

Now obviously Notre Dame is on fire. But now we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it to save it or not? Is the financial cost outweighed by the history? Will those answers change depending on how bad the damage becomes? And you, lonely elderly person in your chair whose predominant socialization these days is at church, how does this make you feel about French people? These are questions that once would have been asked of the church caretakers and the French government. Now every single person is being asked to think about them, without being provided all of the context that is available to the church caretakers and the French government. And along the way, you get these nice, nasty little bits of prejudice and slanted thinking and bias sneaked in.

I told you I’d come back to antis. And here we are.

The vast majority of antis are very young. They grew up in a world where those “programs” were the norm. They were not provided with a cultural basis of “these are the facts.” They were provided a basis of “here is what I think about the facts.” They were provided a basis of, as Mr. Banks said in Mary Poppins, “kindly do not cloud the matter with facts.”

There are no facts! Who fucking cares! An anti who’s 15 years old today was eleven years old when we were introduced to “alternative facts”! Is it wrong for a 27-year-old man to pursue a relationship with a 13-year-old girl? Depends on which news channel, and which presenter, you ask!

They literally grew up in a world in which critical thinking was discouraged. Once upon a time, you would have seen on TV that Notre Dame was on fire, and at dinner–or whatever your family did for together time–you might say things like “going to be expensive to fix that, I wonder what they’ll do,” but you wouldn’t have been hit with six presenters telling you exactly why Notre Dame should/shouldn’t be rebuilt. And don’t forget–even if you, personally, do not watch the news (or read it on the internet, which is just as bad, because everybody’s after those elusive advertising clicks, everybody needs the “scoop” two seconds before it happens), you know people who do. You hear their opinions and their hot takes and their retellings all around you. And those  opinions and hot takes and retellings will be colored by which “program” that person saw first.

Watch the first thirty seconds of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M

Walter Cronkite, a legendary news anchor, giving his opinion on Vietnam. You will notice that he states, very clearly: “it seems very clear to this reporter.” This is Cronkite’s opinion, nothing more, and he makes it clear that he is speaking only for himself.

Now skip to approximately 1:05, and watch him report the Kennedy assassination. You can see he’s emotional, but also keeping it under wraps as best he can because he has An Important Job To Do, and that job is twofold: to deliver the news accurately and concisely, and to keep the American public calm (you can see this when he hurriedly says Johnson is probably taking the oath to become President; a missing VP would be a crisis at this moment). This is a man who’s just found out the most beloved president in modern times is dead. And not just dead–murdered. It’s not like Kennedy had a heart attack, his damn head was blown off. This news is still coming in so quickly that you can see him glancing off the screen to get fresh reports. He’s one of the first to receive this absolute blow–and he’s still holding it together, barely wavering. (When I was a kid, this role would go to Dan Rather. He was no Cronkite, but he tried.)

Where is that kind of rock for today’s teens? Imagine–heaven forbid, in the state our country’s in right now–that tomorrow we get the news Biden was shot.

How would we get that message?

Would it be delivered by an even-keeled, just-the-facts reporter like Cronkite? Or would we get it from a bunch of half-hysterical articles and crisismongering “programs”? And would it be delivered to us straight, like Cronkite did, or would it be buried in three days’ worth of opinions on his “legacy” and policies and What This Means For America?

Now: how are you supposed to build any kind of strong convictions and moral compass on a world like that? Where anything can be true if enough people have an “opinion” on it? Where the facts get immediately buried in a wave of bullshit?

Antis are reacting to a world of “opinions” and “programs” being thrown at them 24/7 by trying to create a world they can control, where there are in fact things that are true, in a world that has actively refused them the opportunity to learn how to parse and process facts. And so what they’ve come up with is this grossly distorted version of facts, because gross distortions of facts are all they know. It’s all they’ve ever seen. They’re perpetuating a system they don’t even realize they’re part of, because they never experienced life before it existed.

They’re not lying when they say they were heavily influenced by fiction because the bounds between fact and fiction have been actively erased. On purpose. And it’s difficult to grok that, if you grew up in a world where you didn’t have to go seek out photographic evidence to be absolutely certain that Notre Dame was, indeed, on fire.

So what we need to be doing, first and foremost, is rebuilding that wall of facts, that line of truth. Otherwise, what we’re going to see is more of this, but getting worse daily.

We set them up for this, and now we’re paying the price for it.

--prismatic-bell on tumblr

String on the Bulletin Board

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~~Isaac Asimov (1980)

Three separate things popped up in my Facebook feed one day last week, all from different sources, and on completely different topics, yet in my mind they were connected by one common thread: the failure of sources of news and information to adequately inform the public about serious issues of the day, and the failure of the public to be curious enough to actually find out what's going on.

The first thing that came up was David Corn's article in Mother Jones about the Russia investigation.  In it he observed that

The media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal … has yielded a flood of revelations. Yet the news reporting tends to focus on specific components of an unwieldy and ever-expanding story... It is hard to hold on to all these pieces and place them into one big picture. These revelations do not emerge in chronological or thematic order. They arrive as part of the fusillade known as the daily news cycle... Attempting to track this whole damn thing … can make one feel like Carrie Mathison on Homeland. Do you even have enough string or enough space on the bulletin board?

I don't get a lot of news from TV.  I don't have cable, and the only broadcast news I really watch is PBS, and that only occasionally.  But I do watch the online version of The Rachel Maddow Show during my lunch break -- she does her research -- and she's been covering this story from the beginning. Watching long term has made me feel I have a general grasp on the story.  I can pretty well see how the pieces fit, and I'm not confused when a new piece is dropped in. But, I can't say I could explain it all to a 5th grader. It's pretty complex. Still, I believe the key to understanding this (and anything, really) is, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, to be curious without judgement. I don't have a problem with an editorial point of view, but at least try to get your facts straight.

I don't know if it's true or not, I heard the story years ago that the Secret Service combats counterfeiting by becoming intensely familiar with real money, not by examining counterfeit money.  The story goes that they are put in a vault where they count large sums of money incessantly for days. When they are done, they know what real money looks like, what it feels like, and how it smells. Knowing real money that intimately, they can spot a counterfeit bill a mile off. I'm never going to know about anything in the news as thoroughly as that because I'm not involved in it day in and day out, but I can at least try to understand basics. I appreciate Mr. Corn's article because it lays out the basic core of the story, and warns us against the pointless distractions.

I had a pastor years ago who pointed out that if someone gets up during the service and leaves the room, our mind doesn't just say, "Oh, someone is leaving the room."  Our mind says, "Why is that person leaving the room?" and then tries to answer itself. I think that that's where conspiracy theories come from: gaps in our knowledge and understanding get filled in with information from uninformed/misinformed sources. And as David Corn once wrote,

"The problem with these contrived conspiracy theories is that they obscure the facts...

Or, as Mrs. Iselin said to her husband in The Manchurian Candidate, "Are they saying, 'are there any Communists in the Defense Department?' Of course not. They're saying, 'how many Communists are there in the Defense Department.'"

The next thing that came up was this little item of twitterature from my friend Allen, which he not only posted on his wall, but also in a private message to me:

Now, at first I just took this as a rhetorical question.  I mean, after all, if I owe Allen five dollars, and he owes Agnes five dollars, and she owes Lilianna five dollars, and Lilianna owes me five dollars, then collectively we owe twenty dollars, even though that debt doesn't increase or decrease any of our assets. But OH-EM-GEE the comments.
  Joshua says:

Rothschild and their chronies (sic) print paper and use it to pay us to be slaves to gather up all the resources and knowledge for them. Then when it all collapses and we’re killing each other because of some political agenda the rich will sit in their golden 100 acre size bunkers and laugh and ride out the storm they created while we depopulate. 

I could show more, but it seemed they were all like that. Yes, income inequality is a severe problem in this country and elsewhere, but our own economic history shows us that  it has to do with tax policy, banking regulations, and campaign finance laws, and not with nefarious Jewish dynasties printing paper money.

The last thing that came up has been around forever (and debunked innumerable times.)  It's a video of the late John Coleman, a long time meteorologist, and a co-founder of The Weather Channel discussing his views on climate change. Mr. Coleman has no background in climate science, nor has he ever published a scientific paper on that or any other topic. Yet he is considered credible, via his (short) relationship to The Weather Channel, even though meteorology is to climatology what psychology is to brain surgery.

Now, I've written about the basics of climate change science before, but I think it's necessary to repeat it here.

Our atmosphere is made up of mostly nitrogen, a lot of oxygen, and other gases in smaller amounts.  Most radiation from the sun passes right through our atmosphere because it has a short wavelength.  The radiation heats the ground and then is emitted as long wave radiation.  This is the same kind of heat you feel from a hot sidewalk.  Water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane  molecules in the atmosphere absorb long wave radiation, which causes them to vibrate.  The vibration produces heat, which is then radiated throughout the atmosphere.  

     Water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane are referred to as greenhouse gases (even though the physics behind greenhouses is quite different,) and they are what keeps our planet warm.  Without them, the radiation from the sun would bounce right back into space, and Earth would be a much colder place.  The opposite is also true, which is what we're concerned about today.

   All of this is just basic physics, and has been known since the 1850s.  Starting in 1859, an Irish physicist by the name of John Tyndall started publishing papers describing long wave radiation absorption by certain gases, and for a long time he was believed to be the original discoverer of the phenomenon.  But recently it was discovered that an American scientist named Eunice Foote had published a paper to that effect in 1856.  Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius postulated in 1896 that a significant increase in carbon dioxide could cause global temperatures to rise, but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists started getting concerned enough to start monitoring temperatures around the world.  By the 1970s, US Department of Energy started getting concerned that increased industrialization would produce global warming, although at the same time, there was also a small group of scientists who believed that the pollution in the atmosphere (aerosols) would reflect the sun's radiation out into space, thereby causing global cooling.  But by the 1980s, temperature data showed that cooling was not happening, and the 1980s wound up being the warmest decade on record.  By 1997, it was determined that there was enough evidence that action needed to be taken.

Mr. Coleman, in this video, is asserting that there is no consensus among scientists on global warming, that the Democrats are in charge of funding science research and they only give money to scientists who support the Democrats' hypothesis on global warming, that 31,000 scientists signed a petition that invalidates global warming. He says that he's a scientist and that the science is on his

side. There is no significant man made global warming, and no reason to expect any in the future. Climate change is not happening.

What Mr. Coleman does not explain (though maybe he does elsewhere) how the Democrats got control over scientific funding in other countries, or how long they've had control of a branch of science that has been around for more than a century. Or why he thinks the Democrats would pay more for bad research than, say, an oil company. Or why there were only 39 actual climate scientists among the fictional and historical characters and Spice Girls on the petition he mentioned.

In the video, Brian Stelter, the host, asked David Kenny, the CEO of The Weather Channel's parent company, whether he was concerned that Mr Coleman was "using his title as cofounder to try to give attention to something that is misleading, that's inaccurate?" I do, and I think it's working. He wants us to believe, as Youtuber Potholer54 put it, that scientists are

...faking millions of points of data in thousands of scientific papers in dozens of different scientific fields and cross-matching them so that they all tell a story that is 180° opposed to reality AND making sure no one blabs about it.

And because of his status, people believe him.

We should all be mature enough to want to understand what's happening in nature, in politics, in economics, and acknowledge when something is right and when it's wrong. Isaac Asimov spoke of the "cult of ignorance" winding through politics and culture. That cult is enabled by unclear reporting, bogus information, and, honestly, just pure laziness. But true information is out there, and it's easier to find than it ever was before. We just need enough string.

Intellectuals, Politics, and Bad Faith

Paul Krugman

New York Times, Opinion, June 4, 2018

Last week The Stanford Daily reported a curious story concerning Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian who is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The story itself, although ugly, isn’t that important. But it offers a window into a reality few people, certainly in the news media, are willing to acknowledge: the bad faith that pervades conservative discourse.

And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.

But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

It seems to me, however, that the media makes Donald Trump’s lies seem more exceptional — and more of a break with previous practice — than they really are. Trump’s seven-lies-a-day habit and his constant claims of being victimized by people who accurately report the facts are only a continuation of something that has been going on in the conservative movement for years.

At a fundamental level, after all, how different is Trump from Fox News, which has spent decades misinforming viewers while denouncing the liberal bias of mainstream media? How different is he from Republicans who accused Democrats of fiscal irresponsibility and now denounce the Congressional Budget Office when it points out how their tax cuts will increase the deficit?

And the same kind of bad faith can be seen in other arenas — very much including college campuses. Which brings me back to the Stanford story.

Ferguson is, as it happens, one of those conservative intellectuals who hyperventilate about the supposed threat campus activists pose to free speech — indeed, calling the campus left the “biggest threat” to free speech in Trump’s America. At Stanford, he was one of the faculty leaders of a program called Cardinal Conversations, which was supposed to invite speakers who would “air contested issues.”

Among the invited speakers was Charles Murray, famous for a much-debunked book claiming that black-white differences in I.Q. are genetic in nature. Not surprisingly, the invitation provoked student protests. This was the context in which Ferguson engaged in a series of email communications with right-wing student activists in which he urged them to “unite against the S.J.W.s” (social justice warriors), “grinding them down.” And he suggested “opposition research” against one left-wing student. A student!

Ferguson later sort of apologized, but it was more of an “I’m sorry that you feel that way” than a true apology, and he began by decrying the fact that these days few academic historians are registered Republicans, which he takes as ipso facto evidence of biased hiring and a hostile environment.

So what’s really going on here? It’s true that self-proclaimed conservatives are pretty scarce among U.S. historians. But then, so are self-proclaimed conservatives in the “hard,” physical and biological sciences.

Why are there so few conservative scientists? It might be because academics, as a career, appeals more to liberals than to conservatives. (There aren’t a lot of liberals in police departments — or, contra Trump, the F.B.I.) Alternatively, scientists may be reluctant to call themselves conservatives because in modern America being a conservative means aligning yourself with a faction that by and large rejects climate science and the theory of evolution. Might not similar considerations apply to historians?

But more to the point, conservative claims to be defending free speech and open discussion aren’t sincere. Conservatives don’t want to see ideas evaluated on their merits, regardless of politics; they want ideas convenient to their side to receive (at least) equal time regardless of their intellectual quality.

Indeed, conservative groups are engaged in a systematic effort to impose political standards on higher education. For example, we now know that the Koch brothers have used donations to gain power over academic appointments at at least two universities.

So what does all this mean for the rest of us? Mainly, it means that if you’re in any role that involves informing people — whether it’s in education or in journalism — you shouldn’t let right-wingers, as Ferguson would put it, grind you down.

These days, both universities and news organizations are under constant pressure not just to be nicer to Trump but to respect right-wing views across the board. The people making these demands claim to want fairness.

So you need to remember that this claim is made in bad faith. It has nothing to do with fairness; it’s all about power.

Brief Observation

According to some of my Facebook friends:

    ....liberal media...
    ....anonymous sources....
    ....Obama did it, too....
and of course,
    ....leaks....
Because

The Secretive Liberals of Foxworld

In Foxworld, there are things "liberals" don't want you to know.

The First Lady of Foxworld

In Foxworld, the Fist Lady has incredible powers.

Paved Roads

I just unloaded on Ben Carson on my aunt's Facebook post.

I honestly didn't know that the event in Orlando last weekend was going to affect me as much as it did.  At the beginning, it was an item in the news that happened to other people in another state, sad, of course, horrifying even, but still far away.  But then the magnitude of the story became clearer.  There was the interview with the mother who had been getting texts from her son, waiting outside to find out if he had survived.  And another, looking for news of her son and his fiancé.  Now I'm emotionally involved.  But identifying with the victims required one more step, and that came through the Facebook posts of friends.

    Like too many people in this world, I get my feel for public opinion from Facebook, and even when I don't agree with someone, much of the time I feel I can at least understand them.  I enjoy saying that I've got clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right.   One of my jokers posted something that just didn't sit right with me.  A conversation ensued.

  Mark asked me if I thought he had some "secret unresolved hatred" toward me.  I didn't quite know how to answer that.  Mark and I have been friends for a long time, and we have a great affection for each other.  But, at the same time, he supports policies that would cause me harm.  Not knowing what else to say, I said, "If I ever feel hated, I'll let you know."  And yet when he wrote on a different post, "What happens when simply holding a view contrary to the Party in power becomes a crime? Can't happen? Checked who's in the public bathroom lately?" I let it go. A report by the Human Rights Campaign said that more transgender people were killed in 2015 than during any other year on record, but I said nothing.
    This conversation went on for a while, involving other people, and branching out into little side convos before it finally petered out.  Simultaneously, I wound up having two other conversations with another joker.  And in the meantime, Facebook goes on discussing the same topic: Does the murderer's claim of having radical Islam as a motive have any significance, or is this just another gay-bashing event in a long series of gay-bashing events?
    The position taken by the gay community by and large is the latter.  This is about us.  It's not about Islam, radical or otherwise.  It's not an attack on America.  We are appalled and disgusted by the attempts from the joker section to use our pain as an excuse to cause pain for another minority, and we are simultaneously disgusted and amused by politicians who were seeking to codify making our lives more difficult yesterday and then saying they are standing with us today.  They won't even mention who we are in their official statements.
    But for many people, "Mateen’s own loudly declared jihadist beliefs" are the only significant thing about the shooting (even though the evidence seems to show that he was lying,) and the history of gay-bashing in this country is not. In a straw man article in the National Review, one that I'm sure the author thought was scathing,  the view held by gay community is an attack on Christianity itself.

"The principles, such as they exist, seem to be this: If you oppose same-sex marriage or mixed-gender bathrooms, then you not only can’t legitimately grieve the loss of gay lives, you’re partially responsible for the massacre in Orlando. Conservative efforts to protect religious freedom and freedom of association from unprecedented infringement will kill people. Never mind that all the actual evidence in the case points to Islamic motivations extrapolated from well-known and widely shared interpretations of Shariah law, somehow those darn Baptists are to blame."

 The article also quoted Jen Hatmaker as saying that “anti-LGBTQ sentiment has paved a long runway to hate crimes,” making sure to label this point of view as "leftist" so we would know it was bad.  But the reason that the article can be referred to as a straw man argument is that Christianity, or whatever else one may use as a justification for hostility toward someone else, is still just an excuse, not a reason.  The road to hateful actions is paved by the things one is taught, though it's not a road that has to be traveled.

Robert Lewis Dear entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs last November, shooting twelve people, three of whom died.  The road that led him there was paved by the media, who kept repeating the widely discredited claim that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue.    The New York Times ran a story detailing Mr. Dear's religious views and mental health issues, and yet somehow politicians and pundits have avoided the phrase "radical Christian terrorist" to people who commit such crimes citing Christianity as their motive.  They're investigating the heck out of Planned Parenthood, tho.

Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto, had his road paved by white supremacist websites.  He felt it was his duty as a white man to personally "take it to the real world" instead of just complaining online. Very little was said about how Roof had been radicalized through home-grown racism.  Few referred to him as a terrorist.  Chad Williams, an associate professor and chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, put it this way:

“Recognizing acts of terrorism requires action by the state, and I think that is something many white politicians don’t conceive of as possible when violence is inflicted against black people.  It’s much easier, given the makeup of our political racial climate, to demonize Muslims and to transform that into political talking points.”

 The problem with focusing on radical Islam is that somehow the word radical is always forgotten and we're left with just Islam.  Then we get the same kind of idiocy that led to my last post.  We get politicians and wannabe politicians proposing unconstitutional policies.  People let their fear do their thinking for them, and then they themselves become the enemy.

And we, the community that was actually attacked, do not want to become the excuse that justifies your hatred.  It upsets us when you try to minimize our pain by turning this into an All Lives Matter thing, like you did when the African-American community started pointing out the deadly flaws in your meritocratic viewpoint.  As Philippa Willitts wrote in her excellent article, "7 Things Straight People Aren’t Understanding About Orlando,"

We are not “all LGBT” now, as one person told me. Nor was this attack on the freedom of all people.
Even when well-intentioned, these comments downplay the significance of the gay-hate aspect of the attack. The killer deliberately chose an LGBT club, and deliberately chose a Latinx night at the club, to focus his hate on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans people of colour. If we ignore this, we are erasing the identities of those who died and those who suffered.