The Gaming Den

Living in Thailand I only find out about US news from my friends. But I'm wondering how it's being reported in the various countries y'all live in.

Well, it's all over CNN and the Internet and most new outlets here in the States...

RBC.ru is short and to the point, as always.

On Wednesday night, June 17th, in the church of american town Charlston unnknown assailants opened fire, reports CNN referencing city police.

According to the police, shooting happened at 21:00 (04:00 Thursday MSC) on thursday in the building of African methodist episcopal church in the middle of the city. No official information about deaths yet. Local media reports eight dead.

According to Fox8 police arrested a 21 y.o. white male on suspicion of shooting.

Gazeta.ru is wordy and has more information, quotes from the mayor, and so on.

Russia24 is also short and to the point, the whole fragment is 49 seconds long. It is also reporting now that the shooter by the name of Dilan Roof was arrested.

Here in the U.S., Faux News has named it an 'attack on faith' and called for pastors to carry guns into church. I have no words.

Actual news programs have not been bizarre propaganda.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Here in the U.S., Faux News has named it an 'attack on faith' and called for pastors to carry guns into church. I have no words.

Lindsey Graham is saying that people are out looking to kill Christians, right now.

Oh, the poor, persecuted super-majority.

How the fuck do you spin this as an attack on Christianity? A white supremacist walked into a black church and opened fire.

In Czechia, we get an Obama quote:

Aktualne wrote:"Nevinní lidé byli znovu zabiti, protože kdosi, kdo chtěl způsobit bolest, neváhal vzít do ruky zbraň," řekl Obama.

Which is the Czech translation of this:

Obama, in original English wrote:We do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun

It's a pretty bare translation. Not a literal translation, nor a really great translation. Basically, it's saying that Obama said that innocent people were killed because someone didn't hesitate to take up arms to cause pain, which kinda loses the context of gun control or its lack in America. The article itself is a series of similarly rushed translations of American news updates.

And I do mean a series. It basically repeats itself over and over again because each update got retranslated and appended to the last one. It's actually really half assed.

Anyway, the core issues that a guy walked into a church and shot nine people and then went to another state and got arrested when locals called him in comes through. The broader context of white supremacist terrorist attacks and gun control debates really don't. They mention the discussion of it being a hate crime, but not anything about why people think that it was or why they would care.

-Username17

In Russia on the internets, we get that it was a hate crime and the gunman's alleged words. There's also a link to a "related article" on the gun control debate. That second article is illustrated by a pro-gun-control protester with an ironic handmade poster who's labeled an anti-gun-control protester in the photo annotation, and the text is a middle ground fallacy with some "lol those wacky Americans and their wacky laws" on the side.

A friend said they saw the shooting on TV framed as anti-migration scaremongering (see what white people are driven to when there are many brown people around). I can certainly believe it, all Russian TV has been basically Fox News for quite some time.

DSMatticus wrote:How the fuck do you spin this as an attack on Christianity? A white supremacist walked into a black church and opened fire.

Because some people have a fucking vested interest and a lot of practice in framing all discussions as about how they are persecuted, and whaaaaaa.

So in fact all over Fox News pundits are saying stupid things like "All pastors should go out and buy a gun right NOOOOW to protect their congregations"*

Except the black ones, who can't have one, and would be shot by the police for having them. They can just keep getting shot up by white supremacists show maybe have a white pastor dad who bought a gun.

In Australia the most right wing paper is reporting;

The Australian wrote:The accused church gunman made a racist rant and reloaded five times during the attack which left nine dead, a survivor tells friend.

Most news sources are reporting it as a racial hate attack and following with Obama's comments framed as a call for gun control.

In NZ it's getting some coverage - the 8th and 9th most viewed stories on a major news website. #8 is a story about a gun ad running above the mass shooting story, so some people have presumably heard about the story from elsewhere first.

Starmaker wrote:In Russia on the internets, we get that it was a hate crime and the gunman's alleged words. There's also a link to a "related article" on the gun control debate. That second article is illustrated by a pro-gun-control protester with an ironic handmade poster who's labeled an anti-gun-control protester in the photo annotation, and the text is a middle ground fallacy with some "lol those wacky Americans and their wacky laws" on the side.

A friend said they saw the shooting on TV framed as anti-migration scaremongering (see what white people are driven to when there are many brown people around). I can certainly believe it, all Russian TV has been basically Fox News for quite some time.

Good thing Russia24 says none of those things. No mention of gun control, no mention of anti-migration. It says that according to the locals riots are unlikely, because it was one crazy guy and not a systematic violence. Russia24 says that the primary version of the police so far is a hate crime.

Is this event going to start a #NotAllRacists hashtag? Or does one already exist?

DSMatticus wrote:How the fuck do you spin this as an attack on Christianity? A white supremacist walked into a black church and opened fire.

It fits two conservative Christian narratives:

• Racism isn't a problem in this country except when the liberuls make it one (i.e. playing the race card).
• True Christians are under attack and we need to beat the war drums.

RobbyPants wrote: Lindsey Graham is saying that people are out looking to kill Christians, right now.

Oh, the poor, persecuted super-majority.

Santorum is saying it, too

In my country they're calling it a hate and racism crime outright.

They also comment that Obama said that in other developed countries people don't go in such shooting sprees with so much frequency.

Now that more info is out and Australia is covering it more, they're 100% behind the "This was a racist hate crime". At least, anything even remotely resembling a news source is - I don't know (or care) what the Bolt report (~= Glenn Beck or that other cockslurp on Fox) has to say on the matter. There isn't really room for debate on the motivations, given the evidence, including the words of the man who did it.

It's worth noting though that Australia gets really fired up about racism in America and the way killing black people seems to just be a fact of life over there... while doing our very best not to ever talk about the way it's just as bad over here.

I don't actually watch Chinese news despite living here because wading through the density of lies is incredibly fatiguing (and if you try to watch Hong Kong news, the channel will cut to commercial mid-sentence when the anchor is about to say something that the censors don't like), but the general response of people around me is something along the lines of "Wow, the United States is really a hell-hole. I could never live there because I'd be afraid of being shot every day.".

So on Saturday my local (NZ, out back of nowhere) newspaper (remember those?) had
"Nine dead: race hatred suspected". With a photo of mourners, and the face of the accused. The story details the what, when, how, where, to who, by whom, quotes officials and witnesses. Noted that his all social media was extremely racist.

The "nobody in our family has seen anything like this coming" quote from his family is kinda hilarious, because the family are all going to horribly racist gun-nuts that gave their kid a gun so he could protect himself from all those black rapists and murderers, but, you know, not "like this".

Monday details the hate groups he was part of, online and offline, and stats on gun killings in the US vs actual civilised countries. You don't often get to use numbers like "97x worse", though the US is notably safer than, say, Syria right now. It's like you're about half at war.

Tuesday editorial was on the ongoing massive problems of racism in the US, along with other issues of lack of gun control, abusive police violence, and the recent coming-to-light of the relationships between those things.

Just how his activities on one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet escaped attention from American agencies paranoid about security is a question needing an urgent answer

Obvious answer: not a Muslim, threatening black people, not even a problem.

Wow. Median household wealth in the US.
[*] White family: $142,000. (pre GFC: $192,500, down 26%)
[*] Black family: $11,000. (pre GFC: $19,200, down 43%)

So 1: ouch, GFC, that's not manners. 2: really stark racism.

There has been a near constant denial in the US that racism really exists. There seems an incapacity among white Americans to see themselves as bad people, and the rush of white Americans distancing themselves and other whites from Roof's violence is testament to that fact. Even the treatment by authorities of Roof has been different to that of many African-Americans: after his arrest he was seen wearing a bullet-proof vest, and he has been transported privately.

Not to mention the difficulty everyone's having finding the word "terrorist" all of a sudden.

As long as they're only shooting democrat senators. Right? How many senators have you guys even got? Because that's got to start pushing up the life-insurance premiums there some time.


More Wednesday, how Carolina is starting to suggest that maybe the confederate flag they're legally obliged to hang off their government buildings could stand to be retired. But also how that's going to be a massive shitfight because of all the racists in office there who'd have to vote to take down their ancient symbol of perceived injustice against white people, which is obviously far more important.

How you can't worry too much about a few dead black people when trying to remember the history of the Confederate States of America. The irony, help, I'm drowning in it.

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But you know, small beans. Big story in another English-speaking country so it's cheap news, chance to make our own racist establishment, violent police, and starkly divided wealthy elite feel better about itself by way of comparison. Because we are probably a bit better than that, but it's still really bad here with basically zero official acknowledgement. The USA have actually got a president up there giving out a few hard truths, which is better than we get by quite a lot.

But then, we've got a parliamentary system, with the whole collective responsibility thing. We used to have a race relations conciliator would talk about shit like that, but then the current government appointed a failed candidate to the role instead, like they have to basically every government oversight body. Bla bla bla.

The local news was pretty straightforward:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/article24880660.html
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/ ... 72749.html

Yes, we have a member of our state legislature saying 'This obviously may have been racial in his mind, but some mental illness or something else was going on, too.'. People in North Carolina are apparently so used to dealing with racists that racism no longer seems like a mental illness.