Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"Back in Kent, Ohio, local business owners ran an ad thanking the National Guard. Mail poured in to the mayor's office, blaming "dirty hippies," "longhairs" and "outside agitators" for the violence. Some Kent residents raised four fingers when they passed each other in the street, a silent signal that meant, "At least we got four of them." Nixon issued a statement saying that the students' actions had invited the tragedy. Privately, he called them "bums." And a Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths; only 11 percent blamed the National Guard."

"Back in Opa-locka, Mary Ann couldn't go to Royal Castle for a burger without reporters and hecklers following her. Death threats filled the Vecchio family mailbox. "It's too bad it wasn't you that was shot." "What you need is a good beating until you bleed red." "I hope you enjoyed sleeping with all those Negroes and dope fiends." "The deaths of the Kent State four lies on the conscience of yourself."

When I read things like this I wonder: what the fuck is wrong with people that they are so vicious and lacking the smallest shred of empathy for a mere child who did nothing to deserve any of this, nor for the victims of a mass murder by people who's duty it was to protect them?

The day after the shooting, a banner was hung in the West Point cafeteria stating, "Us: 4, Them: 0".

America has a non-negligible percent of population who I can only describe as "bloodthirsty for no good reason". They've been here a long time, and remain here today. When we try to discuss the problem, the noise from political side-taking usually overtakes the conversation.

As long as we ignore the violent things done by our country for the past few hundred years, it will continue to poison our society. Reparations for slavery could be one approach, but it doesn’t account for enough of the pain we’ve caused.

Genocide, slavery, civil war, imperial conquest, overthrowing democracies in favor of repressive regimes, to today’s bombing of people in other countries with drones. We don’t discuss these things because they’re painful, conflict with the narrative of ourselves we’ve been told, and are drowned out in modern media because both “sides” agree with the policies.

America is bloodthirsty because we always have been, and have taken no meaningful steps to change it.

Many of these are addressed in the book 'Understanding Power' by Noam Chomsky. It's very readable. It's got hefty footnotes that are available as pdf [1].

Another book is 'How to Hide an Empire' by Daniel Immerwahr.

[1] http://understandingpower.org/

But we do discuss those things... constantly. It seems to be all we talk about. America's wrongs.

To play the other half of this argument: America engaged in slavery, but also fought its bloodiest war to end it, played a major role in ending the Holocaust and freeing Europe from the Nazis, ended Japan's conquest of Asia, freed South Korea, and brought about through hyperpower probably the longest peace between major powers in millennia, among other notable counterpoints.

It's almost as if the world isn't black and white.

America and everyone else will continue doing both wonderful and terrible things, but we'll keep discussing only the half of those things we disapprove of, especially if it feels like it's helping us win an argument.

Hand-wringing over the past doesn't make tomorrow better, it's a distraction from doing things that will.

To be clear, basically the whole of human history is misery and privation, and only in this era of long peace under the aegis of American hyperpower have we witnessed a glimpse of lasting peace and prosperity.

So, no one will disagree that great wrongs have been wrought, but it seems intellectually dishonest to overlook the staggering good.

> To play the other half of this argument: America engaged in slavery, but also fought its bloodiest war to end it

It was only “its bloodiest war” because a sizable fraction of the country was fighting to protect slavery. Much of the rest of the world that had chattel slavery ended it without similarly bloody wars—and generally sooner. The fierce defense of chattel slavery in the US that produced its bloodiest war isn’t a positive.

It would have been bloodless had the Union just said "okay let's have slavery."

But they didn't do that. They laid down their lives instead.

Like I said before, picking out only the things we dislike and overlooking positives isn't productive or honest to ourselves.

> It would have been bloodless had the Union just said "okay let's have slavery."

No, because that’s what the Union said—that preserving the Union was more important than abolition. The South declared secession and attacked federal facilities anyway.

The South’s overweaning fear of the distant future possibility of abolition backfired and accelerated it.

The Republicans were only trying to avoid expansion of slavery, not elimination of it. They fought to maintain the Union, not abolition.

Only later did they free the slaves, and as an act of war more than freedom.

How about these 178,000 men, of whom about 35,000 died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops

I don't think their primary motivation was preservation of the Union, I think it was abolition.

Let's not pretend preservation of the Union was the only major factor, or that abolition was entirely a back-burner concept, it had been building steam and popular support for decades.

Sure, preserving the Union may have been the main concern on a realpolitik level early on, but that doesn't change the fact that abolition was the writing on the wall and had been for decades.

It’s some hubris to think that America brought peace to a wicked world. Especially when at the same time we gloss over the millions of people killed directly or indirectly by American policies and actions during our time in power. We'll never know if the third world and non-aligned movements would have produced a stable alternative, since they competed with American capitalism and thus were destroyed by America.

We did some noble things in the 1940s for sure. Since then, what would you say has been “staggering good”?

History is told by the victors, but that doesn’t make their actions just.

I think things like that are more a result of how information gets disseminated, and how it's framed, than bloodthirst. I'm sure if you took the people that hung that banner and made them hold hand with one of the students as they died, their enthusiasm would quickly fade. The word 'death' is just an abstraction that feels small when you're young, healthy, and haven't had to watch it happen. It's only easy to look at it like a point on a scoreboard when you don't know anything about it.

I think a lot of the divisiveness is a result of the same effect. It's easy to dismiss other people's perspective and think they are 'just stupid or malicious' when you don't know them. We need to get back to assuming the people that disagree with us are potentially as smart as we are, but with different values or information.

I applaud your optimism and boundless faith in humanity.

But as a POC, I point out that America has a long tradition of taking children to witness lynchings, and the children would cheer. Or to beat foxes to death with sticks.

I don't think it’s as simple as “people don’t have emppathy when death is abstract and indirect.” Lots of people don’t have empathy when they’re socially conditioned to believe a certain type of person is a subhuman.

Today, we have police suffocating citizens and murdering adolescents, and there’s a certain type of person who cheers this, provided the victims are member sof a class deemed “subhuman."

I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.

---

I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.

We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.

Yeah, savagery can certainly be a natural state for people. Executions used to be public and people would cheer. The Scarlet Letter had a woman put in shackles in public to be abused for the audacity of having sex. People used to torture cats for a bit of fun downtown.

I'd like to think as a culture we're not so much like that anymore, but it certainly persists in certain ways and places.

Cruelty is a human trait that is not bound by nationality, race, nor religion. I get the desire to slice up the pie of humanity and point to the piece called America; it gives us hope that maybe the problem can be solved. No human cruelty will never go away. It may wax and wane, but it will always be in our nature.

> Cruelty is a human trait that is not bound by nationality, race, nor religion

This is certainly true, but it's also the case that history, culture and ideology influence the behaviours of geographically-close groups of people over the medium-long term.

> No human cruelty will never go away. It may wax and wane, but it will always be in our nature.

I'm optimistic that it will decrease over time, because frankly it has been, if you look at history. I mean, I remember reading up on the "bog bodies" and they figured out that pretty much the whole lot of them died quite brutal deaths.

Cruelty decreasing over time could ironically prove to be a bad thing if it results in us forgetting how violent we really are.

Cruelty may not be bound by time and space, but historically, cruelty has been “unevenly distributed.”

If we were sitting side-by-side in the Warsaw Ghetto, I might agree with you intellectually, but nevertheless my immediate concern would be for the localized cruelty.

I very much disagree that pointing out a particularly virulent strain of cruelty is motivated by the desire to hope that the problem can be solved permanently.

When you’re one of the people with a target on your back, your immediate concern is with the cruelty you are threatened with and/or experiencing.

Under those circumstances, your motivation is to “think globally, but act locally.”

It would be the same dynamic if, for example, I was a woman experiencing misogyny on some social media site. True, misogyny is in a lot of places and has been present for a very long time.

But nevertheless, my immediate concern would be reducing it in the place where I’m experiencing it. If I called someone out for their behaviour, would I accept “Well, lots of people are misogynists, always have been, always will be, so why are you pointing at me” as an answer?

I think not.

The more abstract you make a thing, the harder it is to alleviate your suffering from a thing. Which is exactly why people who don’t want to fix a problem always try to make it as abstract and general as possible.

I can see how you read my post that way. I agree with you that it is not about the abstract group.

building abstractions is a way to diffuse responsibility. attributing it to fate or some vague natural law is a way to absolve of personal responsibility. no one that isn't turning q blind eye to the problem would claim anything of the sort. and if you're turning a blind eye then you're at least morally (if not materially as well) culpable.

so you're right and I hope you don't let the wilfully ignorant discourage you.

I myself am not a Trump supporter (I’m a libertarian) but my wife’s family are all Vietnamese and they are diehard Trump / Republicans. I feel like the media is ignoring a huge story which is minorities who despise democrats. The family is extensive and some are quite poor, but every single one of them (no joke) completely hate democrats and left wing politics. One issue that keeps coming up is how universities discriminate against Asians, as well as various religious issues.

Some people reading this might think I am exaggerating, but if you hear my father in law rant about democrats you would be shocked.

I understand where you are coming from, and you are right in some aspects. But there's more context to why there is a narrative that minorities generally "seem" to lean on the American left. It doesn't really have anything to do with how life is represented in the media - after all, minorities don't really consume American media even in this country.

Minorities are by and large generally more culturally conservative than the majority of the West. The only difference is the approach to communalism versus individualism, but the American conservative affinity towards individualism is largely a classical liberal idea. Minority communities are not blind to that, several aspects of progressive politics are incompatible and the media hasn't changed their mind. For instance, the gay and black community is very splintered, and progressives have been able to manage that. Left-wing literature and academia acknowledge this as well. Add influences of the Vietnam War, and you will get a vastly conservative community.

However, party politics in America do not subscribe to a consistent frame of ideologies. As cultures began compounding over the past 60 years, identity is the mainstream approach for appealing to bases. The parties have chosen a side.

A majority of minority voters have weighed the cost-benefits of choosing between their conservative principles or a stronger representation of their people, and found one side more accommodating. Quite literally, the biggest downfall to the advancement of conservative ideals in America is probably one specific party's refusal to appeal towards minority communities. It was true before Trump, Trump only exposed this reality of the Republican base. There could have been a conservative revolution.

One final point. Asians has had to deal with issues of systemic and structural discrimination from both sides of the aisle. The issues go far broader than higher standards of university admission. Very little to do with their affinity towards specific ideologies.

>But as a POC, I point out that America has a long tradition of taking children to witness lynchings, and the children would cheer. Or to beat foxes to death with sticks.

>I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.

Social conditioning is a way to reinforce the abstraction over the reality though. I come from a right wing family and have seen it several times, not to mention how often it's reflected in memes criticizing the right: they change their minds when it happens to them. Cheney and his gay daughter is a prime example. Being part of a mob and watching another part do something bad to still another (perceived) mob feels more like theater than reality.

>I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.

It's not conflating, it's reality. Those people can vote. They go to work. They are cops. They are doctors. They are school teachers. If you choose not to engage them as thinking people, how do you plan to change their minds? If you don't plan to change their minds, then what's the plan?

>We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.

Are we? Knowing tons of very right wing people, I don't really see anyone happy about the kinds of deaths you're referring to. I see people defending police, giving them (perhaps too much) benefit of the doubt, and at times ignoring wrong doing, but that's a long way from a lynch mob. Not to say it's in good taste, but I think you're stretching a lack of sympathy, or perhaps willful ignorance at the extreme, to be the same as hate. From my perspective some people are just more concerned with law and order than fairness, and it's because they aren't on the losing end, not because they're malicious.

Maybe, but also celebrating tallies of enemies killed sends a fairly clear message to the kinds of folks on your side who might actually be up for that sort of thing what the goal might be.

Everyone may then be shocked when someone actually goes and does it, but it seems to me like a predictable result of dehumanizing your rivals rather than just what naturally happens when smart people with different values and information disagree with each other.

> I'm sure if you took the people that hung that banner and made them hold hand with one of the students as they died, their enthusiasm would quickly fade.

Maybe this has a tendency to happen in larger group-think situations. Those bloodthirsty individuals weren't at Kent State, they didn't experience any of this first hand, but they were part of a group that was, on some level, afraid of the students, and hated what they represented. They lashed out based on group-think.

I blame the scale of our politics for this. The federal government should not be able to start a war without a referendum and a super-majority. Instead of real democracy and "power to the people" everything is becoming a federal issue, covered by a couple dozen national media companies, with everyone in a country of 330 million people lining up behind a thousand career politicians and talking heads, funded by the rich and multinational corporations. So much group-think. No less in the 1960s, I assume.

I agree that the abstraction and scale of the federal government is unhealthy. We need to give more power back to local communities to solve problems for themselves.

Is there any source for that? I tried searching but the first result is this comment!

Search for "victim blaming" or "she was looking for trouble dressing like that and walking late at night on the streets".

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

Or they view justice differently:

> Justice: The world may be a difficult place to live, but it is basically just; people usually get what they deserve. The difficulties in one's life serve as a test to sort the deserving from the undeserving.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)

Anyone who views the Kent State killings as “justice” is deeply dangerous to the health and well-being of those around them.

There are state laws now being passed that make “blocking roads in protest” a felony, while legalizing running over protestors with your car.

> while legalizing running over protestors with your car.

Oklahoma:

A motor vehicle operator who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual shall not be criminally or civilly liable for the injury or death, if:

1. The injury or death of the individual occurred while the motor vehicle operator was fleeing from a riot, as defined in Section 1311 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death; and

2. The motor vehicle operator exercised due care at the time of the death or injury.

* http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok.us/cf_pdf/2021-22%20ENR/hB/HB...

Florida:

870.07 Affirmative defense in civil action; party convicted of riot. (1) In a civil action for damages for personal injury, wrongful death, or property damage, it is an affirmative defense that such action arose from an injury or damage sustained by a participant acting in furtherance of a riot. The affirmative defense authorized by this section shall be established by evidence that the participant has been convicted of a riot or an aggravated riot prohibited under s. 870.01, or by proof of the commission of such crime by a preponderance of the evidence.

* https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1/BillText/er/PDF

If you are trying to flee for your (perceived?) safety during a "riot", then it seems to be treated as a form of self defence (?).

From:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931096

Wow. Just wow.

I don't live in a world where killing 4 students simply for standing around while a protest was going on to be just, even factoring in property damage, but you do you

> but you do you

It's possible to describe/explain something without condoning it.

I'm all for benefit of the doubt in conversations about touchy subjects, but your post did seem to imply a defense, rather than just an observation. I wasn't sure though, so I didn't comment.

> America has a non-negligible percent of population who I can only describe as "bloodthirsty for no good reason". They've been here a long time, and remain here today.

There's more to unpack here (such as anonymity being somehow an enabler of aggression) but hey... Let's arm everyone and see what happens!

FWIW I think that this attitude is at the core of issues such as mass shootings and police violence. That I think it's largely cultural is also why I'm not convinced that gun restrictions will be super-effective at combating it. I think that all humans experience some measure of schadenfreude at seeing people they dislike get a comeuppance, but I don't think that enjoying physical retribution is innate. I remember one year we were over at my sister's house for the holidays and watching A Christmas Story. My 2yo niece was with us on the couch when the scene where Ralphie beats up the bully came on---you could tell that she was horrified whereas noone else seemed to think twice of it. Unfortunately cultural issues are difficult to solve. Christianity brought "turn the other cheek", but 2000 years later look where we are.

> Christianity brought "turn the other cheek", but 2000 years later look where we are.

I've no interest in a debate on religion, but Christianity is the religion that brought "bad people burn in hell for eternity".

Since they're borne to sin, they can do whatever they want.. God will forgive them

Genuine question. Does Christian god forgive everyone? Or only the repentant? Or only the baptized-believer-repentent?

If the answer to the first question isn't yes, can you still go to hell with god's forgiveness?

I think it's a little different across sects, but I grew up around a lot of baptists and the line was that anyone who asks was forgiven at any point, so I think this falls into the repentant category, though I don't think it actually requires repent. Lots of tough questions around someone who lives a virtuous life who asked forgiveness at an early age versus an evil person asking for forgiveness on their death bed and them both ending up in the same place.

A verse you might want to consider is "... we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe." My interpretation is that forgiveness is available to all but made effective only in those who respond in faith. The scriptures do not say anything about those who are ignorant about God's salvation.

My point wasn't so much that Christianity is a solution, but rather that despite how widespread Christianity became since its founding, one of it's core messages hasn't culturally sunk in.

Christianity doesn't have the power to torture people for eternity, and it does have the power to influence believers towards forgiveness. "Bad people burn in hell" is a reassurance that the universe is just, which further enables forgiveness on earth.

Wow, I grew up in Kent and I never heard this side of the story. All of the circles I grew up in, despite being conservative, were on the side of the students and thought what the national guard did was an unspeakable tragedy.

I grew up in Kent too, and this is the first I’d heard this side as well.

Not at all making it ok, but in addition to burning down the rtc building, the protesters ransacked downtown. Lots of broken glass etc. Also a lot of the protesters were from outside Kent (not that that means they deserved to die)

I knew about the vandalism but not in detail, so I'm glad someone brought it up.

My opinion, fwiw: I think people really want to believe that collective punishment works, but it really doesn't. People on the right who were excited about the violence at the time wanted the deaths to teach the vandals a lesson. People on the left chanting "shoot him with his own gun" wanted to teach sadists within law enforcement a lesson. But this woman's first exposure to Vietnam war politics was this specific protest, so how is shooting a student in front of her supposed to prevent vandalism? Maybe the violence was born out of impotent rage? Everybody had people on the other side they disagreed with and no way to reach them or change their mind.

It's meant to convince you that how you feel is in minority. Those in power are working hard to control the narrative.

"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." — Geo. Orwell, 1984

You think the article is trying to convince the reader that the majority of Americans hold the quoted views to their specific extremity, and that this is part of a larger effort by "those in power"? Combined with your dramatic quote (Orwell is getting a little tired these days), this seems like an exaggeration to paint a conspiracy for the purpose of playing the victim.

My comment was in regard to propaganda that followed the incident, working to belittle victims and participants and promote government actions.

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