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A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

quillette.com

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Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#141

Post by ZeroGravitas »

int_19h wrote: post #115
jagger27 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it’s wrong and you fell for it. https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-...

The article you've linked to claims: "some journalists — in Canada and abroad — mistakenly called the unmarked graves being located "mass graves," inadvertently invoking the horrors of the Holocaust. But the vast majority, following the lead of Indigenous spokespeople, got it right" The problem with this is that it's impossible to verify - who are "some journalists", and who is the "vast majority"? But anyway, if you…

Why are you skeptical of graves existing?

We know for a fact that graves existed. We just don't know where some of them are, because they were abandoned.

So, what is being added to the story by saying "this particular discovery of a potential grave location hasn't yet dug up a dead child"?

There's other grave sites where actual bodies were discovered after floods or roadworks, where they've identified what they think are other graves via the same tech.

Those haven't been dug up either, because just randomly digging up graves on an arbitrary schedule to prove to some kook's satisfaction that you have the right to talk about something is absurd.

"I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#142

Post by happytoexplain »

jtbayly wrote: post #88
munk-a wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I had omitted sourcing in my original comment but here: > Dr. Jonathan Arden, the former Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia was hired by Smith's widow as part of her lawsuit to have her husband's suicide ruled "in the line of duty". His report stated that the "acute, precipitating event that caused the death of Officer Smith was his occupational exposure to the traumatic events he suffered on J…

Quoted post unavailable.

What is outrageous about investigating a person's motivations/psychology, and why does it become more outrageous if that person is deceased at the time of the investigation? You may disagree with the conclusion for some reason, but it seems like standard practice.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#143

Post by munk-a »

jollybean wrote: post #107
matthewmacleod wrote: post #93

Quoted post unavailable.

Just the opposite, it's a high quality piece from a high quality site. This comment, which offers no argument for illustrating why the piece is misleading or unfactual, only hurts your credibility. I myself was deeply moved about the 'grave discovery' revelations in Canada, and after just a bit of investigation I was 'shocked' to discover that the narratives were misrepresentations to the point of lying. A short comp…

Please be aware, the entirety of the linked article and my statements below are both true.

There was a radar scan that revealed regular human-shaped anomalies in the soil.

Follow up investigations have reaffirmed that these anomalies were not equipment dysfunction.

In all of the digging that has taken place at this site no bodies have been uncovered.

No digging has taken place at this site.

To the best of my knowledge, no living person has ever seen a body located in one of these graves.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who would have been on hand to bury one of these bodies is still alive (or at least - none have come forward).

It is simultaneously true that no bodies were unearthed (specifically - removed from the earth) and that what is *strongly* believe to be a grave site was unearthed (specifically - discovered).

There appears to be a concerted campaign to spread "correct" information that strongly implies a state of the world that does not match the actual state of the world.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#144

Post by defen »

munk-a wrote: post #135
cm2187 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to tell without knowing what disease we are talking about. If it was the spanish flu there isn’t much medicine could do then.

The deaths at residential schools were higher than similar institutions - I don't understand what's hard to comprehend here when we're comparing a basket of 8 apples to a basket of 10 apples - 10 apples is more apples.

I'm not an epidemiologist, so file this under "baseless speculation by an armchair non-expert", but influenza is an Old World disease - is it possible that First Nations people are more vulnerable to it? Ten seconds of Googling provided this link https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22032099/

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#145

Post by muglug »

scarmig wrote: post #134
muglug wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s not a huge gap between a mass grave and a mass of unmarked graves. Both show a disregard for human life. Quillette writers love to get on a high-horse about such discrepancies, while ignoring everything wrong with the right-wing media in America.

As far as this particular story goes, a population that read this Quillette article would have a better recall of verifiable, agreed upon facts than a paired population exposed just to the NYT article talking about mass graves being unearthed. Disbelieving the NYT doesn't mean taking everything Quillette says at face value; it only means noting that the NYT has a history of fabrication and bias, and that anything sen…

Every newspaper that’s been around for over 150 years will have a history of fabrication and bias. That, on its own, means pretty much nothing.

Quillette and the New York Times are very different. Most of the New York Times’ energy is spent on regular gumshoe reporting. Very little energy is given over to opinion (including media criticism).

You’re obviously going to get a different reaction from reading a straight-up news article vs reading an opinion piece about media coverage.

I disagree with your contention that the Quillette reader comes away better-informed. I found the thing confusing. He seems to suggest that maybe the graves aren’t actually graves, but also says that thousands of children were known to have died there.

Surely the deaths of children is the real story, not the terminology used by some newspapers.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#146

Post by munk-a »

defen wrote: post #144
munk-a wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deaths at residential schools were higher than similar institutions - I don't understand what's hard to comprehend here when we're comparing a basket of 8 apples to a basket of 10 apples - 10 apples is more apples.

I'm not an epidemiologist, so file this under "baseless speculation by an armchair non-expert", but influenza is an Old World disease - is it possible that First Nations people are more vulnerable to it? Ten seconds of Googling provided this link https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22032099/

In this case I'd strongly suggest following up with an actual epidemiologist (which I also am not) but my assumption (also pretty baseless) is that when doing comparative population studies they do try and account for that affect.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#147

Post by renewiltord »

tptacek wrote: post #139
renewiltord wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the quote, with context excised and transported here, has value without its original subject. i.e. if someone had written it without being C.S.Lewis talking about Nazis, I would have upvoted them. And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning sole…

If the quote hadn't been italicized and followed with "(C.S. Lewis)" I wouldn't have responded. And, if I'm misreading the intent of the quote --- that it isn't being used as a sort of generic "be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing and generous with mitigating claims", well, then, I'm just wrong. But if the quote was intended the way I think it was (see previous sentence): it's being used to say almost literally the o…

Absolutely understand. I was sort of alluding to that with the last line (one must, after all, source what one is repeating). And for what it's worth, I enjoyed what you and the other fellow mentioned because I am neither familiar with Lewis nor Bonhoeffer. More "I think that other guy meant this" intent from me, and less "you shouldn't have said what you did".

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#148

Post by UIUC_06 »

munk-a wrote: post #69
UIUC_06 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get too dizzy from all that spinning around. So do you really believe everyone in Canada read that and thought "Oh, they're using the word in a figurative sense! Never mind." If something is, by definition, in the earth and a story says it was "unearthed" it's sorta reasonable to believe it was dug up.

I actually think "unearthed" as in "discovered" is the more reasonable read - along with someone thinking they're clever in making a pun. When history is "unearthed" with radar, we generally assume some folks took a big expensive machine aimed it at the ground and walked away with a strong indication that something exists down there - when it comes to delicate items (like, for instance a decaying longboat that exists…

Yeah, I don't think most editors would think a pun about First Nation graves would be a clever idea.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#149

Post by skyyler »

adamrezich wrote: post #72
jjoonathan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dangerous but not anymore so We can all tell you weren't actually listening to the experts you so detest because that wasn't their stated rationale. The rationale was "flatten the curve" -- some hospitals were two doubling periods away from having parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of ventilators. That's what the lockdowns were about. Making sure we never overwhelmed the medical infrastructure. Subse…

I ignored it and it went away. I worked as a cashier at Walmart during most of the pandemic lockdown times and came down with multiple bacterial illnesses as a direct result of having a piece of cloth over my face for eight hours a day, yet somehow never caught covid, despite remaining unvaccinated while working at a Walmart in a tourist town during tourist season. my local civic center set up an emergency clinic tha…

>multiple bacterial illnesses as a direct result of having a piece of cloth over my face for eight hours a day

Not that I don't believe you, but why don't surgeons get bacterial illnesses from mask use? Did you regularly wash your mask?

>yet somehow never caught covid

I wonder if that has something to do with the mask you wore?

>the Sturgis Rally being nearby was supposed to make us (Rapid City, SD) a superspreader disease nexus

Are we in the same reality? The spike in cases made national news.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/02/covid-s...

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#150

Post by rexpop »

anon291 wrote: post #53
munk-a wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dangerous path to go down without a really full understanding of the situation and the acknowledgement that your statement is covering hundreds of thousands of individual compacts between specific tribal leaders and specific administrators. Additionally "tribes wanted" is a really dangerous statement on its own since "tribes" can be hard to define fairly - if you've been following the news about pipelines y…

First, we need to dispense with rhetoric like 'this is a dangerous path'. I fully understand that tribes are different and people disagree and in particular, that 'tribes' are ruled by people who may not actually be in charge, may not reflect their tribe's real viewpoint, or may have ulterior motives. However, it is equally dangerous to go down the path of 'Canada did this to massacre the tribes and eradicate their c…

Isn't it possible that some indigenous people "saw the writing on the wall," realized that "if you can't beat 'em, join em," and capitulated with the institutions of their own genocide more enthusiastically than we might demand from the privilege of our armchairs and hindsight?
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