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A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

quillette.com

21–30 of 209 posts

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#21
post #7

same as with covid, which is dangerous but not anymore so than many other preventable causes of death that are completely ignored instead of hyped as the end-of-the-world. we are truly in an age of perpetual unfounded social panic. thanks twitter. as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.

> covid, which is dangerous but not anymore so than many other preventable causes of death … if you’re vaccinated.

[deleted]

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#22
I don't really see anything in what I read as a wonderful genocide denial piece of the likes you see on catholic news sites right now, about how the decision to exhume or not exhume is being taken with a lot of care and the decisions lie with the tribes on how to do this. It sounds like at the Kamloops site, they're working on an archaeological dig. [1] These things take time for reasons of doing what may involve the respectful and dignified exhumation of potential corpses. If it's just some anomaly then the people writing shit like this have a LOT of words to eat. It's pretty much their word over elderly indigenous survivors who have pretty much pointed to where they remembered dead kids going in where to do some initial evidence gathering.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. This happened in Canada regardless of whether or not there's graves in these sites, but "oh yeah where's the dead kids bodies already" is in my opinion kind of a horrible point of view given light of the necessarily slow paced process that's happening to uncover the truth.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BA...

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#23

It’s crazy how when a lie takes hold, it just stays forever. Another is relayed to January 6th protests. A friend today, a conservative DeSantis supporter, told me that he knew that on January 6th, the protestors killed several police officers. This is, as we know now, absolutely false. It was based on a rumor, and once the reporting caught up, it turned out to be false. Similarly I’m sure there will be Canadians who…

No post body was provided.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#24

Quoted post unavailable.

> Only someone who was born with ovaries and a uterus can have a baby, menstruate, or chest feed (aka "breast feed").

This is D work (67%).

EDIT: For clarity, the last of the three claims is incorrect:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779241/

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/106/5/e2047/6123860

https://internationalbreastfeedingjournal.biomedcentral.com/...

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#25
post #5

Quoted post unavailable.

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 you may have heard specific tribes both assent and dissenting to access through their lands. A lot of tribes have a pretty loose organization of leadership consisting of both Hereditary and Elected chiefs - and, when it's convenient, governments will occasionally just recognize any old rando they can find that agrees with them as a representative of the tribe.

This is a really hairy topic to begin with and it gets a lot more hairy when you also take into consideration that tribes were frequently being lied to. Canada doesn't have a great record of being either upfront nor fidelitous when it comes to compacts with native americans and if we only have primary contemporary accounts from the "winning side" you need to be highly skeptical of how biased those accounts are.

We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools - whether tribes were initially lied to and sold a rosy picture or whether that force was used initially is an interesting topic, but it's one that we will probably only have clarity on for a handful of tribes and it might take quite a while to settle on a narrative of that topic that can be well supported by evidence.

It's really complicated.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#26

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as po…

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing them? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and accept the punishment. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a person for their crimes or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy soldier.

Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#28

It’s crazy how when a lie takes hold, it just stays forever. Another is relayed to January 6th protests. A friend today, a conservative DeSantis supporter, told me that he knew that on January 6th, the protestors killed several police officers. This is, as we know now, absolutely false. It was based on a rumor, and once the reporting caught up, it turned out to be false. Similarly I’m sure there will be Canadians who…

Quillette is cynically using the exact same "social-panic" tactics they're criticizing to create exactly your conclusion.

The Q article has exactly two complaints about the facts reported by the media:

1. The media claimed bodies were unearthed, when in fact only scans were taken.

2. The media claimed there were mass graves, when in fact scans only detected masses of individual graves.

However, in "social-panic" style, conservatives are taking these two quibbles over terminology and turning them into an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy to deny the graves existence altogether.

Note also the subtle racism in the article, where they compare a hypothetical instant-response to the murder of white children to the "very odd" response of the first nation people. The implication being that first nations people are incompetent, uncaring, or untrustworthy by not immediately doing a certain kind of investigation.

Re: A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves

#30
post #7

same as with covid, which is dangerous but not anymore so than many other preventable causes of death that are completely ignored instead of hyped as the end-of-the-world. we are truly in an age of perpetual unfounded social panic. thanks twitter. as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.

> covid, which is dangerous but not anymore so than many other preventable causes of death … if you’re vaccinated.

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