A Radically Moderate Opinion

 

This post is in response to this Op-Ed from the LATimes regarding the Atlanta Spa Shootings. 

(This is a moderate democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Biden talking, not a far right conservative.)

Obviously this was an opinion piece, but this authors write-up (along with most similar news coverage) reeks of confirmation bias. I wish you would report a more measured/well reasoned/moderate viewpoint on this topic along side this parroted standard narrative. 

Counterpoints Include:

• Why would the shooter also kill 2 non-asians if his intent was wholly racist? He just decided to kill some extra non-asian people? There’s a much better common denominator to the story here besides race - place of work. I would bet that it just so happens that it’s statistically more likely for a sex worker in that area to be asian and that’s why 6 of the 8 killed were of asian decent.
• What’s the statistical probability that a worker at one of these spas would be asian? Could the uneven racial makeup of the victims possibly be due to varying degrees of representation in the workforce for this job type in the region? Yes, of course it could! Are people asking those questions? No, of course they’re not, it doesn’t fit the preferred cultural lens at the moment where everything is apparently inherently racist...
• Why can’t we trust the shooter on his motives? He has nothing to hide and little to gain by hiding a motive at this point. Given the rest of the comments by friends and family it seems abundantly clear that his demons are sexual, not racist. And the fact that he visited these locations ostensibly for their sexual offerings suggest that he actually liked asians. If the argument is then that fetishizing a race is racist then anyone attracted to another ethnicity than their own is suddenly labeled racist - it’s an empty argument that vilifies people inaccurately for sexual preferences that each of us has and doesn’t get to choose (there’s even an evolutionary aside here to explain this phenomenon but I digress).
• The facts of this story clearly point to a conclusion reflective of a sexually deviant, frustrated, and severely religiously shamed person lashing out the sexual temptations that haunted him. He hated himself for the things he liked because he was taught the things he liked were wrong (sound familiar LGBTQ+?). Going after the roots of his sexual temptations after being kicked out of his house represents not a racist outburst, but an ashamed sexual one.
• When the facts do not stack up against the preferred racial narrative here, you cannot automatically say that the police are also racist and somehow in cahoots with the killer (as is being insinuated). They likely know more facts than you do, so they can make batter conclusions. Facts do not care about the emotional biases that are circulating in the culture right now that create a narrative before the facts of the story are known, and it is not helpful to publish news stories supporting narratives that are not factually proven. 
• Finding one police officers tweet of picture of a racist shirt is a prime example of the woke confirmation bias here. Once people here the cops say something that doesn’t fit their narrative, they start digging into the officers past and dox him for any info related to asians that they can find and when they find a crumb of “evidence” to fit their opinions they imply that the whole bread must be there and probably the cops are the bakers. 

Maybe it is the case that the woke, racial narrative is true, but the facts don’t point that way in this individual case. The facts quite honestly are being ignored and misconstrued in a painfully obvious way. The data that anti-asian sentiments are on the rise are still true - those statistics do not hinge on the facts of this case, but the author of Op-Ed narrative seem to think those statistics prove her interpretation - it’s a non-sequitur. A scientist she is not, and I would hope that the real courts can parse the data more clearly than the court of public opinion currently has managed. 

I hate thinking/knowing that this sort of an opinion would be branded as conservative leaning by the Left. It's a good example where the Left are providing fodder against themselves. If it's so easy to pick apart their narratives, anyone right of center thinks they're interpretations of things like this is totally insane. It's not helpful in any sense to push a narrative like this ahead of the facts or in spite of them. I know I am not alone in my radically moderate perspectives here and I hope that more of these types of voices are published.