Two white men were recently arrested in the beating of a black man on Staten Island.
Perhaps the only thing remarkable about this incident was Al Sharpton’s revelation:
We cannot live in a city, state or nation where people cannot safely be in the streets or anywhere else because of the color of their skin.
Which, of course, is precisely why I generally stay away from east Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Some media outlets entertained the story not, as Mr. Sharpton might have us believe, because it is indicative of a problematic trend, but simply because it’s the opposite of the trend..
Hastily jumping to convict the defendants guilty of a hate crime, as Gothamist’s headline did, doesn’t help things much.
Never mind that the hate crime charges were subsequently dropped.
Gothamist’s follow-up post on the beating included no reference to their erroneous hed, but did pause a moment to make us remember that whites beat up blacks — it happened just last year!
That there is no mention of black-on-white crime for comparison is no surprise; lest they feel Sharpton’s wrath, defendants’ race is rarely reported. Except, as we’re seeing, to prove that 2007 New York is really 1828 Savannah.
The School of Social Work cashed a $50 million check from the Silvers (of Building fame). Which, I don’t know, seems like a nice gesture.
Not to Jessica, though, who posted this comment:
and yet our tuition will most likely still go up next year. can’t we get a $50 million grant that helps students directly and doesn’t just go towards some abstract idea. i’d rather have tuition costs lowered than have a nice new building for the school of social work which only has a tiny amount of students compared to the university as a whole. gotta love those silvers, though.
This shows a misunderstanding of donations, which aren’t as open-ended as they can seem. The Silvers have the right to earmark their extraordinarily generous gift to put it toward very specific ends. Yalinchak bought, fraudulently, a lecture hall. Bobst, a library. Kimmel, a center. You get the idea.
When someone gives NYU money, our school will certainly let the donors control the funds. If the Silvers threw that much cash at the university and rolled the dice as to what would be bought with it, how likely would the family be to give in the future? Especially if they didn’t much like their mystery gift.
The Silvers were more than justified in contributing to a noble cause, in lieu of blindly subsidizing snot-nosed students of Jessica’s breed with an overwhelming entitlement problem.
Call me when Jessica does anything worth $50 million. Hell, half that.
As today’s WSN story revealed, Dr. Ron Paul is an internet sensation.
A tiny bit of coverage, having nothing to do with NYU, was feasted upon by his trademark internet trolls. The 344-word article drew 25 website comments in 18 hours despite being all but buried. Obama spoke in Washington Square Park and got just 10 — oh, and perhaps you noticed his huge picture on the front page of our Sept. 28 issue.
Paul’s supporters call themselves Republicans, Democrats, even “Paulists.” Whatever they call themselves, I’d add “a little nutty” to that list.
As a libertarian myself, I can’t help but sit back and chuckle while strange folks descend on the WSN website to label a harmless news story a “hit piece” and speculate with comical paranoia about the writer’s ties to the “controlling mainstream media.”
I’m too young to remember the last time people spoke of a presidential candidate like one would speak of the second coming of a prophet. Then again, this is really only the second election in which the internet will play a decisive role.
The internet’s great for donations and all, but the anonymity is too much for some to handle. The folks at Collegehumor know this. I wonder if Paul’s cause would be furthered best if some of the crazies just hushed up. If anyone were to convince me that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, it won’t likely be Weird Armchair Bob.
What’s certain is that if Dr. Paul turns out to be a crook, there’ll be hundreds of heartaches clogging the intertubes.
Anytime a jarring event like this unfolds in any corner of the world, the word “backlash” creeps out of the woodwork to distort things. It’s a horribly distracting work of fiction; the Council on American-Islamic Relations exploit it expertly.
A Reuters story interviewed the Chinese owner of a grocery store near the Blackburg campus — not surprisingly, the words read like those of someone who suffers from PTSD:
“Everyone has always been open and supportive,” said Xiaojin Moore, co-owner of the Oasis World Market grocery store a mile (1.6 km) from campus.
Moore, a native of China, hoped her three small children would not be targeted because of their Asian appearance.
“We just want to be left alone to figure things out, until things calm down,” Moore said.
Left alone? What horse shit. Nothing happened to you. Notice that the headline of the story cries “Asians Fear Backlash after Virginia Tech Shooting” — only to quote a bunch of people who aren’t worried about a “backlash.”
It gets better. There’s the UC-Riverside professor who dances around plainly trumpeting the fact that, as a Korean-American, he’s a victim, too:
I’m sure that, in the weeks ahead, many Korean Americans will feel somehow responsible for this one Korean American student’s action, even though it appears that this was the action of one apparently disturbed young man. This could have been done by anybody who suffers from severe depression or a mental disorder and is not properly treated. And yet, I too somehow feel responsible. Why? As someone of Korean ancestry, I feel a cultural connection and almost a moral responsibility for his actions. Many in the Korean community are already mourning the very idea that a Korean is responsible for these senseless deaths.
As we approach the 15th anniversary of the civil unrest in Los Angeles, the Korean American community here still vividly remembers how the mainstream media portrayed Korean immigrant merchants as gun-toting vigilantes, defending their stores as Los Angeles burned in 1992 — and we are still trying to overcome that stereotype. There are more than 500,000 Koreans in Los Angeles, the largest enclave outside of Asia, and this is the image many Americans have of them.
The Asian American community has long complained about the absence of Asian American faces in popular media. Even the initial media report of the shooter as Chinese reminds me of how Asian Americans all “look alike” to those outside the community.
Sure, a few professors and kids died, but what about the people who are labeled Chinese when they’re Korean or Thai? What about the tribulations of the poor shooter, who will never get to rest in peace among the headlines that call him not just a cowardly killer, but a South Korean cowardly killer?
The author, Edward Taehan Chang, was able to go a whole two paragraphs before ejaculating his nonsensical concern for this ethnicity. Skim the column for any traces of empathy for the real victims — you’ll find not one.
And that’s the real problem.
Yesterday’s shooting at Virginia Tech must have really put things in perspective. No matter how much of a bad day you thought you were having, you certainly felt like a world-class jerk after reading the news.
I wasn’t really old enough to analyze the Columbine massacre when it went down a day before my birthday in 1999 — I was an adolescent probably too preoccupied with the loot I’d rack up the following day.
Isn’t it interesting how the media oozes this horrendous biography of the killers when things like this happen? I know more about this 23-year-old South Korean nobody than I know about most of my professors. His roommate describes him as a loner, he lived in the VT dorms, he may have been taking medication for depression, and, something that is getting way too much play, he wrote “violent” plays.
I can’t think of any reason that the media would toss all of this at us, except for some perverted attempt at explaining what he was thinking or dealing with.
Newspapers know their readers demand it, so that’s why they print it — they really don’t have a choice in the matter. But trying to place their readers in the shooter’s shoes is awfully hard to do without giving the appearance of apologizing for him, or worse, blaming the victims — the latter of which John Derbyshire of the National Review has no qualms in doing:
Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
An Australian newspaper, the Daily Telegraph ponders in print, “This is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in U.S. history.” (Heart-wrenching photo of the deceased girl included.)
Naturally, the shooter himself was the last to assume culpability for his romp of terror: “You caused me do to this,” read his suicide note. He was an English major, by the way.
So he took or Prozac or something like it. So he wrote a violent play. Fascinating stuff.
It doesn’t connect any dots, of course. Dozens of English majors, this will shock you to know, get through each day writing violent books and plays and movies, without going on real life killing sprees. Depression medication has got to work for a plurality of those to whom it is prescribed, otherwise it would have gone the way of Fen-Phen and Vioxx by now.
Conversely, I’m sure a good share of criminals didn’t write blood-soaked one-act plays or suffer from depression (or live in a dormitory at the ripe age of 23).
Bottom line is, I’ve got to think that with every pointless bit of information that is released about this guy, the victims and their families suffer that much more. I much prefer to refer to 32 dead victims, not 33, and it is no accident that the killer’s name has not been used in this post.
He was the lowliest coward there is, and deserves to be forgotten. That’s it.
My sympathies to the victims and anyone touched by yesterday’s tragedy.
Nobody in their right mind would call the author of this diatribe — which pulled no punches in calling the “majority” of NYU students lazy — a decent politician. In her Feb. 12 op/ed, Meredith Dolgin declared triumphantly, “As the CAS student council president, I can justifiably say that the majority of you have done nothing at all.” (To her credit, “do[ing] nothing” refers to school issues, not just plain nothing.)That’s why it came as no surprise to me to see that Dolgin is in all likelihood as corrupt as they come.
Worse, it’s clear that she can’t be the sharpest tool in the shed, either. What politician insults her constituents? What future job seeker goes autocratic a month before graduation?
Hats off to Megan Cruz for recording what is sure to be a damning conversation with Dolgin in early February:
“If I didn’t want you on the council, I wouldn’t have you on the council. I’d get rid of you — easily,” Dolgin said in the tape. “I mean, I keep people when I want to keep people, and I get rid of people when I want to get rid of people.”
Ms. Dolgin appears to be pre-law from her Facebook profile, so here’s hoping she had no plans for constitutional law. No need to read this story twice to infer that she is no fan of democracy.
Or, if I were Kreiter, HP are stealing from me. In any case, I’m a victim of theft. Help.
I’m trying to print some stuff out on my hot HP PSC 2350 (it prints, copies and scans, but for me it’s been just an expensive, great looking printer), and I got this error message that I’ve never seen before, something to the effect of “checking” the tri-color cartridge. I did that.
About 12 times.
Then, after doing some research, I found out that the cartridge is “expired” and can’t be used.
No worries, I’m only printing some boring Microsoft Word documents. Surely you don’t need a color cartridge for that. Surprise! You do.
There were two types of protesters at the NYU College Republicans’ panel on illegal immigration this past Monday: first, there was the goofball socialist that held up posterboard with colorful accusations “like fascist,” squawked “si se puede,” and boldly turned their backs on Chris Simcox when he spoke.
Then there was the type who only “cheered internally at every ‘fuck you’” and who transcended this whole pedestrian argument by declaring Simcox unfit to contribute to academic discussion. The latter are an elusive breed; thus far I have only identified Mike Devlin and Una Hardester, a self-described “mild-mannered human rights activist,” as members.
I really liked Mike’s column, but maybe I was just relieved that a sympathizer of Enrique Morones was backing up his position in the English language. I exaggerate, but still, the column was good. That didn’t, however, change its status as a more eloquent way of opposing Simcox’s right to speak, and that’s where I take issue.
Image courtesy of NY Times/AP.
Now that the three Blue Devils have finally been cleared of the remaining charges against them, that’s how much the kids should sue for. I’d name the stripper as well as Mike Nifong as defendants.
RALEIGH, N.C. April 11 — All remaining charges were dropped today against three former Duke University lacrosse players who had been accused of rape more than a year ago, North Carolina’s attorney general announced, concluding a three-month investigation of a racially charged case that polarized and outraged many in the state and nation.
An independent investigation “showed clearly that there is insufficient evidence to proceed,” Roy A. Cooper, the state attorney general, said at a televised news conference. “ We believe these individuals are innocent.”
Here is a brief, horrible clip of the ruckus from last night’s panel on illegal immigration sponsored by the NYU College Republicans. Columns from myself and opinion editor Mike Devlin are forthcoming in tomorrow’s WSN.
The Associated Press is reporting that a private regulatory agency has banned a hilarious promotional advertisement for the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club. Because jokes aren’t funny when you explain them, I’ll let you see for yourself.
After watching, you’ll surely agree with me that this is the best part about the new, family Canadian-friendly commercial:
The new commercial also features a disclaimer reading “Dramatization. Do not try this at home.”
Well, we’ve learned an important lesson from all of this: Keep your belt on. Put them in their place with pillows — they don’t leave bruises.
Image via the Sydney Morning Herald.
I’m a staunch believer that there are never too many ways to punish miscreant children. However much spanking and dunce caps are frowned upon in today’s politically correct classrooms, you’ve got to admit that they’re boring anyway.
So here are two pacemakers in the field of teaching delinquents who’s boss, both via Drudge:
- Four little kindergartners were talking too much, so Ruth Ann Stoneburner decided it would be prudent to clip their mouths shut with clothespins.
- Throw the book at them, judicial style. A former high school principal is suing four students (libel, I assume) over phony MySpace profiles that, among other things, detailed his affinity for marijuana and keeping alcohol at school. This one makes me particularly happy, if only because it pries a few more people off of that horrible website (for all of the superfluous features MySpace pages offer, they still don’t have a little hand that projects from your screen, bops you on the head and then gouges your eyes out). As for the merits of the case, I’d love to see the guy win, but I don’t envy his obligation of proving that the profiles were intended to be read as factual. If the little punks were to spread them around to anyone, it would be to their awkward voice-cracking friends, not teachers or anybody intelligent.
Because to be honest, I have no idea. I can see the arguments either way.
Cortlandt – State Police at Cortlandt have arrested a 52-year-old homeless man and charged him with the murder of 86-year-old Richard McKeon of Lake Peekskill. The victim was stabbed to death in his home where police said Robert Gallo frequently did some handy work.
State Police said they recovered knives that they believe to have been involved in the murder as well as an axe, which may also have been used. The victim also suffered from blunt force trauma.
Gallo, who was described by witnesses as a homeless man who frequented the Lake Peekskill community, was developed as a person of interest during the early stages of the investigation. He was located late last night at a local motel.
What makes it so cloudy for me is that the homeless guy apparently became enraged after he asked to move into McKeon’s house and was denied*. Attacking somebody just because they have a home and are better off than you? Seems awfully hateful. And the poor guy was 86 years old — double whammy. (* I heard that part on 1010 WINS this morning, but it was not cited in the only story that came up on Google News.)
You rarely see allegations of hate crimes going in the opposite direction, which is why I posted this. And the idea that minorities just have less “hate” for the majority than vice versa, sadly, isn’t the reason.
I’ve got to say, of the dozen or so pictures that rotate randomly on shiny new NYUHome, this one’s my favorite.
Couldn’t get to figuring out why, except for that, having more than three people featured in it, it is probably the most accurate depiction of the hopelessly overcrowded state of things here.
Oh yeah, then I noticed the hot Vuitton piece front-and-center. They’re an investment.
Go Bobcats.
Clyde Haberman’s piece in today’s New York Times highlights the State Senate’s passage of a “granny bill,” which calls for harsher punishments for perpetrators who assail elderly and/or “demonstrabl[y]” diseased victims. It’s behind the TimesSelect wall, but don’t forget — use your .edu e-mail address and it’s free, as of a couple weeks ago.
The bill quite obviously is the product of legislators’ attempts to capitalize on the outrage provoked by the yet-unidentified man that pummeled and robbed an 85-year-old and a 101-year-old, the latter of which was caught on surveillance tape in the lobby of the victim’s apartment building.
There is a gaping difference between this initiative and the “hate crimes” that I bemoan from time to time. When a robber punches a black man in the face, it could be either (a) because he wants money, (b) because the victim is black and that’s not cool to the robber, or (c) both. Without a little thought police action, proving the answer to such a question just isn’t legally possible without a very, very stupid confession.
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