Shooting spree in massage parlors

The thread title seems a bit demeaning toward the victims, don't you think?

Curious as to what the original title was.

Also, yes this didn't have much to do with their being Asian it has everything to do with the fact that his victims were sex workers.

Would Biden and Harris meet with sex workers? I doubt it. (Although, to be fair I can't think of a single politician who would do so. Except maybe Trump, but not in the same way.)

It is--in my view--an interesting digression (the thread title).

Suppose someone shot up a bunch of stockbrokers at Merrill Lynch and I started a thread with the title "Margin call at Merrill Lynch," or some such thing (what I would term as clear "dark humor"), would that be seen as demeaning, or maybe just as tasteless (or maybe just as dark humor, of course)? Is dark humor worse when the subject matter involves marginalized peoples? Which angle made it demeaning: the fact that most victims were women, that most were Asian, or that most were (probably) sex workers? Or aybe all three?

As I said, I don't intend to demean, but I also don't think dark humor should be limited by who the target is, with regard to demographics.

That said, it's a fair point to argue that it's simply inappropriate as a thread title. I can accept that and apologize for the same.

Maybe, but how would you know? 

I assume we can all agree that human actions can be motivated by more than one factor. 

Personally, I feel the sexual issues at play here are pretty complicated and not necessarily easy to disentangle from the racial ones. Read this, for example... 


www.gq.com/story/atlanta-shootings-asian-racism

There's a lot to unpack there, obviously, but the basic nexus between Long's sexual addiction and the objects of said addiction seems pointless to deny. 

And then there's the "kill all the Asians" line. I can certainly accept the caveat that Long may or may not have said that, but at least consider the possibility that he might have.

Imagine if someone killed a bunch of Jews and shouted "Kill at the Jews", and then people tried to argue that there wasn't any anti-semitic motivation there, on the grounds that there was some other link among the victims (like having the same job).

Would seem kind of ridiculous, no? 

That's correct and it's probably unfair to say it's nothing to do with race but I see a lot of violence toward Asian is bad, which is true of course. I'm not seeing much violence against sex workers is wrong. 

Right. That's the crux of it, for me. It's not an either/or thing (the sex worker angle and the ethnicity angle.)

And to add on to that: maybe I don't have enough information to be totally certain, but I feel comfortable making a guess that Long (probably) had a specific attraction toward Asian women. And that can also be important here. Attraction can often become a powerful fuel for hatred. (Think of Elliot Rodger, for example.). And that's crucial, because I don't think it would be nearly as likely that he was attracted to sex workers , as a general category. Rather, he liked Asian women and so he went to massage parlors where he thought the women there would be Asian.

Maybe a bit of a digression, but I'm reminded now of a murder that took place in Cambodia a few years ago, back when I was living there. An American guy went to a massage place, tried to have some kind of sexual encounter w/ the masseuse, was rebuffed, then tried to rape her, and when she tried to fight him off, he slit her throat. (The guy's name was Shawn Sanchez, if you want to look this up.) Was that a hate-crime, in the normal sense of that term? I'd probably say no. But was race an issue in that story? I'd say almost certainly, even though it might not have seemed that way on the surface, and might not even have seemed that way to the killer himself (Just as Long is supposedly claiming that race wasn't a factor in what he did). Because, IMO, there were quite likely all sorts of hidden elements involved in the Sanchez story...

1. the assumption that Asian massage workers would also be willing to offer sex acts (which is obviously true sometimes, but is also not true more often than a lot of people might realize).

2. the assumption that Asian women are supposed to be submissive, so when you ask them for something, they should be willing to comply (and if they don't, then you have a right to feel aggrieved)

3. the feeling that Asian women are just toys, so resorting to violence is no problem 

Wouldn't surprise me if some or all of these elements were also involved in the Atlanta shooting (again, even if Long doesn't think that's the case).



Agreed. (Although I'm not sure that's quite what the writer was arguing.)




I think all of that is quite reasonable, as far as it goes.

But there's a flip side to all of that, as well. A lot of people are seemingly unable or unwilling to come to grips w/ the racial issues involved here. They can't accept that America continues to have problems w/ racism, so they search for alternative explanations whenever possible. ("George Floyd was killed because he was a criminal, not because of race." etc.)

Even though many Asian-Americans are speaking out and explaining why they feel so shaken by what happened in Atlanta, many Americans will refuse to listen. And that's infuriating (though sadly not very surprising).