In the SJW thread, Surging Chaos brought up the topic of the Swedish press' alleged practice of "whitepixeling". This stemmed the following conversation, which I'm spinning off into its own thread.
Sweden, along with its Nordic cousins, has had a lot of problems with failing to integrate non-Western immigrants into their country. Rather than admit they've screwed up, their press attempts to hide this fact. Sometimes it's something relatively benign like mentioning immigrants as "youth" if a crime is being reported. Or you get stuff like this (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to Tumblr) where pictures of criminals get whitewashed to make them look like native Swedes that never actually committed said crimes in the first place.
You're linking to a site that advocates eugenics and genetic racism. This, uh, to put it mildly takes the edge off of the complains about people of colour being insufficiently portrayed as criminals. That you link us to tumblr is the least of the issues with you.
EDIT:
I mean, ffs
Never mind that the pictures on the specific page you link to are from a site that is now gone and that I can only find on nazi pages and some brief debate pages where it's clear that it was a nazi site.
As far as the policy of lightening skin tones go, the entire point of the mosaics is to obfuscate identity. It isn't necessarily a problem. There is also the concern of nazi networks (who obsessively collect information about crimes committed by people of colour) targeting minorities for attacks. Violence against minorities is the entire point of nazis organisation and the press taking just a moment to not actively feed it is the least they can do. The silhouettes shown are just straight up their silhouettes. They are referred to as a Swede and as a Finn because that is likely their nationalities. The nazis whine about this because they think that Swedes and Finns can't be black, that Swedishness and Finnishness comes from the blood.
The press is not actively feeding Nazi paranoia by representing the facts honestly. If the Nazis take the wrong message from the facts, that's their problem; the press' role is passive at worst. However, if the press began to doctor photographs to misrepresent the truth, then that would be taking an active role in feeding Nazi paranoia - except I'm not sure it counts as "paranoia" if their fear of the public being manipulated by an untrustworthy press is what's actually happening. ("The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists", anyone?)
The thing I don't get here, though, is that you first criticize Surging Chaos' source, implying that what it claims about Swedish press practices is untrue, but then you defend those alleged practices as if the claims were true. Which is it?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This kind of keeping the news PC is ubiquitous. Look at what happens when something happens that fits the PC worldview or can be twisted to like the Travyon Martin case. Look how Elliot Rodger's story was used to further the PC anti-male agenda nevermind that during the same period in time a women shot a man in the face in a bar for rejecting her advances.
As humans, we have a tendency to cling to ideologies. Any positive set of beliefs can quickly turn malevolent once treated as ideology and not an honest intellectual or experiential pursuit of greater truth. Ideology does in entire economic systems and countries, causes religions to massacre thousands, turns human rights movements into authoritarian sects and makes fools out of humanity’s most brilliant minds. Einstein famously wasted the second half of his career trying to calculate a cosmological constant that didn’t exist because “God doesn’t play dice.”
I question the implication that there is anything insidious going on. By not giving out an uncensored picture of someone suspected of a crime and generally withholding their identity you are already not giving out all the facts. You are choosing what the general public should learn. This is based on the idea that doing so could endanger the person in question. Any punishment they should receive is for the courts to decide, not the papers and the public at large. Lightening the skin colour adds another layer of obfuscation and minimises the risk of minority groups suffering further nazi attacks. Also, if this is widespread, that means we can never know what the actual ethnicity of someone in an edited picture is. We can't know if they're light-skinned when that's what every picture is edited to.
Does this constitute the press controlling the information available to the public? Well, yes. All reporting includes an element of what should and shouldn't become known. Even when nothing is withheld there's the fundamental bias of choosing to report something. There is inescapably an ideology involved in informing public opinion. The question is of what guidelines and outright laws there should be controlling it.
Obviously the media withholds information all the time. However, there is a world of difference between withholding information about a person and modifying the information you do provide to be knowingly false. If the Swedish media do not wish the race of criminal suspects to become known, they can easily obscure the suspects' faces entirely, or not release pictures at all. Putting caucasian-colored pixels over the faces isn't obfuscatory; it's outright misleading. It's the difference between withholding a name and address and disseminating a false name and address. The public does not need to receive every single fact, but it does need to be able to trust that the facts it's receiving are truthful. (And, obviously, when facts are to be withheld, it needs to be for an immediately compelling reason.)
That's the general concern with the notion of the press doctoring information. There are further concerns with this particular instance of it (which you seem to acknowledge is not mere right-wing conspiracy theory). By using white as the "default" skin tone, it reinforces the assumption that, well, white is the default skin tone. I mean, think about it. Feminists and progressives quite rightly object to the suggestion that when the sex of a person is unknown or withheld, the language ought to default to calling them "he". Maleness is not the default sex and should not be treated as such. We wouldn't refer to all unidentified criminal suspects as "he", would we? (Or perhaps "she", instead, to fight the stereotype that criminals are male.) No; if we really don't want to give away their sex, it's the height of simplicity to use gender-neutral language. It would be similarly simple just to, again, conceal suspects' race by obscuring their faces entirely. But whoever came up with this whitepixeling idea didn't think of that. He (or she) thought instead, "Let's protect these people by making them white." And that thought has disturbing racial implications. You guys on the left are normally hypersensitive to such implications; don't ignore them just because the practice was instituted in the name of fighting right-wing extremism. It's actually surrendering to the extremists' worldview of white as normal and nonwhite as distinctive.
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So you don't see any problems with journalists conspiring to manipulate the public. Well I do.
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As humans, we have a tendency to cling to ideologies. Any positive set of beliefs can quickly turn malevolent once treated as ideology and not an honest intellectual or experiential pursuit of greater truth. Ideology does in entire economic systems and countries, causes religions to massacre thousands, turns human rights movements into authoritarian sects and makes fools out of humanity’s most brilliant minds. Einstein famously wasted the second half of his career trying to calculate a cosmological constant that didn’t exist because “God doesn’t play dice.”
In what you linked, I don't see any evidence of journalists conspiring to manipulate the public. Read what else I've written in this thread and decide for yourself whether I see a problem with it.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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Keep in mind that, at least according to Combo player, that particular news site is more of a tabloid than a news site. I'm completely unfamiliar with it, so I have to take other people at their words on it.
"Editor in chief for the newspaper Expressen, Thomas Mattsson has said white pixelization was earlier performed by Expressen and that it was "possibly correct in a press-ethical sense", but that it has been policy since he became editor in chief not to use the method"
Of course, all the linked sources are in Swedish, so who knows what they say.
European society has a long standing fear of Islam in general, Christianity had it been weaker at certain ebbs would not exist in the places where it does today, either. I feel that this stuff dates back centuries, and it's not easy to undo some of the prejudices against ethnic groups. Take for example anti-Jewish propaganda began in Antioch under pagan Rome. So yea, these "ancient memes" are going to be hard to kill off and will take probably centuries. The Swedes aren't any different than most European groups, the Germans for example still count people after multiple generations as "guest workers" which is an abomination to German's stellar record for being a wonderful place for employment. That and Japan has had several issues going as far as to take in "immigrants" descended from Japanese in South America for young blood. These people were, for the most part, mestizo anyway ironically. Blood purity and excuses to use as citizenship are screwball. While I dislike some of the "anchor baby" issues with the US, we do a better job at immigration because we've been at it for so long and fought a war with a slave group that beats the drum against racism to this day.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
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Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
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candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Then you have BS like this...http://eagnews.org/1000-member-secretive-progressive-journalist-group-uncovered/
Obviously the media withholds information all the time. However, there is a world of difference between withholding information about a person and modifying the information you do provide to be knowingly false. If the Swedish media do not wish the race of criminal suspects to become known, they can easily obscure the suspects' faces entirely, or not release pictures at all. Putting caucasian-colored pixels over the faces isn't obfuscatory; it's outright misleading. It's the difference between withholding a name and address and disseminating a false name and address. The public does not need to receive every single fact, but it does need to be able to trust that the facts it's receiving are truthful. (And, obviously, when facts are to be withheld, it needs to be for an immediately compelling reason.)
That's the general concern with the notion of the press doctoring information. There are further concerns with this particular instance of it (which you seem to acknowledge is not mere right-wing conspiracy theory). By using white as the "default" skin tone, it reinforces the assumption that, well, white is the default skin tone. I mean, think about it. Feminists and progressives quite rightly object to the suggestion that when the sex of a person is unknown or withheld, the language ought to default to calling them "he". Maleness is not the default sex and should not be treated as such. We wouldn't refer to all unidentified criminal suspects as "he", would we? (Or perhaps "she", instead, to fight the stereotype that criminals are male.) No; if we really don't want to give away their sex, it's the height of simplicity to use gender-neutral language. It would be similarly simple just to, again, conceal suspects' race by obscuring their faces entirely. But whoever came up with this whitepixeling idea didn't think of that. He (or she) thought instead, "Let's protect these people by making them white." And that thought has disturbing racial implications. You guys on the left are normally hypersensitive to such implications; don't ignore them just because the practice was instituted in the name of fighting right-wing extremism. It's actually surrendering to the extremists' worldview of white as normal and nonwhite as distinctive.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
EDIT: Found one:
http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/john-osnes-55-foll-offer-for-svensken/
However, we can see that the uncesored picture is posed following the conviction:
http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sa-****ade-musikkarriaren-i-tragedi/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_pixelization
"Editor in chief for the newspaper Expressen, Thomas Mattsson has said white pixelization was earlier performed by Expressen and that it was "possibly correct in a press-ethical sense", but that it has been policy since he became editor in chief not to use the method"
Of course, all the linked sources are in Swedish, so who knows what they say.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.