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In the wake of the mass shooting in Portland last Saturday night, when reliable information was still scarce, some of those on the right took advantage of the confusion to spread a little more confusion of their own.
Right-wing trolls posted disinformation about the identity of the shooter and the woman he allegedly killed. Others on the right, drawing loosely on misleading and in some cases factually incorrect statements by police, made up their own story of the events, transforming the shooter’s attack on the demonstration into an act of self-defense against am antifa mob attacking his house. (See my last post on the subject for more on this.)
Still others, who stopped just short of blatant lies, attempted to muddy the responsibility of the shooter for the death and injuries among the demonstrators and their supporters by describing the events of the night as what far-right “journalist” Andy Ngo called an an “antifa-involved mass shooting” — a turn of phrase that makes it sound like it was Antifa responsible for the death and the injuries of their own allies. Indeed, some on Twitter took it to mean just that:
Given Ngo’s longtime animosity towards antifa (the feeling is mutual), it seems likely to me that Ngo is deliberately encouraging his uncritical followers to jump to this conclusion.
Ngo used the phrase or a similar one in multiple tweets to his nearly one million Twitter followers.
Ngo has also referred to “the mass shooting involving #antifa” and “the deadly mass shooting last night involving #antifa”; in more recent posts he has talked of the “the antifa vs homeowner shooting” and “the furry neighbor vs antifa deadly shooting.” (He has made much of the fact that the alleged shooter was a furry, evidently as a way of eliding discussion of his oft-stated far-right beliefs.)
Several right-wing publications have also leaned heavily on the word “involved.” The Post Millennial, the web publication for which Ngo is an Editor at Large, referred in one headline to the “Antifa-Involved Mass Shooting.” The Epoch Times declared, also in a headline, that “Portland Shooting Leaves 1 Dead, 5 Wounded Amid Reports Antifa Is Involved.” National Conservative offered its own take, reporting that the “First ‘victim’ of Antifa related mass shooting [had been] identified.” The Lid, citing Ngo as a source, “reported” that “[a]n armed Antifa confrontation with an armed Portland Homeowner near Normandale Park left one woman dead and 5 other people wounded… .”
None of this jibes with what seems to have really happened Saturday night, as made clear not only by the eyewitness accounts but also in the charging document of the solitary suspect. The accused and now arrested shooter — apparently a fervid far-rightist (and Andy Ngo fan) who regularly talked about his desire to shoot “commies” and antifa — reportedly confronted, then opened fire on, a group of women who were trying to diffuse tensions, shooting a disabled 60-year-old woman in the head, killing her instantly, according to accounts of the evening. 43-year-old Benjamin Smith was taken down with a bullet fired by one of the demonstrators before he had a chance to injure or kill anyone else. If the witness accounts and the charging affidavit are accurate, Smith was a cold blooded killer; the man who shot him is a hero, a rare example of a “good guy with a gun” stopping a mass shooting in its tracks.
Antifa was “involved” only in that most of the wounded and injured (except Smith himself) were at least informally associated with the movement. Calling this an “Antifa-involved” shooting makes about as much sense as calling the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a “president-involved shooting.”
While dismissing a survivor’s account of the shooting posted anonymously to Twitter, Ngo eagerly jumped on rumors that the alleged shooter had only been defending himself — a rumor he thought discredited the antifa “narrative.”
Ngo in one tweet tried yet another way to blame the shooting on Antifa, declaring that:
It’s not clear if anyone other than the demonstrator who allegedly shot Smith was armed in the antifa camp. Saying the shooting “happened” because protesters insisted on protesting would be roughly equivalent to blaming the Lincoln assassination on the President’s trip to the Ford theater.
Ngo has also spent a good deal of time tweeting derogatory information about one of the survivors, including her photo, knowing full well that this puts her at significant risk of harassment and worse from his numerous followers. He has also posted tweets about antifa in which he simply makes up “facts” about the group members and their motivations.
The only way to know if the disruptors were “fearful” about the potential release of information would be to literally read their minds. Many in, or in sympathy with, antifa have repeatedly called on the police to release MORE information.
Ngo and his allies on the right are taking a tragedy and trying to turn it into a farce.
###
I know this has zilch to do with Portland, but Russia and Ukraine are officially at war. There’s confirmation of a gun battle near Kiev’s main airport and missile attacks on nearly all of Ukraine’s major cities.
The Washington Post says this about the killer:
Someone’s a snowflake. A murderous snowflake.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/23/portland-oregon-shooting-benjamin-smith/
Careful David, widdle Andy will threaten to sue you for posting basic facts, because he is a triggered snowflake.
Ngo’s followers are attempting to incite further mass shootings. Chad Loder has been keeping tabs on Twitter. You should check out their feed for more info, but here are a few interesting tweets. https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1495970735264866309
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496722154477568003
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496371509182578688
Also the shooter was not a homeowner and this did not take place at his apartment, so that’s just a straight up lie intended to make this look like the shooter was defending himself somehow. He was not.
I’ve been informed that the furry community apparently has a very big nazi problem, but it makes sense that someone like Ngo would view the shooter being a furry as a possible distraction.
I am in neither group, so anything else would be speculation. But his being a furry is completely irrelevant to this case.
Holy shit.
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496803476076068866
So, the fact that the shooter was taken down before he could do worse should make this the perfect case for NRA types to point out. But, of course, they will not, as they are not really about supporting the right to self defense. They are about the “right” of right-wingers to use firearms threaten people they don’t like, and their sympathies likely lie with the shooter.
Welp. Off topic, but looks like the invasion of Ukraine is on. Russian troops taking advantage of the fact that the area around Chernobyl is largely uninhabited to easily get within striking range of Kiev: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-troops-breach-area-near-chernobyl-adviser-ukrainian-minister-says-2022-02-24/
@Snowberry
Just fyi the Ukranian spelling is Kyiv. Kiev is the Russian spelling. It’s best to use the Ukranian spelling.
It’s an awful situation. I hope everyone over in Ukraine stays safe.
Sorry, forgot, I was using the more familiar spelling.
So far it seems to be going badly for Russia? So far: Tens of thousands of people are protesting in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk at least, despite violent crackdowns from the police. The Ukrainian army has inflicted some decent damage, and one Russian platoon surrendered without firing a shot because “we do not want to kill Ukrainians”. Many countries have swiftly cut off all financial and economic connection to Russia, causing the Russian stock market to crash, for whatever good that does.
@Snowberry
No worries! Even some news agencies are using the wrong spelling, but I’ve seen a lot of people correcting themselves on it, too, so it’s good that info is getting out there.
I hope it continues to go poorly for Russia. Putin’s website got hacked, too.
@ snowberry
Yeah, you may recall from that thread last week where I mentioned Seven Days to the River Rhine, so this doesn’t surprise me at all. I suspect the next move, as soon as the initial forces reach the east bank of the Dnieper will be to invade from Belarus to pincer Київ.
Strategically, Russian forces can’t really stay that long in Ukraine as a whole, and politically the Russian economy can’t sustain full economic sanctions. Of course, that assumes that full sanctions will be imposed.
But Putin has three possible exit strategies.
So it’s going to be whether any of those are an acceptable diplomatic compromise against how long Russia can forestall internal dissent once sanctions hit.
FWIW, personally I think that the best sanction would be to prohibit members of the Duma from foreign travel and holding foreign investments, and suspend Russia from the Swift payments system. That would actually affect people who have some sway over Putin.
More updates: It appears that the Russians have captured Sumy, near the border. Their main plan, however, seems to be making swift and decisive strikes on Kyiv and Kharkiv. The attack on Kyiv was beaten back, it didn’t even reach the city proper. But as of the time of writing, the attack on Kharkiv is ongoing and could go either way. They’re bombarding the city with mortar shells and killing civilians, dammit. Don’t know if that’s on purpose or if it’s collateral.
@Alan Robertshaw
Last I heard on that is that the German government is trying to torpedo that idea. Don’t know why.
@Battering Lamb:
I’ve been informed that the furry community apparently has a very big nazi problem, but it makes sense that someone like Ngo would view the shooter being a furry as a possible distraction.
I am in neither group, so anything else would be speculation. But his being a furry is completely irrelevant to this case.
Last I heard, furries were a subculture of people who, in varying nuances and degrees, identify with and like to dress as other animal species; that identity isn’t defined by the belief that categories of people they don’t like have no right to live.
@snowberry
Being as generous as absolutely possible to the pro-military point of view and how they use words, a smart bomb precisely targeted on a specific building might have “collateral” damage if a chunk of the building flies across the street and kills someone in the building next door.
Unguided mortar shells aimed at inhabited areas and allowing wind + gravity to carry your explosives to wherever the fuck inside that inhabited area? That’s just intentionally killing civilians. Period.
The good:
Not very much.
The bad:
The worsening Ukraine situation. (Unmentioned in the recent comments here on that topic is that Putin’s navy of cyber-privateers has battened on various Ukrainian banks and government institutions with assorted malware and DDoS attacks.)
The continuing metastasization of fascism in the US.
That last COVID surge is taking its own sweet time subsiding.
I still have some stamina problems and no doctor; HealthCareConnect continues, year after year, to prove itself to be 100% useless. I don’t know if that is because of COVID or if it was inherently defective and would have failed me regardless.
One of my teeth has become sensitive; cold water on it can cause quite a bit of pain that may last for 10 minutes or more after. Of course there’s nothing I can safely do about it in the middle of the pandemic. At least it’s in a corner so it’s fairly easy to avoid provoking it.
My social life remains as nonexistent as it ever was. Lack of transportation and sufficient discretionary income remain the major identifiable culprits there.
The bizarre:
There’s a TV ad in heavy rotation with some syrupy Muppets song, which ad doesn’t actually seem to have anything at all to do with the Muppets. (It seems particularly jarring with the storm clouds of World War III gathering.)
My social media feeds have been getting lots of posts that are nothing but little arrays of blank colored squares recently, sometimes accompanied by a smattering of small integer fractions. Sixths, usually.
The TV schedule is completely impossible to predict now. Some shows have premiered in July and scheduled their season finales for March. Almost everything spent the February sweeps period in reruns. They uncancelled CSI and Law and Order and cancelled half the superhero shows. It’s pretty much impossible to plan in advance now; you just have to leave your evenings open Mon-Fri and check the program guide each afternoon to see what, if anything, is on that night. They seem to have given up on “same Bat-time, same Bat-channel” a while back but in the past year or two they seem to have given up on even organizing shows into clearly-delineated 22-episode seasons. “Seasons” can be only a handful of episodes or the normal 22 or anything in between, can start and end at any random time instead of September to May, there can be two or even three abbreviated ones in a single year or only one in a two-year period, and so on and so forth. It’s pretty much completely haphazard now. And more and more you see “TV shows” advertised that never actually seem to air on TV at all, existing, if at all, solely behind online paywalls (and therefore inaccessible to anyone with poor internet, or without a credit card, so pretty much limited to the shrinking urban yuppie set who can actually get more then a handful of megabits per second at home).
This might all qualify for “the bad” except that almost every show has jumped the shark, with the sole exception of Star Trek: Discovery, which somehow seems to have un-jumped it and become something resembling an actual Star Trek show in its current season. Too bad it is suffering from the same unpredictable scheduling as everything else, with month-or-two blocks of episodes separated by month-or-longer absences (not reruns, just not there at all) that don’t bear even the slightest resemblance to the September-to-May seasons of the Before Times.
If my TV were to break down tomorrow I’m not sure I’ll bother replacing the old clunker … especially since now that replacement would probably last all of three weeks before getting vaporized, fried by an EMP, or turned into an expensive doorstop by there no longer being a civilization broadcasting signals for it to receive …
@Surplus
Those are Wordle scores, it’s a popular online word guessing game:
https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
People post their scores using the colored squares. The fractions mean how many tries (out of six possible tries) it took to guess the word.
@Battering Lamb, Full Metal Ox:
Honestly I wouldn’t say the furry community has a ‘Nazi problem’ at any greater proportion than society at large. Like many other fandoms it does have some difficulty dealing with that problem due to people not understanding the Paradox of Tolerance and wanting to be accepting to anybody sharing those interests, even if those people aren’t necessarily accepting in return (see the Geek Social Fallacies).
In slightly better news, the Federal courts have been busy…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/24/george-floyd-death-police-officers-guilty-civil-rights
https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/ahmaud-arbery-killing-hate-crimes-verdict/index.html
Geez, modern warfare sure moves fast. So, well-armed guerillas are attempting to retake Sumy. The army which went after Kyiv is being beaten further back but will probably be reinforced by some Belarusian troops later. I don’t know what’s currently going on with Kharkiv, but apparently the mortar shells were supposed to be guided, but someone flew a reconnaissance plane through the area and actively scrambled everyone’s GPS signals. Unknown as to who, though since it’s reported as a Boeing RC-135, it’s worth noting that those are used almost exclusively by the US and the UK. Also uncertain if that’s an oops or not.
Need to quit this for now, maybe I’ll come back to it tomorrow.
@ snowberry
Russia has had GPS jamming equipment deployed in Ukraine for quite some time now.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30741/ukrainian-officer-details-russian-electronic-warfare-tactics-including-radio-virus
Russia also has a history of trying to GPS jam RAF planes.
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/27508-russia-suspect-of-jamming-raf-aircraft-gps-signal-cyprus
So it may be that the jamming was aimed at the RC-135.
Having said that, that plane is almost certainly one of these:
https://www.raf.mod.uk/aircraft/airseeker-rc-135w-rivet-joint/
One of their roles is GPS jamming; and it’s a stated aim of NATO to try to take down the Russian GLONASS system.
So I guess who is actually responsible is anyone’s guess at this stage.
@ Surplus to Requirements
Odd. I have a similar problem with one of my teeth. I went to the dentist for it over a week ago, got a nice little root canal, and the sensitivity to cold went away… until yesterday. Not sure what that means. The root canal was kind of a last ditch effort when the dentist couldn’t find anything wrong, so maybe it is just one of those aches and pains sort of things that come on with age.
@ .45 & surplus
I can share a tooth thing that has worked for me in the past. Fingers crossed it might give you some relief too.
Basically dissolve as much salt as you can take into the hottest water you can bear in your mouth. Then swill the solution around the affected tooth as vigorously as possible.
You’re basically trying to get it to the source of any infection. It gives some instant pain relief, but also it hopefully sterilises the infected area.
Hope that works for you.
@.45:
A root canal? How did you get such a procedure done safely during the pandemic? I can’t think of a way it could be done without being indoors away from home for many tens of minutes unmasked.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Unfortunately, I don’t keep salt on hand, since the only salty foods I tend to eat tend to come pre-salted (e.g., potato chips).
[Site bugs] Here’s something new and bizarre. The comment above this one still says “6 seconds ago” over an hour after it was posted and after repeated page reloads. It’s not updating to the correct elapsed time!
ETA: Posting this caused it to partially update. Now it says “24 minutes ago”, but mousing over it shows a clock time over an hour and a half in the past, so it’s still giving a younger-than-correct age for the comment.