- If I write nothing I get somewhere between 500 and 1000 views a day on this publication from residual traffic on old articles. But on August 4th, I got 2,736. On August 5th, I got 15,029. I must have really written a balling article on August 3rd.
But I didn’t write a thing.
What did happen on August 3rd? Someone killed 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso.
My August 4th article must have been pretty incredible, though, right? The day after the shooting? 15,000 hits say it had to be a great one.
Didn’t write a thing.
Someone else killed ten more people in Dayton.
But they both used guns, and those shots are like the clapper in a giant, insane, social media bell. Massive arguments about gun control reverberate through Twitter and Facebook, fed by the media, as people constantly link articles that they find useful in their anxiety driven yelling fits. Every link drives a click and every click earns some media behemoth a third of a penny, give or take. And when I say they’re ringing the bell, I’m not joking. Let’s talk about bells.
What a shockingly dishonest argument. He starts with the premise that news media is remunerated for clicks about gun violence without pointing out that the news media is remunerated for clicks, period. Then he argues that humans should be discouraged from assigning a magnitude to this one particular thing, as if the only two things humans rank are video games and mass shootings. Then he veers into a tragedy of the commons within the attention economy as if to argue that virtuous journalists would ignore gun shootings but then they'd miss out on those sweet sweet gore clicks because less-virtuous journalists won't. You can really see where he's coming from, however, if you read his linked articles. No, you disingenuous weasel-wording shitstain, the "argumentative rabbit hole" is the crux of the issue: A 65-year-old male gun owner committing suicide IS NOT EQUIVALENT To a child being shot at school. Hey how 'bout this one: Look you fatuous asshole, pissed off people shooting the ones they love is a tragedy but it's nothing compared to your mom getting capped picking up a loaf of bread. This one is just marvelous: I own an AR-15 because there's a 1 in 3 chance of the country descending into chaos in my lifetime, look I mathed it Just as an aside, buddy of mine was shooting a movie in Thailand when tanks literally rolled through the frame. They cut, waited half an hour, and resumed filming. I don't think anybody is celebrating Myanmar right now but I also don't think some jackass with an AR-15 is going to do more than get himself capped by the dudes in APCs. And in the meantime, he's providing cover for the Adam Lanzas of the world. So i don't know what your point was? But this is a heapin' helpin' o'whatabout bullshit that nobody should humor. Yaay him. He's got a pathetic little substack that made him a hundred bucks off of school shootings. I hope he enjoys paying $40 a mag for his 5.56 penis pills.First let us presume death is bad. Since this is a story arc about guns, let us presume that it’s specifically bad when people get shot by a gun. Let us further presume that it’s bad when anyone gets shot, so we don’t get stranded in an argumentative rabbit hole weighing the relative merits of one life versus another. These are presumptions on which that the left and right generally agree.
R^2 = 0.0677. But how about in Europe, where everything is perfect and there aren’t any guns? Those guys and gals over there have totally got this thing figured out, or so I’m led to believe.
Was trying to pinpoint why I felt so weird and kind of gross after reading that article and I think you nailed it. There’s a lot of straw men and whattabouts going on in there. I do appreciate the author illustrating the point that one can make math say whatever they want it to say, and if you’re not, you know, you or devac or am_U, you don’t have much reason to believe otherwise. That’s a problem.