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I don't understand the intention of this comparison. Does this make anything better? Is this considered surprising? Is anybody relieved now because the next vac

I don't understand the intention of this comparison. Does this make anything better? Is this considered surprising? Is anybody relieved now because the next vacation to Europe was about to be cancelled in fear of terror attacks? Is anybody "relieved" because when counting lost human souls Europe is not that badly affected after all (because counting bodies apparently is a thing)? Does this make any of these terror attacks less bad? Echo chamber fueled extremism is on the rise and affects people worldwide. Whoever has not realized how much terrorism is going on worldwide is advised to step out of their local news filter bubble. Wikipedia is maintaining some meticulous lists on terrorists incidents: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents

andrepd 9y ago
The point, as I'm sure you realise, is that the media coverage of attacks in Europe is tremendous, whereas nobody talks about the order of magnitude greater loss of life going on in poorer countries. This is objectively very wrong.
- synicalx 9y ago
  Whether or not it's wrong, I'd say that it's entirely expected unfortunately. It's not particularly surprising if a religious extremist blows himself up in a country with very little capacity to stop him doing so, rampant conflict, and a high rate of such attacks. But when the same thing happens in Germany, a country that has a lot of capacity to stop such attacks, no internal conflict, and very low occurrence of such attacks - that's pretty surprising. News needs to be new and interesting, otherwise people just won't watch it. It's horrible really when you think about it, because it leans towards placing more value on European lives than African lives, but it just seems to be the result of what the public wants to see.
- sintaxi 9y ago
  Europe is a mature civilization. Africa has arguably never established rule of law. That's the difference.
  - grzm 9y ago
    Continents are a little coarse of a unit here, don't you think? You could choose to use them and treat them as an aggregate of some sort, but I think you end up losing a lot of information when you do so.
    - jabgrabdthrow 9y ago
      Would the parent comments point change if you did anything but the equivalent of statistical gerrymandering for the two continents? You are why people voted Trump
      - grzm 9y ago
        I don't think it makes sense to consider the arbitrary geographic landmasses as meaningful cultural units. Do you consider Canada, Mexico, and the US as meaningfully the same? France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Serbia, and Sweden? Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela? Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania? Not to mention Asia and Australia/Oceania. (And then again, how are you going to divide your continents? Wikipedia provides 5 different recommendations.) Even if you're only considering Europe and Africa, are you including Russia part of Europe (as opposed to Asia)? How about Turkey? I don't consider it gerrymandering to consider sovereign nation states differently. We're talking orders of magnitude difference in economies and all varieties of government types.
      - andrepd 9y ago
        Yes it would. It's not statistical gerrymandering. It's categorising by continent that is a gross oversimplification. Just notice you're lumping, say, South Africa and Niger in the same category. This alone should tell you how bad that categorization is. >You are why people voted Trump Wat
  - pizza 9y ago
    regardless of the normativity of matter-of-factness in today's discourse this comment goes beyond the pale.. If this praise for Europe's maturity is representative of its maturity, then it isn't much.
- BigJono 9y ago
  Why? If you're an average citizen in the US, Europe, Australia etc, then why wouldn't you care more about attacks in other western countries than you would about attacks in Africa? The majority of people in western countries aren't planning a trip to Somalia or Syria any time soon. They don't look for jobs there, they don't have family there, and by and large they have very little reason to care about anything that happens there, as long as it doesn't affect them globally. It shouldn't be any surprise that "major terrorist attack in a country I holidayed/interviewed/was born in" is a much bigger story to most people than "major terrorist attack in Africa". Is it not the news's job to report the news that's most relevant to the audience? I'm not saying that European terrorist attacks should be plastered all over the front page and on the TV 24/7 (on the contrary, I too think it's overhyped), but I also don't think African terrorist attacks should be, for the same reason I don't particularly want the weather forecast for Nairobi in my news. It's not that I have any particular opinions about it, of course I want them to have nice weather and no bushfires or blizzards or hurricanes or anything, but at the end of the day it's just not relevant to me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    >> If you're an average citizen in the US, Europe, Australia etc, then why wouldn't you care more about attacks in other western countries than you would about attacks in Africa? Because many more people are killed in attacks in Africa?
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    My connection to France and really any European country is about the same as my connection to the countries in Africa. Why do you assume average Americans have some inherent connection that is much stronger than to other continents?
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      You can read Reuters, CNN and BBC right? Of the three mentioned only Reuters sometimes covers situation in Africa and certain parts of Asia. So if you read or watch or listen to any of the latter two you are likely at least somewhat informed about Europe and China, though in a slanted way.
- mc32 9y ago
  I don't think it's that different from your local news reporting about local crime versus crime in other cities or even states. To get something reported from another state it would have to be notable. I think that's the same happening here. People can only be concerned about the periphery of their lives so much. Likewise, those people in far away places likely don't hear much reportage about incidents happening relatively close to them. It's not that they are callous or don't care. They just have more immediate things to think about.
- everdev 9y ago
  Maybe "local" news sells and US/Europe is considered more local to their audience than Asia/Africa. I wonder if the Asian/African press is covering Asian/African terrorism more than they cover terrorism in the West.
- burntrelish1273 9y ago
  I respect Democracy Now for covering recent events in Mogadishu. It would be more egalitarian if such news were handled with equal importance, regardless of place on the planet, because we are global citizens of the human race first and the world can, and should be, as "flat" as possible. EDIT: here's an interative map of on-going genocides: https://www.click2map.com/v2/H3llo/Genocide_Prevention https://www.click2map.com/v2/H3llo/Genocide_Prevention
- chongli 9y ago
  Objectivity has nothing to do with it. The statistics are presented in an infographic designed to maximize emotional impact. This is an appeal to pathos. For many people like myself, arguments formed this way are seen as psychologically manipulative and offensive. This report is not treating me as an autonomous person able to form my own conclusions, it is attempting to recruit me into a political position with cheap tactics.
- chongli 9y ago
  Objectivity has nothing to do with it. The statistics are presented in an infographic designed to maximize emotional impact. This is an appeal to pathos. For many people like myself, arguments formed this way are seen as psychologically manipulative and offensive. This report is not treating me as an autonomous person able to form my own conclusions, it is attempting to recruit me into a political position with cheap tactics. It is treating me as a means to an end, just as so many soldiers and miners are. The solution to such a problem is to form connections and build bridges between people so that we can come to see one another as individuals to be valued and protected, not recruited into political campaigns in order to attack others.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pizza 9y ago
    I wanna be civil but I couldn't read your comment without sharing my (strong) opinion that instead the opposite of every one of the listed recognitions and conclusions is the more accurate interpretation about this article. - is the imagery really a stylistic choice made in bad faith, if people are more likely to be worse at visualizing the differences in size from numbers than vice versa? - pathos is mutually exclusive from logos? - or that the argument that African victims received less news attention per corpse is a pathos based appeal and not logos..? (or that the suggestion it is not a logos based appeal may be, upon further inspection, a pathos based appeal itself..) - having felt manipulated by receiving accurate info that, nevertheless, made you better informed for having heard it, despite suspicions that there are ulterior motives for being reminded of dead Africans, too? if you wouldn't mind, I'd at least want to see what you thought of that, or perhaps what a better way to communicate the information would have been
    - chongli 9y ago
      sharing my (strong) opinion Share away! Strong opinions, held loosely, is my m.o. What bothers me is the connotation that I, as a Westerner, do not care about Africans for some reason and a further connotation that the reason is racism (using people icons on the infographic). I care a great deal about Africans! It is infuriating how many people in Africa die due to violence, disease, and famine from causes that can be directly linked to Western activities. I get why they did it, mind you. There's plenty of research to show that presenting the facts in a straightforward and neutral manner is less effective at swaying people. I just don't appreciate the use of psychological tricks when they're used against me. I'm reminded of a brief example by Slavoj Žižek: “Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? ‘I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.’ A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: ‘You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.’ Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say ‘I have a choice, I will not do it.’ I promise your father will say ‘What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how much she loves you? How could you do this to her?’” — Slavoj Žižek, “The Superego and the Act” (August 1999) I would rather be forced to help (by tax-funded foreign aid) than be manipulated into wanting to help via guilt trip. Otherwise I'll make my own decision to help in the way I deem appropriate for my situation and means.
- DanielleMolloy 9y ago
  I realize (and it is good that you are sure about this). Lack of objectivity about loss of life is one point I made and I believe we actually agree. At the same time as the Charlie Hebdo attacks there was this Boko Haram attack on Baga, leaving around 2000 innocent villagers dead. News media worldwide treated this as if a bunch of flies died. Ask around educated friends how many terror attacks there were worldwide during the most recent years. Most of them are completely unaware of the amount of extremism-fueled terror, because there are only news reports of attacks on Western nations reaching international media.

andrepd 9y ago

The point, as I'm sure you realise, is that the media coverage of attacks in Europe is tremendous, whereas nobody talks about the order of magnitude greater loss of life going on in poorer countries. This is objectively very wrong.

synicalx 9y ago
Whether or not it's wrong, I'd say that it's entirely expected unfortunately. It's not particularly surprising if a religious extremist blows himself up in a country with very little capacity to stop him doing so, rampant conflict, and a high rate of such attacks. But when the same thing happens in Germany, a country that has a lot of capacity to stop such attacks, no internal conflict, and very low occurrence of such attacks - that's pretty surprising. News needs to be new and interesting, otherwise people just won't watch it. It's horrible really when you think about it, because it leans towards placing more value on European lives than African lives, but it just seems to be the result of what the public wants to see.
sintaxi 9y ago
Europe is a mature civilization. Africa has arguably never established rule of law. That's the difference.
- grzm 9y ago
  Continents are a little coarse of a unit here, don't you think? You could choose to use them and treat them as an aggregate of some sort, but I think you end up losing a lot of information when you do so.
  - jabgrabdthrow 9y ago
    Would the parent comments point change if you did anything but the equivalent of statistical gerrymandering for the two continents? You are why people voted Trump
    - grzm 9y ago
      I don't think it makes sense to consider the arbitrary geographic landmasses as meaningful cultural units. Do you consider Canada, Mexico, and the US as meaningfully the same? France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Serbia, and Sweden? Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela? Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania? Not to mention Asia and Australia/Oceania. (And then again, how are you going to divide your continents? Wikipedia provides 5 different recommendations.) Even if you're only considering Europe and Africa, are you including Russia part of Europe (as opposed to Asia)? How about Turkey? I don't consider it gerrymandering to consider sovereign nation states differently. We're talking orders of magnitude difference in economies and all varieties of government types.
    - andrepd 9y ago
      Yes it would. It's not statistical gerrymandering. It's categorising by continent that is a gross oversimplification. Just notice you're lumping, say, South Africa and Niger in the same category. This alone should tell you how bad that categorization is. >You are why people voted Trump Wat
- pizza 9y ago
  regardless of the normativity of matter-of-factness in today's discourse this comment goes beyond the pale.. If this praise for Europe's maturity is representative of its maturity, then it isn't much.
BigJono 9y ago
Why? If you're an average citizen in the US, Europe, Australia etc, then why wouldn't you care more about attacks in other western countries than you would about attacks in Africa? The majority of people in western countries aren't planning a trip to Somalia or Syria any time soon. They don't look for jobs there, they don't have family there, and by and large they have very little reason to care about anything that happens there, as long as it doesn't affect them globally. It shouldn't be any surprise that "major terrorist attack in a country I holidayed/interviewed/was born in" is a much bigger story to most people than "major terrorist attack in Africa". Is it not the news's job to report the news that's most relevant to the audience? I'm not saying that European terrorist attacks should be plastered all over the front page and on the TV 24/7 (on the contrary, I too think it's overhyped), but I also don't think African terrorist attacks should be, for the same reason I don't particularly want the weather forecast for Nairobi in my news. It's not that I have any particular opinions about it, of course I want them to have nice weather and no bushfires or blizzards or hurricanes or anything, but at the end of the day it's just not relevant to me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  >> If you're an average citizen in the US, Europe, Australia etc, then why wouldn't you care more about attacks in other western countries than you would about attacks in Africa? Because many more people are killed in attacks in Africa?
- Larrikin 9y ago
  My connection to France and really any European country is about the same as my connection to the countries in Africa. Why do you assume average Americans have some inherent connection that is much stronger than to other continents?
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    You can read Reuters, CNN and BBC right? Of the three mentioned only Reuters sometimes covers situation in Africa and certain parts of Asia. So if you read or watch or listen to any of the latter two you are likely at least somewhat informed about Europe and China, though in a slanted way.
mc32 9y ago
I don't think it's that different from your local news reporting about local crime versus crime in other cities or even states. To get something reported from another state it would have to be notable. I think that's the same happening here. People can only be concerned about the periphery of their lives so much. Likewise, those people in far away places likely don't hear much reportage about incidents happening relatively close to them. It's not that they are callous or don't care. They just have more immediate things to think about.
everdev 9y ago
Maybe "local" news sells and US/Europe is considered more local to their audience than Asia/Africa. I wonder if the Asian/African press is covering Asian/African terrorism more than they cover terrorism in the West.
burntrelish1273 9y ago
I respect Democracy Now for covering recent events in Mogadishu. It would be more egalitarian if such news were handled with equal importance, regardless of place on the planet, because we are global citizens of the human race first and the world can, and should be, as "flat" as possible. EDIT: here's an interative map of on-going genocides: https://www.click2map.com/v2/H3llo/Genocide_Prevention https://www.click2map.com/v2/H3llo/Genocide_Prevention
chongli 9y ago
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. The statistics are presented in an infographic designed to maximize emotional impact. This is an appeal to pathos. For many people like myself, arguments formed this way are seen as psychologically manipulative and offensive. This report is not treating me as an autonomous person able to form my own conclusions, it is attempting to recruit me into a political position with cheap tactics.
chongli 9y ago
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. The statistics are presented in an infographic designed to maximize emotional impact. This is an appeal to pathos. For many people like myself, arguments formed this way are seen as psychologically manipulative and offensive. This report is not treating me as an autonomous person able to form my own conclusions, it is attempting to recruit me into a political position with cheap tactics. It is treating me as a means to an end, just as so many soldiers and miners are. The solution to such a problem is to form connections and build bridges between people so that we can come to see one another as individuals to be valued and protected, not recruited into political campaigns in order to attack others.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pizza 9y ago
  I wanna be civil but I couldn't read your comment without sharing my (strong) opinion that instead the opposite of every one of the listed recognitions and conclusions is the more accurate interpretation about this article. - is the imagery really a stylistic choice made in bad faith, if people are more likely to be worse at visualizing the differences in size from numbers than vice versa? - pathos is mutually exclusive from logos? - or that the argument that African victims received less news attention per corpse is a pathos based appeal and not logos..? (or that the suggestion it is not a logos based appeal may be, upon further inspection, a pathos based appeal itself..) - having felt manipulated by receiving accurate info that, nevertheless, made you better informed for having heard it, despite suspicions that there are ulterior motives for being reminded of dead Africans, too? if you wouldn't mind, I'd at least want to see what you thought of that, or perhaps what a better way to communicate the information would have been
  - chongli 9y ago
    sharing my (strong) opinion Share away! Strong opinions, held loosely, is my m.o. What bothers me is the connotation that I, as a Westerner, do not care about Africans for some reason and a further connotation that the reason is racism (using people icons on the infographic). I care a great deal about Africans! It is infuriating how many people in Africa die due to violence, disease, and famine from causes that can be directly linked to Western activities. I get why they did it, mind you. There's plenty of research to show that presenting the facts in a straightforward and neutral manner is less effective at swaying people. I just don't appreciate the use of psychological tricks when they're used against me. I'm reminded of a brief example by Slavoj Žižek: “Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? ‘I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.’ A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: ‘You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.’ Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say ‘I have a choice, I will not do it.’ I promise your father will say ‘What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how much she loves you? How could you do this to her?’” — Slavoj Žižek, “The Superego and the Act” (August 1999) I would rather be forced to help (by tax-funded foreign aid) than be manipulated into wanting to help via guilt trip. Otherwise I'll make my own decision to help in the way I deem appropriate for my situation and means.
DanielleMolloy 9y ago
I realize (and it is good that you are sure about this). Lack of objectivity about loss of life is one point I made and I believe we actually agree. At the same time as the Charlie Hebdo attacks there was this Boko Haram attack on Baga, leaving around 2000 innocent villagers dead. News media worldwide treated this as if a bunch of flies died. Ask around educated friends how many terror attacks there were worldwide during the most recent years. Most of them are completely unaware of the amount of extremism-fueled terror, because there are only news reports of attacks on Western nations reaching international media.