Here's one of the things that bothers me about the coverage of the Atlanta Shooting: it's being portrayed as a direct result of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), but I'm bothered by that interpretation. I don't have a determined position on this, but I'd like to hear any other perspectives that might clarify the situation. The shooter targeted massage parlors, as part of his own crusade against sex work. The fact that six of the eight people killed were Asian American women isn't a statistical fluke. Massage parlors are frequently fronts for sex work, and the women employed in them are frequently trafficked from Asia to work there. Given the shooter's stated motivation, it seems he was going after sex workers, rather than AAPI people. The fact that these women were Asian didn't have anything to do with why they died, as a first order cause. If the women working there had been African-American, or White, or Latinx, or any other ethnicity, they would have been just as dead. However, the reason they were there and perceived as sex workers (which we don't even know for certain) was because they were AAPI. This is one of those situations that's a lot more complex than most of the reporting wants to address.
What I Believe, Part One I've had a number of people tell me I should start a blog. I don't know if that's a good reason to actually start a blog, but I do a lot of thinking and it would be useful to nail down some of these thoughts. Inviting comment from others is a good next step. I plan to discuss many topics here, so the first thing I want to do is lay out exactly how I look at the world. First, I took the title for this blog from a series of books that were a great influence on me at a young age. I just wish the original author actually applied some of the ideals from those books in his own life. The most important thing to remember is that we all have some basic structure we apply to the world and what we expect from it. Philosophy calls this worldview or paradigm or Weltanschauung, if you're feeling fancy (it's just worldview in German). It's the basis of any philosophy because it defines what you think the universe looks like and the rule
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