Is We Smarter Than Me When the Commenters are Racists?

Are Newspaper comments worthless? They are when the articles are about big city crime.

Let’s look at two pieces from Thursday. The Chicago Tribune reported on a morning robbery at a Streeterville (I was afraid that name was being phased out, it has a great history) movie theater. At the Philadelphia Daily News, Will Bunch’s Memo to media, candidates: That UFO in Philly was a bullet pointed the “obliviousness” of the Tim Russert, Brian Williams and the Democratic Presidential candidates to what was occurring around them in West Philly.

[Y]ou’d think it would be a big deal that a convicted murderer who’d just shot up four people, including a Philadelphia police officer, had been running around almost literally a stone’s throw from a room where seven major Democratic candidates for president were in the same stage, surrounded by numerous VIPs. But in one of the saddest example of life-as-metaphor that I’ve seen in a long time, the presidential wannabees and their bizarre media inquisitors, Tim Russert and Brian Williams, stayed inside their hermetically sealed bubble of a so-called democratic (small “d”) process, completely to oblivious that the street outside Drexel University was running red with the blood of a great American city.

Each article generated a couple of dozen comments, the Tribune’s are housed at Topix. There may be a couple of worthwhile observations among them, but what stands out is the racism– and the attempst by some valiant souls to counteract the jerks through rational argument. One could argue that the high ratio of racist-to-worthwhile comments is itself informative and reflective of the society in which we live, but there are better ways to see America’s ugly side. And there are better ways to spend one’s time than reading the comments on newspaper websites.

Sergi Xavier Martin’s Youtube-won Infamy

The big news in Ecuador, besides the case of Miller Bolanos and the banning of Halloween, is the racist attack of a teen Ecuadorean immigrant on a train in Barcelona by 21 year old Sergi Xavier Martin. Eduardo Avila provides quite a summary of the Ecuadorean blog reaction.

The attack would have garnered little attention had it not been captured on security videol it was only a matter of time until it reached that locus of world conversation, YouTube.

One of the Spanish reporters referred to Marin as having a “skin aesthetic,” a verdict derived, I suppose, from his short hair, tight clothes, and demonstrated affection for violence. It always rankles to hear all skinheads thrown in with jerks like Marin: I guess the Spanish reporter has yet to see Shane Meadows’ This is England about white supremacists’ co-optation of skinhead culture.

For that matter, she likely never saw David Fuentes and his multi-racial, one-love ska-rocksteady LA-based band Hepcat. Fuentes died last month at the age of 35; fellow bandmake Greg Narvas started a touching tribute blog, Dave Remembered.