“Bloody Bloo”:
There is nothing ‘libertarian’ about your desire to keep this or any community ignorant of what kind of criminal to look out for. You’re not helping a community to stay safe and avert or deter crime by wanting to hide from people a fact about a dangerous attack upon one of its members. You’re promoting self-censorship, claiming that yours is the popular view, and telling people that they must conform with a claimed but unidentified “majority” so long as what your ‘majority’ thinks helps you to suppress the fact that these kids were brown. Discussing is about informing, not erasing information. You’re also patronizing brown people by presuming that they don’t need to know what bad kids in their community have done. You’re dismissing their sense of responsibility towards who their children might be hanging out with. To me, thinking that brown people shouldn’t know something that must concern them as adults and parents is elitist and racist.
“You have to be more careful in how you depict” something, you say. I disagree. You can’t “depict” or spin the truth, scratch out some of it or embellish it. Truth can only be stated. Matt’s not leaving out the fact of colour makes his warning useful because it’s specific. To protect ourselves, we need to know where, who, when, why and how. If the culprit had been an American, would you have left that identifier out so as not make Americans look bad? What if 3 separate attacks had been perpetrated by Americans in Recoleta in the past 2 weeks? Matt has every right to fully describe the attack upon him. Had he been able to snap the thieves’ picture and posted it here, would you also want that photo self-censored because the kid-thieves were visibly brown? Had the attackers been white portenos, would posting their photos be discriminatory against whites? If not, why not? I’d love to know your answer. If yes, tell us what is wrong with letting the community see photos of criminals who may attack also others of us.
Verbal warnings that give a full true picture are just a form of informing like photos. I think it’s utterly right-wing to suggest that some info about a criminal should be given only to the police. You won’t change the underlying causes of street theft as you know them by withholding from the public, our society, the appearance of someone who has attacked one of us in the street. An uninformed society cannot change anything. Your proposals all support mind control, not libertarianism. As you say, this is an ‘open’ community. Help us to keep it that way.
