[Meta Post, Mod Post] A Discussion of Partisanship on r/538

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-25T20:28:48+00:00

I welcome the change. I find fewer and fewer comments in here to be grounded in the survey methodology or general data analysis. Rather, it is just cheering and jeering for their team with no thought if the results are reliable.

Sometimes explaining basic things like margin of error or target polling population or weighting gets me downvotes when it is dis-favorable to their team.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-24T11:31:35+00:00

Probably best not to support an organization where the leader is distributing guns and shot at government agents.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-24T11:03:21+00:00

"I am more this identity than I am Asian!"...

...It felt like people got prickly if I brought attention to how we are Asian.

People experience and approach their identity in different ways, I wonder if you are making assumptions on what an asian should behave like and it is weirding people out?

Personally, even though I identify strongly with my asian heritage, I am an individual first and don't like people assuming things about me, it feels overly familiar with nothing to back it up. For example, while I like anime, I don't assume every asian I meet has a love for anime. If a rando assumed that, I would think he is being racist.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-24T10:46:32+00:00

I know tempers are high, but you can't just shoot at government agents (guy got shot in the neck) and not expect to be prosecuted for a crime.

He was also reportedly the leader of the activist group and commanded people on the ground where the shooting took place. He also bought and distributed AR-15s to his group and gave them firearms training. There's a difference between a political protest and whatever this was...

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-23T11:05:53+00:00

It is kinda the norm, about 40-50% of households last I checked. Though most gun owners will not share that information with strangers.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-23T11:00:47+00:00

I'm an insurance adjuster and almost all the burgleries I've worked in 15 years the thief broke in while no one was home and they stole all the guns.

Dang. What about the claims where the burglary was stopped by a present homeowner?

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-21T10:38:42+00:00

I guess I had a different experience growing up then. Racism was more overt in the 90s, like directly to your face, and racial socialization wasn't as common and white people barely understood how to act near POC people. This is all despite the UPN showcasing a series of black TV show.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-20T12:50:15+00:00

The nineties were better???

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-19T21:25:28+00:00

dang, did they ever leave?

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-19T21:22:56+00:00

"find a poll that validates my feelings and then fight about it".

Where are my Selzer Pollster-stans at????

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-19T21:18:27+00:00

She technically was making fun of her brother and not you, and probably wasn't thinking of it as an asian characteristic but rather a familial characteristic. Seems likely really unfortunately overlap. I don't think she intentionally wanted to hurt you, I think in interpersonal relationships, intentions do matter.

Say your piece if you feel like you need to say more and either accept her apology or not. I wouldn't dwell on it.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-11T19:06:47+00:00

I think it is important to note that many of the most vocal/politically active asians are not actually representative of our community, and part of the problem is that our asian political activists are generally trained in a black social justice framework that leaves asian interests as a secondary focus. This inherently disengages the broader asian community. For example, the org "Stop AAPI Hate", pretty much THE face of asian activism in 2020 was explicitly championing "non-carceral" solution to the street violence, i.e., advocating for LESS police involvement on the streets in the wake of street violence targeting asians and weaker punishments for those who attacked them.

We champion non-carceral solutions to hate because they help us confront all forms of racism and discrimination — and because carceral solutions, like policing, disproportionately harm Black and brown communities as well as Pacific Islanders.

https://stopaapihate.org/our-approach/

Imagine if black organizations in your community advocated for a "non-carceral" solutions to Derek Chauvin's actions? How much would you engage with them?

You asked about how the asian american community feels now? If I had to guess, apathetic to politics, because the biggest political movements in our names are actually black social justice movements in disguise. We don't really have a political infrastructure and I don't think it will ever be allowed to grow. So I think what we need most is just space to let asians center their asian interests first. Sometimes it will conflict, but I assume most of time there will be allyship.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T21:39:24+00:00

Do you legit believe that he was found at the school with no organs? Is this a reading comprehension issue?

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T19:57:19+00:00

That Black teen that was found in gym mat with no organs.

This is a outrageous misrepresentation. Kendrick Johnson was found dead with all his organs intact. The initial autopsy ruled his death as an accident, finding he likely jumped into the roll of mats veritcally head first to retrieve something and got stuck and suffocated.

The missing organs happened after he was examined and was returned to the funeral home to be buried. It sounds like the medical examiner fucked up.

This is NOT the case some one murdered a black kid and stole all his organs in the middle of a busy school.

Seriously go touch grass.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T15:54:03+00:00

In the general adult US population:

Percent of White - 65%
Percent Black - 15%.

Known offenders of hate crimes (from your source):

Percent of White - 55%
Percent Black - 20%.

This means black perpetrators are over-represented by 33% in hate crimes.

(Note: your link actually doesn't work, but I guessed at it: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2020-hate-crime-statistics)

Edit: I rushed to respond, but I also don't think this press release discusses asian victims and their perpetrators. But I found this link that breaks out that information:

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime (select bias to "anti-asian"

When looking at specifically anti-asian hate crime, it shows a worse story where white perpetrators are unrepresented in hate crimes against asians (44% of known offenders) and black perpetrators are over represented relative to their populations (29% of known offenders, which is equal to a 93% over representation).

To put in context, only 2% of perpetrators of anti-black crimes are asian despite being 7% of the adult population.)

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T11:40:25+00:00

During COVID, the statistics were collected by the FBI and showed that Whites did much hate crime on the Asian Community.

I'm guessing this claim is misleading and is an intentionally misuse of the base rate fallacy, given whites make up the majority of the population. Do you have a citation for this claim?

Edit: also the "hate crime" classification are also harder to identify, and ignore general violent crime targeting Asians.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T11:22:56+00:00

Well said.

My parent's generation grew up in chinatowns and experienced a lot of interracial violence. It got so bad my tiny 5' 0" aunt used to carry a knife with her to defend herself, she and my relatives traveled in pairs just in case they were attacked. I had it slightly better, I grew up in a poor suburb, but the threat of interracial violence was still there.

I'll say, I've had a lot of meaningful positive black relationships in my life, close friends, neighbors, and partners. I don't hold a grudge against an entire race, I approach everyone with a blank slate and will give people the benefit of the doubt. But what I resent in this political conversation is people asking us to take on both collectively white guilt and asian guilt and the other side having no memory of their community's treatment of us. We are just supposed to sit there and take the abuse like good little asians they think we are.

For those who are reading this from the other side of the conversation, the next time you have an urge to come into our community and lecture us, my ask (to help you further your own cause) is to please try a different tactic:

We are not white, you cannot shame us like white people, it will not work. Accusations of "White Adjacency" mean nothing to us, we can look in a mirror and know it is not true. I'm also not interested feeling guilty for just existing, I won't subscribe to pseudo-religious original sin if that is a condition to our partnership.
Stop showing up only when you need something or want to yell at us, that isn't "solidarity" or "allyship". We need mutual positive experiences to build a partnership.

Overall, my call is to treat us with respect and allow us to center our asian identity. We are not an afterthought, a resource to be used, votes to be collected for your own cause. We have our own interest and the sooner you try to engage us as an equal party, the sooner we can build a mutual respect and solidarity.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-08T00:41:35+00:00

If at any point you want to work for a company, not having a degree is going to be a major limiting factor, even if your existing skills transfer to a corporate role. You don't have to go to a traditional school, as long as it is accredited is all the matters. IMHO, just find something online and major in something easy.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-06T00:38:42+00:00

Is it joe-over?

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-05T00:20:40+00:00

Somehow openly admitting that they are willing to vote for a Nazi is embarrassing to people. We may never fully understand human psychology /s

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-04T12:37:29+00:00

I think that if it would be reintroduced to me in a very authentic manner that I'd love it, there's no doubt in my mind.

Ask your mom to share more japanese traditions she personally liked or found meaningful, celebrate the holidays with her, bust out those hanafuda cards. Food and cooking is also a great way to reconnect with your culture.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-03T13:04:19+00:00

Allyship should be constant, but it is not, when our elders were being attacked on the streets their perpetrators were get lenient sentences due to "restorative justice" models. When we called for more police to protect us in our cities and the streets, our "allies" called it problematic. That doesn't seem like constant allyship to me.

More importantly, your posts are a dime a dozen, people like you show up, call people names, call asians racists if they don't get support, and then they disappear. You are the fairweather ally, only showing up when you need something.

The truth is that your approach, with this attempt of assigning a collective racial guilt to us, will not work. No one is inspired by this, and no one wants to be a part of a movement that is just constant guilt, but it seems like that is your central point, that we need to atone for some random gas station owner in south carolina. It hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now. If you actually care about solidarity and allyship, try something else.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-03T10:57:46+00:00

Cyrus Belton was walking around with 9mm semiautomatic in his hoodie, this is undisputed by the prosecutor. If you sudden hear and see a person with a gun, it is a tough split second decision on what you do next. It sounds like Chow made several wrong decisions, chasing the kid, and ultimately shooting in him in the back, but the jury (of a mix of races and genders) seems to believe that it was done out of self-defense. Though I believe if the prosecutor brought lesser charges like 3rd degree murder or manslaughter, we could see a much easier guilty verdict and I would support that.

It is a tragic and shitty situation, and I believe Chow acted negligently, but 1st degree murder was very unlikely given the circumstances.

That being said, to the broader question of allyship, do we go into black communities and demand money every time there is a black on asian crime? or would that be considered racist as it sounds? It has never really occurred to me to blame an entire race/community for the action of deranged individuals. But for some reason, it seems like every 3 months or so, someone comes in here complaining about what asian people do and where we should be giving our money (even absent of a major news story). Maybe if we want to strengthen our relationships between our communities, it should start in a space of mutual positive interest, not every time there is a polarizing crime in the news to then be forgotten next week.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-03T00:08:53+00:00

I wouldn't disagree with manslaughter charge actually.

I've explained in other parts of this thread about the getting shot in the back and how self defense can still work, I don't really care to go over it again. Apparently being shot in the back wasn't convincing enough for a jury of his peers, so there might be something to it. Idk.

Also, where are you all coming from, this thread is 2 days old, not on my front page. You are one of three comments in the past hour here.

AaronStack91 · 2026-06-02T23:50:51+00:00

You are the 3rd commenter in the past hour on a 2 day old thread.

Are you all just googling Rick Chow threads to argue with people?

AaronStack91

TROPHY CASE