Why is everyone wringing their hands over the greater coverage given to the Paris vs the Beirut attacks?

It’s completely obvious why people in the Western world notice what happens in Paris more — there are far more cultural connections to Paris than Beirut in the US. Heck, Paris is one of the few overseas cities that many Americans have visited. Many millions of  Americans slept through French class in school. How many took Arabic? I’ve never seen a public school that offered Arabic classes, though there must be a few. But every school nearly offers French.

Do I care what happened in Beirut? Of course. It’s a horrible tragedy. But I have no cultural connection to Beirut. And even though I lived in the Middle East for a while, I don’t have any deep understanding of the region and I don’t speak or read Arabic. I have no context for anything that happens in Beirut nor could I easily obtain this without years of difficult study.

The same is true of most Americans and most Westerners.

The left is always so eager to blame racism for everything to burnish their reputation and gain empathy status points when more pedestrian explanations are this time (and often) more correct.

To put it in computer design terms, Paris is an easily-accessible interface with many affordances; Beirut is a command line interface without tab completion and with no man pages.

That’s really all it is.