Links - 4th October 2018 (2)

Eyes On The Prizefighters - "A random guy on Twitter with a few thousand followers, Landon Simms, tweeted on Sunday night:
"My grandfather is a 96-yr-old German. When seeing Antifa videos, he shakes his head and says; 'We didn't think it could happen in Germany either. These people (Antifa) act and sound like the NAZI party's Sturmabteilung. Stop them now or you'll regret it.'""

Video: Portland Antifa Beats Bernie Sanders Voter for Carrying an American Flag - "Footage shows Paul Welch, 38, wrestling with masked anti-fascists for possession of the American flag he brought to the counter-demo. They demanded he let go of the flag, calling it a “fascist symbol”... He feared he would be beaten to death but was taken to hospital by onlookers and his head gash stapled back together by doctors"

When the Left Glorifies Violence Against People It Dislikes, Trump Wins - ""Why Civil Resistance Works," a study written by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, found that nonviolent tactics were much more effective than violent tactics... Another study, by Princeton University Assistant Professor of Politics Omar Wasow, found that violent extremist movements in the United States in the 1960s and '70s inspired a conservative backlash that helped elect Richard Nixon to the presidency. Nonviolent protests, on the other hand, did not provoke a backlash... Nothing drives people into the arms of someone like Trump quite like property destruction. Nothing undermines public support for a policy when that policy's backers resort to violence. Trump ran on a platform of restoring law and order to society, and he won."

Latina Antifa to White Antifa: ‘You’re Inherently Racist, Racism Is In Your DNA’ - "“You’re still white,” the woman yells at the man. “You’re still responsible. This is your fault. You’re inherently racist. It’s in your blood. It’s in your DNA.” “I’m seriously telling you to do the work,” she barks. “Punch a Nazi. Stop being performative.” The white Antifa guy squirms about how he’s been “f**king fighting for like three months” and puts himself at risk “all the time,” but only gets laughed at and mocked in return."
I wonder why there aren't more "allies"

Unite the Right rally 2018: Antifa attacks police and journalists in Charlottesville and Washington, DC - "This is not the first time antifa protesters have been violent. In August 2017, about 100 anarchists and antifa members assaulted far-right demonstrators who were marching peacefully in Berkeley, California, with pepper spray, water bottles, and direct physical assault... 'violence can reinforce right-wing views about the left. As Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University and editor of Dissent magazine, told me earlier this year, “[N]on-leftists often see [the left] as a disruptive, lawless force. Violence tends to confirm that view.”'"

Antifa Protest at Portland City Hall Against Police Brutality Turns Violent - "A masked antifa thug wearing a baseball helmet and gray shirt smashed a security guard over the head and face repeatedly with a megaphone"

Former Bay Area professor gets probation for bike-lock attack on pro-Trump demonstrators - "A former community college teacher and anti-fascist activist accepted a plea deal and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor assault for allegedly attacking attendees of a Northern California political rally. Eric Clanton’s attorney Daniel Siegel said the 29-year-old agreed to the plea deal Wednesday in Alameda County Superior Court. He was sentenced to three years of probation. The Alameda County district attorney’s office initially charged Clanton with felonies for hitting several pro-Trump demonstrators on the head with a bicycle lock during a 2017 demonstration in Berkeley. Police seized flags, pamphlets and other paraphernalia associated with anti-fascist movements from his apartment."
If he'd been on the right insted of antifa...

Antifa Activists Are Freaking Out About a Proposed 'Unmasking' Law - "The proposed law would enhance penalties for anyone who interferes with another person's "protected rights" while wearing a disguise... the new and worrying trend here for people like Monaco is the strategy of repurposing a tactic meant to fight racists for the arrest of people on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum"
Apparently laws are meant to fight ideologies you don't like instead of being fairly and equally applied

Antifa compiles list of ICE agents identities and blasts it all over Twitter - "Antifa, a violent, so-called anti-fascist group, tweeted out a list of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ identities... In several video clips, Antifa members are recorded assaulting individuals they described as being right-wing nationalists and alt-right. Department of Homeland Security documents have shown that Antifa has at times posed a greater threat then the so-called white supremacists they combat."

“Antifa Isn’t A Hobby Or A Fad”: A Q&A With Mark Bray - "the violence of fascism and the violence of anti-fascism are only identical if you ignore what fascism means. There is a de-politicization of fascism that sees it as essentially an individual failing committed by a lot of people rather than a force in political history that need to be confronted. So what happens is these confrontations are understood as just individuals committing acts of violence rather than as a political struggle... It is the product of serious political analysis. It’s a reaction to what they perceive to be an imminent threat... Anti-fascists argue that the real enemies of free speech are those who want to murder most of humanity. They don’t see fascism as a difference of opinion that can be argued with, they see it as a political opponent to be organized against... the dangers of organized fascism mitigate the benefits of a free speech absolutism.
Maybe if the "far right" position themselves as fighting the imminent threat of communists, they will be vindicated as the good guys"
If everyone you disagree with is a "fascist", you're justified in shutting them down and using violence against them

Antifa Is Trying to Ignite a Civil War - "no white nationalists were visible in the crowd at Berkeley last weekend. Instead, the “No to Marxism in America” rally was organized by the Oregon-based Patriot Prayer group, which says it supports free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The group’s Japanese-American leader, Joey Gibson, denounced white supremacy last week, saying that if he supported white nationalism, “I’d have to punch myself in the face.” The organizer of the event identifies as a transgender person and also supports President Donald Trump. The person accused Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín of promoting an outright lie that the “No to Marxism in America” rally would promote white supremacy. Antifa thugs and left-wing protesters at Berkeley are falsely equating people who support the Constitution to people who believe the white race is inherently superior. It is an intentional strategy to brand mainstream conservatives, libertarians and other free-speech advocates as racist fascists who are essentially neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. This is the same rationale that left-wing documentary maker Michael Moore used in a recent cnn interview, during which he smeared the “vast majority” of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump as racists... The fact is, groups like Antifa need the threat of white supremacists in order to justify their existence. When they cannot find any Ku Klux Klan rallies to protest against—a common problem, since there are so very few actual members of the kkk in existence—they condemn libertarians and free-speech advocates as fascists"

DHS: Antifa, Not White Supremacists, Posed ‘Greatest Threat To Public Safety’ At Coulter Event

Antifa Rages Against Google’s Dissident - WSJ - "Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest. PDX Women in Tech, a local activist group, proclaimed itself “disheartened and appalled” that we were “engaging in discourse without an opposing viewpoint.” If they’d asked us, they’d have known we invited every tenured and tenure-track professor from the women’s studies department and were rebuffed. Meantime, the administration and student government have organized three counterevents to challenge “the notion that women do not generate ideas”—something Mr. Damore has never claimed. Opponents also attempted to deny our event an audience by hoarding the free tickets and not using them. I used to be an evangelical Christian but became disillusioned with conservative organized religion because of its zealotry and hostility to free thought. When I enrolled at PSU, in one of America’s most secular cities, I thought I was entering a world of open-minded and thoughtful young adults. Instead I encountered a new kind of fundamentalism, many of whose adherents claim to disavow religion... Freethinkers of Portland State find ourselves confronted with a new secular religion, called “intersectionality.” This doctrine conceives of human beings in terms of a good-and-evil binary of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” reducing individuals to a collection of group identities rated within a hierarchy of “marginalization.” Intersectionality’s true believers tend to be far less tolerant than traditional religious believers with their sophisticated apologetics. To intersectionalists, skepticism is an existential threat. To question their beliefs, I’ve been told, constitutes “debating someone’s right to exist.” The title of our event is “We Need to Talk About Diversity.” The proof is that our adversaries are so determined to shut us down."

Occupy Democrats Logic - Hmmm | Facebook - "Twitter accounts not shadow-banned:
Communist Party USA, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Linda Sarsour, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, Louis Farrakhan, Media Matters
Twitter accounts censored & shadow-banned:
Gavin McInnes, Proud Boys, Alex Jones, Ronna McDaniel, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes
Notice a pattern?"

Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello Calls Antifa 'Heroes,' Trump President For Nazis

Major Figures Work To Mainstream Violent Antifa Protesters - "Journalists and major liberal news outlets have compared violent American flag-burning protesters to soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy — all while downplaying the leftists’ violence... Persons associated with the movement have previously stabbed a police horse and beat people with bike locks."

Review: Pride and Promiscuity by Arielle Eckstut - "when Arielle Eckstut brings her ready imagination to conjuring the sex scenes that Austen was not able to provide, she can write as if this were homage rather than desecration"

32 World Flags That Are So Creative, They Must’ve Been Made by Geniuses - "We can see many animals, tools, and even weapons on national flags but the image of a human is only on the flag of Belize."

Here's why you can smell rain, according to science - "rain itself has no scent. But moments before a rain event, an "earthy" smell known as petrichor does permeate the air. People call it musky, fresh — generally pleasant. This smell actually comes from the moistening of the ground"

Social science replication crisis: studies in top journals keep failing to replicate - "Recently, a team of social scientists — spanning psychologists and economists — attempted to replicate 21 findings published in the most prestigious general science journals: Nature and Science. Some of the retested studies have been widely influential in science and in pop culture, like a 2011 paper on whether access to search engines hinders our memories, or whether reading books improves a child’s theory of mind (meaning their ability to understand that other people have thoughts and intentions different from their own)... 13 of the 21 results replicated. But perhaps just as notable: Even among the studies that did pass, the effect sizes (that is, the difference between the experimental group and the control group in the experiment, or the size of the change the experimental manipulation made) decreased by around half, meaning that the original findings likely overstated the power of the experimental manipulation. “Overall, our study shows statistically significant scientific findings should be interpreted rather cautiously until they have been replicated, even if they have been published in the most renowned journals”... A group of scientists took bets on which studies they thought would replicate and which they thought wouldn’t. The bets largely tracked with the final results."