The truth behind America’s most famous gay-hate murder - "The horrific killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is widely seen as one of the worst anti-gay hate crimes in American history. Matthew was beaten by two assailants, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They pistol whipped him with a gun then tied him to a fence in freezing conditions and set fire to him before leaving him to die. The attack became a cause célèbre: it precipitated a national backlash against hyper-macho culture and tacit tolerance of homophobia. As a result of Matthew’s death, many good things have happened for the gay community... A new twist came last year with the publication of another book, this one by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, who has spent 13 years interviewing more than 100 people with a connection to the case. His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth, a drug that was flooding Denver and the surrounding area at the time of Matthew’s death. This new theory has, understandably, caused a lot of anger. Jimenez has faced a barrage of criticism since the publication of his book and has had readings to promote the book boycotted. Jimenez claims, however, that many of his critics have not actually read it. The Advocate, America’s leading LGBT magazine, published a piece last year entitled: “Why I’m Not Reading the ‘Trutherism’ About Matt Shepard”. Jimenez has been accused of being a revisionist, a criticism usually reserved for extreme rightwing ideologues that deny the Holocaust, and labelled a homophobe. “People object to the idea of the book, rather than what is in the book,” says Jimenez. “The anger directed at me has been pretty extreme.”... He’s an award-winning writer and TV producer, and visited Laramie shortly after the murder to gather material for a screenplay about the case. When he started he was convinced that Matthew died at the hands of homophobes, but he soon discovered that Matthew’s tragedy began long before the night he was killed. Jimenez found that Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he’d had occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his death. “This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement,” says Jimenez. “Which is a big part of the reason my book has been so trashed.” Matthew’s drug abuse, and the fact that he knew one of his killers prior to the attack, was never explored in court. Neither was the rumour that the killers knew that he had access to a shipment of crystal meth with a street value of $10,000 which they wanted to steal... Stephen Jimenez is an award-winning journalist and gay man. So why has he put such time and effort into attempting to prove that Matthew’s murder was not a hate crime, especially as it has seen him accused of being an ally to the rightwing Christian fundamentalists who deny the reality of homophobia? “The view was that homophobic rednecks walked into a bar and saw an obviously gay man with money and targeted him and beat him to death for that reason,” says Jimenez. “But that isn’t what happened. Nothing in this book takes away from the iniquity and brutality of the crime or the culpability of his murderers, but we owe Matthew and other young men like him the truth. “Aaron and Matthew had a friendship. They’d been involved sexually, they bought and sold drugs from each other. That complicates the original story of two strangers walking into a bar and targeting Matthew – someone they did not know – because he was gay.” Although McKinney has never acknowledged that he knew Matthew, Jimenez found a dozen sources that had seen them together... JoAnn Wypijewski, an author and former senior editor at the Nation, was one of the many journalists who came to Laramie after the news of Matthew’s attack. She was there for Harper’s Magazine and was the only journalist to suggest early on that methamphetamine may have played a role in Matthew’s death. “The case was used to highlight the fact of violence against gay people,” Wypijewski told me. “Hate-crime legislation under Clinton included provisions for race and enhanced penalties for crimes against women – these were used as sweeteners [to those on the Left]. They were like the identity politics of criminal law. This is what gave some other groups the idea that hate-crime legislation was a good thing.” Wypijewski thinks the reason some sections of the gay community are so angry about the Jimenez book is obvious: “Jimenez has taken away their angel, and there is the reflexive sense that as a community its suffering was being at last recognised. The people shaping the news require a very simple story – they have to be angels and villains.” John Stoltenberg is a gay-rights activist who lived with the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin until her death in 2005... [He] has also blogged positively about The Book of Matt. “Keeping Matthew as the poster boy of gay-hate crime and ignoring the full tragedy of his story has been the agenda of many gay-movement leaders,” he says. “Ignoring the tragedies of Matthew’s life prior to his murder will do nothing to help other young men in our community who are sold for sex, ravaged by drugs, and generally exploited. They will remain invisible and lost.” Ted Henson is a former lover and long-term friend of Matthew’s... Henson told me he believes that The Book of Matt is “nothing more than the truth” and that he was “never certain” that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime. “I don’t know why there is so much hostility towards Steve,” he told me. “Matt would not have wanted to be seen as a martyr, but would have wanted the truth to come out.” Other Laramie residents believe there is another form of prejudice at work in the way Matthew’s story has been told. One that concerns the oft-repeated notion that Wyoming is full of gay-hating bigots. Ray Hageman reported on the case for Wyoming radio in 1998 and was always sceptical of the media construction of the story. “National media couldn’t resist a narrative that fits with its preconceived notions about people in rural western states”... “The folks in Laramie just had to take it, because a fellow who happened to be gay was murdered in their town.”... the Casper Star Tribune, the local paper in Matthew’s home town, published an editorial claiming that an award Jimenez had recently received for his book “deserves rejection”, saying: “From the beginning there have been those who want to ignore the sadistic homophobic motives of Shepard’s attackers and instead insist the matter was a drug deal gone bad.”... the mystery remains – not so much why Matthew died, but why the gay community, after almost five decades of campaigning for equal rights, relies so fundamentally on the image of the perfect martyr to represent the cause."
From 2014. When your gospel gets questioned, you get upset
Ai Weiwei: In Many Ways, The United States Is Already An Authoritarian State - ""In many ways, you are already in the authoritarian state. You just don't know it," he said. "Certainly the United States, with today's condition, you can easily have an authoritarian." He also said President Trump, whose tweets he compared to nightly messages from Mao Zedong, was not an authoritarian. He said: "If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself." "Many things happening today in U.S. can be compared to the Cultural Revolution in China," he explained. "Like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness. That is very dangerous.""
Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds - "In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, the distinction between “socialism” and “liberalism” gradually came to seem less necessary. Instead, the connotation of “socialism” shifted from “something adjacent to Communism” to “countries like Sweden with high taxes, free health care and tasteful furniture”. If you’re a moderate liberal like me, then Sweden-style democratic socialism might be somewhat to the left of your ideal point. But it’s still well within the acceptable range of outcomes — particularly since Sweden is a canonically individualistic, culturally liberal, WEIRD country. However, the purpose of this essay is to argue that socialism now has a worthy successor in the Hayekian triangle — what for purposes of this essay I’ll call Social Justice Leftism (SJL) but is more commonly referred to as “wokeism”. Proponents of SJL usually dislike variations on the term “woke”, but the problem is that they dislike almost every other term as well. And we need some term for this ideology, because it encompasses quite a few distinctive features that differentiate it both from liberalism and from traditional, socialist-inflected leftism... The focus on identity isn’t the only distinctive feature of SJL, but it is at the core of it. SJLs and liberals have some interests in common. Both are “culturally liberal” on questions like abortion and gay marriage. And both disdain Donald Trump and the modern, MAGA-fied version of the Republican Party. But I’d suggest we’ve reached a point where they disagree in at least as many ways as they agree... Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, I’ve sometimes heard people express surprise that other people they knew (whether in their real lives or on social media) turned out to be more pro-Israel or pro-Palestine than they thought. To me, it’s almost been the opposite: the reactions have been highly predictable. Leftists tend to take the Palestinian side, and liberals the Israeli one; I think it was easier for me to see this because I’ve long been sensitive to the difference between leftists and liberals. Furthermore, these views tend to be correlated with other issues that divide liberals and leftists, such as free speech and even COVID restrictions... SJL has an elaborate matrix of racial and identity categories, which Jewishness has always fit awkwardly into. Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion. Jews in the United States are quite successful despite the extremely high historic incidence of anti-Semitism, including of course the Holocaust. Meanwhile, there’s the distinction between the Jewish people and the Israeli state. And race and ethnicity within Israel are complicated; many Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, meaning they have ancestry from the Middle East rather than Europe. So Jewishness is an edge case that makes the entire identity politics architecture look kind of dubious, if we’re being honest... I suspect that an increasing number of liberals will a) more clearly recognize that they belong to a different political tribe than the SJLs and even b) will see SJLs as being just as bad as conservatives. And this will cut both ways; some SJLs will regard liberals as just as bad as conservatives — enough so that they might even be willing to deny a vote to Biden. All of this is quite bad for the progressive coalition between liberals and the left that’s won the popular vote for president four times in a row... The old left-right coalitions have long been under strain as America has moved away from materialist politics to the politics of cultural grievance. The clearest manifestation of this has been intense polarization based on educational attainment (the more years of schooling, the more likely you are to vote Democrat). If, however, higher educational institutions and the ideas associated with them continue to become more and more unpopular, I’m not sure what happens next."
Somehow, many people don't like the term "modern liberalism", as opposed to classical liberalism
Meme - "This is an analogy for Western civilization btw
ttyd @atousl: "There's always a white guy at the bonfire who really fucks with keeping the fire going and I respect that""
When Prejudice Matters: The Impact of Racial Stereotypes on the Racial Policy Preferences of Democrats and Republicans - "Our findings indicate that racial prejudice remains a politically powerful force, but its influence is now most pronounced exactly where it is least expected. It is not in the Republican party— the new home of racial conservatism— where prejudice finds its most consequential expression. Republicans, whatever their level of prejudice, are committed to a limited role for the national government in the social welfare domain. This leads unprejudiced Republicans— who we show have a genuinely positive regard for African-Americans— to be virtually as limited in their support for government aid to minorities and special treatment for blacks as more prejudiced Republicans. In the contest between subjective personal attitudes and political party philosophy, unprejudiced Republicans have no trouble following the latter rather than the former. Presumably, the reason why racially tolerant Republicans do not translate these sentiments into support for government activism is because they believe that the national government is an inappropriate vehicle for this purpose. For, at the same time, they are significantly more likely to support private initiatives in civil rights than their more prejudiced co-partisans. Prejudice has its most powerful influence on white Democrats. Prejudiced Democrats are not only more conservative in their racial policy preferences than unprejudiced Democrats but are virtually indistinguishable from Republicans. Unlike those of non-prejudiced Republicans, the attitude these Democrats hold toward blacks are translated directly into racial policy preferences, into opposition to government efforts to overcome racial inequality. As we have seen, these prejudiced Democrats are committed to an activist role for the national government in social welfare generally; they are not Democrats in name only. But this commitment does not extend to providing government aid and support to African-Americans. They are social welfare liberals but racial conservatives— a mix that has significant electoral as well as policy implications"
Democrats' political positions are shaped by racism, but not Republican ones, because the latter are principled. The comparison to how dog whistles affect liberals, not conservatives, is telling
Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice? - "White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioeconomic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans."
This suggests that "racial resentment" is a flawed construct, since for conservatives, it doesn't indicate racial prejudice (i.e. racism) - it only predicts racist attitudes for liberals. As the authors note, "This fits with the resentment-as-ideology thesis and provides an important challenge to the notion that resentment is a simple measure of racial prejudice"
Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism - "Liberals show consistently lower levels of resentment toward Blacks than toward other groups. Given that the correlation between resentment and policies is only present when Blacks are the target group, this suggests that liberals have special attitudes toward Blacks that shape their answers to these questions... By contrast, conservatives respond consistently across all target groups... conservatives are motivated by a belief in a just world. This model is broadly consistent with major psychological models of conservatism. Moreover, the overall higher levels of resentment among conservatives that we observe is consistent with the idea that just world belief drives responses—conservatives are likely to agree with the statement that if somebody would only work harder they could get ahead, regardless of the group in question... rom a scientific perspective, labeling consistent responses across target groups as racist raises a thorny issue. The scales were designed to mea- sure racism toward Blacks, and decades of scholarly literature have claimed that the re- sponses given by conservatives represented racism because the scales were specifically target- ing Blacks. However, we show that conservatives give consistent answers regardless of the target group, which implies that these attitudes are not unique to Blacks. If the non-specific treatment of Blacks can also be claimed to be measuring racism, then it is not clear if these scales are usefully distinguishing racist from non-racist attitudes."
Liberals are racist in that they favor black people; liberals love black people (this ties in with how they patronise them). OTOH, conservatives have the same attitudes to people of different races
Partisans Agree Muslims Face Lots of Discrimination - "Now, there is a lazy and partisan way to read this chart – and I think it’s the path most in the media would be inclined to adopt – and it would run something like this: Democrats are really concerned about historically-marginalized and disadvantaged groups, while Republicans are concerned about reverse-discrimination against high-status groups (Christians, whites) instead. Entire academic literatures are premised upon reading these kind of data in this kind of way – including, perhaps especially, research on Trump and his supporters. However, the chart does not show this at all. Instead, what we see is that Republican views about the prevalence of discrimination are fairly consistent across the board, with roughly the same share of Republicans (35- 45%) saying of any group that they face ‘a lot’ of discrimination. Irrespective of reference group, most Republicans do not believe discrimination is highly prevalent in the United States. Indeed, literally the only group a majority of Republicans believe faces ‘a lot’ of discrimination is… wait for it… Muslims. In fact, there is actually significant overlap between Democrats and Republicans as to who they perceive as the most persecuted groups... This pattern, that Republican attitudes and behaviors tend to be relatively stable irrespective of reference group, while Democrats’ attitudes and behaviors vary dramatically depending on who is being referred to, is a persistent finding in social research... A more accurate top-line quote for the chart might therefore be: conservatives believe America is generally fair, and don’t believe any group other than Muslims are particularly persecuted. Most Democrats, meanwhile, think many groups face a lot of discrimination and other groups don’t."
A Cross-cultural Analysis of Censorship on Campuses - "Modern Western societies conceive universities as places for free thought, open discourse, and the relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, many scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses, suggesting that social justice goals have taken priority over open inquiry and truth-seeking goals. In the present investigation, we tested whether people have heightened desires to censor information on college campuses that is perceived as threatening to group equality or reinforcing of status hierarchies—specifically, information that portrays low status groups unfavorably. Across four samples from three countries (United States adults and three college-aged samples in the United States, United Kingdom, and Hungary; total n = 1,616) and three domains of group differences, we found that people were more censorious of information that portrays low status groups unfavorably (women, Blacks, Muslims) than identical information that portrays high status groups unfavorably (men, Whites, Christians). We also found that these “double standards” in censorship preferences increased as participants were more politically liberal. This likely reflects Liberals’ greater aversion to inequality and protectiveness toward low status groups. Such patterns (especially in conjunction with other recent work) challenge the conventional wisdom that double standards and biases generally harm low status groups and reinforce existing hierarchies. Instead, in modern Western societies, at least in recent years, group-based biases in information evaluations seem designed to help low status groups and eliminate or possibly even reverse existing hierarchies."
"Trust the Science"!
Liberalism is about patronising "minorities" by "protecting" them and spreading noble lies
Political ideology shapes the amplification of the accomplishments of disadvantaged vs. advantaged group members - "Inequality prospers when successes of advantaged group members (e.g., men, whites) get more attention than equivalent successes of disadvantaged group members (e.g., women, blacks). What determines whose successes individuals deem worth promoting vs. those they ignore? Using hundreds of thousands of tweets from the 2016 Olympics, we show that liberals are much more likely than conservatives to shine a spotlight on black and female (vs. white and male) US gold medalists. Two further experiments provide evidence that such differential amplification of successful targets is driven by a motivation—higher among liberals—to raise disadvantaged groups’ standing in service of equality. We find that liberals drive differential amplification more than conservatives and establish a behavioral mechanism through which liberals’ egalitarian motives manifest."
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "How is it that the pro Palestinian crowd always finds people to riot and protest but we can't find people to do the same for housing and immigration?"
"Odds are centrists and right wingers are also busy at work"
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "I got banned from my city sub for saying my work fired the old manager, hired a filipino manager and then they hired 20 filipino people. Apparently calling out racism is a hate crime."
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "I got banned from the Ontario sub after politely questioning federal Liberal party policy. The comment I was banned for? From several months ago, saying that my case of covid in January was very mild. When I messaged the mods asking why they banned me for that comment in particular, they silenced me for 28 days. These mods are out of control losers who can't tolerate a different point of view."
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "The exact same thing happened to me on another sub. I pointed out that a group of people on a video were not canadians but intl students. Banned for racist and then silenced for 28 days LOL."
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "I just got off a week timeout from all of reddit for putting literally writing "[insert group of people we all know here]". Didn't even name it, but it was hate for some reason?"
"My main accounts were all banned last year for making one comment in a covid sub, in which I didn’t even make any agreement with what they were saying. Apparently interacting at all was worthy of permanent ban. I deleted the comment like they sad but ban still applied. I’ve made maybe 20 accounts in the last while, sometimes they last a month, sometimes they last an hour, not sure why it changes if they can auto check the IP/device, but it’s usually after I comment something that even slightly goes against the Reddit status quo. Doesn’t make sense too me."
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "I had a reddit user have an absolute meltdown at some of the subs I'm posted to. They went absolutely batshit insane. The subs I subscribe to do not define me. Many of the subs they were outraged about, I subscribed to specifically because I disagree with their opinions, and I wanted to fully understand the opposing argument; I would fairly regularly argue in opposition. I find it very strange how some people insist that if you subscribe to a specific sub it must make you a bad person. I enjoy hearing all sides of an argument; that's all. It should be possible to agree to disagree without having a psychotic break"
I don't get it : CanadaHousing2 - "The Palestinian crowd has well over 40 years of organizing, holding rallies, protests, and it's very well-funded both by Canadian and foreign sources. It's organized through a vast network of mosques, leftist organizations, and anarchist organizations. It's also politically influential, to the point where they played a strong role in Trudeau becoming the LPC Party Leader. Housing and immigration being out-of-control is a relatively new phenomena and people wanting to protest it is very new as well. A lot of the Palestinian crap goes on behind the scenes, they have community organizers who explicitly guarantee politicians a certain amount of voters for going along with their crap along with a certain amount of donations (and every MP is, as a general rule, selected for being the strongest fundraiser within their ridings) which is why they're able to have such "vigorous" protests with so little police response. It's the same things as asking why the Khalistanis are allowed to do things that would get anyone else locked up for hate crimes. They've got the political fundraising apparatus and can reliably guarantee votes. Try a housing or immigration protest and you'll get the horses and nightsticks, much like what happened during the carbon tax protest in Newfoundland last weekend. You need deep organization, electoral influence, and solid political fundraising to be allowed the right to protest in Canada."
Protests the left approve of are good. Those they hate are bad
Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States - "Social movement scholars have described activist burnout—when the stressors of activism become so overwhelming they debilitate activists’ abilities to remain engaged—as a formidable threat to the sustainability of social movements. However, studies designed to map the causes of burnout have failed to account for ways burnout might operate differently for privileged-identity activists such as white antiracism activists and marginalized-identity activists such as antiracism activists of color. Building on previous studies of activist burnout in racial justice activists and examinations of the roles of white activists in antiracism movements, this study represents one attempt to fill this gap. We analyzed data from interviews with racial justice activists of color in the United States who have experienced burnout to identify the ways they attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors—the racism—of white activists. These included (1) harboring unevolved or racist views, (2) undermining or invalidating the racial justice work of activists of color, (3) being unwilling to step up and take action when needed, (4) exhibiting white fragility, and (5) taking credit for participants’ racial justice work and ideas. Implications for racial justice movements and the participation of white activists are discussed."
Ahh, the circular firing squad of the left!
Meme - "History of the chair
Chairs are known from Ancient Egypt and have been widespread in the Western world from the Greeks and Romans onwards. They were in common use in China from the twelfth century, and were used by the Aztecs. In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans."
Naturally, the last line is no longer in the current version of the article. But the article is notable in the total absence of sub-Saharan African examples.Of course, if you think Wikipedia has a liberal bias you are a far right conspiracy theorist and spreader of misinformation
Meme - Luke Skywalker with Miami Beach cap: "I'm not a Racist"
Hermit Yoda with Miami Beach cap: "You will be"
Meme - Dan Peters: "Detroit has one of the highest crime rates in America, no one wants to live around that."
donna @jibreeladonna: "What is a "rate" again? People talk about crime rates like it's science. Like we can measure the rate of air inside a bike tire. Criminology, not so much."
Dan Peters @TheDanPeters: "The number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies for every 400,000 persons within a population."
donna @jibreeladonna: "What if a city has less than 50,000 people? Note: crime data isn't meant for public consumption because folks like you are going to tum these numbers into competition. Like this is baseball or something."
Who was Francis Scott Key, whose namesake bridge collapsed in Baltimore? - The Washington Post - "Who was Francis Scott Key, controversial poet the bridge is named after?"
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
