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Monday, December 05, 2016

Links - 5th December 2016

Hate crime: the facts behind the headlines - "One of the chief criticisms of hate crimes is that they are rooted in perception. This introduces an element of subjectivity with the victim essentially determining whether it is a hate crime or not; people may see what they want and add a hate crime motivation to what may be an everyday crime or incident. Many of the incidents that fuelled press reports of increasing levels of hate crime were based on incidents logged in forums like Worrying Signs, often by an individual with no independent corroboration or context... The majority of police-recorded hate crimes are non-violent... no more than one in 10 recorded hate crimes are physically injurious to the victim... many crimes are being assumed as hate crimes, even when there is no evidence to suggest that they are. Press reports then often link the incidents to Brexit, even where there is no evidence of a link... The way in which all three collate information is problematic. None seeks independent verification that an incident has taken place: they all simply log the reports as they come in. Each is effectively a catalogue of alleged incidents with no corroboration... the first logged incident is as follows: Manchester – 28th June. A group of young men hurled racist abuse at a fellow bus passenger. Telling him to “get back to Africa” and throwing beer on him.‟ If we take this incident at face value and assume that the reporting of it is completely accurate, it is still difficult to see what it has to do with the EU referendum or the campaign... It should also be noted that reported hate crime has been trending upwards for the last few years, long before the EU referendum campaign began. Does this reflect a widespread increase in intolerance towards certain minorities? Or does it reflect the rising profile of hate crime as a category of offence and the opportunity to report it"

Police: Lafayette student lied about being robbed of wallet, hijab by Trump supporters – will face charges - "The 18-year-old Middle Eastern student reported to police Wednesday that she was walking to class about 11 a.m. when two white men, one wearing a Donald Trump hat, jumped out of an SUV, struck her and hit her repeatedly. She also said the men yelled racial slurs at her, ripped her hijab off her head and stole her wallet. She has since admitted to police that she lied about the attack. The story made national headlines and was featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and other national media outlets. Messages of love and support were found all over UL Lafayette’s campus after news of the attack spread."

Sorry, Trump Protestors: This Is What Democracy Looks Like - "“This is what democracy looks like!” That was my favorite chant during the anti-war protests I participated in my senior year of high school in 2004. Twelve years later, the same folks I marched down Sixth Avenue with protesting outside the Fox News building are back at it, protesting the victory of Donald Trump. I’ve got some bad news for the thousands of my former comrades marching through the streets: You saw what democracy looks like on Tuesday night... I was driven from the progressive cause because I came to learn that messages about inclusiveness, love, and respect were contingent upon a very specific set of characteristics one had to already possess. We are seeing that same hypocrisy in the present... Chants of “not my president” are now heard reverberating through urban centers, shouted by the same folks who just a few days ago were warning of civil unrest when Trump was defeated."

Colleges Cancelled Exams for Students Traumatized by Trump's Election - "I don't blame students for being really, really upset about Trump's win. I know plenty of mentally stable, not-at-all-coddled people who were similarly upset. But they all still went in to work on Wednesday. Life goes on. It's possible the news is hitting students even harder than it hit members of the liberal media—college students, after all, are even more out-of-touch with the Trump movement than the media is. College campuses have created safe spaces to wall students off from the mildest forms of disagreement. Too many of them simply had no idea that great numbers of Americans despised their progressive agenda and were eager to strike a blow against political correctness... campus progressives have willfully pushed race-based and identity-group-based classifications: calling for segregated safe spaces and programs for students of color, LGBTQ students, Native American students, Latinos, and so on. At the same time, they have assailed white privilege and white fragility, treating white people like the enemy. In electing Trump, whites may have lived up to their expectations, but I can't help but wonder whether that was a foreseeable consequence of the left's campaign to demonize them."

Liberal Professors In America Give Students Day Off To Cope With Trump Victory

Democrats Blame 'Voter Suppression' For Clinton Loss At Their Peril - "There is thus far not enough evidence (as I’ve shown in this post) that these laws actually affected the outcome of the presidential election. We have statistics on a fewer number of polls open or early voting days in some of these states, and we know courts have found in some cases that up to hundreds of thousands of voters lacked the right kind of ID to vote in some strict voter id states. But it is a big empirical leap to claim that these cutbacks caused the losses for Democrats in states that mattered for the outcome of the electoral college. Lots of people who lacked id could have gotten it and voted. (A more plausible case could be made in some of these states that these laws mattered in races which are very, very close.) More importantly, even in states that had eased their voting and registration rules in recent years, such as Minnesota, Democratic turnout was way down. This is key: Hilllary Clinton is down millions of Democrats' votes (right now about 7 million votes) compared to Obama in 2012. People stayed home for reasons unrelated to voter suppression."

I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump. - "as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla... The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton... I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition. What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America... We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind"

Left-Wing Bigotry And Hatred Is On Full Display After Trump Win - " Exit polls show that 42% of women cast ballots for the Republican. Nearly half (49%) of independent voters backed Trump. So did 14% of LGBT voters. Trump did better among blacks, Latinos and other minorities, as well as lower-income voters, than the ultra-noncontroversial Mitt Romney did in 2012. Trump did almost as well among college graduates as Clinton — 45% to 49% — and captured half of the suburban vote. In other words, his support was widespread. But almost as soon as the election results came in, many on the left exploded in anger, smashing windows, setting fires, calling for Trump to be assassinated, and labeling his supporters bigots and sexists who should be murdered. Protesters burned Trump in effigy, and passed around a stuffed figure of Trump in a noose."

Sandbagged by Hope - Twenty-Six Letters - Quora - "Sure, the President was (still is) personally popular but the liking people feel for him never transferred to his policies. Since the day of its passage Obamacare has been about as popular as leftovers five days after Thanksgiving. If the right track/wrong track poll numbers are to be believed, the American people are profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the nation, i.e. with the policies pursued by the Obama Administration since 2009. In short, the President’s personal popularity is of no particular political significance."

Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch - "the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who voted for GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. Meanwhile, African Americans did not turn out to vote against Trump. In fact, Trump received a higher percentage of African American votes than Romney did... The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters. The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump... those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance... Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In 2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42 percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1, conservatives are considerably more common within the general public... While some of the political differences between educated and working-class voters is based on a dispute over hard facts, the much broader and more foundational disagreements are about norms and values... a reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance — in addition to being wrong about its primary source — will simply make the disagreement far more personal, entrenched and vitriolic. And it won’t make liberal values more persuasive to the less educated, as Trump victory demonstrates"

What This Means, How This Happened, What To Do Now - "you reach a somewhat fatalistic conclusion about Trump supporters. You can’t persuade them, because they’re racists, and racism is an irrational feeling. Instead, you fight them, by mocking them, and trying to turn out your own base. By treating Trump’s support as largely the product of racism, one gives up on any attempt to actually appeal to Trump voters’ concerns and interests, since racism is not an interest worth appealing to. This was what Democrats did. This was a campaign of mockery: Trump voters were treated with disdain. Hillary Clinton dismissed huge swaths of them as a “basket of deplorables.” To be a Trump supporter was to be dumb, a redneck, a misogynist... There are facts that complicate the simple “racist deplorables” explanation. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times noted, “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters,” meaning that this was “not a simple racism story”... running Hillary Clinton for president was never a very good idea. Running Clinton against Donald Trump was an especially bad idea, because all of Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate played to all of Trump’s strengths. Clinton gave Trump precisely the kind of fodder (mini-scandals, shady dealings, etc.) on which his bombast thrives. She also happens to be a very poor campaigner, and a complacent one. The weakness was obvious even in the differing campaign slogans. “I’m With Her” is about the interests of the candidate. “Make America Great Again” is about the voters. Let’s learn an important lesson here: do not run a widely-despised ruling-class candidate who has open contempt for the white working class. That is a recipe for electoral catastrophe... We need something that has what Obama had: inspiration, hope. It was joked that Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan was “No you can’t.” That’s no good. Trump inspires people. He may inspire people by appealing to their nastiest, most inhuman and unneighborly instincts. But he inspires them. We have to have an agenda that gets people excited. It can’t be like trying to make people eat their vegetables. “You’ll vote for me and you’ll like it, because you have no alternative” is not an effective way to get votes"

An Open Letter to My Friends on the Left… about Donald Trump’s Hair, Unfortunately - "What scares you about Trump is that he will get his hands on the levers of power — levers that you yourselves constructed, over the protests of libertarians and old-style conservatives. For years we who are not of the left put up with the taunts: Isn’t the right wing crazy? How silly to be afraid of the government! How unfair to think of federal agents as jack-booted thugs! To worry about black helicopters and FEMA camps and Jade Helm! And now just maybe the jackboot is on the other foot... In a democracy, progressives’ second goal, populating the government, depends on one of two things. Either the oppressed must be the most numerous — unlikely for long in a democracy — or else a coalition must be built consisting of the oppressed and their sympathizers."

Trump Gives Victory Speech, Liberals Rediscover Appeal of Limited Government - "the left is interested in limited government again. Would have been nice to have them with us during Obama's eight years in office, but we'll take what we can get, I guess."

Dear Democrats, Read This If You Do Not Understand Why Trump Won - "Wikileaks has a 10-year record of never releasing a single falsified document, and is not connected to Russia. Everything they released were the actual e-mails of Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff... In an attempt to inform my friends, family, and followers I posted dozens if not hundreds of Wikileaks e-mails, and tweeted alt-right news just as much as I did liberal news. I did this because most of my followers are liberals, and I realized they were all living in an echo chamber on social media where they were not being exposed to differing opinions or news. I was mostly rejected by liberals for doing this, they didn’t understand why I was sharing things that made them uncomfortable, but now they know why. Ironically, I got far more support from Trump supporters for trying to tell Democrats the truth... While you weren’t paying attention, Trump is actually a former Democrat. If you study his actual values he has far more in common with traditional moderate or liberal values than he does a traditional conservative. In fact, Trump may even be more liberal than Hillary Clinton on several issues. The media prevented any kind of discussion on values, and instead focused on rhetoric and propaganda... politically he’s actually a New York Democrat in Republican clothing (this is why the Republican establishment rejected him). You also need to consider Donald Trump just overthrew a group of political elites who have been ruling this country for decades. He just beat the political establishment singlehandedly. No matter what you think about him personally, he just accomplished something historic to become our President. At the end of the day, this is an opportunity to learn and grow and consider another world view. This is a wakeup call to get out of safe spaces, politically correct thinking, shatter echo chambers, and challenge yourself to consider the other side of the fence. This is an opportunity to reach out and truly learn to understand each other."

Research finds women feel happy when their husband or partner is upset - Telegraph - "The detailed study found that wives or girlfriends were pleased when their partner showed emotion because they believed it demonstrated a healthy relationship. The survey, carried out by Harvard Medical School, also found that when men realised their wife was angry, the women reported being happier, although the men were not. It revealed women most likely enjoyed spotting when their partner was dissatisfied because it showed his strong “engagement” or “investment” in their time together... “This is consistent with what is known about the dissatisfaction women often experience when their male partner becomes emotionally withdrawn and disengaged in response to conflict”... “Women’s satisfaction was more strongly related to the perception that their partners were trying to understand their negative emotions than to men’s actual accuracy in reading those emotions.”"
The article is Eye of the beholder: the individual and dyadic contributions of empathic accuracy and perceived empathic effort to relationship satisfaction.
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