Links - 13th July 2019 (3) (General Wokeness)

Google tends to push stories for left-leaning readers, study shows - "Google tends to only feature a handful of news outlets (all with a left-leaning audience) in their Top Stories box — a spot in search results every newsroom is clawing for. The study shows articles from publications with left-wing readers get about five times as many views as those with a right-leaning readership.The researchers from North Western University in Illinois used data from 2017 to test 30 articles for a month, collecting more than 6,300 links... Their audit showed outlets with a left-wing audience had 62.4 per cent of all article views compared to 11.3 per cent from the right. Even when accounting for stories that weren’t rated as having right or left readers, the researchers say the trend is still clear.The monopolization also became more apparent with certain searches. CNN and The New York times racked up three of four article views in a search for “rex tillerson.”... Newsrooms with left-wing readers produce twice as many stories as their counterparts, but Google seems to exaggerate the difference to three times as many stories, which means those articles end up in the Top Stories box more often."

“This Is What Happens To Pretty Girls” - Who are we really staging this for? | Facebook - "I watched Pangdemonium's This Is What Happens To Pretty Girls (TIWHTPG) on the night of Tuesday, 14 May 2019. I left Drama Centre Theatre distressed not just by the content of the show per se, but the means that Pangdemonium adopted to subvert the gross misconceptions that those who think they know "what happens to pretty girls" (which I still find a highly problematic title)... The way TIWHTPG was staged - I felt that the focus was shifted away from empowering survivors to say what they want to say, and towards giving a neutral bird's eye view of what happens in a consentless world. I respect the attempt to not be didactic, and to trust the audience to be independent and mature enough to think critically about what they watched. But when you stage a scene where one character is being forced to give a blowjob to another (this is just one example of the instances of sexual violence portrayed in the play) and follow it up with another intense scene involving victim blaming, without metaframing why sexual violence was portrayed with such realism - what are the implications?... Yes, ending sexual violence is a topic that everyone should think about, and talk about more openly. But to broach the discussion in such a in-your-face manner like in TIWHTPG? Now that I have watched the play, I have misgivings about bringing someone who has little to zero prior engagement with discussions of sexual violence. And I definitely wouldn't bring someone who has survived sexual violence to watch TIWHTPG. No one comes to the theatre to be reminded of the literal hell that they have gone through/are still going through."
Aka "This play is problematic because it doesn't shove the simplistic feminist narrative down the audience's throat. A play on sexual violence should not contain sexual violence, and should be a group therapy session"

White liberals dumb down language with minorities - "Democratic candidates used fewer words related to competence when speaking to minority audiences than they did to mostly white audiences. Meanwhile, the speeches of conservative candidates showed no significant difference... In a separate series of experiments, the researchers asked white participants to select words from a list to draft a hypothetical email to a stranger. Each recipient had been given a stereotypically white or black name — such as "Emily" or "Lakisha" — and the researchers had ranked each word on the list for competence and warmth.The results showed that participants who self-reported liberal views tended to avoid words that could make them look competent when addressing the black recipients, but not white recipients. Again, conservatives showed no significant difference in the language they used to white and black recipients."
Since treating people of different races equally is considered racist, this shows that Republicans are the true racists

The Infantilization of Black America - "We are expected to think, act, and vote as one, and any attempt to step outside the bounds of our pre-determined spectrum of thoughts can lead to summary excommunication. Our diversity pertains to our race, ethnicity, gender orientation, or sexual preference when set against the rest of the American population, but the diversity of opinions, beliefs, and values found among American blacks is seldom acknowledged. Even though the ‘black community’ in America includes immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as multiracial individuals and descendants of the slave trade, we are often grouped together as one large indistinguishable ideological bloc... Black voters are expected to be Democrats—or at least left-leaning in their politics—not because of their views on this-or-that policy initiative, but because of the perceived racial attitudes of Republicans. But this has resulted in an odd paradox—despite black progressives’ professed hatred for ‘systemically racist’ government and institutions, they continue to trust in and empower those same institutions by voting for policies that strengthen them and their ability to hold sway in our lives. If you believe the government is oppressing you, it is surely counter-productive to demand that it take more of your money, that it institute policies that further criminalize your behavior, or that increase its ability to infringe on your privacy. Well-meaning white progressives, meanwhile, treat black Americans more like the family pet than the family friend, condescending to praise us when we align with their views, and ferally attacking when we don’t... While black Americans have been voting Democrat, the wealth gap between blacks and whites has widened... Of the ten poorest cities in America, nine are run by Democrats. Of the ten cities with the highest levels of unemployment, nine are run by Democrats. Of the ten most dangerous cities in America, eight are run by Democrats. In each case, those affected are disproportionately black, with blacks having higher rates of poverty, lower rates of income, and higher rates of criminality. Despite a dearth of evidence that voting Democrat has an inherently positive impact on life as a black man or woman in America, progressives continue to demonize any attempt by blacks to look for solutions beyond the Democratic echo chamber. The saddest part of this narrative is that liberals seem to think they have little of value to offer black voters besides apologies for past transgressions and a savior complex that promises to police current society’s racial shortcomings. Often the voices screaming the loudest following instances of racial animus or law enforcement misconduct belong to white progressives who have taken it upon themselves to champion causes on behalf of the politically mute or ‘marginalized.’ This embarrassing spectacle sometimes resembles an adult who humors a fractious infant just to reassure it that he is an amiable and unthreatening figure... The monocausal progressive explanation for black disadvantage is dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, it imposes a false conformity that helps ensure alternative hypotheses which might improve understanding of the underlying complexities of racial disparities in America are left unexplored and undiscussed. Secondly, the reflexive imputation of racial bias in situations where alternative explanations for behavior are readily available risks inducing a skeptical fatigue. So, when racism does rear its head, it has already been trivialized and risks being ignored"

Researchers publish U.S. data on police-related injuries - "An estimated 55,400 people were injured as a result of legal police interventions in the U.S. in 2012, a study found.Those interventions accounted for less than half a percent of all arrests that year... Miller had expected higher rates of death and injury during stops or arrests of minorities. “But it turns out, the probability you will be killed or seriously injured if (you are) stopped/arrested by the police is not affected by your race/ethnicity,” he said."

Black lies matter - "You would never know it from the activists, but police shootings are responsible for a lower percentage of black homicide deaths than white and Hispanic homicide deaths. Twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers, compared to 4 percent of black homicide victims.That disparity is driven by the greatly elevated rates of criminal victimization in the black community. More blacks die each year from homicide, more than 6,000, than homicide victims of all other races combined. Their killers are not the police, and not whites, but other blacks. In Chicago this year through Aug. 30, 2,870 people, mostly black, were shot.If you believed the Black Lives Matter narrative, you would assume that the assailants of those black victims were in large part cops. In fact, the police shot 17 people, most of whom were threatening lethal force, accounting for 0.6 percent of the total... Police critics have never answered the question of what they think non-biased policing data should look like, in light of the vast differences in rates of criminal offending. Blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Black males between the ages of 14-17 commit gun homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined... Other research this year shows that blacks are actually shot less than whites by the police.The most sophisticated lab study of police shoot-don't-shoot decisions to date, published this year in Criminology and Public Policy, found that officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects and took significantly longer to decide to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects.Lead investigator Lois James, from Washington State University, hypothesized that officers were second-guessing themselves when confronting black suspects, due to their awareness of the potential negative repercussions of shooting a black civilian. James' work anticipated a much-discussed working paper by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. He found that police officers in Houston were nearly 24 percent less likely to shoot blacks than whites... an analysis of police use of force by the Center for Policing Equity concluded, consistent with James and Fryer, that whites were disadvantaged compared to blacks when it comes to lethal force. Officers' use of lethal force following an arrest for a violent felony was over twice the rate for white arrestees than for black arrestees... Why, then, the widespread perception that there is a law enforcement war on blacks? Because the mainstream media relentlessly focuses on a handful of police shootings of blacks and ignores police shootings of whites, as well as the crime that brings officers into disproportionate contact with black suspects... In fact, fatal police shootings are rare, no matter the race of the victim... Police officers are far more likely to be killed by a black person than vice versa. Over the past decade, black males comprised 40 percent of all cop killers, though they are 6 percent of the population. That means that an officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer... Officers are routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they try to conduct a street investigation or make an arrest. Resistance to arrest is up, officers report. Cops have been repeatedly told by Obama and the media that pedestrian stops and public order enforcement (known as "broken windows policing") are racist. In consequence, they are doing less of those discretionary activities in high-crime minority communities.The result? Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations... The victims of this politically driven de-policing, what I have called the "Ferguson effect," are overwhelmingly black"

This filmmaker sat down neo-Nazis and jihadists. Here’s what she learned. - "In two documentary films, White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others (both of which are currently streaming on Netflix), Khan sits down with white supremacists and jihadists (respectively) and tries to understand what’s really motivating them... it’s really, really easy for everybody involved to hate each other from afar, to judge each other from afar, but it’s much more difficult to hate up close and personal... Part of the reason people subscribe to these movements is that they feel shunned in their lives, in their personal lives or in wider society. These movements are deeply rooted in a sense of victimhood, real or imagined. So if we exclude them, if we shout at them, if we condemn them, that completely feeds into that. And then the monster gets bigger, not smaller... Much of it doesn’t come from hate. It comes from a lot of other basic human needs that are not being met. To be sure, there are political and social and economic factors involved on both sides, but if you dig deep, you find that it’s about much more than that.I tried to understand the core psychological draw of these movements. I found that a sense of belonging or purpose was a major factor... he actually became friends with the pastor of a mostly black church who lived in his apartment complex. The pastor invited him and his fiancée to his church, and Ken basically stood in front of everyone there and said, “I used to be in the Klan, now I’m in a neo-Nazi organization, these are the views I hold ...”And after he was done, people came up to him and hugged him and said, “Look, we detest what you stand for, but it takes a lot of courage for somebody like you to come in here and share what you have shared.”That was the last straw for him, where he realized that the people he hated so deeply are showing him nothing but kindness and compassion and an open heart, and are showing it to him even though he doesn’t deserve it. His whole ideology fell apart... we have to become active citizens and active human beings, and no matter what happens, we cannot afford to give up on each other. That means even people that we disagree with and people that we dislike. In fact, it matters more. It’s easy for me to like you. It’s easy for me to be nice to you because we probably see the world fairly similarly. That’s easy. That’s not when our principles really matter.It matters when you are able to extend it to somebody who might not deserve it, or who you might not like or might not agree with. Otherwise, we become just like them — and, in the process, do their bidding."
Funny, I thought screaming at them and punching "Nazis" was the answer/solution

Deeyah Khan's 'White Right' Shows How to Fight Racism - "anti-racists departed from the conventional wisdom that bigots are best excoriated and shunned (if not punched and kicked); engaged prominent, hard-core racists; and managed through civil interactions to persuade some of them to renounce their beliefs.Khan described similar results from her efforts to combat both jihadism and white-supremacist extremism—an outcome that she didn’t expect.“I’ve had experiences of racism most of my life,” she said. “As a result, I’ve been an anti-racist, anti-fascist campaigner for most of my life. I’ve done everything that you would imagine. I’ve gone to anti-fascist protests. I’ve shouted at these guys. I have flipped them off. I have thrown stuff at them. I’ve done all of that. And none of that really did anything.”Judging and condemning jihadists and white supremacists “feels great,” she declared, but yields little"