- My friend Jenn Moore has started a new blog, Broken but Beautiful. Please go check it out.
- Justice Antonin Scalia Can’t See The Difference Between LGBT Rights And Child Molester Rights. This is why I’m desparate for a Democrat to win the next Presidential election.
- The Complete History of Transgender Characters in American Comic Books | Autostraddle
- Giving housing to the homeless is three times cheaper than leaving them on the streets – Vox
- The Confused Thinking Behind the Kimono Protests at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and, Seeing Beyond “Kimono Wednesdays”: On Asian American Protest. Two contrasting views on a recent “cultural appropriation” controversy. In this case, I’m on the side of the writer who calls the protests “confused thinking.”
- Report: Transgender Job Applicants In D.C. Face Staggering Discrimination Rates: DCist
- Study Finds People With a Disability Are More Likely to Face Employment Discrimination
- A survey measured 38 countries’ support for free speech. The US came out on top. – Vox The survey didn’t include any look at how people felt about copyrights interfering with free speech, however. Or employers interfering with free speech.
- Why I Provide Abortions – The New York Times
- I’m really enjoying Mapcrunch. Just hitting “go” again and again and teleporting to different spots on earth. (If you like a challenge, you can play the airport game, but “challenge” here is synonymous with “tedious.”)
- Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year – The Washington Post
- The 911 System Isn’t Ready for the iPhone Era – The New York Times
- How Fox News’ Climate Change Denial Finds Its Way Into Children’s Textbooks | Blog | Media Matters for America
- Why one political scientist thinks Donald Trump might actually win – Vox
- These stairs are so gorgeous, and the only way I’d ever go down them is backwards with my hands and feet, like going down a ladder. So steep! What was the designer thinking?
- Should Marvel’s Iron Fist Be Cast With An Asian American? Short answer: Yes. He makes a good argument, I think.
- How to Prosecute Abusive Prosecutors – The New York Times
- Laquan McDonald and The Corrupt System That Killed Him – The Atlantic
- Icelated — Sick Burn from the Official British Rebuttal to The Declaration of Independence.
- The tardigrade genome has been sequenced, and it has the most foreign DNA of any animal – ScienceAlert Includes an incredibly cool animated GIF of a tardigrade swimming!
- ‘No more baby parts,’ suspect in attack at Colo. Planned Parenthood clinic told official – The Washington Post. So when you use fake footage to paint Planned Parenthood as monsters unfit to live, this is the unsurprising outcome.
- Ted Cruz Describes Alleged Planned Parenthood Shooter As ‘Transgendered Leftist Activist’ | ThinkProgress Also unsurprisingly, Cruz is lying.
- The Perpetually Frustrating Conversation About Sex Differences | | Observer A good Cathy Young article that – despite some pointless (and unsourced – which feminists have said “the sexes are exactly the same and that men are evil beasts and women perpetual victims”?) feminist bashing – I by and large agree with.
- Faith in Representation: Valiant Efforts A thoughtful comic strip, by Sarah Winifred Searle, about representation and a forthcoming fat superhero. (Thanks to Richard for the link.)
- Donors gave a super PAC $6 million. Candidates actually got about $140,000. – LA Times In a nutshell: A lot of people who thought they were donating to Ben Carson, were actually mainly putting money into the pockets of PACs and consultants and mailing-list gurus.
- 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. — Medium Thanks to Harlequin for the link.
- Why Consensual Sex Can Still Be Bad — The Cut
- And a commentary on the reaction to the above article: Sex can be entirely legal and also really bad.
- Gamergate: The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled – The Establishment I’m linking this piece mainly because of the fascinating story of “Allison Prime.” I always find sock puppet narratives compelling.
- Well that neighbor feud took an amusing turn.
On that topic, Clemintine Ford has demonstrated again how many people thing being for social justice is about being as big an arsehole as you can be.
To those that argue freedom of speech isn’t about being protected against consequences, I’ll say it’s not about that, it’s about disproportionate responses.
That guy that takes a swing at you for looking at his girlfriend the “wrong way”? Arsehole.
The woman that calls the cops on a man in the park with a camera, or for being black? Arsehole.
Pushing for someone to be fired because they said a nasty word online? Arsehole.
Edit: See also, the concept of “useful idiot“.
Yes, clearly all the people trying to get Prof. Dorothy Bland fired for accusing cops who stopped her of being racist are doing it “for social justice”. The idea that this sort of behavior has any particular partisan bias is routinely asserted, and rarely supported.
(Also, at least Amp is pretty damned consistent about opposing what he sees as employers infringing on free speech, no matter how wrong he may be about that….)
desipis:
Sure, although you needn’t go that far, since “criminal” fits, too.
I’d never heard of Clementine Ford, so I followed your link, and then followed some more links and did a bit of reading.
Here’s a synopsis as related by Megan Levy:
From that account, it looks like Nolan listed his employment on his Facebook page, and then used that Facebook page to call a woman a slut in response to an article where she recounted examples of online harassment she had received. Said woman looked at his public Facebook profile and asked the employer shown on that profile if they were aware of their employee’s public actions while identified as their employee. The employer then decided they no longer wanted to be associated with the employee.
Whether or not the employer response is disproportionate, I’m missing the part where she was “pushing for someone to be fired”. Do you have further information which you could link for us?
And, out of curiosity, what would you rather Ford had done, other than ignore it? She has already tried to use Facebook’s feedback mechanism to address comments far worse than that. Facebook user “Mathew Harris” wrote, “Clementine you are the most annoying feminist slut to have ever walked the earth. Please sit on a butchers [sic] knife so that you may never be able to reproduce.” Facebook’s response: “We reviewed the comment you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”
This is from someone whose online experience is such that she can’t be sure that this is the worst thing which has been said to her: “You deserve to be gangraped by a pack of aids infested n—–s. Die, f–king bitch.”
So, if you had your druthers and could tell Ford what to do in response to messages like those, what would you tell her to do?
Grace
It is a little strange that one can read a story about a guy who heaps misogynist abuse on strangers and fills up his FB page with racist jokes and conclude that someone else is being as “big an arsehole as [they] can be”.
Yeah, I think that the whole “twitter-shitstorm-pile-on” thing has gone way too far.
In fact, does anyone here disagree with that? Hate mobs, mass letter writing campaigns to employers for minor shit from low-level employees, stuff like that — does anyone here support this kind of thing? I don’t.
But that is not what happened here. If someone does something shitty to me personally, I am certainly allowed to say loud and publicly that they did what they did. I can say this to whoever I please. After all, their right to drop shit in social media stream is precisely equal to my right to drop shit into theirs, or their wife’s, or their employer’s. Why not?
This is the “more speech” model, which back in the 80’s libertarians would trumpet as justifying a “free speech culture.” We didn’t need government, they claimed. Instead we could achieve social change through more speech. Let the chips fall where they may.
There is much I dislike about libertarian types, but I think they might be correct about this one.
If you go around abusing women, and one of them gets evidence, and she shows that publicly, and if you get fired — well too fucking bad. Asshole.
Keep in mind, Grace & pillsy, that these are the opinions of someone who, immediately upon hearing about the shooting of Black Lives Matter protestors, was happy to tell us how they got themselves shot.
This is one of those cases where I’m truly not sure whether it’s a person with odious opinions or pretty decent trolling. Given the lack of follow up, either in support of the original Black Lives Matters shooting comment or an admission that they were a little quick to judge, I’m leaning a bit towards the latter but am still very much undecided.
Condemning Ms Ford in this instance seems to be tantamount to saying that she has an obligation not to (truthfully!) tell people that someone verbally abused her in a public fashion. Expecting strangers to remain silent when you’re gratuitously shitty to them because otherwise you might suffer negative social consequences strikes me as despicably entitled and irresponsible.
Pingback: Hotel Fires Employee For Calling Someone A “Slut” Online. Is This A Free Speech Issue? | Alas, a Blog
Hey, pillsy:
Out of curiosity: would you happen to be the same pillsy that I knew at Brown around 99-00?
yrs–
–Ben
As part of fundraisers and fairs for a group I was once involved in, the Japanese members have twice organised a “try on a kimono” section for visitors. Although it was actually a yukata, and they were busy running other parts of the event so they got me to help people put it on even though I’m not Japanese.
Perhaps the difference is that these Japanese people were born in Japan, so they have a different perspective to Japanese people who have grown up entirele outside Japan. It has been my experience with everyone from overseas, whether they be Japanese, Indian, Swedish or whatever, that if you try on their clothes, listen to their music, eat their food, or whatever, they become very happy and excited and regard you as their new friend forever, just for being interested in their culture. But these are all people, like I said, who are from overseas, not born here.
Edit: also, trying on a yukata is a lot less involved than a kimono, even if it does involve several belts and folds.
@Ben Lehman:
Yup, that’s me. :)
Cool! Nice to see you again!
Leaked documents in Dothan, AL, show that a specialized narcotics task force within the Dothan police department, made up largely of members of a local neoconfederate organization, planted drugs on young black men for years, resulting in nearly a thousand wrongful convictions.
They were supervised by Steve Parrish, the man who is now the Dothan Police Chief, and Andy Hughes, the man who is now the Director of Homeland Security for the State of Alabama. They were both also members of this organization.
Their crimes and the subsequent Internal Affairs investigation were covered up by the local District Attorney, who may be subject to felony charges himself.
—Myca
@myca Do you have any confirmation of that from a reputable news source? I looked but couldn’t find anything and the site you linked to looks sketchy at best.
Alternet and Rawstory are both covering it, which, yeah, still isn’t CNN.
Boy oh boy, I hope this isn’t real. I’d rather be taken in by a thousand fake stories than for this to be real.
—Myca
Jake Squid:
I haven’t seen anything that contradicts the initial indications that BLM supports harassed, assault and pursued the individuals who ultimately shot at them (feel free to point me at anything that does), so I don’t see a reason to change my perspective. What other sort of follow up do you feel I’m obligated to give?
Here’s one report for you.
Turns out that paper on the tardigrade genome may not be accurate. We’ll have to wait for a tie breaking paper to be published.
a) I’m not sure the opinion of the prosecuting attorney in a politically charged case could be considered unbiased. I’ll wait for the trial.
b) I’m not using the phrase “got themselves shot” to mean that the shooters were legally justified. I’m using it to mean that the protester’s actions were unreasonable and the consequences (getting shot) were reasonably foreseeable. If a white man walked up to a black gang and started slinging racial epithets, and a member of the black gang shot the white man, then I would describe the situation as the white man getting himself shot even though there was no justification for the shooting.
It was a comment intended to focus on the silliness that the Black Lives Matter movement seems to be engendering and not on justifying the actions of the shooters. There’s also this example.
@18:
As one might imagine, out here in the Chicago area the coverage of this story has been both broad and detailed. But in reading the Atlantic story I see that they left out something important. They go into detail describing the corrupt system and the public officials whose complicity led to justice being denied for over a year. They name the Chicago Police Department superintendent, the Mayor of Chicago and others. But the Atlantic left out the one person who had all the information needed to indict the officer involved and put him on trial, the State’s Attorney for Cook County. The Mayor couldn’t put the officer on trial. The Police Superintendent couldn’t put him on trial. But the State’s Attorney for Cook County could – and did, 13 months after the killing and only after repeated FOIA requests finally sprung loose the video that the State’s Attorney had seen over a year previously.
The State’s Attorney’s acts – and lack thereof – have been central concerns in the stories published here in Chicago, but makes no appearance in the Atlantic story at all, even though all the other major players are mentioned in it. I wonder – would that possibly be because all the other major players are white males (thus fitting the narrative) but the State’s Attorney is one Anita Alvarez, who is both Hispanic and female?
What would you think if four white men in masks walked up to a group of black protesters and starting slinging racial epithets and some of the protest group asked them to leave? What if the racial epithet slinging, masked white men refused to leave and some of the protest group escorted them away from the larger group of protesters? Did the protesters get themselves shot?
Your version of events does not seem to match the facts reported by the vast majority of credible news sources. Nor does your version of events include any background (like videos self-posted to youtube by the shooter(s)) of the racial epithet slinging, masked white men.
Your use of the word unbiased made me LOL.
You’re confusing me. Can you elaborate on the silliness that you think BLM seems to be engendering? I haven’t a clue as to what you’re referring.
[edited to add: “Got themselves shot” is a way of focusing on the silliness of the group that was shot at? Huh.]
@RonF:
I’ve been reading quite a lot of condemnation for Alvarez. The nicest description of her history as State’s Attorney that I’ve seen is “atrocious.” I also see that Chuy Garcia has joined the call for Alvarez to resign.
All of which is, of course, irrelevant to your criticism of the Atlantic article. I just wanted to note that Alvarez has been roundly condemned for her (in)actions.
On the one hand, I agree with @RonF that the complete omission of Alvarez from the Atlantic piece on the Laquand McDonald shooting is a glaring problem with it. On the other hand, omitting her because her presence would complicate a simplistic narrative of white males being at fault for all the flaws in the official handling of the case really doesn’t seem like Conor Friedersdorf’s style at all.
pillsy: I have no knowledge of Conor Friedersdorf’s style. But as Jake notes, there is no shortage elsewhere of criticism of her handling of this case, even to the point of calls for her resignation (and not just for this particular case, but based on her overall record). So I’d like to see him account for why he left her out of his story completely.
She’s up for re-election in March. She’s already announced that she has no intention of resigning and that she is going to stay in office and let the voters decide. Given that she’s a Democrat in Cook County, unless the Democrats set up a primary opponent against her she will likely be re-elected. I don’t know if she’s got the juice (and has an awareness of the burial places of a sufficient number of bodies) to keep that from happening or not.
And I have to day, I called this. A rather liberal friend of mine (an Episcopal priest) and I had a discussion prior to the last set of elections. Neither of us was going to change each other’s minds on the top of the ticket, so we talked about the other races. I specifically mentioned the Cook County State’s Attorney race and told him that he should not vote for her because, despite her sex and race, she was a partisan hack and would not serve the ends of justice. I wish I had not been quite so right on that one.
Jake @ 20:
If the protest occurred in a public place and the protesters did not have prior approval for exclusive use of the place for a time (e.g., a permit), then they have no business attempting to escort anyone anywhere against their will.
That would depend on the level of force – if any – that the protesters used against the counter-protesters. I understand that in this particular case that remains an open question. But at least theoretically it is possible for that chain of events to be considered as “get themselves shot”.
I tried on a kimono once. Or, more accurately, it was thrust upon me. I was walking down a corridor in a dormitory in Japan during a Scouting trip when a Japanese Scout leader saw me, said “Look! Leader, leader!”, and grabbed me and pulled me into his room. Before I could blink I was down to my t-shirt and underpants and a female leader was putting a kimono on me. In order to be able to reach behind me and put the belt around my stomach and cross it behind my back she had her face buried in my stomach.
I then strolled down the corridor and into the meeting room where about 36 American Venture Scouts and 40 Japanese Venture Scouts were listening to a presentation. When I walked in a couple of Japanese Scouts jumped up and started yelling, and in the next second every Japanese Scout in there had jumped up and was taking pictures of me. “Like small wrestler!” I heard some say. I was blinded from all the flashes.
After that all calmed down I sat down to listen to the presentation I had inadvertently interrupted. My inexperience in wearing such a garment apparently became evident, as after a couple of minutes one of the female American Venturers said to me – quietly – “Mr. F., keep your knees together!”
Some of the omission of Alvarez may be because there’s been so much focus on her already.
On the other hand, I think RonF might have a point, though my reasons are different. It’s quite common to (rhetorically as well as prosecutorially) treat women/PoCs as not really or totally responsible for the things they did, but influenced by men/white people, without a lot of intent of their own. (Think of a focus on the effect of behind-the-scenes people, like campaign staff for politicians or songwriters/producers for musicians, in addition to who’s assumed to be the ringleader in a criminal conspiracy including multiple genders.) So it’s plausible she wasn’t included because, on some subconscious level, Friedersdorf just didn’t hold her as responsible as the men who must have really been making the decisions, y’know?
You understand that and I understand that. I just don’t think that desipis understands that as desipis hasn’t backed off that description of the incident at all.
Whoops, link went AWOL. Try this.
Jake Squid:
Sure, you could argue that the white men in masks “got themselves harassed and assaulted”. I’m not defending their initial actions. I’m criticising the reaction to it. Both sides contributed to the escalation of the situation.
Of course its still open to question. I offered an interpretation of the statements by witnesses qualified by “it seems”. I didn’t declare that interpretation as a clearly evidenced, unquestionable conclusion.
@RonF:
I probably disagree with him at least as much as I agree, but he’s usually worth reading, especially on issues surrounding police violence, so I too would like to see him account for that.
As for Alvarez herself, she sounds seriously awful, even by the debased standards of elected prosecutors.
desipis:
Which, by-the-by, is why the prosecutor is so confident that they will not successfully claim self defense. He doesn’t have to prove that it wasn’t self defense beyond a reasonable doubt; the burden is on the defendant to prove that it was. Self defense is, in law, an affirmative defense: “Yes, I concede the elements of the charge you are alleging, but by doing so, I averted a greater harm, and I had no better way to avert that harm.” There appears to be plenty of evidence that they were well aware that their actions could result in violence. Difficult to succeed with a self defense claim self defense under those circumstances.
Grace
@desipis:
It was a comment intended to focus on the silliness that the Black Lives Matter movement seems to be engendering and not on justifying the actions of the shooters.
The Black Lives Matter movement, specifically? At least only one BLM supporter threw a punch* at the counterprotesters. Multiple Donald Trump supporters punched, kicked, and choked BLM protesters at a Donald Trump rally.
*There’s also the behavior that has been variously described as “chasing”, “herding”, and “escorting”, which could be varying degrees of threatening.
Another comment on the McDonald shooting, this time from the New York Times Editorial Board. It gives Rahm Emmanuel a thorough (and IMO richly deserved) kicking, but Alvarez isn’t even mentioned by name. Part of this is probably that Emmanuel has a national political profile and Alvarez doesn’t, but it’s still a pretty glaring omission.
Hey Amp–the blogroll isn’t working for me on any device or browser at the moment.
(I suppose I could subscribe to the blogs I like rather than using your blogroll to keep up with them, but…why? :D)
closetpuritan:
I’m not sure “better than Trump supporters” is a particularly meritorious standard.
Thanks for pointing that out!
The blogroll plug-in I was using seems to have ceased functioning – and it hasn’t been updated in two years, always a bad sign.
So I’ve replaced it with a new plug-in, and took the opportunity to update the blogroll, which had become too full of blogs that haven’t updated in months. Hopefully this new plug-in will work. (Fingers crossed).
This is a good time for people to suggest blogs to add to the “Alas” blogroll! I don’t guarantee I’ll add everything people suggest – my tastes are quirky and sometimes arbitrary – but I’ll certainly look at any blog anyone suggests.
Also, if there’s any blog that used to be on the blogroll that you noticed I failed to re-add, and that you miss, please let me know that too.
Okay, obviously the leaflets are mean and the people who thought of and distributed them are assholes.
But – and maybe this is just me not understanding the UK – I don’t understand why this is a matter for the police to investigate.
Amp – handing out any leaflets without permission of the transport authority on the Tube is a crime, regardless of their content. Had the leaflets been distributed on the street, it wouldn’t be a police matter, but the choice of venue makes it one.
Pillsy – I’m hardly surprised that the New York Times editorial board found it not worthy of note to discuss official malfeasance by a minority female.
Eytan – Oh, I see. That makes more sense, thanks.
desipis:
I’m not sure “better than Trump supporters” is a particularly meritorious standard.
No, but you said “the silliness that the Black Lives Matter movement seems to be engendering”, not “the response common to human nature that BLM seems to be not 100% effective at preventing in its supporters”.
closetpuritan @ 32:
Really? I just watched the video and read the story at the link you provided. I’ve also read other reports.
1) I don’t see anyone kicking, punching or choking anyone in that video.
2) I haven’t see any other video reported anywhere that showd that.
3) You say “BLM protesters”, but there’s only one person alleging that they were the target of any such behavior.
4) I haven’t seen any statements from anyone corroborating the complainant’s claim.
Watching that video, I see a man on the ground that a bunch of people seemed to be trying to help get up. Once he got up, he kept pushing into people until he was finally escorted out.
You – and others to whom Trump in particular and the GOP in general are anathema – have cited the allegation above as a fact. Why? Based on what?
desipis @ 35:
Do you have any evidence that this allegation is factual?
closetpuritan:
That’s because I see both BLM and Trump’s rhetoric (along with much of American political and ideological rhetoric) as exacerbating harmful aspects of human nature, not simply failing to reduce it.
An important distinction between these two is that the justifications for that exacerbation, such as appeals to ideological authority or the need for in group loyalty, are typically conservative values while the ideals which oppose such exacerbation, such as harm minimisation, are generally central to progressive values.
RonF:
I wasn’t making any allegations. I was disparaging Trump supporters generally, not in regards to a specific incident.
@RonF:
I didn’t watch the video, but my understanding of the situation was based on the article I linked to and others. The article says, e.g. “A woman in the video can be heard shouting, “Don’t choke him, don’t choke him, don’t choke him.”” I doubt she was shouting that just in case somebody might take it into their heads to choke him, even though nobody had done so yet.
Having watched the video there’s a couple of points worth making about the differences between the two incidents.
1) The Trump rally was in a hall which was under private control, where as the BLM protesters were on public streets.
2) Based on trumps words (e.g. “get him out of here”), it could be argued that:
a) the protester’s right to be present at the rally had been revoked, by not removing themselves promptly they were trespassing.
b) the people (presumably the Trump campaign) with the legal control over the hall may have the right to use reasonable force to remove the trespassers.
c) the crowd had explicit or implicit authority from the Trump campaign to act on the campaign’s behalf to use reasonable force to remove the protesters.
3) Given the protester was putting up significant physical resistance to being removed a significant amount of physical force could be reasonable used to remove them.
4) The pushing and shoving seems like it could fit a reasonable force standard. 5) Choking (if it occurred), or actions such as punching or spitting would not.
Internet Confessional: How many of these sins have you committed?
desipis @ 44:
What? Appeals to ideological authority and group loyalty are typically conservative values? The left lives off of ideological authority and group loyalty (i.e., identity politics).
closetpuritan @47:
Something I’ve learned is that when there’s video of an incident I should watch it myself and not depend on an advocate of a particular viewpoint to interpret it for me.
I watched that video 3 times and did not hear anyone say that. If anyone else has, please cite the time and I’ll be glad to watch it again and see if I can pick it out.
And even if someone did shout that, I think it’s entirely possible that some anonymous person might have misinterpreted what they were seeing – or, knowing that CNN was there recording the incident, might have shouted something to try to influence future viewers’ perception of what was going on.
“advocate of a particular viewpoint”=CNN? Damn that lamestream media!
“knowing that CNN was there recording the incident, might have shouted something to try to influence future viewers’ perception of what was going on.”
Anything’s possible, but that’s moving towards paranoia/conspiracy-theory territory.
RonF:
I was basing that comment from Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theroy:
I would agree that a lot of the noisy left holds the values typically associated with the conservatives, but just express those values differently. Loyalty to the cause of minority groups rather than loyalty to social traditions, respecting the (moral) authority of individuals of minority status rather than respecting the authority of individuals appointed to formal positions, respecting the sanctity of minority cultures rather than respecting sanctity of virginity, etc.
However, I think that a majority of the left only support those things when they are compatible with the underlying values of harm, fairness or liberty. This is in contrast to the dogmatic or axiomatic support of many of the more vocal advocates. This division in values is causing the political division on the left between the “Cultural Libertarians” and the “Social Justice Warriors”.
Meanwhile the whole “safe space” thing is escalating in a direction that ought to have been obvious:
Meanwhile the Goldsmith Islamic Society condemned the group that organised the speaker of “vile harassment”.
Perhaps the most absurd bit is that the Goldsmith Feminist Society, in considering a situation where a group of men were shouting down an Iranian woman arguing against the sexist subjugation of women in that part of the world, decided to back the men.
Here’s a link to the video to the time when things started to get heated.
OK, that last comment was maybe too snarky. But I was surprised to see CNN described that way, when they try to position themselves as basically, “We try to be neutral, unlike some other networks we could name [Fox & MSNBC]”.
I normally do try to watch videos if there’s much controversy about what they portray. Until your comment I hadn’t encountered anyone claiming that the protester hadn’t really experienced any violence.
Another couple reasons I don’t watch many videos and can usually find out more from other people’s descriptions, coming into play here:
My computer is old and if I haven’t restarted it recently the video tends to “skip” rather than playing smoothly. It does look like a guy in a blue checked or plaid shirt threw at least one punch. I can’t see much of what’s going on, though.
I don’t hear well with background noise. I’ve been told that I “probably” have a mild auditory processing disorder.
I also just find videos kind of inconvenient, admittedly.
@Myca, Ben:
Slate’s Leon Nefakh has more about the Dothan, AL story.
I’m not sure at this point if it’s more like what was originally reported, or more along the lines of this.
Oh, CNN sure is classy.
I never said they were classy. Classy/=partisan.
Yup. Absolutely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
An interesting article about where, exactly, the “355 mass shootings this year” statistic comes from, and how it is fairly misleading about the actual problem of indiscriminate, arbitrary mass shootings in a public place.
I mean, if there’s one thing journalists/news orgs are know for, it’s respecting privacy. Especially in the wake of a death.
So, Amp, you’re making an open call looking for blogs to add to the blogroll?
How can I resist?
Here’s a few suggestions.
http://www.instapundit.com
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com
http://www.althouse.blogspot.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy
http://michellemalkin.com
I think that’s true; but I also think it’s true that the creators of the statistic aren’t trying to describe indiscriminate, arbitrary mass shootings in a public place. (The thought process of the wider news media who repeated the statistic may or may not have done. Er, assuming there’s a thought process there at all…)
The problem of preventing gang violence or domestic violence is different from the problem of preventing arbitrary shootings in public places. But it’s a lot harder to kill a lot of people at once if you don’t have access to a gun. I think there’s also value in pointing out that people killing multiple other people at once happens a heck of a lot more in this country than you’d think if you listened only to stories of indiscriminate, arbitrary mass shootings in public places.
(Possibly I’m also less interested in this because I read an article in the WaPo describing this statistic and where it comes from a number of months ago, so I’ve known what it is the whole time; I forget not everyone’s a numbers geek like me :).)
Also relevant, of course, is that–even though they are still rare–the pace of mass shootings has increased. (That article has a pace of around every 60 days from late 2011-2014; more like 90 days this year, as there have been only 4, but still much lower than the average time between shootings in previous decades.)
@harlequin
But if you include “all incidents where four or more are injured and a gun was involved,” it’s pretty hard to make a case for gun control or some sort of growing epidemic of violence, because those incidents are not particularly increasing. You’ve inflated your numbers by conflating a bunch of different things, many of which are trending down.
Whereas, if you take “mass shooting” to mean the thing that most people think about when they talk about mass shootings, that’s on the increase. Much rarer, but worryingly increasing.
yrs–
–Ben
Maryam Namazie has more on her own blog.
In another post, Namazie writes:
Given that some female students, including members of the ISOC “sisters”, wanted to hear the talk, it seems to me that the Feminist Society there is doing intersectional feminism wrong. The first people you go to when you want to figure out how to support minority women should not be minority men.
@closetpuritan
I cannot for the life of me figure out what this is “more” of.
Ben,
closetpuritan “more” was responding to desipis’s comment at 52.
Thank you, Charles.
RonF – Thanks for the suggestions! Most of those blogs don’t appeal to me, but I did add Volokh to the blogroll.
Are any of the people who were allegedly involved denying there was such an incident? From what I remember, Trump’s response was “maybe he deserved to be roughed up” or something close to that. He has not claimed that the incident didn’t happen.
This webpage contains an “implicit bias” test for democrats vs republicans.
I got a “-0.2,” which is about halfway on the bias scale, with a preference for Democrats.
(Thanks for the link, Ben!)
I score +.28… That’s between “Very Conservative” and “Strong Republican”. Imagine my surprise!
I guess I’ve gotta vote for Cruz or Trump or somebody now. In any case I’m sorry that I’ll be unable to vote for Clinton or Sanders in the general election, but I need to be consistent in basing my life on internet tests.
Kate:
Who is alleged to have been involved? “Trump supporters”? Trump supporters present at that rally? As far as I know, no particular individual has been ID’d to have done this. Do you expect all of the people who were there to read news reports and then send out public statements saying “No, I didn’t do this”? No. That’s not going to happen. If someone in particular has been alleged to have done any of this – and I would think that someone who actually WAS videoed doing anything that’s alleged here would have been ID’d by this time – then I would expect them to respond (or hire a lawyer).
But issue a denial of allegations made by one person with no other witnesses accompanied by a video that is represented to support those allegations but in fact does nothing of the sort? No, you’re not going to get everyone there to jump up and individually say “Not me”. And you’re going not to get someone to say “No, nobody here did that” because no one is authorized to speak for everyone there (including Donald Trump) and no one can claim to have seen everything that happened at that rally.
Now, let other witnesses come forward supporting this allegation or let a video that actually supports these allegations be shown and you’ll have something worth investigating. Otherwise this whole thing sounds like BS to me from people – both the person making the allegation and the people reporting it as a fact instead of an allegation – who are more interested in discrediting Donald Trump than representing the truth.
There is a woman who says “don’t choke him” about five times starting at 18 or 19 in the linked video.
It is very difficult to see what is going on in that video. The people handling the protester are putting their bodies between the protester and the camera. But the notion that they were just trying to help him get up is patently absurd.
I got around -0.02, but I’m not sure how much of that was me not being able to remember which party the donkey went with…whoops.
I look forward to seeing your Trump bumper sticker. Have you bought a gun yet?
I don’t think I can get a Trump bumper sticker until he wins the GOP nomination. The test didn’t tell me which very conservative, strong Republican to vote for, so I’m going to have to wait.
Haven’t bought a gun yet. But that’s only because no internet test has told me I’m strongly in favor of guns, yet.
Not really, not if he’s resisting them as much as he seems to be resisting people once he gets up. I don’t see any arm or leg motions that look consistent with throwing a punch or a kick. When you punch or kick you pull your arm or leg back and then swing it. All those people have their arms extended and they’re not swinging them. That’s consistent with reaching towards him to help him (or restrain him), not throwing punches. Same with the legs, no one’s swinging their legs.
Also, if he was punched or kicked you’d think that he would have shown the people he was making allegations to the signs of his injuries – cuts, bruises, etc. But there’s no report of that or of him having sought medical treatment.
Amp @ 74: I’d love to see how many people questioned in that survey said “None of your damn business” or some other non-response. I’m thinking it’s tough to get reliable data on a question like “Do you own a gun?” I sure as hell would say “None of your damn business!” if I was asked by some random stranger.
Oh, and have you seen the new Trump campaign logo? It’s here.
With the caveat that I expressed above, Here is a link supporting the proposition that increasing gun ownership among the citizenry leads to fewer gun-related homicides because criminals are afraid of armed victims. Which, to me, makes perfect sense.
Yes, I know. Correlation does not = causation. I said “supporting”, not “proving”.
Having their arms extended in front of them is consistent with threatening to choke him, and the woman on the video says “Don’t choke him.” about five times beginning at about 19 (a point you keep ignoring or denying). The video clearly supports the protester’s contention that he was choked.
There are no clear punches or kicks on the video, but it begins mid-incident, and there are several men around him, going in and out of frame throughout the course of the video.
Why would what looks like four or five men gather around him to help him up, and then keep insising on giving him “help” that he clearly does not want?
Smack bang on “moderate”, -0.08.
RonF,
Wow, that’s a terribly misleading chart.
After all, what matters is not the number of guns in private hands; it’s how many people own guns. (The difference in deterrence between a victim with 0 guns and 1 gun, if the criminal knew that, would presumably be large; on the other hand, the difference in deterrence between 1 gun and 5 guns isn’t as large, because the person can only realistically use one at a time.)
Since the height of gun violence in 1993, when that chart starts, the percentage of households that have any guns in their possession has dropped from 42% to 31% according to the GSS (PDF source) or remained flat at around 40% according to Gallup (source). So the entirety of that rise in “more guns” is people who already owned guns buying more of them, and the chance the average victim is armed has not changed or has dropped.
Also, of course, you can’t just look at one time period. The gun homicide rate had a kind of U-shape from 1981 to 1993, a period of time in which gun ownership underwent a similar U-shape with higher gun ownership correlated with higher gun homicide rates (Gallup) or, with some jaggedness, did an inverse U-shape with higher gun ownership correlated with lower gun homicide rates (GSS), although the two Us in the GSS rate don’t have the same low/high point.
So: can’t say a lot from those numbers about the relationship between gun ownership and crime deterrence, except that the original article you linked is totally useless at demonstrating the thing it wants to claim.
That was a fun quiz. I was expecting to get a moderate-to-strong bias in favor of Democrats, although I am not one myself, but I got a +.25, at the top end of “Very Conservative.” Go figure.
(I think it was partially because I paused every time Greenpeace came up to try to remember where that was supposed to go and miscategorized it as “bad” when it was supposed to be “good” twice. The NRA badge also gave me pause, since I didn’t recognize it, though not to the same degree. I think the quiz might have been more accurate in my case if they hadn’t thrown those outside entities in there.)
Heh. -0.4, which suggests I hate conservatives and everything they stand for.
This is probably reflects the fact I hate conservatives and everything they stand for.
Take that implicit bias test more than once. You may be amused by the results.
Grace
I scored -.5 the first time, and +0.1 the second.
Conclusion: The test is bollocks.
You are so very cynical.
Harlequin:
Hm. Joe Blow owns a shotgun that he got from his Dad. Worried about the uptick in crime in his neighborhood, he and his wife each get their CCL and buy handguns. The household started off as “household with one firearm” and is now “household with 3 firearms”. Their recent purchases of handguns doesn’t affect the number of households in the U.S. that own firearms. But the number of armed “victims” in their house has gone from 0 to 2.
I suggest that there are a lot of people out there who had long guns in their household that now own handguns they didn’t own a few years ago. Can I prove it? Nope. But you can’t discount it, either. What I can do is offer a link to the number of CCL’s issued over the last 20 or so years. According to it, in 1999 there were 2.7 million CCL’s in existence in the U.S. In June of 2014, there were over 11.1 million. That’s a 200% increase in people who are now entitled to legally carry a concealed firearm, and my guess is that since then the number has grown even more. I’ll also propose that the vast majority of those people did NOT carry a concealed firearm illegally.
So I’m guessing that while the number of households that own firearms may not have increased, the number of people arming themselves in public has.
RonF:
Who is alleged to have been involved? “Trump supporters”? Trump supporters present at that rally? As far as I know, no particular individual has been ID’d to have done this. Do you expect all of the people who were there to read news reports and then send out public statements saying “No, I didn’t do this”? No. That’s not going to happen. If someone in particular has been alleged to have done any of this – and I would think that someone who actually WAS videoed doing anything that’s alleged here would have been ID’d by this time – then I would expect them to respond (or hire a lawyer).
But issue a denial of allegations made by one person with no other witnesses accompanied by a video that is represented to support those allegations but in fact does nothing of the sort? No, you’re not going to get everyone there to jump up and individually say “Not me”. And you’re going not to get someone to say “No, nobody here did that” because no one is authorized to speak for everyone there (including Donald Trump) and no one can claim to have seen everything that happened at that rally.
I would expect that if Donald Trump supporters view this as vicious slander, and know that it is not true, they would want to defend Donald Trump and his supporters. I mean, I guess if it didn’t happen but they didn’t think, if it did happen, it would reflect badly on them, then they wouldn’t care. Sure, they couldn’t know everything that happened at the event, but you can hear and see enough in the video that you could know if the incident you observed and the one in the video were the same.
let other witnesses come forward supporting this allegation
Does a witness who’s also a reporter for the Washington Post count, or as a left-of-Fox-News paper, do you figure they’ll tell bald-faced lies if it will discredit Trump?
Also, after watching the video on a different website and computer (I think that the CNN site, by having an embedded video at the top as well, makes it more difficult to get smooth play) I could make out the “Don’t choke him”, and I could see Checked Shirt Guy appeared to kick as well as punch, and after they get separated he’s holding his hands in a ready-to-punch looking stance.
I didn’t realize at first that the video was taken by CNN and not a bystander. If I’m wrong and there isn’t actually any violence in the video, then to some extent, Trump has brought this on himself by keeping reporters in a “pen” and trying to keep them from filming the incident. But a fair number of Trump supporters seem to agree that the violence was happening, and approve of it [also from the WaPo report]:
I went through 7 pages of search results to see if I could find any right-wing coverage of the incident, and did find this, sent in by a reader of The Gateway Pundit:
The first sentence and the last sentence seem to contradict each other.
The last time I did one of those implicit bias tests, it said that I had a strong bias against Christians. I took the test around Christmas time, and I’d been having an “Ugh, enough already!” reaction to the onslaught of Christmas stuff for weeks already by that point.
Perhaps, and some of that is probably happening, but the increase doesn’t appear to be large. (From the linked Congressional report, US gun owners purchased about 7 million handguns more than you’d expect between 1994-2007 if everybody bought the same kind of gun they already possessed [out of 74 million total purchased guns], so handguns did increase in relation to other guns owned. But without knowing the typical distribution of guns per type of gun owner it’s impossible to know how many people bought handguns who didn’t previously own them.)
That’s possible. But that still doesn’t mean it deters gun crime–the people who actually study this at a more nuanced level than looking at two trendlines don’t have a consensus. (I’ll also point out that “number of CCLs” != “number of people carrying guns in public.” Some people get them just in case and don’t use them; some people don’t use them all the time; the fraction of people in the latter two cases goes up as CCLs get easier to obtain.)
And absolutely none of that addresses my point that you only get this correlation by looking at a very specific statistic in a very specific time window: by looking at the rate of gun homicides since the peak of that statistic in 1993. If guns in private hands are deterrents to gun crime at such a simple level that it’s visible from the correlation between those two statistics, we should be able to see that in any time period. And we don’t. Because the number of guns in private hands has continually increased (since guns are not frequently discarded) and the number of gun homicides did this.
Again, the question of whether guns in private hands deter crime (and deter it at a sufficient level to be worth the additional risks of gun ownership) is not a settled one among the people who study this kind of thing. But the article you linked, which smugly points out that–hey–gun crime has been decreasing since its maximum peak ever, while the number of guns in private hands has increased because it always increases (absent huge government pushes to change gun culture e.g. Australia), frankly doesn’t tell us anything about the deterrent effect of possibly-armed victims. It’s a really obvious example of how to lie with statistics: show only the window of the x-axis that demonstrates what you want to show, and not the whole trend.
It works as a possible counterargument to a claim that more guns means more gun crime, by showing that there’s not a good correlation between the two numbers. But a correlation in the other direction–that more guns means less gun crime at such a simple level you can see it in a chart like that–is clearly and definitely false.