Group items tagged

1) There is something wrong with polling in this country

Seeing these results throws past polling into doubt as well

There are lots of theories—people don’t answer their phones, people distrust callers even when they do answer, people don’t tell pollsters their true views. Whatever is happening, we need to figure out a system for gauging public opinion that is more accurate because you can’t rely on gut feelings or lawn signs.

Disturbingly, the boogaloo movement is at least the third example of a mass of memes escaping from 4chan to become a real-life radical political movement, the first being the leftist-libertarian hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged in 2008; the second was the far-right fascist group of angry young men called the alt-right, which formed in 2015. (The conspiracy theory QAnon might be considered a fourth, but it is more than a political movement.)

their arrival can be explained by tracing their online origins. Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. And with a mix of ignorance and simplicity, they view their discontent through the most distorted lens imaginable: internet memes.

The birthplace of the boogaloo movement, 4chan’s /k/ section, is ostensibly devoted to the ownership and purchase of weapons. But in practice, it is a space where weapons discussions combine with 4chan’s politicized male anger.

Law enforcement officials concerned by the prospect for violence at a rally in the nation’s capital next week are planning to reinstall protective fencing that surrounded the U.S. Capitol for months after the Jan. 6 insurrection there, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

“We intend to have the integrity of the Capitol be intact.”

Police continue to track intelligence indicating far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are planning to attend next week’s rally, which is designed to demand “justice” for the hundreds of people who have been charged in connection with January’s insurrection. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, however, has said he doesn’t expect his membership to attend.

uses the drug ring to show how the fraternity ethos shapes elite societies as a whole, beyond the College of Charleston: with impunity.

Marshall shows how being asked to join a fraternity means having a safe place to behave badly between high school and the job that frat puts you on the fast track towards. In his book, he quotes a Cornell Greek life website: “While only 2% of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of US senators and congressmen, 85% of supreme court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.”

the former fraternity members Marshall interviewed for Among the Bros said their experience selling drugs in college was good prep for their careers: “They’d say things like, ‘I learned supply chain economics, salesmanship, delegation and marketing.’” As a reader, it’s hard to not feel pangs of anger at how for some (“some” being young white men), recklessness could be a stepping stone to a six-figure salary.

Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl

He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.

his message is quite horrifying.

Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.

when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.

no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.

what sets Mr Tate apart from other alt-right social-media personalities and previous anti-feminist online movements is the extent to which his views have found a ready audience among teenage boys.

In 2021 Mr Tate established Hustlers University, an online platform where young men could take courses in business and investing for $49.99 a month. It also gave students financial rewards for promoting Mr Tate’s misogynist ideas via a now-suspended affiliate marketing programme. Thanks to a continuing stream of fan-generated content, his views have proliferated on social media even though most platforms have banned his accounts.

Part of the reason why Mr Tate has found success specifically on TikTok is that its algorithm is uniquely predictive, appearing not only to rely on the content users watch and recommend, but making assumptions about their potential interests

Our species evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Scientists are still working out how humans later populated the other continents

A lot of evidence indicates that Native Americans originated from a population somewhere in Asia more than 15,000 years ago. In search of clues to that founding population, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues examined a 24,000-year-old bone buried near a village called Mal’ta in eastern Siberia.

the Mal’ta boy belonged to an ancient population spread out across Asia 24,000 years ago. They came into contact with an East Asian population at some point, and members of the two groups had children together. Native Americans are the descendants of those children.

Every time we allowed ourselves to be even remotely optimistic, some new reminder arrived that we, an immature electorate, had elected a child.

In eight years in the White House there had been an uninterrupted stretch of calm and decency. In eight years there has been no scandal, not even a whiff of scandal, coming from the White House. That is a profoundly difficult thing to do, especially with the two houses of Congress in Republican hands and the president’s every move or hope met with biblical opposition.

For eight years we have been able to look to the White House and see a president who thinks and acts with cool deliberation, whose every sentence is well-considered. Anyone can disagree with President Obama’s policies but it cannot be denied that the first family acted with unerring decorum and amenity.

Fight Erupts in Trump Administration Over Transgender Students’ Rights

One filing deadline is coming up this Thursday in the case before the Supreme Court involving the Virginia transgender boy, Gavin Grimm. He sued the Gloucester County School Board two years ago after the board refused to allow him to use the boys’ bathroom and told him he could use a separate bathroom in a converted janitors closet. The Obama administration had rejected that type of accommodation as unacceptable and discriminatory.

Police decided the swastikas didn’t constitute hate crimes, and school officials said they punished students who were involved

One teacher broached the subject in her classroom. Another raised the topic of anti-Semitism with fellow teachers, and privately with a student. Both were sanctioned with disciplinary letters.

Teachers asked administrators to send a letter home to parents explaining the situation, according to The Boston Globe. That didn’t happen, the Globe reported, and students and some teachers began talking about it. 

One summer about 85 years ago in a small Alabama town, a scrappy tomboy named Nelle met her new next door neighbor, Tru, a bookish, dapper dresser with a high-pitched voice and a mischievous streak.They made an unlikely pair. She often went barefoot in overalls while he dressed so fastidiously that a teacher said he stood out like a bird of paradise in a flock of crows. But both were oddballs who took refuge in detective novels, and they quickly bonded over their mutual love of Sherlock Holmes and the Rover Boys, spending long afternoons reading mysteries in their treehouse sanctuary. To entertain themselves, they started writing their own stories on her father’s Underwood typewriter, taking turns as one of them narrated while the other typed.

They grew up to be two of the South’s greatest writers — Harper Lee and Truman Capote — and their lives and work were intertwined long after that first summer. Ms. Lee drew on their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in her newly released novel, “Go Set a Watchman.”

Their broken friendship has been restored — in fiction, at least — in a forthcoming middle-grade novel, “Tru & Nelle,” by Greg Neri. Though Ms. Lee and Mr. Capote have each individually been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries and feature films, “Tru & Nelle” is the first book to focus primarily on their childhood bond.

Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

Paleontologists in Uruguay published findings in November suggesting that humans hunted giant sloths there about 30,000 years ago. All the way in southern Chile, Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has shown that humans lived at a coastal site called Monte Verde as early as 14,800 years ago.

Dr. Guidon, the Brazilian archaeologist who pioneered the excavations, asserted more than two decades ago that her team had found evidence in the form of charcoal from hearth fires that humans had lived here about 48,000 years ago.

South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth.

The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in early February and is being debated by the state Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.

At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You saw Secretary Clinton there did not want to use the words radical Islam. Your response

As this crowd is fond of saying, words have meaning and they have consequences

This is a clash of civilizations.

After a year in which it has never been far from the headlines, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is back in the news again -- this time for a cartoon that critics say pushes its provocative brand of humor too fa

The publication has sparked outrage for a cartoon that suggests drowned toddler Alan Kurdi -- the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose death in September triggered a global wave of sympathy for migrants -- would have grown up to be a sexual molester of the type blamed for a recent wave of mob sex assaults in Cologne, Germany.

The cartoon sparked an immediate reaction on social media, with many labeling it offensive and racist, and many questioning whether the masses of people around the world who tweeted #JeSuisCharlie in solidarity after the January 2015 attacks would feel the same way in light of the cartoon.