Group items tagged

White House rivals Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have poked fun at each other at a charity dinner, a day after their bitter duel on the debate stage.

She laughed as Mr Trump joked about her well-paid speeches and the FBI investigation into her private email.

But the Republican was booed when he joked that his Democratic opponent hated Roman Catholics.

Gamergate

The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect

ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.

NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts

Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture

Millions tuned in every week to hear Trump say his signature line, “You’re fired,” and cement his image as a man who played up conflict for the cameras and who never met a self-promotional product placement he didn’t like. He was a quintessential reality star — and a senior Trump campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, said this past week that the mogul is still exactly that: “This is the ultimate reality show. It’s the presidency of the United States.”

Everyone may love to watch the villains and the insult-lobbing ringmasters on reality shows, but no one ever roots for them, which, technically, should not bode well for Trump’s chances. Technically.

The people who stick around longest on competition shows aren’t always the ones with the most “skill” at whatever it is the shows make contestants do. Often, they’re the ones who stir up the most hate-watch rage

a wide array of figures whose own commitments seemed incompatible with Trumpism decided that he was worth defending and eventually supporting.

These figures, strikingly, came from both sides of the pre-existing civil war

Early in the campaign, when it seemed as if Jeb Bush had a chance to coast to the nomination as the standard-bearer of the establishment, it was mostly voices from the professional base — talk-radio voices, Fox News voices and for a time Cruz himself — who worked to build up Trump as a populist alternative

rump has become the hillbilly vehicle for revenge upon the elites who have manipulated them for decades.After 52 years of abuse by their rulers, this “base” has finally turned on its leaders. The irony is that the only option for the now-former dominant Republicans is going to be to fall in line with them behind Trump.

They have no place else to go: They will follow those they had so easily manipulated for so long; they will support Trump. If they don’t, their influence will disappear.

This is not new. Small-town Americans had fallen completely out of media favor by 1960

I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.

Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos. They are reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system.

As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex.

The TV producer in Ailes saw a marketing niche, and the political operative in him saw a direct way of courting voters. Rupert Murdoch owned the network, but Ailes was its intellectual author. In the two decades since, the network has thrived without legitimate competition of any kind. It has proved to be a big tent, sheltering beneath it some excellent reporters but also a collection of blowhards, performance artists, cornballs, and Republican operatives in rehab from political failures and personal embarrassments. With the help of this antic cast, the Fox audience has come to understand something important that it did not know before: The people who make “mainstream” news and entertainment don’t just look down on conservatives and their values—they despise them.

By 2010, the network had become so popular that—according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room—Ailes added a new goal to the mission: the election of the next president.

Almost as soon as the election ended, Fox News went back to work on the mission, emphasizing a variety of themes, each intended to demonize the left. At the top of the list was the regular suggestion that Barack Obama was an America-hating radical, an elaboration of Glenn Beck’s observation (on Fox) that the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Other themes included the idea that straight white men were under ever-present threat from progressive policies and attitudes; that Planned Parenthood was a kind of front operation for baby murder; that political correctness had made the utterance of even the most obvious factual statements dangerous; and that the concerns of black America—including, especially, those of the Black Lives Matter movement—were so illogical, and so emotionally expressed, that they revealed millions of Americans to be beyond the reach of reason.

On news sites like this one, in newspapers, and even on TV, Americans have been grappling with concepts that normally don't get mentioned outside of a comparative literature class or liberal arts college symposium: neocolonialism, white man's burden, paternalism.

Maybe this is a conversation that started with the decline of the Iraq war. A February 2003 poll estimated that nearly 60% of Americans supported an invasion. By May 2007, 61% said the U.S. should have stayed out. The lessons were about more than the limits of American power or the wisdom of this particular conflict (although those are both important), but, underneath all of the questions and national soul-searching, the first hints in a century of American dominance that maybe our power isn't always and necessarily a force of good

during the two weeks of wall-to-wall American media coverage of the Egyptian revolution, hardly 10 minutes of cable news could go by without someone mentioning U.S. support for Mubarak. Americans were rooting for Egyptian protesters but, at the same time, they were helping to prop up Mubarak by participating in an American system that proudly promotes American hegemony by backing guys like him. The big contradiction in how Americans see our role in the world, obvious for so long to people in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was finally becoming clear to us.

The popular media tempest surrounding homework formed in 2006 with the publication of two books on the subject: “The Homework Myth,” by Alfie Kohn, and “The Case Against Homework,” by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, followed by Time Magazine’s The Myth About Homework by Claudia Wallis. Last year, Vicki Abeles’s documentary “Race to Nowhere” joined the fray.

my students feel that quality homework is worth the effort, I’m keeping it. With one caveat. All assignments must pass the “Ben” test. If an assignment is not worthy of my own son’s time, I’m dumping it. Based on a quick look at my assignment book from last year, about a quarter of my assignments won’t make the cut.Children need time to be quiet, play, read and imagine. Teachers who sacrifice these vital elements of childhood for anything less than the most valuable homework assignments are being derelict in their duty to their students and the teaching profession.

According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is "the Narrative" -- his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren't so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that "U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny."

one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. "If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world," he said, "it should stop killing Muslims."

How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter.

 Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 

When I grew up, I realized that in 1944 and 1945, my father was sinking ships that were evacuating German civilians and troops from Riga, in Latvia, and Tallinn, in Estonia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic — for which my father received his medals. It’s been a long time since I was proud of him, but I don’t judge him. It was war.

My father fought the evil of fascism, but he was taken advantage of by another evil. He and millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen, virtual slaves, brought the world not liberation but another slavery. The people sacrificed everything for victory, but the fruits of this victory were less freedom and more poverty.

So my father went off to defend his homeland. He was still a boy when he went to sea, in constant terror of drowning in that steel coffin. He ended up protecting the regime that killed his father.

Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not “Jewish extremists.” They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of “the Jewish state": Those for whom every Arab is a bitter enemy, simply because they are Arab; those who were silent at the Beitar Jerusalem games when the team’s fans shouted “death to Arabs” at Arab players; those who call for cleansing the state of its Arab minority, or at least to drive them out of the homes and cities of the Jews. No less responsible for the murder are those who did not halt, with an iron hand, violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, and who failed to investigate complaints “due to lack of public interest.”

The term “Jewish extremists” actually seems more appropriate for the small Jewish minority that is still horrified by these acts of violence and murder. But they too recognize, unfortunately, that they belong to a vengeful, vindictive Jewish tribe whose license to perpetrate horrors is based on the horrors that were done to it.

The Israel Police was quick to label the murderers “Jewish extremists,” meaning they aren’t part of the herd, they are outliers, “wild weeds.” This is the police’s way of trying to justify a sin, to “make the vermin kosher.” But the vermin is huge, and many-legged. It has embraced the soldiers and other young Israelis who overran the social media networks with calls for revenge and with hatred for Arabs. The vermin was welcomed by Knesset members, rabbis and public figures who demanded revenge. Nor did it skip over the prime minister, who declared “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.”

2015 was the Year of Trump because he is the perfect candidate for our viral age. His success tells us a lot about the nature of what goes viral and how it reflects our beliefs and our fears

“What goes viral is what we think is remarkable,” Jeff Hemsley, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University and a co-author of the book “Going Viral,” said. “In a way, it represents what we as a society think is worth talking about.”

Virality can be about sheer news value, but emotion also plays a big role in determining what gets shared. If we think about a given news story as a disease waiting to be passed along, human emotion is its most common vector. And some emotions are more contagious.

But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.

It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.

We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever