薔薇語

Haha. Even the Neo-Nazis don't seem to believe President Elect Trump when he disavows them. ^^ http://www.joemygod.com/2016/11/23/nazi-leader-im-disappointed-trumps-disavowal-understand-forced/ Soar. - I am looking forward to his swearing in so I can just start typing "Pres." instead of "President Elect". My fingers are getting tired. ^^

If he came out tomorrow and made a bit TV speech, i think it would be good. Just as I said before. I would like it. But I am not going to be convinced of his new commitments to minorities because of such a speech. I am also not in the group that thinks he is a raging racist inciting neo-nazis. I am not the demographic that needs convincing while still being in a demographic that won't be convinced. I can accept that. I wish Mega could too but ultimately nothing will change. As to him losing votes - meh. Non-point. This idea that he won any victories by catering to neo-nazis is gleefully unaware of the exit polls. Soar.

But here is the thing, Mega, you have found four examples of him disavowing such groups. I personally knew of the two recent ones off the top of my head. You can now choose to accept him at his word here or hold him to his past statements. You are choosing the latter. Tomorrow he could give a speech summed up as "white suprimicists are bad. Don't hurt minorities". Then following that speech you would be faced with the same choice you have today. His past statements wouldn't have changed and his speech tomorrow wouldn't have deviated from his current rebuking. So, you would in essence have the same amount of information. Are we to magically accept you will change your opinion? I think not. There will always be a way to move the goal posts. "He didn't really mean it!" "He phrased X too loosely so it means he really just hates minorities" "He didn't do it early enough, so even if he isn't supporting them (which he still is!) he is still responsible for them!" "Y person connected to the campaign (but not actually connected) gave a secret Nazi handshake to signal President Elect Trump didn't really mean it." "Yeah, but these people are still out there so he needs to keep repeating this until they are gone!" And god knows what other goal-post moving tools will be used. There will be no satisfying anyone who isn't already satisfied. He has made two (4 per you) statements. One in the wake of harassment and one in response to the Neo-Nazis. Soar.

Also, the two issues aren't completely comparable. Prior to the speech, I don't think he ever gave as clear a statement as President Elect Trump has about White Supremacists and others. I could be mis-remembering but I think there was just the general wishy-washy statements prior. Soar.

Praised by people who didn't get a hoot about the issue to begin with. What person honestly clamoring for such a speech found their opinions changed? None. It was one of many of President Obama's concessions to the loonies. Of course that doesn't mean it and many other speeches he gave weren't good. But he didn't convince anyone to change their mind on that issue. Soar.

Did it help? Nope. Not a single person concerned about that issue had their opinions change. Soar.

People who believe that President Elect Trump is supporting these Neo-Nazi's can see him denounce harassment and condemn the group. But no amount of evidence will convince people otherwise. Ultimately, we have to recognize that large swaths of people are willfully ignorant. People who believe Pres. Bush brought down the towers, people who believe we never went to the moon, people who believe any number of things that they feel they have "evidence" for and refuse to find counter-evidence for. Well, we have it. On TV and in a NYTimes article both with the same conclusion. Whether people choose to accept that message is up to them. But alas, the goal posts will always move. Soar.

If President Elect Trump did such a thing - gave a grand speech***, it would make me happy. I would be a tiny bit more proud of the man. I just think that doing so to please people who will never be pleased is pointless. Soar. ***Just giving a "grand" speech on anything might be worth the money to see it.

Yeah, and nothing but upside for President Obama to release his birth certificate. Don't get me wrong, Mega. I get your position. I was on here 8 years ago wanting the birther BS to go away thinking, just like you in this case, that President Obama could only win from just showing his birth certificate. Guess what! He didn't win. There was no upside. People who want to see bad will see bad. The goal posts will continue to move. We have his statement of condemnation. This is in conjunction with his 60 minutes point of not harassing people. It will never be enough. So rather than placate people who won't be satisfied, move on. Soar.

And if he did it tomorrow, you and other would still accuse him of the same things and beat on the same same dead horse. Soar.

Of course not. It never is and never will be. The issue is just whose problem that is. Soar.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38069469 Soar

Time for some comedy in our politics. Soar.

I think the problem with such analogies is two fold: they are overly simplistic and "othering", and they are clearly politically biased as people don't dare think about those implications when put against their candidate. Senator Obama (08) thought marriage should have been between 1 man and 1 woman. Does voting for him mean you are homophobic? No. Secretary Clinton has supported our surveillance state - does voting for her mean that Democratic voters support big-brother? No. She has supported bombing tactics that just deem all 14 boys in Yemen killed terrorists and has killed countless innocent families. Does voting for Sec. Clinton mean you support these bombing runs that murder children? No. Politics is a much more complicated issue than the above. These candidates also supported many other issues that were given more appeal to individual voters. And slinging around these hasty generalizations that divide people doesn't serve anyone but your own catharsis. Soar.

Yes, presumably that it so. But I assumed Mega's point referenced nation exit polls and not state or local ones. And if so, that would indicate a break with the national results for other groups. So, apples to apples it seems to me. But again, there is nothing sacrosanct about the data. If it is true that he only pulled in 18% and not 29, then that is the real data; trend be damned. But before accepting it off hand a quick reality check to see if it jives with other data points is a good practice. Soar.

I was unaware of that. It is a good point that exit polls aren't gospel, however they are the best data we have available. Now, if I recall correctly, pre-election polling suggested something closer to that 18-20% value. So that makes me wonder if the current polls are wrong and yet somehow the earlier ones were right or if there is other wonkiness at play. Presumably the polling pre-election and exit polls operated under the same standards. One bit of caution I do actually have with this new possible readjustment downward in the Latino vote is that it breaks with essentially every other trend we see in the data. In particular, every other racial group voted for President Elect trump in a consistent way from 2012 with similar decreases in Democratic support and rise in third party support. If the Latino vote dropped by some 10 points, that would suggest their community would be the only one that changed and, unless those ten points are transferred to third parties (extremely unlikely) the only group that increased in support for the Democratic party. While not impossible by any stretch, rather odd given the over all patterns. Soar.

To be a bit trite: the plural of anecdote is not data. This election didn't feature any particular major shift in substantive voting demographics for the Republican party***. Whites, white women, blacks, various age groups, local population, etc. The single largest shift (in raw numbers) was a one point shift between men and women (men increased by 1 percent form last time and women decreased by 1). But even that data point is incapable of expressing what happened because the women who did vote voted Republican at a lower rate. And while men increased in support for the Republican party by 1 percent, that is probably more a reflection of the slight uptick of Black and Latino support for the Republican party. All in all, President Elect Trump gained an extremely comparable vote share as Gov. Romney in terms of demographics and raw numbers. If your friends voted for Gov. Romney, they likely voted for P.E. Trump but don't want to tell you for, well, obvious reasons. Soar. ***Note, this is limited to the Republican party. The Democratic Party saw some major shifts - hence why they lost. But those shifts were not to the Republican party.

So your reference was of their statements from your earlier link. My second post to you address that.

Looking back, I Imagine the contention is in regards to the post election rate. It is here that I think it is important to recognize humans are really bad at processing data. If they are in an environment that is telling them they should expect an increase it doesn't matter what is actually happening, they're going to perceive an increase. That doesn't mean there isn't actually an increase but rather that the perception might be outweighing the actual evidence. The link you showed above didn't cite any actual individual evidence for hate crimes. They rested their case on two main points:１- that the number of phone calls they are getting has increased and 2 - that this feels like an increase over what it was 15 years ago. It is important to note that getting a phone call is not synonymous with the commission of a hate crime. Considering that we've had known examples of misinterpretation, and outright lies, it is best to approach random phone calls with some caution. Of course this doesn't mean that every phone call is not a true case of a hate crime but that it is not a one-for-one ratio. Also I would imagine that there might be multiple phone calls for the same incident. It is also important to recognize that this is hate crime in general that they are looking at. The linked article doesn't talk about Anti-Muslim crime exclusively when it talks about the number of phone calls they are getting. They've received about two hundred phone calls reporting incidences of hate crimes since the election. If we assume that every single phone call is accurate and does not repeat any incidents, we find ourselves at a rate of about 7000+ for the whole year. That is in line with year-to-year averages in hate crime in the US. Edit: This calculation is off. I got the date wrong on the report. Over a five day period in the US, there should be about 85ish hate crime incidents / 90ish victims. So assuming ever single call reflect a separate, accurate, and true crime there has been a doubling in the 4 day window. Whether this is accurate or reflects a new standard is yet to be seen. Soar.

The SPLC is wrong if that is what they are saying in regards to the FBI data. We had 307 victims last year compared to nearly 600 in 2001. And that 2001 shot up from 36 the previous year. We did not hit anything near the rash of anti muslim crime we experinced in the aftermath of 911 in the whole of last year. And it is of note that 2002 saw a quick decline into what became the new normal (around 200 a year). Soar.

"Not a good trend" is certainly a point even I think is easily pulled from the data. And that is not a hysterical claim. More the nation that the muslim population is under some great seige today that seems to be making its rounds on social media is. Its the nature of humans to find danger and amp that up - hence why most everyone thinks we live in an ever more dangerous world when in reality this is by far the safest time to have ever lived in history or pre-history. Again, there has been an increase and that should give us pause but we are still far from 911 levels and a Muslim in the US is still far more likely to be the victim of a normal murder (a moderately rare crime) than any type of hate crime (personal attack or attack on property or intimidation). Soar.

To TheDarkness: In response to my use of Meme: Perhaps there is some confusion here: I am not using meme to refer to "cute cat pic" or similar FaceBook / Twitter note. Rather that of a piece of 'knowledge'. Aggregated data vs specific: When we are talking about numbers that are in the few thousands we can start to get some real clear trend lines of the overall social climate. But when we get to data of just 2-300, even small number changes have extreme percentage swings. To give a bit of a flippant example, from 2011 to 2012, we saw about a 60% increase in violence against disabled folks and over a 100% increase from 2010 to 2012. That is one catchy headline, but in raw numbers it was a shift of about 50 victims. While it is something to be concerned about for sure, when measured against the populations as a whole, it is a minor shift. Any number of factors outside of an increase in anti-Disable mindset could account for a raw number shift of 50 victims. That is why it can be troublesome to pull trends from small data sets. That is why, for example, national polls with less than 1000 people aren't considered reliable and 2200+ are more the gold standard. That said, lets look at what is considered to be some basic issues with President Elect Trump: He started off his campaign being anti-immigrant and in particular anti-Mexican / Latino. Later on, especially with the terrorist attacks in Europe, a ramping up of Syrian activity, and the nightclub shooting in the US, he ramps up his anti-immigrant / Muslim rhetoric. He is constantly bashing on China and our relations with them. Given these things and your assertion that the increases in hate crimes can be attributed to him to some degree, lets look at data. Hispanic: The 2010 to 2014 (5 year span) of data for Anti-Latino crimes shows an average yearly victims count of 523. 2015, despite Trump, saw a decrease of 25% overall. It stayed on par with 2014. Asian: The 2010 to 2014 (5 year span) of data for Anti-Asian crime shows an average yearly victims count of 177. 2015, despite Trump, saw a decrease of 23% overall. It was actually down quite a bit compared to the 2014 rate. Islamic (broken down even more): The 2010 to 2014 (5 year span) of data for Anti-Islamic crime shows an average yearly victim count of 178. 2015 saw an increase of about 73% from the 5 year average. It seems to be ramping up a trend that was already in the data - 2010 was at 197 and went down to 2012's 155 before picking back up to 184 in 2014 (A /u/ shaped trend with us on the right side). It is of note that we had that micro trend (3 years) in increase prior to President Elect Trump. What could possibly explain that? Well, in 2012 we saw ISIS and their activities get major attention, the Syrian Conflict boil up, and continue on from there with Islamic Terrorist attacks in Europe and the US and eventually the Pulse Nightclub shooting. These are all major Islamic terrorists acts that seemed to coincide with the rise in anti-Islamic hate-crimes in the US. Do you think there could be a connection here? I do. However, from this last bit of data, people are trying to link President Elect Trump with that increase. But given his comments about Mexicans and Latin Americans, one would expect that if we can attribute an increase in Anti-Muslim activity, we should also find some increase in anti-latino crime but there was no significant increase only the decrease we have seen lead into 2014. But of course the contention is then that the degree to which President Elect Trump discussed Islam / Muslims and his rhetoric around it was not actually comparable. Okay, lets bite on that and say that they weren't and thus we shouldn't expect Trump's anti-Latino language (which was omni present) to actually affect hate crime rates. But here we come to the end of what we can actually extrapolate from the data available. We have some evidence to suggest that Donald Trump's comments don't have effect (Latino and Asian experience) and some evidence that they do (rise in Anti-Islamic) but that evidence is shady because it can also be explained by unrelated events (terrorist attacks) and belong to an overall trend (albeit an increase in that pre-existing trend). Also, given the timeline of President Elect Trump's campaign, if his comments had any impact on the last half of the year, that impact had to be extreme because he had such little time. His Muslim Ban, for example, didn't come about until late November to December of 2015. So, allow me to sum up the above: The data is very small (300 victims this year). That makes pulling out actual trends from random fluctuations very hard under pristine conditions. The data can't show increase in 2 of the three groups that President Elect Trump focused on. 1 group I would expect to not show any trend (Asians) but the other group (Latinos) I would expect to show a trend if any trend could be attributed to Trump on the third (Muslim). Even accepting that they are not comparable for some reason, we have compounding factors (the existence of a trend prior to Trump and various foreign and domestic attacks) that muddy the data. In order to tease out what effects derived from Trump and not in response to other events would require very targeted data (explicit time point data pre and post attack and pre-post campaign event) with a very strong set of controls to ensure we are pulling out only Trump Related data. And given the extremely small data set, I highly doubt such numbers could be teased out. Now, going back to the other issue of the rise in crime in general, we can look at the actual victims that occurred. We saw an increase in victims of 73% over the previous 5 year average. What comprised that increase? While there are a variety of crimes available to look at, most of them don't occur in particularly large numbers (murder and rape are super rare, for example). So let's look at the 4 big categories: Aggravated Assault, Simple Assault, Intimidation, vandalism. The 5 year average for each of those is: Agg. Ass: 16.4 Sim. Ass: 41 Intimidat: 59.8 vandal: 48.8 The 2015 victims count and percent change was: Agg Ass: 27 - 65% Sim. Ass: 41 - 56% Intimidat: 120 - 100% Vandal: 76 - 55% While all major types of HC increased, Intimation was by far the largest increase. It alone accounts for about 50% of the increase in 2015 compared to the 5 year trend. I hope the above provided some context for what we have actually seen happen. Ultimately my paragraph about "Aggregated data vs specific" is the main point. It is hard to pull out meaningful trends from small data samples. Muslims have seen an increase (something I have never denied) but linking that to the rise of Donald Trump is sketchy at best. The major point of the Previous post was that while we are seeing increases, it should be kept in perspective. We will always see normal fluctuations in HC. Overall HC are quite uncommon (6 year average of 2.44 per 100k people - Less than our murder rate alone in the US: 3.9). These are things we should be trying to fix but hyping them up and adding hysteria to it all does not serve the communities affect (adding to their anxiety) nor us as a whole because we lose perspective and guidance on how to solve this. Nor does scapegoating it all serve anyone. Soar. Edit: In the original version of this, I stated "incidents" and not "victims". This was a mistake. I had been using Incident data in the previous post but used the victim data in this one and forgot to adjust my language accordingly. Side note: Victim data out paces incident data rather obviously. A single incident can account for multiple victims (like the Pulse night club, for example - one incident several victims). To give further context - in 2014 there were 154 incidents against Muslims. That was 184 victims (30 more victims than incidents). In 2015, there were 257 incidents against 307 victims.

Do you know that old saying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics? The article I linked to didn't do as good a job at expressing the point as I had hoped. Here were the big take aways from it and a couple more: 1 - There had been a meme going around saying how the crime statistics that got released reflected rates of violence resulting from this election cycle and President Elect Trump. This piece of information is a misleading factoid (looks like a fact but isn't). The Crime statistics were from 2015. Donald Trump had hardly become more than a blip. The last half of 2015 has him starting to garner real attention but I hardly think one could draw a link from a year's worth of data in aggregate and the slow rise of President Elect Trump. 2 - The change in numbers did go up but not by all that much. Of course any incident is tragic but relatively minor fluctuations are always to be expected. And seeing a one time change from 2014 to 2015 does not a trend make (more on this at the end). 3 - Hysteria and Hyperbole do no one any good: pt 1. When one says "hate crime", if the listener is anything like me they picture images of gay men being drag by cars and beaten to death. Of course I know intellectually that the term "hate crime" encompasses far more than that extreme example that is burnt into my memory, but incidents of someone yelling an epitaph out a window while driving do not readily spring to mind. We should keep in mind the power of that phrase when we throw it out there. 4 - Hysteria and Hyperbole do no one any good: pt2. Repeating stories one hears through the grape vine is a sketchy practice. Like any game of telephone, there is a lot of room for mistakes to be made and facts to be lost. I believe the linked article mentioned the black guy who spray painted his own house with what appeared to be an extreme and racist message. He did this in protest to a court case he lost and before the election to which it had no connection. But the grapevine morphed that into a rather terrible incident. Spreading these rumors on mass when they aren't true builds up unnecessary anxiety in people and might actually embolden some folks. 5 - A return to statistics. One thing the article didn't do that it should have was to give us a longer picture of hate crimes in the US. It mentioned the incidents from last year but didn't think to discuss the 5 or 10 year pattern in the US. Compared to 2014, there was an increase of about 0.23 incidents per 100k people. A small increase but an increase none-the-less. But how does that compared with our 5 year average? Well, if you think it is above average, you are incorrect. We are still actually down compared to our 5 year average. The rate of HateCrime incidents in total (attacks on person or property) was at about 2.061/100k compared to a 5 year average of 2.12/100k. 2014 actually happened to be a blip in that it was the biggest deviator from the 5 year average. 2013 was down from 12 (although there is some wonkiness with with the 2012 data). 14 was down from 13. 15 saw an increase but is STILL down compared to 12. --- Ultimate take away: there are most certainly hate crimes occurring. But we don't actually have hard data to prove any significant increase for 2016 compared to 2015. We should be cautious in reporting news we are biased to believe and have too few facts on. Hysteria is our enemy. Soar. -My numbers come from the FBI UCS. I plopped the numbers into excel to get the population rates and averages.

Some Perspective: http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/18/election-hate-crimes-hoaxes-hyperbole Soar.

But here is the rub: you already had that chance. It is no secret that the Democratic party is the hands down favorite to win the Senate race. I think you would be hard pressed to find any non-Democrat who thinks they have a chance of actually winning. Why this matters is because those same people (non-Democratic voters) already had the chance to intercede in the Democratic Primary and choose a more moderate Democrat. But, to the best of my knowledge, we weren't seeing that. Why? Because ultimately the people who vote in the Primary are the most partisan of voters and Independents tend to not show up. This year we had absolute record breaking turnout in the primary with 7.5 million voters. But this was likely more due to the Sec. Clinton & Senator Sanders race still being undecided. Not because Independents or Republicans being especially interested. We can see this because the Democratic candidates skyrocketed in votes (top two under this system previously had 2.8m or 62% vs this years 4.4 or 58%). Ultimately it doesn't actually give additional choices to the electorate that it didn't already have; people have had always been free to vote in the Democratic primary to swing them more moderate. By pushing off what is essentially the Democratic Primary to the general race, they ensure that no protest vote is an option and thus no protest vote has a chance in hell of winning.** This of course has downballot effects. By not giving people a choice for the Senate race, already feeling disenfranchised by the foregone national race conclusion, some people (re: republicans) just aren't going to show up and vote on down ballot initiatives. It is the starting point in sending every level of government further Democratic. **I failed to make this as clear as it deserves. If you have an very popular person running on the ticket at a high news worthy level, you get down-ballot effects. For example, President Obama was a much more popular person than normal. This drove people to the polls. This year neither side had a President Obama-liks figure. But even if the main presidential candidate is uninspired a charismatic Senate candidate can still drum up support. In every other state each party has essentially two to three chances for such a person to emerge: Pres, Senate, and Gov. The Democrats in California have engineered a system wherein they get 3 (1 pres and 2 senate) and Republicans get 1 (Pres). Even in off years, Dems get 3 (2 senate and one gov) and Republicans get just 1 (gov). This means all republican hopes of inspiring people are placed in a single easily broken basket. Soar. Edit - I think it should be noted that there is an exception to the ballot lock out - moderately popular incumbents. It is probably unlikely that an incumbent will face a strong inner-party opponent. Thus the second party candidates actually do have a chance of getting on. But incumbents are even harder to dethrown than a simple party favored first-timer. 2012 had this kind of race.